One of the big inspirations for the MixedRealities blog is the book Race against the machine, written by the MIT-researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. These last few days I’ve read another book about globalization and exponentially growing technologies, Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think, by the engineer… Continue reading
Another week, another Coursera-course (via the University of Toronto): Learn to Program: The Fundamentals by Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries: Behind every mouse click and touch-screen tap, there is a computer program that makes things happen. This course introduces the fundamental building blocks of programming and teaches you how to… Continue reading
“In the fast-evolving realm of free online college courses, Coursera seems to be evolving the fastest.” It seems that being open, or at least not exclusive, is a competitive advantage…. via Diigo http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/09/19/online_education_coursera_adds_17_universities_aims_to_take_over_world.html
What does it mean to be an avatar? Or should we say to ‘have’ an avatar? And what is an avatar: the thumbnail on a Twitter of Facebook account? The 3D characters in World of Warcraft or in Second Life? The textual description of a character in a text-only roleplaying… Continue reading
Stephen Downes keeps an overview of open online courses, I guess many of them are Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. It seems he’ll update the list. Yay for Stephen Downes! via Diigo http://www.mooc.ca/courses.htm
Coursera grows fast, and looks – rightly so – overseas. For the moment, almost all courses seem to be in English. Will that language become even more dominant in higher education, because of the rapid expansion of American platforms? Or is it just the initial phase? via Diigo http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-number-of-university-partners-increases-focus-overseas/
Interesting. George Siemens, together with Bonnie Stewart and Dave Cormier have agreed (and been contracted) to write for Johns Hopkins University Press. George Siemens launched the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2008 (with Stephen Downes). His book, about the scope and nature of higher education (HE) change, will… Continue reading
Okay, gamification – using elements and design principles from games in non-game contexts – is already pretty hot. But now the real money could get involved. Ryan Kim at GigaOm sees gamification startups as the next big enterprise target: Gamification is thought of as a hyped buzzword by skeptics, but… Continue reading
I wrote a column for my newspaper about media streams and how also education should happen in streams (it’s in Dutch, and no, it seems that translating is not something which can be automated easily). Examples I used are the videostream at The Wall Street Journal, Worldstream, and Howard Rheingold’s… Continue reading
There is this idea that Facebook is just for entertainment, friends and family contacts. Robert Scoble already demonstrated that in fact Facebook can be used to create great lists, even more so than Twitter. Of course you can find interesting groups about any subject on Facebook, or follow media. I… Continue reading