NMC New Media Blogs

There is a new iPhone app on the horizon called SekaiCamera. Its not out yet and some are skeptical that it can really do what it proposes, but the demos at conferences have been well received. It is being developed by a company in Japan called Tonchidot. The app uses the iPhone's camera as a "lens" onto the world where tags pop up in the field of view showing items people have tagged in the area you are looking at. You really need to see some of the video demos to get a sense of it. If its the real deal, it will be one amazing application. Do a Google search for SekaiCamera for links and go to this one at TechCrunch for some more eye candy. Don't trip!

Spring 2009 Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas is moving to Moodle, branded TLEARN, from Blackboard. Transition to be completed by June 2009.

It has been almost a year exactly since Paul Hammond and I published "The Future is Now" on youTube. This gave us a taste of just how valuable the experience is of collaboratively creating idea-driven visual essays.

Last month, I presented our latest effort with new media collaborative composing on a panel at the MLA, entitled "How We Teach Now," organized by Gerald Graff. Paul and I have ground that talk, and the accompanying visual piece, down to 14 minutes. Because "This is How We Dream" exceeds youTube's now firm limit of 10 minutes per video, it has been posted in two parts.

With as much information that is at our fingertips on the web, it seems just about any amount of information can be found. This begs the question do we really need to memorize things in this wired internet age we are in, especially for students who traditionally have had to memorize a fair amount of content of the course of their academic careers. This is a question that has received some serious thought and one that will most likely garner some disagreement. Don Tapscott, a well regarded writer about all things internet, argues that memorization is not necessary and that student's minds can be tasked with more creative and comprehensive thinking. Is the internet and our culture of instant gratification changing how our brains are wired and how we actually think?

Last week, as we have done each January now for six years, we released the newest edition of the Horizon Report, a publication which grows in reach each year. (About 75,000 copies of the 2008 edition have been distributed so far.)  Since the effort began in 2004, the Horizon Project has grown into a longitudinal study of emerging technologies with a great deal of supporting research and data, and a growing impact.