GUILLERMO

Educational environments and emergent virtues

Jane McGonigal thinks the opposite of games and gaming is not reality, but depression. In ten years from now, playing games in synthetic environments (MMORPG) will become a skill that new generations will perform at a virtuoso level. As a result of that a new range of dispositions will be available for that generation: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity and epic meaning. A whole new educational environment of planetary scope has emerged in a decade, with enough force to tackle our "real" contemporary challenges.

tips 4 tweet

Here some.

A Cloud over MS

Interesting article about google vs. MS.

Jeff Bezos on the Next Web Innovation

Jeff Bezos talks about the 1849 Gold Rush, the early days of the electric industry, and the Internet.

Crowdsourcing

In June 2006, Jeff Howe from Wired Magazine coined the term crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is when an organization takes a role traditionally performed within a company and outsources it to an open group of people via the Internet. It is the growth of taking structure of work in Open Source software projects and applying it to other domains of human collaboration.

There are several interesting sites dealing with Crowdsourcing, including:

1. Assignment Zero: NewAssignment.net's first experiment. Collaborating with Wired Magazine, they are organizing combination of professional and amateur (or crowd-sourced) journalists to report on crowdsourcing. You can check out the various domains they are looking at here.


2. Jeff Howe's Blog: Jeff Howe and Wired are tracking the rise of crowdsourcing.


3. Or check out James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

Morphing Faces

A link to a YouTube video showing an interesting tool for modeling and animating 3-D faces.

Value in Robinson's Article

Take a look at this article. It seems like a discussion on pricing in the biotech industry. But it is also putting our attention on how the old school collaborative networked economy interacts with the private market-oriented businesses, as Yochai Benkler articulated in his book The Wealth of Networks.

Wealth of Networks

I highly recommend reading Yochai Benkler's book “Wealth of Networks.” It is a balanced articulation of what the Internet and Web 2.0 is enabling in the development of new forms of social collaboration that are not adequately recognized as such by both private/regulated market advocates and for welfare advocates.

One of the things that struck me most is Benkler's capacity to create a perspective in which he can show that these new forms of collectives are rooted in old practices that have existed forever. And he shows these practices can gain major significance if

1. The neutrality of the web, access to the web, Open Source initiatives, and General Public Licensing type of legislation is improved, and


2. The aggressive move toward Intellectual Property laws and regulations, and control by corporations, is counter-balanced.

Read his book and get involved in his wiki.

Networks

The word “network” is used in different contexts in different domains.

In the engineering and technological context, it is used to denote a set of equipment interconnected to deliver a particular functionality. It used in a social context to denote a group of people that collaborate to address shared concerns. Or in neurophenomenology, to denote patterns of neural activity that correlate with specific behaviors.

In all these cases, networks distinguish a unity constituted by a set of interrelated components. However, the disciplines and practices required to design, develop or operate in each of these classes of networks are very different. Very often, especially in a business context, disciplines and practices relevant to a specific class of networks are used to think and act in another type of network, producing significant miscoordination and waste.