So I bought an Oculus Rift virtual headset and ventured into Second Life using the special viewer. This was rather frustrating using a MacBook Air 1.7 Ghz, Intel HD Graphics 5000, but things went a lot better with a MacBook Pro 2.5 Ghz and an Intel Iris Pro for graphics…. Continue reading
Today I made a presentation about my MOOC-experiences for a Blended Learning Symposium. Turned out I only had ten minutes, this text is the elaborate version. Blended Learning is about learning in the physical, digital and social space. My question: what about the virtual? A university can think it is out… Continue reading
Listening to Stephen Downes discussing Massive Open Online Courses (see previous post) I felt the need to make an overview of the online courses I participated in during these last few years. Downes inspires me a lot and I fundamentally agree with the discintions he makes between connectivist MOOCs which are… Continue reading
Stephen Downes, the Canadian MOOC-pioneer (Massive Open Online Courses), delivered a talk in Armenia and as usual he generously shares the recording and the slides. My own MOOC-experiences started in 2008 with CCK08, facilitated by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Back then we lived in full euphoria about the power… Continue reading
Reacting on my previous post about Second Life veterans uniting, draxfiles asked on this site and on Facebook: Interesting how some folks get “tired†of a world unlimited in its creative possibilities, a world that is continuously mind-boggling in the sense that folks make awesome things and yes: a LOT… Continue reading
I remember, in the good old days of the Metanomics show in Second Life, that we discussed a study about what happens when people have to leave a virtual world. You get a virtual diaspora, groups of people settling in new virtual worlds, and eventually you get tensions between those… Continue reading
I just supported (very modestly) the Kickstarter project of Radiotopia – and if you care about storytelling, radio shows and podcasting, you should consider it too. The Kickstarter campaign for this new kind of public radio still runs for 4 days as I write this. The goal of $250,000 was… Continue reading
Just learned about Frederator‘s Bee and PussyCat show in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a great story about an indie production for YouTube, getting no corporate response yet mobilizing a lot of devoted fans on Kickstarter and now launching on YouTube. This is the first video they published in August… Continue reading
‘The web is a terrorist’s command-and-control network of choice.’ That’s the title of an opinion article in the Financial Times, written by Robert Hannigan, the chief of Britain’s electronic spying agency GCHQ. The digital natives who joined the terrorist organization Isis are very adept in using social media and in… Continue reading
Professor Owen R. Youngman teaches a great course about Understanding Media by Understanding Google, but maybe he should consider a follow-up: Understanding Media by Understanding Facebook. Ravi Somaiya explains in The New York Times how Facebook is changing the way its users consume journalism. For quite some time media experts… Continue reading