“The Fab Lab program has strong connections with the technical outreach activities of a number of partner organizations, around the emerging possibility for ordinary people to not just learn about science and engineering but actually design machines and make measurements that are relevant to improving the quality of their lives.” [MIT Center for Bits and [...]

From Silicon.com:

In this video interview, Noel Sharkey, professor of robotics and AI at the University of Sheffield, discusses developments in robotics – from the proliferation of robots in Japan’s automotive industry to the stair-climbing dexterity of Honda’s Asimo robot and beyond.

He also discusses ethical issues, and in which countries we can find the most robots [...]

Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of education from 1657-2045. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into modern education, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future history presented is intended to be edgy, [...]

More at www.invisiblelearning.com…

Open source collaborative content holds the promise of freely distributed high-quality education materials. Developing and sustaining the community to needed accomplish that is the difficult part.

Roberto Balaguer notes that a book we are collaborating on has captured the attention of the president of Uruguay:
The website of the Presidency of the Republic [of Uruguay] takes the news. On Tuesday, in connection with the [Montevideo International] Book Fair, we held the pre-presentation of the book on Ceibal Plan and the OLPC model, [...]

Henry Jenkins thinks so. Watch his interview with PBS’s Frontline:

More at PBS’s digital_nation site…
(Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo for the link.)

I co-host a podcast on Blog Talk Radio called Four Guys Talking. In episode 5, we discussed the role of higher education institutions to create
technology savvy leaders. To cut to the chase, we concluded that we are not
doing nearly enough to ensure school leaders are able to handle the changes,
or even capture the opportunities, brought on [...]

Knowledge powers the 21st century
Dan Wallace (@ideafood) forwarded a link to this short essay by TED curator, Ted Anderson. Networking technologies are transforming the potential of teachers:
There are many scary things about today’s world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five [...]

OLPC may see a new competitor enter the market. Utilizing a new microprocessor technology that embraces probabilistic logic computing rather than traditional boolean logic computing, a team at Rice University is designing a digital, touchscreen, LED slate for deployment in developing countries. Probabilistic computing permits devices to provide correct answers most of the time [...]