Archive for Education

Shift Happens: Facebook Is Just The Tip of the Iceberg of Change

February 25, 2009 at 5:23 am · Filed under Augmented Reality, Education

Social networks are reaching more people more quickly than any communication technology ever has. Consider how long it takes to reach an audience of 50 million people:

  • Radio – 38 years
  • TV – 13 years
  • Internet – 4 years
  • iPod – 3 years
  • Facebook – 2 years

from Did You Know 3.0

Since we’re here in Facebook land, it’s interesting to note that according to the founder

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world.

Social networks like Facebook are more than media, they are virtual locations, places where people gather and interact. There’s something much bigger going on here than communication. We’re interacting with each other on many levels here and we’re also interacting with increasingly sophisticated computer programs that are learning about our likes and interests. How we produce and consume media is changing. At the same time the networks expand out into mobile devices, cars and buildings, they are also reaching inward, merging with our biology. In my comments on an early YouTube version of “Did you know?”, I raised broad social questions about this. On a personal level, I suppose the big question is are you ready move beyond a strictly biological physical existence? In a decade, concerns about privacy/terms of service are gonna seem pretty easy.

Updates 03/09/09:
Here’s a long but excellent account of the history and evolution of Did You Know? from the original author.

Previously on The MJ, a link to a narrated version

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Political Mesh & The Power of Music

January 27, 2008 at 11:08 pm · Filed under Education, Music, News

Noted blogger Dave Winer has endorsed Barak Obama and one key to his analysis is the changing perception about race amongst young people:

The problem for the Clintons is that the country has changed, as recently as the generation that’s now in its early 20s. Because of my experience at Harvard, I know quite a few of them, and I promise you, race doesn’t mean to them what it meant when I was their age. To them, this country is a melting pot where we’ve not only accepted blacks and Hispanics, but people from incredibly far away with incredible complexions, hair, clothes, traditions and names.

Find A Shared Vision, v2.0

I would submit that the key driving force in this transformation/convergence, the single most powerful meshing factor has been music. Dave has been giving tribute to the Music for as long as I can remember but as I’ve noted elsewhere music goes beyond tribute:

Informing and inspiring the open source movement are the African call-and-response traditions, Jazz and the free dance movements which emerged in the 20th Century. Late 20th Century open source strategies include Fluxus, web jams, Wigglism and the international Hip Hop culture.

Wikipedia: Open Source Society and Culture

After Obama’s South Carolina victory, Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed and Delivered was playing in the background. Some of us recalled that the real Clinton told us long ago this day would come:

Tell ‘em to make sure they got their James Brown pass
And don’t be surprised if Ali is in the White House
Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure
Richard Pryor, Minister of Education
Stevie Wonder, Secretary of FINE arts
And Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady
Are you out there, CC?

Chocolate City

 

More recently and much closer to the young folk Dave mentioned was Paint The White House Black. There’s a long way to go but it’s good to see people like Dave stepping up and shining a spotlight on what’s really going on. Colors don’t clash – people do.

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Political Mesh & The Power of Music

January 27, 2008 at 11:08 pm · Filed under Education, Music, News

Noted blogger Dave Winer has endorsed Barak Obama and one key to his analysis is the changing perception about race amongst young people:

The problem for the Clintons is that the country has changed, as recently as the generation that’s now in its early 20s. Because of my experience at Harvard, I know quite a few of them, and I promise you, race doesn’t mean to them what it meant when I was their age. To them, this country is a melting pot where we’ve not only accepted blacks and Hispanics, but people from incredibly far away with incredible complexions, hair, clothes, traditions and names.

Find A Shared Vision, v2.0

I would submit that the key driving force in this transformation/convergence, the single most powerful meshing factor has been music. Dave has been giving tribute to the Music for as long as I can remember but as I’ve noted elsewhere music goes beyond tribute:

Informing and inspiring the open source movement are the African call-and-response traditions, Jazz and the free dance movements which emerged in the 20th Century. Late 20th Century open source strategies include Fluxus, web jams, Wigglism and the international Hip Hop culture.

