Group items tagged

"The big theme of Mr. Shirky's talk was openness. Taking advantage of technology, he argued, will require "doing more sharing than we're used to and then learning to live with results." He underscored the power of sharing with an anecdote about what happened when the Smithsonian Institution made a cache of photographs available on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users catalogued the archive with tags that reflected an unpredictable range of interests, including facial hair, the history of photography, and the fiction genre known as Steampunk. "There's all kinds of hidden value in our systems which you can't even understand until you open them up to see what people do with them," Mr. Shirky said. "The thing that drives me craziest in conversations with large institutions about large data sets is they want to know in advance what will happen. Why should we open up our data? To which the answer is, you open up your data to see where the value is. It's the value you can't even predict until you try it that you get back.""

"Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong. I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward. The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one. "

"He compares traditional teaching to "giving people thousands of rubber mallets and asking them to drill a hole through a mountain." He said, "We need nitroglycerine." His "nitroglycerine" is Saylor.org, a nonprofit online university he backs as sole trustee of the Saylor Foundation. Saylor's model is to offer students a free, one-stop shop for self-paced college courses. Saylor.org aggregates free content offered by open-source providers like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses, and groups it so that students can pursue a continuous sequence of courses in a major. The model takes a different approach than that of high-profile providers of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, mainly in its role as an aggregator of online content into comprehensive courses. Instead of following a professor through a series of video lectures and peer-graded exercises on Coursera, for example, students in Saylor courses read, listen to, and watch material from different sources and grade themselves using answer keys."

"Focus Forward films highlight exceptional people and world-changing ideas that are impacting the course of human development, changing our lives for the better. We are looking for professional quality 3-minute stories about visionaries and thinkers and in some cases everyday folks who have brought a quantum leap to human progress by their efforts and inventions. Your film may encompass anything from jaw-dropping medical advancements to renewable energy breakthroughs; open-source architecture to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries; computer programming wizardry to sci-fi-worthy robotics; or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires you. We're especially interested in the accomplishments of inventors, engineers, educators, surgeons, scientists, techies, artists, programmers, backyard tinkerers-i.e. anyone making a difference, utilizing their skills and vision to innovate, share their work, and help sow the seeds of a brighter future."

"The akashic records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogies commonly found in discourse on the subject include a "universal supercomputer" and the "Mind of God". People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated automatically and that they can be accessed through astral projection[1] or when someone is placed under deep hypnosis. The concept was popularized in the theosophical movements of the 19th century and is derived from Hindu philosophy of Samkhya. It is promulgated in the Samkhya philosophy that the Akashic records are automatically recorded in the elements of akasha one of the five types of elements visualized as existing in the elemental theory of Ancient India, called Mahabhuta. In the Mahabharata mention is made of Chitragupta (lit. "hidden picture"). "

If Google is to achieve its stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," says Wiley, it must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And he says experience sampling-bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not-is the best way to do it. "Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it's getting us better information that we really haven't had in the past," he says.

The School of Commoning is a growing worldwide community of people participating in the global and local commons. We support the developing commons movement, as well as interested organizations and individuals, with well-organized knowledge resources and educational programs on commoning and the commons.

While the structure of a charrette varies, depending on the design problem and the individuals in the group, charrettes often take place in multiple sessions in which the group divides into sub-groups. Each sub-group then presents its work to the full group as material for future dialogue. Such charrettes serve as a way of quickly generating a design solution while integrating the aptitudes and interests of a diverse group of people. Compare this term with workshop.

"In his new book To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink reports that education is one of the fastest growing job categories in the country. And with this growth comes the opportunity to change the way educators envision their roles and their classrooms. Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation. Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas."

Home Blogs Think Tank Better Than Free: How Lynda.com Made a Pay Wall Pay by Megan Erickson January 26, 2012, 12:00 AM Computer What's the Big Idea? Free is easy. In an age when just about anything can be shared, the hard part is getting people to pay for it. For ten years, content creators have argued that if you want watch, read, or listen to something, you have to support the writing, editing, and production work that has gone into it. Usually, this translates into nothing more than guilt-tripping or flattering an audience into making a donation, since it's widely assumed that putting content behind pay wall is a sure way to kill a site's traffic.

The Worst Consequence of Your Best Ideas You have to wonder why desks in rows and textbooks on the desks have survived as long as they have as the dominant instructional model when so few people think that it's actually a good way to teach and learn. And then you realize that while it never goes all that right, it rarely goes all that wrong either. Teachers don't usually get in trouble when administrators walk into their classroom and see kids with books open, doing work, even if the work isn't worth doing. And all those other ideas that we love so much - inquiry, project-based learning, technology, real world application of student work - they get so… messy. And something always seems to go wrong. And we have to face that education is a somewhat reactionary field to work in. The death of so many good ideas is when something goes wrong and someone decides that we should never do that again.