“Did you ever think that your computer was alive? That there was someone inside working for you? ‘Hi, a real human interface’ is a metaphor for how interaction with technology should be. It was our attempt to create the perfect interface; one that really understands our deepest needs, a human interface indeed.”

“Multitouch Barcelona is “an interaction design group exploring natural communication between people and technology. We design experiences that merge real and digital into a creative environment where people are invited to touch, play, move, feel as they do in the real world”

• Video from Vimeo
• Excerpts from Multitouch Barcelona

“On Jan. 17 George Siemens and I will launch the third offering of our online course called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’ — or CCK11. We use the term ‘connectivism’ to describe a network-based pedagogy. The course itself uses connectivist principles and is therefore an instantiation of the philosophy of teaching and learning we both espouse….

“Connectivism … is a pedagogy based on the realization that any knowledge, all knowledge, is … not something we can package neatly in a sentence and pass along as though it were a finished product. It is complicated, distributed, mixed with other concepts, looks differently to different people, is inexpressible, tacit, mutually understood but never articulated.”When we focus on the content of a discipline, we miss most of that. We learn the words, but not the dance.”

• Excerpts from Stephen Downes: ‘Connectivism’ and Connective Knowledge

“Many of us who have been following social media since the early 90s are very sensitive to today’s exponential growth in usage of the sharing web.

“Inspired by other cool real time counters, Social Media Industry Head, Laurel Papworth, my own Rise & Rise of Social Media presentations and various ‘cool’ videos (you know the ones) I decided to put together this little Flash app (which is in constant development) showing how active & dynamic the Social Web, Mobile Industry and Game Business is.”

• From Gary Hayes at Personalize Media

“It is finally sinking in that mobile devices are part of the Internet. The iPad doesn’t set us up for a return to pre-Internet business models. The web is not dead. Mobile devices may not be serving up content in a web browser as often as on our laptops and desktops, but regardless what app is used to serve up the content, it is being served from the Internet, and the Internet has changed the world too much for this model to make sense anymore….

Comments: “Radio did not kill journalism, television did not kill journalism and the Internet has not killed journalism. They each merely redefined it….

“Old media is just scared, same thing was when trains first arrived. The old establishment opposed the build out of train system, which prelonged the transportation industry some years….

“The network topology of information transfer is changing — a distribution monopoly (or close to it) has evolved into a roughly hub-and-spoke system that has shifted power toward information meritocracy. What traditional media doesn’t do well is value intermediate nodes in the increasingly flat distribution network. An ideal system would pay people (nodes in the network) who share information, and charge people who do not. The payment/charge should be pro rata for services rendered. In the new world, everyone is both the paper boy and the subscriber….

“Publishing has to adjust to the nature of consciousness and the global mind. Nothing else will work….”

• Excerpts from Why the iPad is Destroying the Future of Journalism

“McKinsey’s new survey research finds that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins…

“A new class of company is emerging — one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers. We call this new kind of company the networked enterprise.

“Results from our analysis of proprietary survey data show that the Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance. In fact, our data show that fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.”

• Excerpts from McKinsey Quarterly

“The internet has caused an economic shift every bit as important as the Industrial or Agricultural Revolutions. Thousands of bottom-up solutions are leveraging mobile and social media, open-source values, collective intelligence and other emerging patterns.

“These crowd-driven innovations are combining – symbiotically — into a truly novel way of living and doing business.

“Symbionomics is part online media project, and part feature length documentary film. We intend to highlight the emerging patterns, cultural trends and business models that will take us into a deeper relationship with wealth.”

• Excerpts from Symbionomics: The Film

“Our global society faces the challenge of moving from an industrial-growth society to a life-sustaining society. This shift is often referred to as ‘The Great Turning.’”

• Video from Blip.tv
• Source materials from WGBH Lab Sandbox, CC Mixter, Flickr Creative Commons, and Shift in Action

“While Lieberman’s tirade against Wikileaks was certainly related to matter of public policy, was he actually expressing an opinion on policy? Or was he simply threatening private firms for facilitating the dissemination of speech he didn’t like…

As an attorney and former state Attorney General, Sen. Lieberman should have known full well that his actions were directly antithetical to Wikileaks’ First Amendment rights. As such, he may not enjoy the protections of qualified immunity….

On one hand, Julian Assange may be guilty of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein argues forcefully in an op-ed in today’s The Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, the Wikileaks website may well enjoy the same First Amendment protection that the Pentagon Papers were found by the Supreme Court to enjoy in New York Times Co. v. United States, via the WSJ Law Blog.”

Excerpts from OpenMarket.org

The majority of taggers may tag “las vegas” as “vacation,” but those who think of it as “sodom” can find their way through the data as well.

That’s the big change the rise of the miscellaneous brings. We’re adding massive amounts of metadata — tags, links, playlists, even taxonomies — to all of the resources available on the web without prior planning and coordination, making a huge mess. But, that mess actually enhances the available ways we can find and make sense of what’s available to us. All that unplanned metadata lets us pull pieces together, and then it helps us contextualize and understand those pieces.

Until we started digitizing everything, we organized either the physical things themselves (what Everything Is Miscellaneous refers to as the first order of order) or we physically separated the information about the things and organized that (the second order): Think of books and card catalogs, or merchandise on racks and a catalog of products. With the third order, for the first time we can organize information, ideas and knowledge free of the limitations of the physical. And that enables us to get past the notion that there must a single right order, whether it’s Aristotle’s, God’s, or Linnaeus’ best guess.

• Excerpts from Wired.com

“A few days ago I started reading The Last Child in the Woods. It sparked in me a sense of panic and guilt about the amount of time my daughter spends outdoors connecting to nature, getting fresh air, and exploring. I decided I wanted us to begin exploring our surroundings together. Even if our immediate surroundings was an empty dry desert field covered in garbage and construction refuse.

“We went outside with our cameras in hand to see what we could discover. I wish I had a field recorder, so I could have recorded her excitement and enthusiasm. We spoke of the wind, the setting sun, and how plants can grow with little water. We spoke about the power of art to make the ugly appear beautiful. We asked questions of each other. We guessed at answers. The two of us were a mobile outdoor classroom. Father and daughter in an empty field in the desert.

“When we came home I asked her if she wanted to see her pictures on the big screen of the computer and talk about what she had seen. The result was a very simple photo essay.

http://dearkaia.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-photo-essay.html

“Being the proud dad that I am, I decided to share the experience with my Twitter network. I thought that was the end of it, until last night when I noticed several comments come pouring in. After a quick request as to who was responsible I found out that @wmchamberlain had shared Kaia’s blog post with his class. I suggest you go and read some of the 43 comments.

“I immediately got in touch with him through Twitter, and he told me that a few of his students were curious if we had electricity in Doha. I told him, if he was interested, I could Skype into his classroom and answer some quick questions. So there we were, a small classroom in rural Missouri and me in my kitchen talking about our surroundings. We were following our curiosity. We were discovering new things. We were learning, beyond classroom walls, because we had all decided to take risks and be open with our lives. I told wmchamberlain’s students that since Kaia is only three she may have a hard time reading their comments and really grasp what is going on….

“The next day Kaia and I sat in our kitchen and watched their video. She is still too young to really grasp the connections that she is making, but in a few years these connections and this type of interaction will be ubiquitous in her life. I hope that her teachers are ready to help her continue on this journey.

• Excerpts from Intrepid Teacher