Wikipedia: Open Source Society and Culture

After Obama’s South Carolina victory, Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed and Delivered was playing in the background. Some of us recalled that the real Clinton told us long ago this day would come:

Tell ‘em to make sure they got their James Brown pass
And don’t be surprised if Ali is in the White House
Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure
Richard Pryor, Minister of Education
Stevie Wonder, Secretary of FINE arts
And Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady
Are you out there, CC?

Chocolate City

 

More recently and much closer to the young folk Dave mentioned was Paint The White House Black. There’s a long way to go but it’s good to see people like Dave stepping up and shining a spotlight on what’s really going on. Colors don’t clash – people do.

Comments (1)

Review: “The Rise of the 3D Internet” Part 1

September 24, 2007 at 6:14 pm · Filed under Education, Intel, Metaverse

Justin Rattner’s keynote at the Intel Developers Forum was loaded with excellent information for people seeking to understand how the 3D portion of meshverse is unfolding. It’s a lot to take in and organize – the presentation is an hour and 10 minutes plus and there were 42 slides in addition to several live demos. I don’t want to get bogged down trying to review it all at once so I’m going to do a multi-part review that will conclude with a summary.

To kick things off how about a bit of

slide2.jpg

Rattner starts out by noting the similarities between today’s walled off virtual worlds and the proprietary online services of 1993. Acknowledging that there have been predictions of 3D on the web before, he points out the increasing capabilities and mega-trends that are making it reasonable to expect that there will be a transition from today’s digital communities to a virtual world paradigm. As someone who made such predictions a decade ago, I’m not convinced that we couldn’t be much further down the road because the increased capabilities and mega-trends have been ramping up for quite some time. We can’t change the past but we can make better choices going forward by understanding these trends, by recognizing that it’s 1994 But Moving Faster.

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Nuclear Energy & Education

August 21, 2007 at 10:35 am · Filed under Education, Energy, News

There are many areas of science and engineering that are very dangerous and/or expensive to investigate, where experimentation in the meshverse is much safer and cheaper. Clearly, nuclear energy is one area. Learning in the meshverse can also be more effective too:

In a way, running experiments and teaching classes in Second Life offers a number of advantages over real life: students watching from their computer screens won’t have to wear expensive radiation badges or obtain clearance to enter an actual laboratory. Instead, they can attend in the guise of “avatars” — virtual likenesses, like personalized computer game characters, whose appearance and features can be customized.

They can also interact with other avatars, a key to making a successful virtual classroom, Amme said, and a major advantage over more traditional Web-based distance learning programs.

“We think that a hands-on laboratory experience is the best teacher, and to be able to do this in Second Life is a marvelous breakthrough, a marvelous opportunity,” he said. “The Web itself is rather benign by comparison because there’s no interactivity. … What’s missing in a lot of distance learning is the socialization [among] students.”

There are other benefits too: Avatars don’t flinch when they’re doing gamma ray spectroscopy. “We don’t have to be worrying about the control of actual nuclear specimens because they can’t be stolen,” Amme pointed out. And, “you don’t have to worry about using plutonium, for example, as a source of neutrons.”

Inside Higher Ed: In Second Life There’s No Fallout

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Nuclear Energy & Education

August 21, 2007 at 10:35 am · Filed under Education, Energy, News

There are many areas of science and engineering that are very dangerous and/or expensive to investigate, where experimentation in the meshverse is much safer and cheaper. Clearly, nuclear energy is one area. Learning in the meshverse can also be more effective too:

In a way, running experiments and teaching classes in Second Life offers a number of advantages over real life: students watching from their computer screens won’t have to wear expensive radiation badges or obtain clearance to enter an actual laboratory. Instead, they can attend in the guise of “avatars” — virtual likenesses, like personalized computer game characters, whose appearance and features can be customized.

They can also interact with other avatars, a key to making a successful virtual classroom, Amme said, and a major advantage over more traditional Web-based distance learning programs.

