Go inside the cunning mind of a charming criminal genius as National Geographic tells the dramatic story of this fearsome pirate who preyed on Caribbean trade routes. Blackbeard: Terror at Sea charts the exploits of Englishman Edward Teach an intelligent and charismatic leader who confounded the powers of England and Virginia as he overtook and pillaged 40 ships in two years stealing hidden cargo and precious exports to and from the Caribbean. Featuring sea chases cannon battles and swordplay Blackbeard: Terror at Sea provides an exciting dramatization of one of the most notorious men in American history.
City of London + City of Vatican + City of columbia are the 3 independant states within states wich composes the empire of the city. The first is financial control over earth economy, the second is religion control over the earth and the third one is military control over the earth. Together they make the very unholy trinity which forms the egyptian pyramid that we can see on the back of the privately owned federal reserve note that is used as american dollar to maintain the colony in debt and under the Queen. Many people realize that this mystifying situation, in which an alleged democratic and self-governing nation is actually controlled against the will of the people, is a clear indication that there must be a very powerful and well-financed occult organization which plans and directs world affairs, and for lack of a more specific identification thie suspected secret organization is popularly referred to as the International Financiers, Banksters cartel or "The Crown corporation".
City of London + City of Vatican + City of columbia are the 3 independant states within states wich composes the empire of the city. The first is financial control over earth economy, the second is religion control over the earth and the third one is military control over the earth. Together they make the very unholy trinity which forms the egyptian pyramid that we can see on the back of the privately owned federal reserve note that is used as american dollar to maintain the colony in debt and under the Queen. Many people realize that this mystifying situation, in which an alleged democratic and self-governing nation is actually controlled against the will of the people, is a clear indication that there must be a very powerful and well-financed occult organization which plans and directs world affairs, and for lack of a more specific identification thie suspected secret organization is popularly referred to as the International Financiers, Banksters cartel or "The Crown corporation".
This was the decisive naval encounter of the Graeco-Persian wars. Following three days of indeterminate skirmishing off Artemisium, the Greek fleet fell back to the island of Salamis, and it was here, in the channel between the modern Ambelákia on Salamis and Pérama on the coast of Africa, that the reckoning with Xerxes' navy took place.
In 1911, Hiram Bingham, famed American explorer, stumbled across a remote Inca city atop a high peak in the Andes. The site was called Machu Picchu perhaps the most famous ruin in the world. What was its purpose? Was it, like Bingham believed, a military fortress? Or did this glorious ruin have a secret purpose? From the mountains of Peru, Josh will follow in the footsteps of Hiram Bingham. He builds a log bridge across a raging river, examines the stonework at the site, and reviews ancient manuscripts to discover the true purpose of Machu Picchu.
"New technology is the devil incarnate. We should go back to the good old days"
"New technology is the panacea we've been looking for."
The reality is much more nuanced than that. It's not about the good or the bad (it's not about pedagogy vs technology, the unfortunately entitled panel session I'll be on later).
danah boyd is talking about teaching young people to think, by taking a look through the viewfinder of social networks and the mobile devices we are already and will increasingly use to access, connect and share on.
It's about teaching young people to think. The reason we taught literature, film, mathematics in the past was to provide a reason for people to think. The introduction of technology alone will not necessarily help young people think. Worse still, technology is seen as a means of unleashing new cash, in a cynical way ("we have all Macs")
We don't just teach algebra to teach algebra. We teach it to help understand the world around us. When we think about teaching (with) technology we have to think about how it fits into this world around us.
That's hard.
Technology is fundamentally taking apart the world around us. Technology opens up the potential to access much stuff around the world, with the teacher and their rear view mirror allowing the context and meaning of that to be brought to light.
The contexts of social networks
Social networking sites have three core structures that make them work:
1. Profile
When we enter a room we tend to take some thought about decorating ourselves: what we wear, do we put on that tie...? Online we are an IP address, a rather undecoratable unappealing code. Therefore, where we create a SNS profile we're taking some care to create a presentation of ourselves within a space. Bedroom culture is the same, but on social networks it's amplified.
2. Friending
There are three clusters of behaviour: 30-40 friends, worried about their nearest and dearest. 300 friends are all the people they met at school, at church at the youth group. Very few teenagers collect Friends (politicians, music), reaching into the hundreds of thousands of friends. Mostly they're boys, collecting "hot girls". They're creating that list that, apparently, lots of boys used to make on paper.
But whether someone is your friend or just your Friend becomes socially awkward. In girl culture girls grew out of the habit of exchanging friendship bracelets to work the equivalent online.
3. The Wall
Comments, testimonials, the wall... in the early days of SNSes, people spoke in the third person about their friends (and still do on LinkedIn, inhabited by older professionals). Later, it began to be used as a space for conversation that complimented other places where conversation was going on (IM, chat).
Looking at it as a stream of text one could be mistaken as meaningless "how are you", "fine", "you?", "OK"...
What's going on is "public social grooming": it's a way to upkeep your social status as friend which, after all, is only a check box at the beginning of the online Friendship.
