Archive for April, 2005

Cyc to be unleashed onto the Internet

4/22/2005

Certain elements of the blogosphere are abuzz with news that Austin, TX’s Cycorp is about to release an AI, “Cyc,” on the Internet. With a mission to learn and build its knowledge, it will accelerate its new knowledge acquisition by interacting with netizens and siphoning multimedia information on the Web. In a New Scientist article [...]


Kurzweil: The singularity is near

4/22/2005

Here is a book to watch out for: The singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil, to be released in September, 2005. The following information is cut-and-pasted from Amazon.com‘s description of the volume: Product Details Hardcover: 624 pages Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005) ISBN: 0670033847 Book Description The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is [...]


Slashdot: Users as innovators – why open source works

4/18/2005

Shamelessly cut-and-pasted from Slashdot: eaglemoon writes “Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull. The Boston Globe has an interview with Eric von Hippel, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on users as innovators. In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the [...]


Using Squeak as an etoy platform

4/2/2005

Squeak is based on the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language developed by Xerox in the 1980s. Today, it is used as a “media authoring tool” to create virtual, educational toys in the classroom. Using a constructivist framework, “some students work with media created in Squeak by their teachers; others are creating their own simulations and models [...]


Related posts

Games in the Classroom 7–game mechanics for creating learning

One of the big ideas from 6.0 was that kids are not naturally good at complex games. They often have the time, resources, but they do not always have the guidance of a mentor. Many kids are playing games designed by adults for adults. This is good and bad. Good in that the adult games [...]


MIT Media Lab H2.0 webcasts online

Archived webcasts from the MIT Media Lab H2.0 symposium are available online. Under a theme of “new minds, new bodies, new identities,” the one-day event explored, “how today’s—and tomorrow’s—advances will seamlessly interact with humans, giving us a glimpse into a future where all humans will integrate with technology to heighten our cognition, emotional acuity, perception, [...]


Using tech to teach the same old garbage

Folks, when you use new technologies to teach the same old garbage, you’re not going to get the results that you want. The NY Times started to touch on this in their article, Seeing no progress, some schools drop laptops: …the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting [...]


Legalizing “cheating”

Some troubling news has appeared in media over the past 24 hours. Many news sites and blogs have been citing an Associated Press article that claims that teachers and administrators are dismayed by students’ use of mobile devices to cheat in the classroom. The question is, why not “cheat?” If students will use similar or [...]


Integrating Open Source models into education

In Spring 2004, Laurie Taylor and Brendan Riley published an article in Computers and Composition on introducing the Open Source model into education to transform the nature of academic research and pedagogy. In regard to research, the authors argue that adoption of the model among authors would shift the ownership of academia’s intellectual property from [...]


About

Education Futures explores a New Paradigm in human capital development, fueled by globalization, the rise of innovative knowledge societies, and driven by exponential, accelerating change. Education Futures is owned and published by Education Futures LLC.