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Sunday, April 06, 2003
 

Classroom of the future
I spent the afternoon at Stanford's Community Day where I had the pleasure of listening to and participating in lectures on the classroom of the future.  Stanford scored a very large grant for The Center for Information Learning last year, and has created a set of classrooms like no other.   Partly research, partly a showcase for SteelCase's high tech products, and Ideo designs.

Some of the features:

  • Large 4 or 5 foot color LCD monitors have replaced the blackboard
  • Mac or PC software runs on those monitors, including special stylus controlled "chalk".  They can run any PC app up there.
  • Whiteboards all over the place, including my favorite Huddle Boards
  • Cameras conveniently located to take snapshots of any whiteboard
  • Printer in the corner, can print result of any camera shot, or printout from the monitors up front.
  • Pass around cordless keyboard, or any laptop in the room can take control of the board (sounds wild).  They demonstrated this.  That's real interactivity!  Won't this make the teacher crazy?
  • Simple, collapsable tables, that can be moved around easily.  No permanent desks.
  • Secure Laptop storage cabinet, with AC power to each to keep them charged.
  • Room Wizard touch screen, web enabled information appliance located outside of all rooms, to help admin the room, schedules, etc

If you're in the Stanford area, definately check out the new Wallenberg hall on the main quad, just to the left of center up front. 


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Ugghh!.. I see Google AdWords ads on the New York Times search result page.  Could they possibly clutter the NYTimes page any more.  I don't know about you, but I've learned to tune out Google's Adwords on their search results.  Those, combined with the NYTimes popup ads.. it's branding overload! and not aligned with Google's mission to provide clear and useful results. Alltheweb.com still has a clean right side of the page.
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MIT's Technology Review magazine had an intriguing article in March on hardnessing the power of Quantum Bits, aka, Quantum Computing.  The idea rests on creating a bit that has quantum like behavior, where the bit can be in 2 states at once.  The bit is normally on its own, being in one of 2 states, but then only when it's observed, it takes on a 0 or 1 state in the classical sense.  The possibility of harnessing this type of behavior is huge. 

Consider that a traditional memory register of 8 bits can only store 1 of a possible 2^8, or 256, digital "words".  But a quantum bit loaded register with 8 "quantum bits" can represent and compute with all 256 words at once. 

Hmm.. sounds like this behavior could change the entire fundamental operation of a computer, and help us realize memory capacities and computing speeds of astronomical proportion.   Cool.


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I've started a Radio Story page to a list of Weblogs from Japan.  I lived in Japan from 1998 thru 2000, as an ex-pat working at Ford & Mazda in Hiroshima.  While I was there, I published a few sites from Japan in the same spirit as these blogs, albiet, I did it the old fashioned way with html editor, Perl and FTP.   I'll continue to add to this story page as I hear of other interesting blogs out of Japan.
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Last update: 1/25/2004; 1:37:46 AM.
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