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There's no denying Wikipedia's usefulness, but French computer science student Owen Cornec believes the website could stand to display entries "in a more engaging way." Thus, he created WikiGalaxy: a special Wikipedia browser that visualizes the website as a 3D galaxy. Each star represents an article, and related entries form clusters of stars -- clicking a star loads the entry itself on the left-hand panel and links to relevant articles on the right. If you want to make browsing Wiki even more interactive, you can activate "fly-mode," which sends you zooming through the stars with each click. It's a really fun way to discover new articles, and you have to try it out if you can.

And my sense is that this sort of thing happens almost every day — someone somewhere has the information or insight you need but you don’t have access to it. Ten years from now you’ll solve the problem you’re working on and tell me about the solution and I’ll tell you — Geez, I could have told you that 10 years ago. How does this happen? Why does communication break? One answer to that is right in front of us. This is a letter, addressed to one person who might find it interesting. Clarke couldn’t have addressed it to the folks at APL because he didn’t know they would be interested.

Carol Goman calls this phenomenon “Unconscious Competence”. You don’t know the value of what you know. It’s not just that Clarke didn’t send his letter to the right people. It’s that Clarke didn’t think there was that much of interest to tell. He sent out that letter, but for the ten years before that that he had had that idea, he didn’t send letters to anyone.

There’s a broad feeling that social media has solved this problem. I think it’s solved a lot of it. But as I think we’ll see, there’s a lot left to improve.

continuing development of new knowledge, making it difficult to compress all that learners need to know within the limited time span of a post-secondary course or program.

ncreased emphasis on skills or applying knowledge to meet the demands of 21st century society, skills such as critical thinking, independent learning, knowing how to use relevant information technology, software, and data within a field of discipline, and entrepreneurialism.

developing students with the skills to manage their own learning throughout life