04 Education – Page 49 – Public Intelligence Blog

There are differences between “learning” and “education,” but hopefully more people can be inspired to blur the two further than we currently see happening.

Open Courseware, Audio and Video:
Open Courseware Consortium
M.I.T. Open Courseware
M.I.T. open courseware YouTube channel
List of courses by subject (May 2007)
The University of Chicago on iTunes U,
University of South Carolina at iTunes U,
Stanford at iTunes U, Depaul at iTunes U,
Univ of South Florida at iTunes U,
Harvard “Extension” at iTunes U
Udemy.com
Khan Academy (videos)
Audible.com
“World In Time”

+ Gutenberg Project (for text)
+ Scrape Torrent (books, videos, etc)
+ Clips and Documentaries at YouTube (and the YouTube Time Machine), Google video, Journeyman Films, TED, live online courses.

Video talks
Sir Ken Robinson: school kills creativity
Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution
Entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse (entertaining and fascinating)
Jesse Schell explores the social, cognitive, and technological trends in computer game design and use.

+ Affordable mobile devices, tablets
+ Example of a digital textbook

Continue reading “Hyperlink-Notes on the Future of Education (and the future is now) from Bits to Bots”

2010/09/202010/09/20

MakerFaire Africa 2010 Project Showcase

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, Mobile, Technologies

Maker Faire Africa is a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and creation. Here you will find the Makers who showed their work at the 2010 event in Nairobi Kenya. Work ranges from time saving devices for agriculture to alternative energy sources from design with recycled objects to social media applications for mobile phones. Per maker you will find a short synopsis of their work, their contacts details plus a possibliity to collaborate with them.

Terra Weikel from Uganda came with briliant idea on how to improve the digitalization of rural Uganda, and they concluded that the best material would be to use a drum which is readily available. They then converted it into a digital tank (kiosk). He was here to create awareness of the digital drum and inspire its use in other African Villages! To inspire for a better Africa, in terms of digitalization.

The Village Telco is an initiative to build low-cost community telephone network hardware and software that can be set up in minutes anywhere in the world. No mobile phone towers or land lines are required. He was here to create awareness of the product and it entrepreneurial sense! To inspire for a better Africa, in terms of Tele-communication.

Continue reading “MakerFaire Africa 2010 Project Showcase”

2010/09/202010/09/20

Journal: US Secretary of Education Does Not Get It…

04 Education

Tech-loving U.S. education chief ‘not a fan' of Microsoft Xbox 360

TechFlash Seattle

Todd Bishop on Sunday, September 19, 2010, 9:10am PDT

His opinion might not carry the weight of Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J among the country's schoolchildren, but Arne Duncan, the U.S. education secretary, is adamant in this New York Times Q&A today when asked if he would ever buy an Xbox for his children.

“Not a fan. No, absolutely not.”

Phi Beta Iota: Grand Theft Auto, and X-Box, have made huge differences in children's lives. X-Box Live is social networking and social problem-solving of very high value. What we have here is US education being run by a guy who got the job because he was a local pal of the President. He is so out of touch with the reality of what digital natives want and need that he confirms our view that education, intelligence, and research need to be under one big brain that can redirect three fifths or more of the secret intelligence budget to a total make-over of education, intelligence, and high-tech research & development in the context of one integrated “smart nation.”

2010/09/13

Journal: Internet Archive in Sun Portable Data Center

03 Economy, 04 Education, Collective Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process

Data Storage: Internet Archive Gets a Place in the Sun (Portable Data Center)

By Chris Preimesberger on 2009-03-26 eWeek.com

The Internet Archive, one of the fastest-growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its massive amount of content into a new Sun Microsystems-built portable data center loaded with 60 Sun X4500 Thumper arrays that each have 48TB of storage capacity. Sun staged a launch event at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters on March 25.

“It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer,” Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, told eWEEK.

The archive, which employs the equivalent of only three system administrators, goes back to 1996 and stores more than 150 billion Web pages, Kahle said. It is accessed 500 times per second. Archive.org also houses the Wayback Machine, 1 million books, 100,000 movies and about 200,000 audio recordings, Kahle said. “It is a full-on library. This technology we see as another step toward a manageable system for dealing with enormous amounts of information safely.”

Phi Beta Iota: Don't miss the eight-shot slide show above. Brewster spoke at OSS '92–we have wasted the past twenty years, he has not. Now imagine this combined with the C Drives of participating members of the Global Game, and all the insurance data, and true cost information overlain on all credit purchases…..

