China innovating forward

MIT just published an artilce about China's efforts to take leadership in clean coal technology. The first paragraph of the article states that,

"China looks set to overtake the United States in the application of
technologies to clean up coal-fired power generation, if several proposed
projects come to fruition. GreenGen--a joint venture established by Chinese
utilities--has broken ground on China's first integrated gasification
combined cycle (IGCC) plant and signed agreements to build two more."

It will be interesting to watch how the new administration and the US responds.

Pitch Poker - Life...

Here is an interesting video that looks at life as a game, relating it to poker.  It is a bit long, but if you stick with it... they talk about innovation and creativity and how technology enables us all to work in this world. 

Google and voice.

Google and voice. The Technology review posted a story about Google's ambitious efforts to work with voice and search. Green is quoted as saying, "if you own an iPhone, you can now be part of one of the most ambitious speech-recognition experiments ever launched."

This and other efforts like it will change how we interface with devices.

RDF the Future of Information Literacy & Learning

When we talk about information literacy we can't help but frame it through our current limited viewpoint.  Information components such as Resourcs Description Frameworks (RDF) are unfamiliar to most of us and therefore have not been part of the information literacy conversation.  RDF is a language for representing information on the Internet allowing data sources to more easilly be combined and mashed up to create new understanding and visualizaitons.  The following video provides an example of how RDF can be utilized to combine information to increase understanding.

Voice Thread

When things shift - it can be very uncomfortable

When students begin to understand that they can learn from each other things get interesting. The learning ecosystem has just shifted and change is always uncomfortable and resisted by those who don't understand it.    As Mark Masnick reported in his article, "Should you live blog / twitter a college class?" 

The professor in the class she talked about wasn't particularly happy about the article, which was then discussed in the class itself (very meta). According to students in the class (and the author of the original piece), the professor made it clear that they were no longer to blog, text or Twitter about the class, or to quote the professor without permission. 

Similar to the music industry we are seeing a shift in power and change in control of who distributes information.  Their is no controling this power shift.  Individuals that learn to understand the signifiance of this shift and learn how to live within this new learning ecosystem will thrive as instructors.  

Resources (Great Books - Articles - Must Read)

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Outliers: The Story of Success

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

The Post-American World

LibraryThing - connect to readers.

LibraryThing is a social networking site for book lovers. To learn more watch this introduction video.

What are blogs anyway?

Blogs are easy to use web authoring tools. You can use them to publish your content to the world. For a great overview of why blogs have become so popular take a look at the video Blogs in Plain English.

Social bookmarking explained

Everyone bookmarks things they like on the Web. However, finding new quality content can be overwhelming and we know that we are missing good stuff. No one individual has the time to search for and qualify everything that is being produced and shared on the Web. Social bookmarking is one tool that can help you solve this problem. Watch Social Bookmarking in Plain English for a basic understanding of social bookmarking and then start using a tool like Delicious. If you joined Delicious - you are now a part of a learning community. By sharing what you see, you are contributing to that community, and you have an opportunity to learn through the community by seeing what others found to be important. Be patient, your learning community will improve as you find individuals that are providing relevant and worthwhile content. Keep watching those individuals and stop watching those individuals that are producing things of little value. It's that easy...

New to Twitter?

If you are new Twitter take a look at this video by Commoncraft - Twitter in Plain English.

What is RSS and how do I read it?

For those new to RSS feeds and feed readers - I recommend the following video... RSS in Plain English by Commoncraft.

Highlight the web!

Do you like to highlight your books? If so, Diigo allows you to highlight the web, take notes on those highlights and then share those annotations with the world.

Learn more by watching the video below or visiting Diigo directly.