Using Microsoft Tag (currently in beta) you can make almost anything you want  interactive.  Link real life with the digital world, by adding a  tag to product packaging, print-based media, signage, outdoor advertisements, business cards, storefront signage , exhibit, video or wherever else you can imagine using a  link to the virtual world from a physical space.

The tag above can be snapped by a  phone camera (a free iPhone app is already available) and it will provide automatic opening of a browser and navigation to  the home page of this website for example.  I’m thinking of virtual supplements to sports museum displays as a potential use.

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Ubiquity’s goals are to:

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

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• On user interfaces, and command lines
• Ubiquity: Mash-ups for the masses

These are my links for December 15th from 20:44 to 20:44:

• WorldChanging: Award-Winning Solutions Journalism – About Worldchanging
• Worldchanging is a 501(c)3 media organization that comprises a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers covering the world’s most intelligent solutions to today’s problems. We inspire readers around the world with stories of the most important and innovative new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future. Our readers are ready to change the world, and Worldchanging links them to the first steps.

Image by via CrunchBase

Robert Scoble suggests that back in 2000 (when there were few blogs) it was not unusual for a conversation to take place through the blog comments over the space of week. Now with twitter, the time shrinks dramatically. He then looks at FriendFeed and suggests that, with proper search facilities added to what is already there, the trend can be reversed and what he calls “the half life” (~20 hours in the example from 2000) will increase as older conversations can be found and referenced again.

Image via Wikipedia

These are my links for November 20th from 15:18 to 15:24:

• Planning to Share versus Just Sharing at EdTechPost – This is a long post, born out of years of frustration with ineffective institutional collaborations. If you only want the highlights, here they are: grow your network by sharing, not planning to share or deciding who to share with; the tech doesn’t determine the sharing – if you want to share, you will; weave your network by sharing what you can, and they will share what they can – people won’t share [without a lot of added incentives] stuff that’s not easy or compelling for them to share. Create virtuous cycles that amplify network effects. Given the right ’set,’ simple tech is all they need to get started

These are my links for November 19th from 00:33 to 01:05:

• Half an Hour: The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On – Though today we stand at the cusp of this new vision, the future will see institutions and traditional forms of education receding gradually, reluctantly, to a tide of self-directing and self-motivated learners. This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.

I’ve started a commversation on Tangler about third places of learning. The conversation revolves around a presentation by Teemu Arina. Here’s his own description of what he covers in his keynote address:

“In my presentation I’m defining three of my concepts until now unknown to the field of distance education: seredipic learning, homo contextus and parasitic learning. I call for third places of learning running outside of the reach of formal structures. These spaces are run by self-directed connective learners (homo contextus) utilizing abilities in distributed cognition, prosthesis of thinking and parasitic approach to informal learning. Serendipity defines the accidental encounters of individuals in such third places linking the skills and wills of people through social technologies. The social noosphere (mindsphere) extends into a planetary thinking network, effectively decentralizing learning through technological extensions of mind and body. In the shadow of Marshall McLuhan, hard questions are left for reflection regarding New Learning 2.0:”