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Sunday, January 22, 2006 |
Ray Kurzweil in Ubiquity. The ACM online journal Ubiquity features an interview with futurist/genius/inventor Ray Kurzweil in the January 10-17, 2006, issue. The interview focuses on his new book The Singularity is Near, which includes statements like "We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010." Pulled out of context, such statements seem, well, hyperbolic, but the interview touches on some points crucial for teaching and learning. Consider, for example, this exchange about pattern recognition and think about how it might connect to the discussion about experts and novices in works such as Brandsford et al's How People Learn: [Academic Commons -]
1:27:55 PM 
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Wikimedia Commons reaches 400,000 Files.  [Slashdot] -- this could be a vastly simplified version of MERLOT with a very low theshold to usage. The institutional issue will continue to be ease of use and the combination of powerful search engines (perhaps with a personalized profile) and open content could be the sweet spot for reuse of learning materials. The personalized profile could come from piggybank firefox plugin supplimented with rss feeds profile organized as "project/courses." The point is that for a LOR to actually become a part of a person's normal project workflow it needs to be a painless tool with a low threshold (aka easily discoverable interface) for reuse. Many academic tasks are widely spaced in time and this implies that most of the time the user never gets really skilled using the interface so getting it to work should be easy so that next year when I/you do this again it will be painless and effective use of time. -- BL
12:05:50 PM
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Wireless USB hubs.  [Slashdot] Powered by Freescale’s Ultra-Wideband technology, Belkin brings the world’s first wireless USB Product to the market -- at 480 mbs it will work well with hard drives. What this will mean is that the comupter box will disappear from view so it can finally become part of the infrastructure along with the plumbing and hot spots will come to mean within range of the computer UWB antana . Because of the sheer speed this technology will be very attractive for home theater and home offices and will accelerate the growth of USB devices as the user interface connection (over bluetooth because it is faster and more private). This should push the demand for home office rackmount systems since the ugliness of the backend can be out of view. UWB is also the technology of choice for ad hoc wireless computer clusters such as the sony/toshiba/ibm cell processors which will further push beyond wires with the only limiting technology being portable power supplies (some progress on solar chargers from Voltaic Systems) -- BL
9:39:39 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Landon.
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