Twitter has a flurry this morning from us New York City based folks saying in it snowing in New York. I can see it out my window. When I checked our local the radar from Weather Underground, I saw the above image, and grabbed a screenshot. What a colorful reminder of how very much we can learn in a click or two from the internet. A look out the window shows a few snowflakes falling past. A look on the internet say yeah!, it’s snowing, and then gives everything from meteorological soup to nuts.
It’s snowing in New York — yeah!
The quark, the jaguar, and the internet
Yesterday I began reading Murray Gell-Mann’s classic book The Quark and the Jaguar. I am thrilled that I am at last understanding (having failed before). My new prowess comes from watching Professor Steven Pollock’s DVDs on Particle Physics. I am reading the book because I think Gell-Mann’s subject for the book is a powerful metaphor (or an actually explanation) for the internet.
Gell-Mann tells us that the book is about “the study of the simple and the complex.” This is a quotation from the first page of the Preface of The Quark and the Jaguar:
[The study of the simple and the complex] . . . has started to bring together in a new way material from a great number of different fields in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences and even in the arts and humanities. It carries with it a point of view that facilitates the making of connections, sometimes between facts or ideas that seem at first glance very remote from each other.
Surely, the social networking of the internet is a huge new cultural and sociological force that is changing the ways of human life. I would bet a lot that our changing relationship with what humankind knows will have a more profound — and certainly a beneficial — impact on the human future. Let me just change a few words in the Gell-Mann quote to tell you why:
The open internet has started to bring together in a new way information and ideas from a great number of different fields in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences and even in the arts and humanities. It carries with it operations that facilitate the making of connections, sometimes between facts or ideas that seem at first glance very remote from each other.
Science Commons video fundamentally important
Science Commons is a project of the Creative Commons. Along with posting this video, project text overview, Making the Web Work for Science, explains:
Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.
Our goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery — unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.
When today’s babies are ten the internet will be in virtually everyone’s pocket.
The Wired Campus reports that “By 2020, Access to Internet Will Be in Everyone’s Pocket.” A child who is a baby today — in the USA, Europe, Africa, Asia, everywhere — is almost certain to have the Internet in his or her pocket at age ten (in 2020).
- This is a HUGE change in how children will get information.
- This is a FABULOUS opportunity to reconfigure education.
- The central challenge and needed focus of education planning is on how to maximize learning for these kids.
- We need to start now, with today’s kids.
The Wired Campus report tells us:
The verdict on the future of the Internet is in (once again), and experts overwhelmingly agree that by 2020 much of the world’s population will connect to the Web using mobile devices, according to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
The report,“The Future of the Internet III,” included predictions from some 600 experts, including scholars and Internet stakeholders, about what path the Internet will take.
Of the respondents, 77 percent agreed that mobile devices, which will have greater computing power and will be more affordable, will be the primary tool used to connect to the Internet.
Clicker iPhone app superior to plain clicker
The Wired Campus reports: Mobile College App: Turning iPhones Into ‘Super-Clickers’ for Classroom Feedback. The iPhone image shown here from the article displays the cloud response possible with the app — and not possible from the simpler “yes” or “no” and multiple choice responses of clickers. Here are some of the other advantages from the article.
The idea for such a system is far from new. Several companies sell classroom response systems, often called “clickers,” that often involve small wireless gadgets that look like television remote controls. Most clickers allow students to answer true-or-false or multiple-choice questions (but do not allow open-ended feedback), and many colleges have experimented with the devices, especially in large lecture courses. There are several drawbacks to many clicker systems, however. First of all, every student in a course must have one of the devices, so in courses that use clickers, students are often required to buy them. Then, students have to remember to bring the gadgets to class, which doesn’t always happen.
Using cellphones instead of dedicated clicker devices solves those issues, says William Rankin, an English professor at Abilene Christian who is coordinating academic uses of iPhones there. Because students rely on their phones for all kinds of communication, they usually keep the devices on hand. The university calls its iPhone software NANOtools — NANO stands for No Advanced Notice, emphasizing how easy the system is for students and professors to use. “We see it as a kind of super-clicker,” he says.
The iPhone app makes the personal mobile a clicker if it is an iPhone. The final step will be when clicker apps are open source for all mobile phones via the internet.
Walt Whitman Archive a leader in knowledge migration to the internet
The Walt Whitman Archive feature on The Wired Campus Archive Watch is aptly titled: All Whitman, All Digital. The feature introduction (followed by an interview with Professor Folsom) gives its history. This is a leader project for literary migration to to internet:
In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.
ZooBorns is endearing and informs
The Red-River Hog-lets in the video are babies born at the Cincinnati Zoo. The video is from a blog called ZooBorns: The newest and cutest exotic animal babies from zoos and aquariums around the world! The pictures are endearing — and great fun to wander through. You can subscribe to the blog’s RSS to enjoy new pictures as they are added.
ZooBorns.com is not only enjoyable. It informs in ways that show us the immature species of 21st century pedagogy from which we can expect growth and flourishing in months ahead. When a baby picture captures a visitor’s interest, Zoo Borns provides basics about the baby in the image and clicks to a lot more information. Like this sea lion pup at the Longleat Safari Park, youngsters — characteristically eager to learn — sit up and pay attention.
ZooBorns.com comes through loud and clear, BTW, on my iPhone browser. Let’s hear some barks for smartphone learning.
Could the Internet Have Prevented WWII?
