What happens when everyone and everything becomes connected? « Ponoko – Blog | the internet of things, open data and the city What happens when everyone and everything becomes connected? These are the beginnings of some exciting times indeed This short film explores how connectivity is changing our lives in ways never before imagined. Through conversations with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud, we learn that there may be greater changes in the next ten years than in all of the past half-century. “…when the light bulb was the big thing and they dug up all of NY just to be able to put light bulbs in the houses, they didn’t really see the extension of light bulbs – that you could have other electrical appliances.We are at the light bulb stage of the Internet.” It’s well worth setting aside 20 minutes to watch, absorb and be inspired. via Sugru
Parents break age rule to help kids join Facebook | more learning 15 Big Ways The Internet Is Changing Our Brain | Online College Tips – Online Colleges | more learning If you don’t have a PLN, you don’t know what you’re missing!! « NovaNews Recently I was asked to write an article for an upcoming edition of Connections, a quarterly newsletter produced by the Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS), a business unit of Education Services Australia. Aiming to provide informative and useful material relevant to school libraries which helps keep library professionals up to date, Connections is distributed to all schools in Australia in both hard copy and digital formats. I was asked to write specifically about Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) both from a general and personal perspective. I found the process of putting my thoughts together both challenging and inspiring. My article in Connections has been published in mid February 2012 and can be read in hard copy and online in Issue #80. Just recently I had the most thrilling experience! I met – in person – some members of my PLN!! In between shared handshakes, hugs and giggles, gasps could be heard: “Wow – you’re so tall!” So who are these people? “So what is a PLN?”
The Filter Bubble: How the Web Gives Us What We Want, and That's Not a Good Thing by Maria Popova How the web gives us what we want to see, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Most of us are aware that our web experience is somewhat customized by our browsing history, social graph and other factors. But this sort of information-tailoring takes place on a much more sophisticated, deeper and far-reaching level than we dare suspect. (Did you know that Google takes into account 57 individual data points before serving you the results you searched for?) I met Eli in March at TED, where he introduced the concepts from the book in one of this year’s best TED talks. The primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. What, exactly, is “the filter bubble”? EP: Your filter bubble is the personal universe of information that you live in online — unique and constructed just for you by the array of personalized filters that now power the web. How did you first get the idea of investigating this? Donating = Loving
Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989,[2] and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year.[3][4][5][6][7] Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. Early life Berners-Lee was born in London, United Kingdom (UK),[18] one of four children born to Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee. Career After graduation, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, UK.[18] In 1978, he joined D. Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. Current work Awards and honours Personal life See also
The Rise of the Toilet Texter We know where some of you are reading this. A recently released survey of the mobile phone habits of Americans, going where few other surveys care to go, has found that 75 percent of the populace have used their mobile devices while on the toilet. Among those aged 28 to 35, the figure is 91 percent. The survey of 1,000 people by the marketing agency 11mark found that private contemplation has given way to toilet-time talking, texting, shopping, using apps, or just surfing the Web, by both sexes and most ages. Chip Litherland for The New York TimesTexting, though, is fine. It gets weirder. Hope you are sitting down for this: 20 percent of males have at one time joined a conference call from the toilet. This is, in a sense, a testimony to our collective passion for communication and contact over all other needs, and a lesson in how quickly ideas of decorum adjust to the times.