Why are young people spending so much time on MySpace?
We used to have permission from our parents to roam really far. Nowadays, the circle of navigation has been greatly reduced to the garden, out of public view. We've also tended to programme the lives of our young people more than we ever did, meaning we leave less time than ever for them to socialise.
Other characteristics of online interaction
danah reckons than social network structures will go mobile soon, within two years. I would bank on them coming a lot sooner than that, given that many of those with the better phones can already and do already interact on their various SNSes through mobile. In the UK, 3G is cheaper and more ubiquitous than most places on the planet, so we can expect it sooner here.
Location-awareness is increasing, making the network part of social networking even stronger.
Knowledge is online, and when we don't know it first time around we access just in time when we're mobile.
Notes of her talk, as usual, riddled with errors and unreliability.
One of the challenges of 4iP is to create some projects that help us all get more direct democracy than current 'democratic' systems afford. Apparently we needn't try too hard: YouTube's doing it already.
The systems have been unable to change quickly enough (or at all) beyond the 'safe' model that encourages elites to represent us (as Billy Connolly has said: anyone who wants to be a politician should, as a consequence, never be allowed to become one). Social media means we don't have to continue down the path of this elite choosing which issues are important enough to take on; we can use the wisdom of the crowd to filter and prioritise issues, and even get around to sorting some of those out amongst themselves.
The new fascinating read from Demos on the "Video Republic" shows just how far YouTube and other video sites have gone in opening up alternative democratic routes for youngsters. And, true to form, there's a YouTube video explaining this, too.
John Connell picked the item up from this parish's online bookmarks and has speedily summarised the main issues, all of which touch on areas that still require development, though, or just cogniscence by those in positions of power to do something about it. Basically: there's more to be gained from us all, foot soldiers and political or decision-making elites, harnessing the power that online video has unleashed:
All of these could be met with "it's easier said than done"; it would be rather cool for 4iP to just do it rather than talking about it.
Citizens in North Korea live life in contast fear and they must pretend and even to conduct themselves to show that they love their egocentric president.
NOVA reports on the different ways scientists explain how life emerged on Earth.
In this 20 min program narated by Stephen Hawking, we take look at the origin of the universe as is understood by modern science and largely thanks to Hawking's contribution to this field of research.
Of all the gaming consoles out there the one I always come back to is the Nintendo DS. It's small, its touchscreen means I don't even need to use a stylus, and the battery life is astounding. The new Nintendo DSi which has just been announced in Japan, due for launch in Europe in the Spring of 2009, opens up the potential even more for the use of gaming consoles as part of a one-to-one computing initiative, for the same price as the current model.
At the recent Emerge 1-2-1 Conference in Calgary, I made the point that I didn't feel the future was in laptops, despite the strong belief from other speakers that the laptop was the only "spread bet" option for learning, able to cope with the maximum demands of the classroom and home. I've always felt that mix and match is the best way forward, much in the same way as we tend to use technology in 'real' life: the right tool for the right job.
Cue the new Nintendo, with its built-in camera and web browser. For most web browsing a small screen and awkward navigation is fine, because most people are not blogging 1000 word theses, but they are Googling and then reading. For most photography in the classroom you don't need high-spec cameras. Learning logs need quick snapshots of progress, and the 0.3 megapixels of the DS, while paling in comparison to most camera phones, will suffice for this purpose.
Wiiwii have a really complete rundown of the new Nintendo DSi. The pic is from Wired, and therefore used illegally here, but I'm going to pay for it with a link to the shovelloads of liveblogging goodness of the moment the new model was unveiled.
A fascinating and personal insight into the Long Tail in action. Earlier this week I appeared alongside illustrious company in the Wall Street Journal. However, I can't even find the referrals from there in the first few pages of my stats, with links from Google search, other educators and, lo-and-behold, Twitter, knocking the American giant of the printing press off into stat result obscurity.
There are, as usual, a lot of people typing the address into their browsers directly, but no discernible difference from normal numbers. Indeed, there's even been a 400 person decline in my subscription numbers since starting work at Channel 4 (evidently there's a great mistrust of thoughts coming from those who turn to the dark side of the media), a figure that's not buoyed by the one-hit clickers of the WSJ readership.
Conclusion? It's more worthwhile cultivating online and offline relationships with people than relying on large institutions' pull of strangers with no tangible digital breadcrumbs of their own. Here endeth the lesson.
Pic from Superamit
New research from Scotland and the UK Government shows that Web 2.0 and gaming can and do make a difference to educational attainment and student experience.
Since the birth of most "web 2.0" technology in the past six years I've been there gathering and even doing some of the research into whether it offers up any improvements on pedagogy and/or student experience in the classroom. It's not stopped healthy questioning of the validity of data, normally in midflow during a keynote, but there has always been a layer of distrust in stats and research that has not been peer reviewed, to the extent that there has been a great excuse for the lack of change by haughty educators and States that don't want to make the effort.
