Flat Classroom Project

Flat Classroom® Conference heads to Europe (Germany December 6-8, 2012) and Asia (Japan March 8-12, 2013) - here's the information you need to get started to plan your trip!! Bring your students and join us! I'm taking a group of students to Germany so if you want to come early and tour with us, let me know! http://bit.ly/KchopE

Cell phones will be able to see through walls according to new research. Perhaps the pundits would do well to watch a few old episodes of Star Trek since the tricorder seems to be getting closer to reality than ever. Such things have all kinds of privacy issues at the helm deserving discussion now before we see our way to a future of things that cause big brother to be everywhere. 

Massively Open Online Courses are the discussion in Open Education -- I think the important thing is that students want to CONNECT around content - it is the relationships and connections that are so amazing more than just the content. People with a common passion are connecting through the content. The content becomes a conduit. 

"Consider Stanford's experience: Last fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence course taught by Mr. Thrun and Peter Norvig, a Google colleague. An additional 200 registered for the course on campus, but a few weeks into the semester, attendance at Stanford dwindled to about 30, as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems.

Mr. Thrun was enraptured by the scale of the course, and how it spawned its own culture, including a Facebook group, online discussions and an army of volunteer translators who made it available in 44 languages.

"Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," he said at a digital conference in Germany in January. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I've taken the red pill, and I've seen Wonderland."

This is about the first website used as World Wide Web.

"CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined in and soon became its number one advocate.

The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links."

Welcome to info.cern.ch The website of the world's first-ever web server 1990 was a momentous year in world events. In February, Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison. In April, the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. And in October, Germany was reunified.

More Internet Information Sources and Usage Statistics CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, provides tools and analyses promoting the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure.

Internet World Stats, Population and Internet Users in all countries and regions of the world. The Internet Big Picture.

An anecdotal history of the people and communities that brought about the Internet and the Web (Last updated 24 March 2010) You can also read this history in a Belorussion translation by Bohdan Zograf.

Information on International children's day which began in Turkey. Here's some information on this event.

"Every year, the children in Turkey celebrate this "Sovereignty and Children's Day" as a national holiday. Schools participate in week-long ceremonies marked by performances in all fields in large stadiums watched by the entire nation. Among the activities on this day, the children send their representatives to replace state officials and high ranking bureaucrats in their offices. The President, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Ministers, provincial governors all turn over their positions to children's representatives. These children, in turn, sign executive orders relating to educational and environmental policies. On this day, the children also replace the parliamentarians in the Grand National Assembly and hold a special session to discuss matters concerning children's issues.

Over the last two decades, the Turkish officials have been working hard to internationalize this important day. Their efforts resulted in large number of world states' sending groups of children to Turkey to participate in the above stated festivities. During their stay in Turkey, the foreign children are housed in Turkish homes and find an important opportunity to interact with the Turkish kids and learn about each other's countries and cultures. The foreign children groups also participate in the special session of the Grand National Assembly. This results in a truly international Assembly where children pledge their commitment to international peace and brotherhood.

http://youtu.be/RIMB9Kx18hw

Why you should hyperlink from your wiki pages.....

A ;new proposed law in the UK wants Skype and social networking sites to be required to keep communications for 12 months. I am thinking this would also apply to Twitter. Understandably, privacy concerns swirl around this proposal.

"Ministers say change is needed to help fight crime and terrorism, but critics warn it is an attack on privacy.

Internet service providers (ISPs) are obliged to keep details of users' web access, email and internet phone calls for 12 months, under an EU directive from 2009.

Although the content of the calls is not kept, the sender, recipient, time of communication and geographical location does have to be recorded.

The proposed new law - which the Home Office says will be brought in "as soon as parliamentary time allows" - would extend those requirements to social networking sites and internet phone services such as Skype."

Instagram is on Android with support for Facebook Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare but not Flickr. Increasingly, pictures are being shared due to the proliferation of websites like pinterest. It is a free app and a great way to share photographs from your phone.

A wiki where fans edit information about things they like. Another example of a wiki that is somewhat of an offsping of wikipedia. As Wikipedia has gotten more formal in editing requirements, those who like the free-er atmosphere from the early days of wikipedia are moving elsewhere to places like this. This wiki has no notability requirements. Anything can be added that one likes.

It looks like, however, that this site has locked down editing (for now) because they didn't have enough editors. However, this is a pretty large wiki.

Lists current trends and articles regarding web 2.0

For you Digital Natives out there, this infograph from MBAonline.com will seem all too common, so please forgive us "over 35" crowd for taking a moment to muse on just how the Internet has changed everything (so far)