Category Archives: Technology
Google Circles is here!
Looks wicked. Like the launch of Chrome pushed innovation at Microsoft, this should get Twitter and Facebook to work to improve their offering.
Classroom 2.0 is here!
I was back in Ireland last week and heard that my old school, St Colman’s College is to launch elearning with iPads replacing schoolbooks. The details:
Next September will see 90 first year students in St Colman’s College, Claremorris being part of what can only be considered the dawn of the digital classroom. The school has decided to swap school books in favour of the Apple iPad tablet. The programme will be phased into use later this year and all first year students will be given the option of purchasing an Apple iPad instead of their course books.
It is understood the cost per student over a three year spell will be in the region of €700. This €700 will include the device and a suite of apps specifically designed for schooling.
The switch will enable students to download ebooks and also avail of many related facilities in the self-directed learning field. It will also mean an end to the often very heavy schoolbags that they carry around with them.
The programme however is not mandatory and all pupils will be given the option to retain books over the iPad.
St Colman’s are the first school to introduce the new method of learning.
I already spoke to this type of use of technology, here and here. Great to see!
Online Currency
Had heard about the currency on Second Life, but Bitcoins were new to me:
Bitcoins have been called a “crypto-currency,” the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders’ computers. (The name “Bitcoin” is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.
This seems so scamable its unreal. I wonder how long it takes to go legit.
Bubble 2.0
Buttonwood has a great discussion on the web 2.0 bubble that the LinkedIn floatation exposes:
AS LinkedIn closes its first day of trading on a valuation of 36 times sales, some of us can feel a wave of nostalgia coming on. Restricted float? Yep. Only 10% of the stock was on offer. New valuation method? Check. The FT says the stock is valued at “more than $100 per user”. Remember “price-per-click” and all that nonsense? It is possible that your blogger is listed as one of those users; I had to join once to try and track down the landlord of some noisy neighbours. The revenue LinkedIn has (and will) generate from me is zero, save if it sells my name on a mailing list in which case the purchaser of that list will face a disappointment.
Online Libraries
Yglesias makes the point that many for-profit uni’s in the states are now required to put their content online:
Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials—videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more—available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license.
Cyber-warfare
Misha Glenny discusses the dawn of cyber-warfare:
Some, such as the former presidential security adviser Richard Clarke, see Stuxnet as proof that the US and western Europe are fatally vulnerable to a range of cyber-attacks that could result in a catastrophic collapse of the so-called critical national infrastructure (CNI). He described a doomsday scenario in which the US is reduced to stone-age conditions within a few days as viruses and other cyber weapons bring down planes and trigger nuclear explosions.
Few security professionals fear this “cybergeddon” is imminent, but there is nonetheless real concern that most banking, power and water systems are over-reliant on vulnerable computer networks.
A Silent Place – With WiFi
Yglesias also discusses libraries and how they are coping with the age of the e-book and the potential savings:
So if a library can save $5 per book on acquisitions by going digital, then every thirty or so new books it acquires generate enough savings to buy a Kindle that can be made available to folks who don’t already own an e-reader…. Once you consider storage costs and the fact that electronics are getting cheaper very rapidly, I think it would almost certainly be cheaper for public libraries to shift to purchasing e-readers and e-books instead of stocking physical books.
This doesn’t contradict the beauty of the library as a place of silence mentioned here, but older people will need to adapt to the idea. I think more important then libraries would be to issue e-books preloaded with textbooks for all school kids. The amount of books kids carry today has become a serious health issue with the back strain and so this would be a great solution. Kids are already used to owning expensive iPods and Laptops, an e-reader would not be a large step. Ad in some sort of tablet for writing answers (emailed direct to the teacher each night) and you immediately have a 21st century classroom, for a cheaper and cheaper marginal cost.
Online Business Models
Great post from Felix Salmon on advertising on tablets like the iPAD:
The more that both publishers and advertisers concentrate on the creative side of things, and the less they worry about the distractions of granular economics, the more successful both are likely to be. Digital display and brand advertising is still very young. Let’s nurture it without giving too much authority to the bean counters. If they stifle it now, they’ll end up suffocating the very digital publishers that they’re going to need, in future, as print slowly dies and consumption moves to tablets.
Talking to friends in dead tree book publishing, there is still a real restraint to moving to new business models for creative content in a digital world. People want things for free and will only pay for things if quality is guaranteed and its easier then getting it for free, ie iTunes and Spotify. Print book and magazine publishers are going to be left behind by the likes of Amazon in the same way the big music producers were unless they adapt to the new, online, economic reality.
Escaping the Filter Bubble
Brilliant talk from Eli Pariser on the filter bubble that internet companies are constructing to bring us to our unique personal online experience. A potential solution would be to have a “general” or master search function that deletes all custom criteria and allows us to have a Google search (or Facebook search or whatever) as it once was. Doubt there is much call for this among the general public so sadly we are probably stuck with this model.
https://ted.com/talks/view/id/1091
IwentdowntotheRiver 