5 Guides to Life from Cultural Luminaries One of our favorite unattributed quotes goes as follows: “Life is a test. It is only a test. If this were your actual life, you would have been given better instructions.” The good news is that guidance is in fact out there, which is why we’ve put together a short list of reads (and one documentary) that gather the best of what we’ve collectively learned about the tricky art of living. Where the self-help genre can be trite, a byproduct of the latest pop-culture trends, there’s comfort in knowing that these picks go deeper in their quest for human self-actualization. In 2011, we live in an age without existential anchors, a state that leaves many of us feeling adrift in our day-to-day lives. [A]nyone who hopes to enrich his or her life by experiencing it in the light of classic philosophical and literary works can hope to find something here. Director Astra Taylor has her subjects – and their minds – on the move in Examined Life: Philosophy Is in the Streets.
ImageQuiz Virtual Reality Simulation E-Learning by Skills2Learn Training your workforce or students today can pose a number of challenges. Cost expenses, equipment shortages, dangerous situations, people’s motivation to learn are all factors hindering good training. Fail to motivate learners? Leave learners confused and lacking confidence? Test competency? Deal with customer issues? If any of the questions above affect you then Skills2Learns virtual reality may be the solution for you. Skills2Learn use its own award winning technology to create virtual reality simulation solutions that can be used for almost any subject matter. The possibilities of 3D and virtual reality are endless from environments, buildings, equipment to people.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: This is how Learning Will Look Like in The Future It's really hard to anticipate what the field of education will look like in the next coming years. Technology and digital media have radically changed the entire learning ecosystem and this is only the beginning because the real impact wont be visible till decades later. This is exactly what happened with the invention of the printing press. When Gutenburg first invented the printing press in the 15th century he did not have any idea of the transformative change this machine would bring to the entire humankind. This is probably what will happen with learning too.
Envisioning Technology 2012 What is the visualization? Understanding where technology is heading is more than guesswork. Looking at emerging trends and research, one can predict and draw conclusions about how the technological sphere is developing, and which technologies should become mainstream in the coming years. Envisioning technology is meant to facilitate these observations by taking a step back and seeing the wider context. Who made this? Envisioning Technology is a technological trend forecasting firm headed by emerging technology strategist Michell Zappa. If you have any ideas, questions, complaints or suggestions, feel free to email us: mz@envisioningtech.com Technologies mentioned Follow the project This is the first in a series of projects related to the future of technology. License & credits
Music Music Music ‘Hypnagogic pop’ and the landscape of Southern California James Ferraro Touch Screen Splatter Punks of Digital Tokyo (In production, due to be completed in 2013) I’m sitting on the AstroTurf lawn of The Grove, a ‘retroscape’ shopping mall in Los Angeles, listening to 1980s covers band The Copycats deliver immaculate counterfeits of bygone MTV hits. Coined by The Wire magazine’s David Keenan in 2009, ‘hypnagogic pop’ is a term for a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave mtv pop, sedative New Age and the peppy synth-driven soundtracks of Hollywood blockbusters. Hypnagogic is the term for a state between being awake and falling asleep, associated by some with hallucinations that are hyper-real rather than surreal. LA is a city where Spectacle (in the Situationist sense) and the Spectacular (in the geological sense) are freakily entwined. Hypnagogic is a 21st-century update of psychedelia. Simon Reynolds
My Best of series You can find all of my “Best” lists in broad categories here. The link to that page can also be found at the top right of my blog: My Best Of Series I also have them all on another page where they are listed in the chronological order in which I originally posted them. Two thousand “Best” lists are a lot of best lists! In an effort to make them both further accessible and to update many of them, I began posting “Best Lists Of The Week.” I’ve created about sixty-five of them so far and they encompass a few hundred “Best” lists. You will find these newly categorized lists on a page titled My Best Of The Week, and they’ll be shown as “buttons” (you can see what they look like at the top of this blog post) listed alphabetically (more-or-less). I hope you find the lists, and the way they’re organized, helpful! Please note that I continually update and revise all of the lists. The Best Resources Discussing The Importance Of Art In Education — Help Me Find More All My BAM! Reading
Best Online Collaboration Tools 2012 - Robin Good... Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Ed Edition Login or Create New Account Member Spotlights RIT Launches Nation’s First Minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture NMC Blog The 7 Things You Need to Openly Engage with Your Community iTUNES U Ideas that Matter and More High Quality, Free EdTech Content Sparking innovation, learning and creativity. > Publications > NMC on iTunes U > Creative Commons NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Ed Edition The NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program. This ninth edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. This year’s NMC Horizon Report identifies mobile apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Tags: 2012 107490 reads
The legacy of Brazil’s pioneering digital culture policy, and why it should be protected. Jose Murillo produced the following primer on Quora, explaining the legacy of Gilberto Gil (and his successors) and Lula’s policies, now endangered under a new Minister of Culture: “I think it would be useful to mention the elements which, in my view, created the set and setting for the Brazilian Digital Culture Experiment. * a minister of culture like Gilberto Gil, who created such thing as the Tropicalia movement in the 60s, and was seconded by his own vice, Juca Ferreira, resulting in 8 years (2002-2010) of a continued program happening at a strategic moment for technology and culture. * advanced free software policies implemented since 2002 by the Brazilian government as a whole, creating a better IT environment for understanding the fabrics of the internet. (1) I think it is important to highlight that there was a cultural narrative underlying the whole movement, one that Gil was able to adapt to the 21st century. The ‘Brazilian Public Software’, more about it here:
William Annin Middle School | Showcase | YoYo Games Who are you, what is your role and what class(es) do you teach Steven Isaccs, Teacher of 8th grade Video Game Design and Development. What versions of GameMaker do you use? Currently, GameMaker Studio. What made you choose GameMaker? GameMaker provides a wonderful opportunity for students to create games in an easy to understand, concrete manner while still maintaining an authentic introduction to computer programming concepts. How many students do you teach at a time? I teach 3 sections of the 8th grade elective. How long are you classes? 40 minutes How long is your course? 20 weeks Do the students work alone or in groups? Both. What background/majors/emphasis do the students have? It varies. How are the students graded on their GameMaker projects? I utilize a Quest-based learning management system for my course. How would you rate the students' interest in game development before and after the class? Their interest level is high prior to and after the class. Absolutely!
The Internet will not ruin college I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over. Debating the value of online education at the current moment in history makes about as much sense as questioning the tactics of the losing Roman generals in the great third century B.C. battle of Cannae. Perhaps of some interest to academics, but moot. I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. A friend of my son taught himself how to play the ukulele from YouTube videos last summer. In mid-January, Udacity announced a deal, partially brokered by California Gov.