Thursday, March 29, 2012

A real future - or Glass Cleaner required!

Just over a year ago, Corning (the glass manufacturer) posted a video on YouTube called  a Day Made of Glass. In the past year it has had over 18 million views on YouTube - viral by any definition. The video is about 5 minutes long and is here for you to watch.



Now - anyone who has used an iPhone/iPad or tablet of any nature (or wears glasses for that matter) will smurk - how do you keep the stuff clean! Bad enough with just your own prints on it - just imagine everyone elses! But of course - this is not the point - the point is the possibilities for the future.

I remember Alan Kay and his great quote - the best way to predict the future is to invent it. So - it's the direction that these creative people are looking that makes the video worth watching.

In February of this year, Corning released a sequel. A Day Made of Glass 2. Here it is.



It has had 1,500,000 views in the last month or so.

And then to top it all off, a video showing the "truth" behind the video - how it was put together and explaining the technologies and where they are at, and what might be possible in the near future and what might not. This video has had 650,000 views in the past month.




Watching these visions of the future is cool.  When you couple this kind of "biased" look through the eyes of a glass manufacturer with that of the latest version of the "Did You Know" series of videos, maybe you start to think of just how fast things are moving.




And how a sense of urgency is required when it comes to opening your mind to other ways of doing things ... particularly in education. Do you, for example, use YouTube as your second source of searching on the web?

Now - where do I get a large supply of  glass cleaner?

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Big History via Chronozoom

Thanks to Microsoft's Research labs Chronozoom is now open for viewing.



According to the Microsoft information

"Embark on a voyage through time, infinitely scalable from the Big Bang to today, exploring this master timeline of the cosmos, Earth, life, and human experience. By unifying a wide variety of data and historical perspectives, ChronoZoom provides a framework for examining historical events, trends, and themes, enabling researchers, educators, and students to synthesize knowledge from different studies of history, specialized timelines, and media resources, courtesy of the cloud. This platform for research and learning helps users develop a broad understanding of how the past has unfolded and discover unexpected relationships and historical convergences that help explain the sweep of Big History—and the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. Become your own time traveler and check out the beta today"


Head to here for a tutorial on how to use Chronozoom and to here to try it out

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Infographics by Visual.ly

Infographics interest me - for a number of reasons. I'm basically a visual learner is probably the main one, but I'm also a closet mathematician so always look for a way to present data in visually attractive ways.

A long time ago I registered for visual.ly and heard nothing until my email this morning reminded me they were there and are now "open for business". Well, kind of - they have a couple of options only at the moment taking your stats from Twitter and Facebook. I took the opportunity to see just what the "you are what you tweet" option gave - and the result is below.  What I look forward to is the tools becoming readily available to build infographics like the ones they have here.



Tuesday, March 13, 2012

TED for Ed

Many of us know and love TED for the vast array of inspirational "talks" that have graced the internet over recent years. Today sees the official launch of Ted-Ed, an initiative to introduce the world's greatest teachers and animators to classrooms across the world.

Don't get the wrong message to start - this is an initiative to try and generate great lessons by joining great ideas by teachers with great animators - so there is not much content available yet (12 videos there at present) - the initiative is designed to get you to nominate your ideas to TED and then the community will do its thing and bring the best to life. That's the way I read it anyway. This is from the PRNewswire release:

"In the first stage of this initiative, TED-Ed launches a new education channel on YouTube today [http://www.youtube.com/tededucation]. It offers up original video content that marries the talent of great teachers with top animators to bring concepts like neuroscience to life in in short videos, typically 5 minutes long.  The channel is part of the youtube.com/edu offering – a collection of half a million educational videos – available in many schools as well as to the public online.
Through its open submission process, animators and educators from around the globe can contribute lesson plans and video reels on any topic [http://education.ted.com/]. Select lesson submissions will be matched with chosen visualizers to create video lessons worth learning, watching, and sharing."

Here's the launch video on the Youtube channel for TED-Ed.



So - I'd encourage you to do three things.


  1. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for TED-Ed - this is the link
  2. Suggest a lesson or nominate someone you know to contribute the great idea - we must have some of those here in our own community.
  3. Share this blog post with colleagues of your around the country - as I said earlier - many of us have benefitted from using TED talks, so the more we get for education, the better our classrooms might be.
Thanks TED and good luck!