TED -Technology, Entertainment, Design

TED began as a conference bringing together people from technology, entertainment adn design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). View the list of videos.

TED's ethos encompasses believing "passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world." The website has become a "clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other." And the end result is hours of entertaining videos and sound bites.

I especially enjoyed this one recently: Sir Ken Robinson talking about "Do schools kill creativity?" at the 2006 Confernece. It's entertaining, funny and very thought provoking. Al Gore also spoke on averting climate crisis.

Poke around .. you are just going to be "blown away". Enjoy

Horizon Report 2008 - emerging technologies in higher education

The 2008 Horizon Report is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, An EDUCAUSE Program.

The Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. The 2008 report focuses on the following topics;

• Grassroots Video
• Collaboration Webs
• Mobile Broadband
• Data Mashups
• Collective Intelligence
• Social Operating Systems

"Each profiled technology is described in detail in the body of the report, including a discussion of what it is and why it is relevant to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Specific examples are listed there for each of the six topics, consistent with the level of adoption at the time the report was written (December 2007)." (page3)

Toxmap

If you haven’t checked out Toxmap before take a look. It is a website from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that uses maps of the United States to show the location and amount of certain chemicals that are released into the environment. Read the FAQ’s to learn more about it.

TOXMAP (http://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) from the Division of Specialized Information Services (http://sis.nlm.nih.gov) of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) (http://www.nlm.nih.gov) that uses maps of the United States to help users visually explore data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and Superfund Program.

TOXMAP homepage: http://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/main/index.jsp