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Monday, January 31, 2005 |
The Horizon Report.
Six Big Trends
The Horizon Report from New Media Centers is a annual project identifying key technologies that will inform teaching and learning in the next years. This year's edition highlights six areas: 1. Extended Learning 2. Ubiquitous Wireless 3. Intelligent Searching 4. Educational Gaming 5. Social Networks and Knowledge Webs 6. Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality.
The report includes a thorough discussion of each, plus links and other resources. Just a great resource. Go for it in PDF. [blogged by John on ratchet up!]
Via networked_performance [unmediated]
10:27:50 PM 
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Student blogs.
A while back I posted about my plans to teach a class in which each student would be required to maintain his or her own blog. We are now halfway through the quarter (really) and so I thought it would be a good time to get some outside readers to take a look at the students’ blogs. If you happen to have a moment and wouldn’t mind surfing over I am sure the students would be delighted to get some comments from people not enrolled in class. TheRockBlog.com has a link to each of the blogs in the right-hand menu.
As you will see, the quality of student posts differs quite a bit. This is not particularly surprising since once can expect some level of variation in the work of students for most classes. To give a bit of background on the content of the blog entries, students are required to post to their blogs each week discussing at least two of the reading assignments covered that week. Students can use their blogs to post other material as well. They are also required to post a comment on a peer’s blog each week. The syllabus also includes some additional blogging assignments (finding and discussing various online content).
Judging from midterm feedback, it sounds like most students are enjoying the blogging experience although some find commenting on others’ blogs a bit tedious. At the same time others find it disappointing that they are not getting more feedback so it’s hard to satisfy everyone. Having students blog about the readings is certainly helpful for an understanding of how they are processing the material. Their blog entries have guided discussion in several class sessions.
I’ve learned a lot from this experience and plan to write up a detailed description of the course logistics later. For now, feel free to take a look at how the student blogging is going by visiting some of their sites. [Crooked Timber]
10:21:13 PM
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Jan 31, 2005: The Greatest American.
For the next several weeks, AOL and the Discovery Channel will be taking nominations for the "Greatest American." This can be anyone from a politician to an academic, from a celebrity to an activist. They can be living or dead, but must be/have been an American citizen. Since most of us have some icon that epitomizes the term "greatest American," and because for so many that person is a Democrat, this is a perfect chance to band together as a community and lend our voices to a small tribute. You may vote as many times as you wish, so vote early and vote often.
[Kicking Ass]
10:21:07 PM
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Teaching Computers to Read. Creating a computer that can learn at a sophisticated level -- even that of a 3-year-old with a Dr. Seuss book -- is not easy, though sci-fi stories portray smartypants computers as villains. But scientists keep trying [Wired News]
7:35:56 AM
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'Collapse': How the World Ends. Jared Diamond draws on vanished societies to explain how cultures contribute to their own demise. By GREGG EASTERBROOK. [NYT > Science]
Faith in progress.
Brad DeLong spares me the effort of completing a half-written post about how badly Gregg Easterbrook misses the point of Jared Diamond’s wonderful Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond isn’t arguing that material circumstances trump human inventiveness but that they structure it. Still, there’s another aspect to Easterbrook’s review of Diamond’s new book which is worth discussing. In Easterbrook’s closing paragraph, he says:
Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity — we’re living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society’s evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature’s standards.
This crystallizes something that I’ve been struggling to articulate for a while. It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse). This comes out very clearly over the course of Easterbrook’s review, where it becomes clear that Easterbrook’s objection isn’t to the specifics of Diamond’s arguments - it’s to the very notion that material limits might determine our collective fate, a contention which Easterbrook bizarrely describes as ‘postmodern’. This faith in boundless possibilities is at best a-scientific, and at worst pseudo-religious feel-good claptrap along the lines of Easterbrook’s previous muddled attempts to reconcile cosmology and religious belief. Of course, it may be true that future discoveries will enable us to leave the Earth, conquer the galaxy, exploit the “infinite resources” of the universe etc. But half-assed appeals to the limitless opportunities of the future aren’t an argument; they’re a statement of faith. It’s a wonder that Easterbrook should have been asked by the NYT to review a serious book; it certainly shouldn’t happen again.
[Crooked Timber]
7:32:28 AM
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A fatal infection.
I would urge readers to drop the baby, turn off the oven, sit down and read this MIT paper on viral networking.
In a nutshell, it describes the future of mesh networks. There are two core results:
- Throughput increases with node density. More nodes add to capacity, not divide it.
- Latency is not a problem.
This is the E=mc2 of communications. It means that fibre to the home and so on are just icing on the cake. The lower bound for the future of connectivity is going to be damned high wherever humans or their powered objects congregate.
It means the end game is already pre-determined. Centralised telecom won’t exist in its current form. Don’t hold long-dated bonds in network operators or their equipment suppliers.
The caveat? Getting this into reality is, as they say, non-trivial. You have to make it scale in a world where bad actors may be at play. You have to get all the non-functional stuff right, like battery life. We could be talking anything from years to decades. It’s as big a jump as E=mc2 to the atom bomb — the Manhattan Project of communications.
But the theory is rock solid, and the future inevitable. You’ve been warned.
Via Telepocalypse [unmediated]
7:31:03 AM
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