Best content in Digital Students @ CU Boulder

We've been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988, when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term "ubiquitous computing", referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous and pervasive that "technology recedes into the background of our lives".
...

Cancel
sensor-driven collective intelligence
...

Cancel
When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed
...

Cancel
...16 more annotations...
You're still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so.
...

Cancel
- Elise Beall on 16 Mar 11
  
  I have great optimism for actually being alive to see all of this happen. My fear is that it falls into the wrong hands. Or we begin to rely on it so heavily, that when the system hiccups, the world crumbles. Recently, in my "Computational World" class, we talked about how the fear is all relative. My teacher (late 40s maybe?), said he wanted nothing to do with facebook, and has a hard time understanding why people feel the need to share in that way. He also despises his cell phone, and only carries one because his family insists. My generation has embraced all of these technologies, and I am positive that my son will grow up with few reservations about this incredible growth in tech.
  
  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">I have great optimism for actually being alive to see all of this happen. My fear is that it falls into the wrong hands. Or we begin to rely on it so heavily, that when the system hiccups, the world crumbles. Recently, in my "Computational World" class, we talked about how the fear is all relative. My teacher (late 40s maybe?), said he wanted nothing to do with facebook, and has a hard time understanding why people feel the need to share in that way. He also despises his cell phone, and only carries one because his family insists. My generation has embraced all of these technologies, and I am positive that my son will grow up with few reservations about this incredible growth in tech.</div>
  
  ...
  
  Cancel
...

Cancel
credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone
...

Cancel
Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed
...

Cancel
So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals?
...

Cancel
Seth Priebatsch
...

Cancel
SCVNGR
...

Cancel
His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail
...

Cancel
why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score
...

Cancel
Clay Shirky
...

Cancel
The end state of connectivity," he argues, "is that it provides citizens with increased power."
...

Cancel
AskNature
...

Cancel
Nissan, right now, is developing swarming cars based on the movements of schooling fish
...

Cancel
the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't
...

Cancel
we were not meant to operate as computers do
...

Cancel
A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But "
...

Cancel