Inventing a New University

One of the courses I really enjoyed these last few months was History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education, by professor Cathy N. Davidson (Duke University) on the Coursera platform. The final assignment was the invention of a new institution of higher education. This was my answer, and yes, I… Continue reading

The Singularity was in Budapest, Hungary

I attended the Singularity University Summit in Budapest, Hungary. It was like two days of total immersion in discussions about the concept of exponential growth, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, bio-hacking, medical breakthroughs and organisational change. I tried to bring some elements together in a wiki mindmap, people have added… Continue reading

Digital Game Based Learning MOOCs: Join in September!

So nice. We already had the connectivist Massive Open Online Courses – based on learner-centric, distributed activities using a syndication engine to connect the various events. Then came the xMOOCs – more top-down like massive courses, experimenting with auto-grading systems. Now I learned about gMOOCs – game-based MOOCs. Have a… Continue reading

Toward a Metaverse Future Society!

AvaCon announces: AvaCon has exciting things planned for 2013! We are working on new initiatives to connect and support the communities and people involved in co-creating and using the metaverse, including new events, a new membership-led community organization (coming soon!), and our latest call for proposals for the recently launched… Continue reading

Beware, the Singularity Comes Nearer: Kurzweil Teams Up with Google

((I had a rather troublesome evening posting this stuff about the entry of Ray Kurzweil in Google. I tried to use Storify for this, but that service and WordPress are a difficult combination. In general, I find WordPress to be rather difficult to use, compared to other blogging platforms.)) Anyway,… Continue reading

A virtual worlds community going beyond virtual worlds?

Fleep Tuque, a major virtual worlds community expert, said on her Google+ page that AvaCon, the organizers of the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) plans to include the open-source version of Second Life, OpenSim, and other platforms, in the upcoming gatherings (which will get another name). On the AvaCon website… Continue reading

Hack your games!

Mozilla has a challenge for you: Show what’s possible using the web as an open gaming platform for the world. From the Mozilla-blog: Imagine the Web as an open gaming platform for the world. Where game players seamlessly become game creators. Where your favorite games work on any device, anytime,… Continue reading

Virtual communities on Google+

Getting tons of invites for communities on Google Plus. A limited selection: communities for Digital Culture (look for Ted Newcomb to get an invite), Second Life (288 members already), Second Life Arts (135 members), Opensim Virtual (‘First there was Second Life, then there was Freedom), MetaMeets (3D internet conference), Augmented… Continue reading

“The ideal technology is invisible and ambient”

I did not make it to the LeWeb conference in Paris, France, but I’m looking at the abundant streams of tweets and blog posts about the event. I won’t talk in this post about the Instagram-Twitter drama – it has been covered widely on so many other places. My personal… Continue reading