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 [...]

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 [...]

Google hosts a “Gapminder” tool that uses Flash technology to turn otherwise tedious or boring data into readable, interactive animations. Gapminder is a foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida, and the data presented are gathered in collaboration with the United Nations Statistic Division. [...]

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 [...]

Article Link: Computers as authors? Literary luddites unite! (free registration required) The New York Times reports that to write novels, computers don’t need writers anymore. Selmer Bringsjord at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and David A. Ferrucci at IBM created “Brutus.1” an artificial intelligence program that simulates literary creativity. Read one of Brutus.1′s stories.