Virtual worlds and trying to keep up-to-date with the "real" one...

When I think about the future of education, I think about things like these:


Are virtual worlds the future of the classroom?

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: June 12, 2006 4:00 AM PDT

Of course, such virtual worlds are only a small part of the story, but this type of tools has a fantastic potential that needs to be harnessed. The technology is here already - or could be here shortly if we devoted the right amount of resources to such project.

Hmmm... I'm annoyed at my lack of technical knowledge in the area. Hopefully, I'll be able to meaningfully address this sad state of affairs over the next few years. I wish I had studied computer science more seriously at some point in my life, but I guess it's never too late.


On a vaguely related topic, I've been reading "The Google Story" lately. The book relates the story of the world-famous search engine. It's a great read for anyone interested in information and communication technologies. Google's founders have really big dreams - and they're doing a great job at turning them into something concrete!!! It's a truly inspiring story. I think I have not dreamt big enough lately: I'll try to fix that too. ;-) Who knows? Maybe five years from now, I'll be doing truly interesting things...

Google, Stanford, M.I.T., Harvard... I used to snob a lot of what was going on in the American "ivy-league" universities - to a certain extent, I still do -, but some of these universities have truly exciting projects as well. Five years from now, I want to be pushing the boundaries of educational technology along with the most important leaders and shapers of the field. I probably won't be satisfied with myself five years from now, but the day that I am, I'll have become old and lazy. Anyways, as long as I give my best shot, I know I'll be able to live with myself...


I haven't updated this blog in a while, so let me add a thing or two about what I'm up to these days. A while ago, my dear cousin Yan asked me what I thought about the whole "Web 2.0" thing. At the time, I didn't really know anything about it, so I didn't have much of an opinion on it, but I've read a bit about it in the last few weeks.

For those without a clue, I'll just say that it refers to a new layer of virtual bonds between web users. With the "old" web, information was mostly one way: from the website publisher to the person consulting the website. With the "new" web, users can, for example, chat with strangers who happen to be surfing the same website as they are at the same time and exchange views about the website - or anything else; they can rate the websites that they visit so that other people in the community can find the best websites more easily; they can share their bookmarks with friends and with perfect strangers who have similar interests, and they can look for the bookmarks of someone considered an authority in their field of interest. These, obviously, are just a few simple examples of a new emerging paradigm for the web: it is by no means a complete list!

What have I discovered? The two biggest things - i.e. the most useful to me - are:

1-) www.digg.com
2-) del.icio.us

The first one has a system where comments are rated by readers. The comments not worth reading are "down-voted" by users and then hidden from view automatically - unless you choose to expose the hidden comments. It is not a perfect system, but it addresses a real problem, as anyone who's reading forums regularly will be painfully aware. By filtering out the crap, you can find the insightful comments more quickly. My limited experience with the system left me pretty impressed.

The second site is a website that stores your bookmarks, allows you to tag them and then search through them using the tags you attached, the title of the page or other criteria. I haven't used it much yet, but it looks promising. If you are a casual browser who only visits a handful of websites - and always the same few -, then del.icio.us might not be really useful to you. However, if you try to keep an archive of all the interesting pages you will be visiting over the rest of your life, then a tag-and-search system makes much more sense. Lately, I have tried to organize the bookmarks I collected over the last few years. I deleted a few, I created tons of folders - categories and sub-categories -, and then I still didn't know what to do with certain links that didn't fit well with my system of classification. I'm sure it will take me some time to start using tags smartly and productively, but it obviously is a much more powerful system. With del.icio.us, you can also search the shared bookmarks of other users, but I haven't used that much yet so I do not know how useful it is at the moment. (I assume the technology will grow more mature as time passes - and then be attacked by evil spambots trying to sell you life insurance and penile enlargers!!!)

To keep up with world news, I looked for a better RSS feed reader. There are many on Windows, Linux and OS X, and I don't know the Linux or Windows ones yet, but I'll try to recommend one within a month or two. On the Mac, I think Vienna does a great job. It allows you to create smart folders (like smart playlists in iTunes) or folders within folders. It's the feed reader I have settled on for now. Also on the Mac, Shrook looked promising as it pushes the smart folders even farter by trying to learn from what you read in order to suggest you other articles which you might like. I have not tested that function yet though as the Shrook synchronization tool (to keep your news feed synched on different computers) seems to have some unsolved issues that bugged me beyond forgiveness. As of now, I have about 70 news feeds that deal with everything from world news to tech news to healthy recipe ideas, and it is relatively manageable, but it still takes me a bit too long to browse through all of the articles every day. As I find more and better news feeds, I will probably make more use of the smart folders to keep 100% up-to-date with the few topics I am most interested in, at the risk of letting a few gems "slip through the cracks" by not reading through all of the article's titles.


Hmmm... As I wrote these lines, I truly wondered whether I should put this long "web 2.0" and "news feeds readers" ramblings here in my personal blog, or in my tech blog. I chose to put it here as I am hoping that some of you will jump on the RSS boat in the near future. It's a truly simple, yet powerful tool.

Ouch! It's... late!!! Time for me to go to bed.