“We think that a hands-on laboratory experience is the best teacher, and to be able to do this in Second Life is a marvelous breakthrough, a marvelous opportunity,” he said. “The Web itself is rather benign by comparison because there’s no interactivity. … What’s missing in a lot of distance learning is the socialization [among] students.”

There are other benefits too: Avatars don’t flinch when they’re doing gamma ray spectroscopy. “We don’t have to be worrying about the control of actual nuclear specimens because they can’t be stolen,” Amme pointed out. And, “you don’t have to worry about using plutonium, for example, as a source of neutrons.”

Inside Higher Ed: In Second Life There’s No Fallout

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Lockheed & Learning

August 18, 2007 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Business, Companies, Croquet, Education, Games, News, Simulation

Looking to take a leadership position in the field, Lockheed acquired privately held 3DSolve. Via Croquet 2 Play. See also related entries in the Education category. Coming on the heels of Intel’s joining the Croquet Consortium, this news bodes well for the Croquet platform.

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Lockheed & Learning

August 18, 2007 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Business, Companies, Croquet, Education, Games, News, Simulation

Looking to take a leadership position in the field, Lockheed acquired privately held 3DSolve. Via Croquet 2 Play. See also related entries in the Education category. Coming on the heels of Intel’s joining the Croquet Consortium, this news bodes well for the Croquet platform.

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Serious Gaming

August 15, 2007 at 4:03 am · Filed under Business, Education, Games, Metaverse

“It’s not something that has snuck up on us,” says Stefanie Kane, a partner with PwC’s Entertainment & Media Practice. “Video games continue to be one of the fastest-driving segments of the market, no matter what region you look at.” The surprise, more likely, will be that the video game industry grows even faster than these analysts predict, flexing its muscle across the entertainment industry and beyond.
Casual Gamers Will Drive GrowthPwC estimates that the global video game market will increase from $31.6 billion in 2006 to $48.9 billion in 2011, growing in every region. (The report includes video game sales and, in the U.S., advertising within games, but not hardware sales.) This makes video games the third fastest-growing segment of the entertainment and media market after TV distribution (9.3%) and Internet advertising and access spending (13.4%). (For highlights of the report, click here.)

But while the PwC analysis is thorough and offers a solid assessment of how the mainstream gaming industry will grow, it doesn’t look at the innovations happening on the fringes of the industry—innovations likely to mature into whole new markets or to cross over into nongaming industries and create entirely new revenue streams. “The real growth in video games will come from the casual and nontraditional game market,” says Evan Wilson, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.

Getting Serious About Gaming

See also: Bottom Line and More Than A Game 

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Manufacturing, Second Life and Human Capital Development

August 13, 2007 at 8:39 am · Filed under Business, Education, Metaverse, People

Design software vendor Autodesk has an entire island all to its lonesome, which makes a lot of sense considering the fact that there is already a 3D modeling application built into the SL user interface. Just as in the real world, it pays to keep a close eye on the competition, and no doubt Autodesk is looking to recruit the brightest 3D designers to its ranks,just as Pontiac recently gave the most talented “virtual car designer” in SL free real estate to set up shop on its Motorati Island.Scenario-based 3D training software, already used successfully for military and law enforcement training, is beginning to take hold in training forklift drivers and warehouse workers. Even your everyday office tasks are gaining extra dimensions — a company called SpaceTime is kicking the Internet browsing experience up a notch with a 3D browser, a beta version of which is available here.Whether in teaching vital skills or teaming of information workers, a virtual platform designed and built like a video game is already like a second home to the workforce of this digital age. By adapting processes and applications that take advantage of this familiarity, smart companies can build recruitment and human capital development strategies that will reach and teach the next generation of employees.

So the long and short of it is that “virtual worlds” already provide something beyond entertainment — it’s up to your company to decide whether to get with the program and reach out to your potential customers, employees, or both.

IndustryWeek : Second Life: What Is It? (And Why Should Manufacturers Care?)

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