Where is your avatar, anyway?

These last few days were very rich in eye-opening news events and posts – enabling us to get a better view on fundamental changes in media and technology. An overview: [<a href=”http://storify.com/mixed_realities/where-is-your-avatar-anyway” target=”_blank”>View the story “Where is your avatar, anyway? ” on Storify</a>]

Virtual Worlds, Games and Education (another MOOC!)

There is a true explosion going on in open online learning. I don’t know whether it’s always “massive” as in Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), but anyway, there is a lot happening out there. I don’t have statistics about how many projects there are, nor about the total number of… Continue reading

Open online community of digital storytellers DS106 finances itself through Kickstarter

Last week I attended a Rheingold Youniversity Alumni meeting with Bryan Alexander, who talked about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), and he mentioned DS106, an open online community of digital storytellers. Here is how DS106 describes itself: DS106 is a digital storytelling course that began as a face-to-face course at… Continue reading

Race against the machine meets radical transparency

In the book Race against the machine, written by the MIT-researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, one of the examples of the exponential technological development is the self-driving Google car. Google claims to have safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, even though there is some discussion about this…. Continue reading

WTF… Corporate Rebels???

This was pretty amazing: a post about Corporate Rebels United by Peter Vander Auwera on his personal blog. Peter works for Innotribe:  SWIFT’s innovation initiative. “Corporate” and “Rebel”? The corporate world seems to be the world of the suits, no? Places where one better can be predictable and reliable, achieving the… Continue reading

Three observations about perseverance in online learning

The blog has been idle for about two weeks now – because of family emergencies, the launching of a liveblog and a column at my newspaper. Which allows me to reflect on the issue of loyalty toward online projects and communities. – Gameification does not really work for me. I… Continue reading

Howard Rheingold: Attention!

I interviewed Howard Rheingold about his new book, Net Smart. It was a broad-ranging conversation, which was published on PBS MediaShift. Here is what he said about the importance of attention: You are known for giving students exercises in attention — rather than just ordering them to close their laptops… Continue reading

Social discovery services turn the world into a virtual environment

There is something strange going on with virtual worlds. MixedRealities used to focus heavily on worlds such as Second Life, but these days less so as I no longer think that Second Life is “the future of the internet”. It’s an interesting niche product, but not about to go mainstream,… Continue reading