Group items tagged

Technology can link a kettle to a mobile phone, so every time an elderly person boils water for their morning cup of tea a message is sent to a family member letting them know their relative is up and well. (Australia)

His suspicions grew further when he noticed a small, flat, circular object hidden under the rim of his new bin. About the size of a 10-cent coin, it had the letters "TI-RFid" embossed on it.

RFid technology attached to garbage bins to collect data about home owners re-cycling efforts or lack of. (Australia)

Business people and management should read this article about the transformation of business by using workplace communities. "Workplace communities are designed to solve workplace-related challenges" -- they focus on tasks. I would find it interesting to see a business REALLY use technology to change things. Having the business in a business network (OK a NING) and let people tag their posts with the business related PROBLEMS they are having and blog, video, or photograph it-- the tag cloud would tell the business IMMEDIATELY what the problems are in the company. The problem with this model is that there are few corporate executives who REALLY want to know the problems within their organizations. They don't want to be problem solvers, just opportunity creators. However, when managers open their eyes (and I'm a former General Manager myself) and see that two things give business opportunity: problem solving and innovation. And they are directly related. True innovation solves problems. Read this article and think about how you may solve problems using the networks you may now create. If you don't want everyone to know, keep it private and only allow people in your company in.

Important article about why businesses need to change.

referenced in Scope Conf SAF2008

Adobe is trying to get its Flash player installed on more mobile devices.

Adobe will stop charging licencing fees for mobile versions of Flash and plans to publish information about the inner workings of the code. Wikinomics concept: The move is the latest in a series that are aiming to open up Flash and get MORE devleopers working with it.

Many of the observations about the increasing costs of rural education apply in rural Canada as well. Rural schools with highschool enrollments of under 100 students can't be sustained using current models. However, the use of technology would make it possible to deliver world connecting education with a fraction of the cost. Which means that small rural schools could be sustained. We won't be having the standard industrial model of one teacher per class per grade. And maybe that's a good thing, it was kind of an arbitrary arrangement anyway, more for the sake of administration than learning.

We live in a wireless world. Garry Barker meets a man whose world is more wireless than most.

Good article that explains the different wireless protocols used in mostly layman's terminology. Could create some ideas for a multi-media artifact?

Flickr users are angry about the addition of video. If you search "video" on flickr, you'll see many such responses. This is important to highlight in the horizon project.

Response of many flickr users to the addition of video to flickr. This is going to be a very interesting thing to watch. Should a company focus, or should it be everything to everyone? I think that somehow flickr may miss the point... there are subgroups of people who want to use technologies in a focused way without everyone else. IN some ways, self selection makes the product more usable to a niche. Now, photobugs may have to go somewhere else or tolerate the "moving pictures" that they so hate.

Technology start-up PluggedIn Media Inc. is set Wednesday to begin letting users view for free near-DVD-quality music videos licensed from three of the four biggest music companies, along with information about artists and links to buy merchandise and concert tickets.

Lines stretched for blocks outside phone stores Monday as ordinary Cubans were allowed to sign up for cellular phone service for the first time.

This is the effort to have ubiquitous log in ID's for people across the Internet.

Places to get an Open ID -- this important technology allows people to have one user ID to log into many sites -- and because it is a distributed ID -- you can keep using it even if your main site dissappears.

Wow! This student says so much very eloquently about Don Tapscott's keynote: My tenth grader says in this blog post: "A teacher should, as Don Tapscott said, no longer be a transmitter of information, but a regulator of educational settings. Our teacher Mrs. Vicki could stand in from of the class room all day and lecture us on exactly what to do and how to do it. We would ace tests and learn a lot . . . for a while… However by next year about 65% of what we learned will be irrelevant due to technology changes and development. Instead, she gives us projects to complete that pose challenges to us that can repeat themselves. Such as giving us a project to make a video by using a program we are unfamiliar with. Though we may not ever make another video, it is inevitable that we face the challenge of having to use an unfamiliar program, ergo, we will be prepared to deal with this for the rest of our lives. So in conclusion, the role of a teacher is now: to regulate the educational environment; to introduce students to the realm of ambiguities; and to no longer evaluate our overall knowledge, but our constructive, creative, and adaptive capabilities." Wow! I am humbled and impressed at what students have to say when asked and challenged!

A student's rumination on teacher roles in the classroom.

Projected impact of computer-based/online learning on schools

Tried to leave a comment but it said I had unspecified parameters. Maybe I was just to long-winded. Anyway I wrote up my comment as a blog entry at http://ict07598.wordpress.com/in-house-dc-electrical-generating-plants/

High priced conference some good links on the page one being Is IT Becoming Extinct? Miguel Guhlin

fantastic experiment not sure if the title of the article is justified in the text. Biggest complaint seems to be loss of control and authority. hmmm "Students having their classroom ideas judged not simply by their peers but by a far wider audience" and that is a bad thing because...?

The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity.

Mr. Lee is to direct a short film comprising of videos created using their mobile phones.

An "assignment" for each act will be announced online and people will then have four weeks to produce their submission.

Spike Lee has linked up with Nokia to direct a movie made with cell phone footage from everyday people in what he calls the democratization of film.

MySpace hopes to provide an alternative pilot process. Rather than spend millions of dollars on a test TV episode that might never receive a series order, the company hopes to use its social network as a test bed.