Technology's Promise

Halal, in his book discussed the best forecast data ever assembled, covering the entire span of technological innovation. One of these technological innovation I found during my reviewing to the Technology’s Promise by (Halal, 2008) is Star Travel. His discussion is about the maturing of Artificial Intelligent and robotics about 2020 for unmanned space mission. I think traveling to the space for regular people will be started in the nearest future while traveling to the stars will take place later than 2020. Halal claim “Although NASA’s central role may seem to contradict the trend toward private space ventures, it may be that the Moon and Mars will then become more easily available for private enterprise. Now, Virgin Galactic project is very close to Moon trip in near future”.
Halal’s discussion about space traveling is become true. Sir Richard Branson has unveiled his Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, the world’s first commercial spacecraft, paving the way for thousands of tourists to travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Sir Richard teamed up with renowned aviation designer Burt Rutan to build the spacecraft, which has been five years in the making. The vessel’s maiden voyage, which could happen as early as 2011. The SpaceShipTwo can carry six passengers and two pilots. Supprisly, there are 300 clients have already paid the $200,000 ticket or put down a deposit for a seat. My point is the show how close Halal’s claim about the star travel to the reality. Sir Richard said the journey will be "100 per cent safe". I hope travelling to the star will happen in my time and I hope I would have money and time to do travel to the space.

Place watch this video:




Reference

Halal, W.E. (2008). Technologies Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society. Hampshire, Great Britain: Palgrave McMillan

Sir Richard Branson unveils world's first commercial spacecraft. Retirved on September 04, 2010 at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6754738/Sir-Richard-Branson-unveils-worlds-first-commercial-spacecraft.html.

3D educational simulations

In the next 10 years, the gaming scenario would be pretty advanced. The games would mostly constitute of Virtual simulation. It would contain real people characters and their reaction and view them like a coffee table and see small-scale real people made up from light running around on that table. All this would be made possible through use of virtual reality technology. This technology gives us the ability to create a simulation which replicates much of the realism of the real world environment, while eliminating many of the associated risks and costs. That’s will offer good opportunity to create educational simulations allow students to become immersed in the learning process and assist in transforming them from passive observes of linear material, to active hands-on operators of interactive content.
In other words, gaming scenarios could be designed using design principles and game technology for purposes other than entertainment such as education purposes. It may turn modern audiences into active participants by engaging them in an immersive virtual environment, relevant to the industry associated with the game.
In addition, simulation-based training provides many benefits to commercial and military industries, allowing trainees to test and hone their skills in a safe virtual environment.


This picture explained the current use of 3D training simulation software for airport ground support equipment operators. The simulation allows operators to be trained, tested, and assessed in a safe, risk-free, and low cost environment. Future 3D simulator would be pretty advanced. Some of the technological issues: we need more advance of tool(s) to create more advance 3D educational simulator. These tools could be more advance high-performance scripts, animations, textures, sounds, objects, course materials, Ease implementation at every stage in the development cycle for designing, Increase flexibility, coding, debugging, and tuning applications, and Minimize learning curve and improve productivity. This technology may take 15 to 20 years before widely adopted in educational processes.

New Business Horizons

New Business Horizons, an award winning Second Life 'Full Service Developer' with offices in London and Montreal, has created the ‘Blue Horizon’ virtual business park which offers companies and organizations the opportunity to enter Second Life quickly and at minimal cost (no set up cost and low monthly rent). This enables companies to experience the environment and explore the business benefits which can range from a unique sales, marketing and PR tool to a rich medium for communication, collaboration and participation.
You can find the "New Business Horizons" in Second life at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Blue%20Horizon/128/128/47

for moreinformation please visit: http://www.nbhorizons.com/

Animoto Innovation Video

Classroom of the future Gabcast

Gabcast! Classroom of the future channel #0

The 21st century Schools require new models of teaching, learning, and meaningful assessment. Instructional technology is one of the most exciting and significant ways to support and facilitate school reform.
A key principle of Classrooms for the Future is providing teachers the necessary technology-related professional development that helps teachers change teaching practices, which would have a significant impact on the students’ learning.

