Difference and the unexpected are what matters

Nice video about how education changes and should change. Because difference and the unexpected matter more than identical competences and predictability. Coursera is one of the examples of the ‘new education’, but I think other educational practices would be even more illustrative of the deep changes. Stephen Downes and George… Continue reading

3D printing: does the revolution look vintage already?

Nice overview of 3D-printing: Hat tip to Bruce Sterling on Beyond the Beyond. I liked his comment: Really makes one anticipate 3d printing in 2022, when all this contemporary stuff looks charmingly crude and tentative. Very “early teens.” So does our revolution look vintage now already? More about all this… Continue reading

Old texts make us dream and build the future

I just finished the first session of Howard Rheingold’s online Think-Know course. It seems the participants are an amazing group of people dispersed over several continents. The next weeks we’ll dive into both the theoretical-historical background of intellect augmentation and the practical skills of personal knowledge management. We’ve been reading… Continue reading

Liveblogging going full circle: Circa News

Cir.ca is an interesting mobile news app. As Online Journalism Blog says: It’s a simple idea: look at the latest news, pick stories you want to follow, and get a notification when something new happens on that story. The key difference is that updates are not delivered as traditional articles,… Continue reading

Ada Lovelace Day

And today is Ada Lovelace Day: “Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields.” Read… Continue reading

‘We live in a culture of real virtuality’

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  “With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are… Continue reading

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong – The Atlantic

Alexis C. Madrigal explains:  “For one, I spent most of the 90s as a teenager in rural Washington and my web was highly, highly social. We had instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email. ” It’s important to have the history of the web right…. Continue reading

Pentagon’s Plan X: how it could change cyberwarfare – CSMonitor.com

“The same Pentagon futurologists who helped create the Internet are about to begin a new era of cyberwarfare. For years, the Pentagon has been open and adamant about the nation’s need to defend itself against cyberattack, but its ability and desire to attack enemies with cyberweapons has been cloaked in mystery…. Continue reading

In search of… metacognition amplifiers

I’m gearing up for Howard Rheingold’s course about Think-Know Tools and so I read his latest book, Mind Amplifier. I’m starting to become a bit of a veteran in Rheingold courses, so I was not surprised to read about the notion of literacies, of designs for improved collective action and… Continue reading