For a decade, I have argued that a golden age is dawning because of the internet. My reasoning has been that the internet will cause the world population to become educated, and thereby create an engine of individual liberty that no terrorist or tyrant could push back.
Michael S Malone has an essay today on edgelings in which he speculates on the question: Could the Internet Have Prevented WWII? His discussion is interesting. Essentially he sees the power of the internet to prevent trouble as a matter of creating public awareness. He speculates at one point:
. . . the Internet, had it existed, might well have stopped Hitler. Imagine ten thousand blogs and websites, all exposing the excesses of the Nazis: breaking leaked information from Hitler’s circle, showing cellphone videos of the horrors of the SA purge or Kristallnacht, showing how Hitler’s poisonous vision in autobiography and speeches were now unfolding across Germany – and pointing to its obvious conclusion. Most of all, giving persecuted Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals a voice beyond the increasingly Party-controlled media. All of this would have embarrassed Hitler and the Nazis in a very different way than Le Clezio suggests, but it might have been much more effective. In showing the Nazis for the low-rent thugs they were, the Internet might have created enough doubt among the German middle class to take away the votes Hitler needed to take power.
I remain convinced that very soon the multiplying mobiles in the hands of the world population will elevate literacy and learning. Stopping the Hitlers of the future will be one of many benefits from this truly profound global change.
Unrest in Greece/Europe driven by discontent with education
. . . discontent among youths in many European countries over outdated education systems, lack of jobs and a general apprehension about the future, is the lede explanation for the street rioting in a Wall Street Journal article today: “In Greece, Protests Echo European Students’ Ire.” The WSJ report continues with country-by-country trends of youth dissatisfaction for Greece, Germany, France, and Italy. It is hard to imagine that the aging analog and aristocratic educational systems of the past will ever be expanded and opened to welcome the growing hordes of young Europeans who are upset.
On the other hand, it is a safe bet that these disgruntled young people carry with them mobiles — computers in their pockets capable of delivering knowledge and instruction. It is not hard at all to envision education emerging from the mobiles. In fact another 3-4 billion mobile users in the next few years will make these devices the obvious delivery system for learning.
Carnival of the Mobilists #153 includes The Idea School movie
GoldenSwamp is honored to be on the mobile midway this week at Carnival #153, where our link about The Idea School is one of the featured posts.
Surgeon saves boy’s life in Congo with texted guidance
A boy in the Congo was gangrenous with only a few days to live, after his arms had been ripped off by a hippo. British surgeon David Nott, on the scene as a volunteer, told CNN: “I knew that the only way to save this boy’s life was to do a forequarter amputation, and I knew that Professor Meirion Thomas was really the expert.” Dr. Nott received a text message with 10 steps, shown in part above in a frame from a CNN video, and performed the surgery successfully.
Most kids carry a mobile phone with them that not only can receive text messages like the lifesaving one from Dr. Meirion to Dr. Nott. The devices kids carry increasingly are able to deliver messages, images, and the Web itself. We can save some minds in the young generation by transmitting the knowledge they need to learn so they can use it through their mobiles.
Maybe by 2030 we will have dozens of Einsteins
There is an article today in Yahoo! News speculating on: “Is Einstein the Last Great Genius?” The Yahoo! article quotes from its Live Science source an earlier article that asks: “Will there Ever be another Einstein?” The conclusion to the Live Science article is quoted below in this post; what it says is quickly becoming outdated.
The speculation in these articles about the emergence of genius misses a HUGE factor. In his book Jump Point, Tom Hayes explains (page 11) that by 2015 five billion people will have their own Web-enabled devices. Almost every adolescent on earth — thus virtually every potential Einstein — will have access to what is known and a way to publish his or her ideas.
Maybe by 2030 we will have dozens of Einsteins — by tapping the entire world population instead of only (more…)
Learn nodes animated at learnodes.com
At GoldenSwamp.com’s sister website Learnodes.com I work to develop ways to connect learners with superior open knowledge content online. The latest two learn nodes I have built have something new: Flash animation so you can click out to the Internet from a pattern of illustrated discs directly to related content.
These 2 first animated learn nodes are based on news that relates to science. Take a look:
The Flash swf animations do not yet work on mobile phones, but I included the smaller image and put the links in the text so these learn node posts work fine on my iPhone coming directly in through the Safari browser. Building these nodes as animations takes time, but they have the permanent value of becoming independent connecting assets for their subjects out in the open global commons. Their tags and content attract search engine bots. Visitors are able to find the learn nodes and click through them to the six excellent nodes each one offers for its subject.
Advertising or learning resource?
Who cares that these “Science” pages on apple.com promote Macs when what can be learned here is accurate, authoritative, and compelling? The image above is from an article called “Breakthrough: Unmasking Early-Stage Alzheimer’s Disease.” Featuring the work of Professor James Brewer of the University of California at San Diego, the text explains how he uses Mac technology in brain analysis. Included is a QuickTime movie of a 256-slice brain MRI.
Instead of being put off by the advertising implications of these pages, why not look at them as apprentice pages. This spot on the Web is a marvelous small tutorial from the real world of medicine on how to obtain and manipulate images of the living brain.
Idea School glimpses golden age of learning
This video is on YouTube and comes from the Aditya Birla Group in India. While America’s politicians have no new ideas for education, and the privileged kids on New York’s Upper Eastside have not thought about using their mobile phones for learning, the golden age of learning is dawning. Just not here in America.