Classrooms for the Future provides appropriate technology tools in classrooms for student use and provides extensive professional development and support for teachers and administrators to make sure that these technologies are effectively used.
Currently students live in a digital world and our schools must adapt instruction to complement learning in today's environment. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to utilize research-based, technology-enabled instructional strategies to thrill, to inspire, and to capture the imagination of our students. Classrooms for the Future creates environments for deeper cognitive development through
• inquiry,
• real and relevant project-based learning, and
• differentiated instruction.
The overarching goals of the Classrooms for the Future are to:
- Improve teaching and learning.
- Change classroom practice.
- Change student-teacher relationships.
- Increase student engagement.
- Increase student responsibility for learning.
- Develop 21st century skills in students.
- Increase Academic achievement.

Cool Web 2.0 Tool - Part #2

SlideSix – Multimedia Presentation Sharing
Its free online presentation creation and sharing tool. Edit, and share your PowerPoint (PPT), OpenOffice (ODP), and Keynote presentations.

Features:
Slide six is all about multimedia sharing. You can recode audio, video directly with their management consol and embedded directly to the uploaded slides. You can also search for embedded external video from site like YouTube to help enhance our slides and demonstrate certain things. Its powerful tool, it allow us to create a unique presentation we can not find anywhere on the web.

How It Works:
1. Upload and share your PowerPoint, Keynote and OpenOffice presentations.
2. Record audio and video narration and attach external videos without leaving your site.
3. Manage your presentations, profile and groups in the management console.
4. Try features like Presentation Analytics and Collaborate in SlideSix Labs.
5. Try it enjoy it. It’s free.

A master plan for a new project

One of the case studies in the Christakis book is the SDP approach to Front-End Work. Effective Front-End Work generally recognized as a critical success factor for rapid development of any new product. Christakis argues that “much of the work in the Front-End stage involves planning and decision-making by a team created to work on the project” (Christakis, 2006. P. 93). Any project should start with plan. Having clear plan will absolutely will lead for accomplish the product on time or earlier with reasonable cost. It should include the initial idea, definitions, final design approach, implementation team, etc. In addition, the SDP approach to Front-End Work should include collaboration among all the members of the project from planning to the decision making.
The principle benefits from applying the application of SDP process are the capability to accomplish in short period of time, the capability of producing faster and better Front-End Master plans, faster termination of drug candidates, and the ability to provide useful information when applying the SDP process in any new project such as medical project.
On of the most effective example shows how the Front-End Work was applied with SDP approach within Christakis textbook is a XY234. XY234 was a compound developed by the XYZ Pharmaceutical. The essential goal of the application of the XY234 project was to involve the interdisciplinary team in creating a Front-End Master Plan, collaboratively. Master Plan provides with business planning excellence at affordable costs. The team should be knowledgeable with all project aspects with respect to their job function.


Reference:

Christakis, A., Bausch, K. (2006). How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power. Information Age Publishing, Connecticut. ISBN 1-59311-481-8.

3Book: A Scalable 3D Virtual Book

The use of technology can enhance the learning process, making topics easier to cover, reduce the time, and cost efficient. One of these technologies is 3Book: A Scalable 3D Virtual Book. The 3Book is a 3D interactive visualization of a codex book as a component for various digital library and sensemaking systems. It has the ability to represent books in 3D animated format and allows users to read large format books, and has features to enhance and support sensemaking operations by readers.
Previous book-like interfaces started with Catalogues, TabWorks, WebBook, and Early 3Book.
They developed a prototype 3D electronic codex book called the 3Book (see figure 1). The 3Book open to a double page of text as the reader turns a block of pages. The reader can turn individual pages by touching them or turn blocks of pages by touching the fore edge of the book. The ability of the 3Book to operate on a full book at interactive speeds depends heavily on the underlying engine.
British Library has developed a museum oriented electronic 3D books. The pages can be turned by finger (in the Library itself) or by mouse in a reduced-size Web version. But such system has some technological limitations.
Some technological forces may impede adoption this technology are the size of the book and memory consuming. For example, large book presents very strong challenges the reason behind they the true 3D books have generally been small. For example, the British Library Lindisfarne Gospels and others referenced earlier are also 3D books, but only about 40 of the pages are included—not entire books. The animation images are actually photographs of intermediate points during page turning. One version of the system consumes 304MB for only 20 book pages.
Check the link for more information: http://www.parc.com/publication/1374/3book.html



