In a TEDxNYED talk that is destined to become a classic, Jeff Jarvis takes on the industrialization of education and the irrelevance of lectures in an innovation-powered world (Knowmad Society!): From his notes: One more from him: “It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.” Google sprung from seeing [...]

Cristóbal Cobo forwarded an article from Brand Republic from earlier this year. It contains a few provocative lines from Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics: Tapscott said: “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge — the internet is. Kids should learn about history but they don’t need to know all the dates. “It is enough that [...]

Two interesting pieces of news emerged on virtual worlds: At the Virtual Worlds Conference, IBM and Linden Labs announced plans to develop a set of open standards that would allow avatars to traverse from one virtual environment to another. Multiverse Network is building tools that will allow virtual world developers to access and incorporate elements [...]

Education Futures has been receiving many visitors from Latin America –particularly from Mexico. To help make the site more accessible, I added a Traducir al español link to the sidebar.

From Ars Technica: Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google [...]

To do is to be To be is to do So Do We? It is just good teaching Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn. Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is [...]

Echoing the spirit of Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson’s EPIC 2014, Casaleggio Associati has produced a short video on the Future of Media, where Google, Amazon and Second Life dominate the media world through business acquisitions, reality replication in virtual spaces, and reality design. Does the Eye of Osiris at the end of the video [...]

Privacy issues aside, this is pretty darn neat. Apparently, with a little trick, you can sometimes zoom in a bit further than Google Maps suggests you can…

The Ottawa Business Journal reports that Google, is poised to replace email as the most-used digital thanks to higher-speed connections and the ever-growing mountain of digital data. The company predicts the scope of search, while still based on text-based key words, will expand to include digital data held on devices such as PCs, mobile phones, [...]

From the Economist: “Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We’re not trying to build a better operating system,” says Mr Schmidt (although that will not kill the rumour). Part of the [...]