2010/09/122010/09/13

Y Combinator Hacker News Community’s Model for Info-Sharing & Potential for Collective Intelligence

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hacking, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Technologies

“Hacker News” has a welcome page and guidelines page offering an overview of what the organizers expect from those planning on posting comments and why it's good overall for the community. I (Jason Liszkiewicz) was impressed with this. Hacker News has a solid number of participants and provides a simple and mature format for exploring and contributing thoughtful feedback, insight and resources.

It has a jobs link (mainly for engineers and programmers) and the “Ask Hacker News” link which enables the community to share information and reply to what is shared. Such a model (deemed an “experiment”) that provides mature and thoughtful information-sharing is something we need more of. Communities inter-linking with communities (or at least over-lapping) to spill over each others insights can be invaluable and potentially priceless.

Example: Ask HN: What do you perceive as worth spending money on?

This simple and useful model is something I hoped would emerge + converge from the SMS/text messaging developers at ChaCha.com (humans online responding to text messaged questions) or somewhere else. Converging multi-community info-sharing online, offline, and through the mobile world on a global scale is an exciting possibility.

The next level to all of this exists in the form of ideas or fragmented applications but it seems not beyond that, yet.

Email earthintelnet|at|gmail.com or post something at this new forum to discuss these ideas. Or, provide some mature and thoughtful feedback at the Hacker News community.

2010/09/122010/09/12

Sick Systems on a Micro to Macro Level; Not All Vampires Suck Blood; Psychopaths Among Us

04 Education, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement, Media

The following pieces are from June 2010 and 2001. They were found separately within the same day and provide inter-connected insights. Link to the full version..below is an extremely shortened version:

PSYCHOPATHS AMONG US

Dr. Robert Hare claims there are 300,000 psychopaths in Canada, but that only a tiny fraction are violent offenders like Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen. Who are the rest? Take a look around.
By Robert Hercz (2001)

(three highlights from the article)

+ Hare has said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice (Forbes magazine called the Vancouver Stock Exchange the scam capital of the world). This brings a whole other meaning to “psycho-geography.”

+ Soon after he delivered a keynote speech at a conference for homicide detectives and prosecuting attorneys in Seattle three years ago, Hare got a letter thanking him for helping solve a series of homicides. The police had a suspect nailed for a couple of murders, but believed he was responsible for others. They were using the usual strategy to get a confession, telling him, ‘Think how much better you'll feel, think of the families left behind,' and so on. After they'd heard Hare speak they realized they were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel neither guilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to, “So you murdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared to Bundy or Gacy.” The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn't just confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.

+ Know your own weaknesses, they advise, because the psychopath will find and use them. Learn to recognize the psychopath, they tell us, before adding that even experts are regularly taken in.

How to keep someone with you forever (common enslavement tactics)

Jun. 9th, 2010

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn't there. No energy, and your lover's dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

Continue reading “Sick Systems on a Micro to Macro Level; Not All Vampires Suck Blood; Psychopaths Among Us”

2010/09/11

Journal: Unemployment Up AND Gap in Skills

03 Economy, 04 Education

Skilled worker positions go unfilled, despite high unemployment

Employers cannot find job candidates with the most sought-after ability

By John Schmid of the Journal Sentinel

Sept. 11, 2010 7:06 p.m

EXTRACT 1: According to Manpower Inc., the global job-placement company, the nation has a gaping disconnect between openings and qualified candidates – a gap contributing to around 3 million unfilled U.S. jobs – which in turn hampers growth.

EXTRACT 2: Talent shortages span a broad scale, from engineers who can contribute to global development teams to electricians, mechanics and other specialized machine-shop skills that have seen waves of retirees exit the workforce in recent years without a commensurate wave of apprenticeships to replace them.

EXTRACT 3: “Notwithstanding all our best efforts in attempting to fix the system with recent improvements in workforce development, the pipeline is broken,” Sullivan said. “The fact that virtually all (kindergarten through 12th grade) education in southeastern Wisconsin is based solely on a college prep curriculum, with no exposure to industrial arts, means we are not feeding the market with the right skill sets.”

EXTRACT 4: Resigned they might not find the exact candidates they need, even from abroad, employers will begin to abandon the notion of the ideal candidate. Instead, they will seek the most “teachable fit.” This is a new breed of job candidate – folks who lack some qualifications “but whose capability gaps can be filled in a timely and cost-effective way.” Employers who are willing to set up in-house training academies increasingly will look outside their traditional industries.

SEE LIST OF TEN TOP JOBS LACKING FILLS