Figure 1. 3Book. (a) 3Book in closed position, (b) Turning a block of pages.

Cool Web 2 tools.

Hard to upload and share your photos with your friends, and/or family members? not problem you can use Troovi tool. Troovi is a very easy way to upload and exchange your photos in high quality format. You do not need to register your self with the Troovi website. Just choose the photos you want to share, and upload them, then the website will generate the link for you automatically when you successfully upload your photos and send then you can send the link to your friend(s). All these process will be done within ten minutes.

Features:

1. There is no need to register! You just choose the photos and upload them in high quality. Afterwards your collection is accessible by a unique url which is generated automatically.
2. To share these uploaded photos with friends, just send them your unique link. Also you can use the built-in share feature for email, facebook, del.icio.us and much more services.

http://www.troovi.com/

The 2009 Horizon Report – Cloud Computing

Specialized data centers that host thousands of servers — has created a surplus of computing resources that has come to be called the cloud. Cloud computing makes it possible for almost anyone to deploy tools that can scale on demand to serve as many users as desired (Horizon Report 2009).
The cloud is always invisible to the users, supports applications doesn’t matter, the applications are always available, and data storage is very cheap.
The emergence of cloud-based applications is causing a shift in the way we think about how we use software and store our files. For example, educational institutions started using the cloud advantage for their own benefit for example, made applications hosted on a dynamic platform.
There are so many educational application can be hosted on cloud such as photo and video editing or publish presentations and slide shows. Those applications provide students and teachers with free or low-cost alternatives to expensive, proprietary productivity tools.
Currently, there are many cloud-based applications for teaching and learning started to be emerged such as animated educational environments. With cloud computing, applications could be easily distributed across a wider set of devices with low cost of computing and support for group work at distance embedded in many cloud-based applications. That would provide great benefits for many students or learners.

According to recent reports Armbrust et al, and DeCusatis, the leading obstacles which hinder the widespread adoption of cloud computing include security, data transfer bottlenecks, unpredictable performance and energy consumption.

Please visit the Horizon Report 2010 wiki at http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org/for more information!

References

Armbrust et al. (2009) “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing,” EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Tech. Rep. Retrived on July 27, 2010. Available: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.html

DeCusatis C. (2009). “Converged networking for next generation enterprise data centers”, Proc. National Science Foundation conference for the Enterprise Computing Community (ECC), Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY.

Ted Talk - David Merrill demos Siftables

David Merrill demos Siftables.


We must keep up with technology, sharing information with the students in form that captures their attention while meeting the needs of the curriculum and beyond.




These are the toys of the future, small tiny computers that have the ability to interact with each other to make networks that represent words, art, math, and music.


Two points from the video that our Think Tank should study during our innovation strategy sessions:


Is this the future thing in hands-on learning?


Is it important to make learning on hands, authentic, interesting and enjoyable experience by using new technologies like this smart computerized toys (Siftables)?

Welcome to Classroom of the future Blog

Everybody welcome here.

This blog was created as one of CS855 - Futuring and Innovation(Summer 2010) course requirement.

CS855- is very excited class. Now I posted outside the box of the Moodle. I like to learn using new tools. I’m very glad to be in this class. I think there will be much more to learn.

You comments are so important to me.

Thanks alot