In case you needed a reminder, we’re no longer living in your grandfather’s world. This video makes that plainly clear. Everything is changing in a blink, and education offers you and your kids the best way to navigate it all. Don’t take it for granted.
via The DigitalBlur. Thanks Jillian for the tip on this one.
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We have here a short, catchy animated documentary that explains how we get from the 1950s to the internet that we know and love today. Along the way, it covers inventions ranging from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. Have a look…
Stanford Engineering Everywhere is a new project rolling out of Stanford, and it’s making available to anyone, anywhere 10 complete online computer science and electrical engineering courses. This includes the three-course Introduction to Computer Science series taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates.
The top-notch courses are free, which means that we’ve added them to our large collection of Free Online Courses. They’re also accessible via multiple formats (YouTube, iTunes, torrents, etc.) and released under a Creative Commons License, allowing students and educators worldwide to use these courses for their own educational purposes. They come complete with handouts, assignments, exercises and software. Quite a good deal, I must say. Below, we’ve posted the initial lineup of courses. Definitely check them out.
Introduction to Computer Science
A quick fyi: BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has released a new collection of essays called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. As he summarizes it, the book features “28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects.” You can download a free PDF version here, or purchase a hard copy here. Also don’t miss the free tech/copyright writings by Larry Lessig below.
Related Content:
Download a Free Copy of Cory Doctorow’s Bestseller, Little Brother
Free Download of Cory Doctorow’s Graphic Novels
Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: Available in Text or Audio (For Free)
The Future of Ideas: Download Your Free Copy (and More)
The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers’ ($28.95 for 126 pages); and ‘The 2007–2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6‑Feet by 9‑Feet or Smaller in India’ ($495 for 144 pages).”
But Philip M. Parker, the man behind them, is nothing if not ambitious. He’s also programming his machines to generate language-learning crosswords (i.e. clues in one language, answers in another), acrostic poetry, and even scripts for game shows and videogames. All of this reminds me of a novel by Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age. In it, engineers of the future design a sort of artificially intelligent primer for young girls–the book generates stories and lessons on the fly. Maybe Parker’s read this one before.
The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling now comes with a lot of cool features: mesh technology so a group of students can share one wifi connection; low power consumption and the ability to recharge batteries with solar cells or even a hand crank; a linux operating system and open source software.
I suspect that last feature is causing the biggest problem for Intel. According to the Times, company sales reps actually tried to persuade several countries to ditch the OLPC in favor of a more expensive machine running Microsoft Windows. I don’t know about you but I have a hard time imagining disadvantaged Peruvian first-graders keeping up with their security updates, troubleshooting the less-than-stellar Windows wifi utility or shelling out for that upgrade to Vista.
Maybe those kids need other things more than they need laptops, but it can’t hurt. In any case it’s hard to believe how badly Intel managed this saga in terms of public relations. Think of the children, guys!
I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety of different subjects (some of the most successful so far relate to video games).
What Wales spoke about today, however, is a new collaborative search project. The concept is still in its early stages, it seems, but the idea would be to harness the intelligence and dedication of human beings to produce search results significantly better than Google’s. This raises a few questions:
Is Google broken? It’s amazing what Google pulls up, but maybe we’ve all gotten so good at working with an imperfect system that we just tune out the spam and misinterpretations that still crop up.
Is a collaborative social model the appropriate solution to this problem? People are good at compiling encyclopedias, but they may not be good at emulating search rank algorithms. Also, Google is powered by millions of servers in dozens of data centers over the world managing petabytes of information. In other words, this may be a technology+money business, not a people+transparency business.
These issues aside, Wikipedia is one of the most amazing things to come out of the whole Internet experiment, so I’m excited to see what Wales comes up with. Has search become a basic service? Would it work better as an open-source system?
In case you missed it, The New York Times published a piece yesterday previewing two new efforts to bring electronic books to the mass market. In October, Amazon.com will roll out the Kindle (check out leaked pictures here), an ebook reader, priced somewhere between $400 to $500, that will wirelessly connect to an e‑book store on Amazon’s site, from which readers can download books in electronic format. (Think iTunes for ebooks.) Meanwhile, Google will start “charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database” and share revenue with publishers. The whole idea here is to disrupt the $35 billion book market in much the same way that the Apple has dislocated the music market with the iPod. But whether consumers will see digital books as having comparable advantages to the iPod remains TBD, and the doubters are certainly out there. Read more here. And, in the meantime, if you want a lot of free audiobooks, check out our Audiobook Podcast Collection.
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