So I'm delighted that colleague Derek Robertson and University of Dundee researcher David Miller have, through their large-scale study, found that playing 20 minutes of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training every day is much more likely to improve attainment and speed of calculation in mathematics (up to 50% faster than the control group). Their results are to be peer-reviewed, hence the frustrating but necessary wait for the graphs, stats and data.
Furthermore, Becta's research into Web 2.0's impact in the classsroom, for which I presented the opening keynote at the expert seminar earlier this year, has just been completely published, and shows
You can read the full research report online, which includes some input from myself and colleague Matt Locke at Channel 4. The recommendations state that all teachers need to be given more significant time to do more complex work with Web 2.0 in their classrooms, directing students learning in these tools. It also, thankfully, helps us see realistically what students do with technology.
Above all comes the caveat that we must not over romanticise what young people are capable of doing with technology without the structure of learning and teachers acting as guides on the side.
Fascinating stuff on which to start building more daring policies. Essential reading for all those who lament the lack of interest in new technologies from "those up top".
Pic from David Muir, his blog is here.
"Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree: Al Quaeda leader is Dead or Alive". Yossi Vardi's photoshopped CNN reportage was certainly amusing but was, above all, a completely accurate forecast. What forecasters mustn't do is try to eliminate the uncertaintly from our futures.
Paul Saffo, formerly of the Institute of the Future, shares some of his secrets and insights from his main job: forecasting the future.
The Information Revolution is over. This is the Media Revolution
Everything in the knowledge and information world is uncertain. The information revolution is done, gone, in the past. We are now gripped by a media revolution - media is information that goes deep down and makes a difference in our life. It's also a shift within this field, from mass media to a very strange new world of personal media. Indeed, it's what my new job is all about - making the convergence of media count and make amplification have a new, almost reversed sense.
Even the information devices of old are now media devices. 1998 saw the first ring tone sold, and 2005 it had become a $2b business, accounting for 10% of the music business. Cell phones are entertainment media devices that happen to be communication devices. They are not information devices.
As Jane McGonigal, still at the Institute of the Future, has repeated: you need to look back twice as far back to see what's ahead. It might not be repeated, but the future will rhyme with it. If we peer back to the 1950s we see huge experimentation in mass media, in ways the television could be used, developed, enhanced. Today's use of the web is probably not even a bump on the landscape compared to what we will use our discoveries today for tomorrow.
When television emerged in the 1930s, it took some 20 years until it began to take off. Time-sharing (through email) took time from its first developments in the late 70s to become accepted in the 90s. Technology takes time to take hold, but in recent history technology is taking less and less time to make an impact:
This means that email and internet apps are nowhere near the peak of their activity.
Never mistake a clear view as a short distance
The challenge for those trying to predict the future is that, at one stage on the uptake curve you're made to look foolish as no-one joins you in the adoption of the technology. After a while, you give up on that bandwagon and think about what is worth betting your efforts on next. Just as you give up on it everyone else starts to adopt. You therefore look foolish twice over. I've written off many a fashion faux pas on that S curve theory.
SecondLife is one such maligned technology - I've managed to hit the middle part of that S Curve about a dozen times in the past three years, and have kept on it; something's afoot in this space. Paul believes it has a smell of the 20 year S Curve in it. He mentions the Cisco SecondLife meetings that my now-Cisco colleague John has talked about before. Likewise, in the nineties publishers would have scoffed if you said that something like the MacBook Pro Nano would make reading books online or on a computer doable - and enjoyable.
The changing nature of innovation
The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000 P2P - Napster
2010 Sensors - Smartifacts
Sensors will lead to smartifacts, robots that can make life easier, more enjoyable, more connected... Think of the current indicators: Roomba, the first robots to kill a human in the war on terror in Yemen in 2002, Nabaztags, robots that drive cars more safely than us... The indicators are already in place, though I think we're probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.
We're moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals.
We are moving at a tumbling rate from the Consumer Economy where buying and selling rule, to, markedly in the past two weeks, an economy where there are new actors in a Creator Economy. Google makes the perfect example of the success of the Creator Economy. It costs $0 to subscribe to Google, the usage charges are $0 and every time we use it we make it better. That last part is the cost - our search string contributes to the richness of what, in days past, would have been the Manufacturer. The question is, do we care if the $ cost is zero and the [heart] cost is information?
One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future's looking like one heck of a ride.
Paul Saffo speaking at the ebic Thought Leader conference, Berlin, at which I am later speaking on the futures panel.
An exploration of the dark side of Christianity, following acclaimed author and former priest James Carroll on a journey of remembrance and reckoning.
There is, perhaps, no scene that conjures the word "primordial" more than that of a shadowy, steamy jungle. There are mysteries hidden everywhere, otherworldly screams, camouflaged predators, noxious plants, stinging bugs, mold, decay and boggy impassable ground. It is, in the minds of many, the very thing civilization was invented to fend off.
The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.
Christopher Columbus was wrong: The Earth is flat, at least in places. There are seemingly endless expanses of open ground, flat as the mind can imagine, found on every continent. Sometimes they are covered with grasses, ice or low shrubs that dot the land like stubble on a vast expanse of dry skin.