Foo morning
1. Howard Rheingold is working hard on pulling together information about collaboration and cooperation across many disciplines. He's been teaching a course at Stanford, and wants to do a book.
2. Jonathan Aquino talks about yubnub. He says it's a command line operating system. Yubnub makes it possible to save web sequences (sequences of web pages) as an arbitrary word. Then you can run these sequences (either by going to yubnub or by using a yubnub plugin). So, for example, people have created commands to find a pizza place in a particular locality, using Google local. Or commands to find scholarly papers, using Google scholar. Yubnub harnesses the power of traditional command line syntax for the web.
Someone suggests that he find a way to allow web services to be invoked in the command line. Someone else says that it might make more sense for yubnub to be the library, and to have all the commands run at the client. Someone builds a new command that invokes split-screen web search results (from Yahoo! and Google) during the session.
3. I dropped into O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme mapping. He's having the crowd list what's different about the new web. People are talking about cost-effective scalability, collective intelligence, components, data ownership remixing, addressable data, differences in how products are built. It's a lively discussion.
4. Scott Gray (ex-LearningLab) has a couple of things to talk about. (I'm sure he has many things to talk about — he's irrepressible and superlative by nature.) First, he wants to tell us about what he thinks is the BEST TECHNOLOGY EVER.
What is it? It's using spectrum that we have trouble generating (terahertz gap spectrum, between microwave and infra red) that can bounce through materials safely and tell us what's inside. He's telling us that organic materials resonate at these frequencies. So you can point a reader (a tricorder) at yourself and see whether you have cancer, or a virus, or you can point at a road and see whether there's a bomb buried there. The detector technology for this spectrum is very advanced, but it's expensive and difficult (right now) to generate the waves. There's a company that is working hard on this, and Scott thinks there's a huge future here.
He notes that Star Trek gave us the communicator, and Get Smart the slamming doors — this will be a Star Trek device that we'll carry around.
Then he switches gears and talks about online education. He's into training people how to program by putting a lot of effort into technology (so they have a live terminal view of their environment) and not that much into teachers. Teachers can be coaches, answering queued-up questions. Students can be exploring, education can be cheap, and it can all be constructive. No simulations, no self-grading, and lots of interaction between teacher and student. No one-sided lectures (he got some reaction here from people who pointed out that we got interested in his first topic because he told us about the Star Trek link; context and scaffolding helps). He's working hard on how to educate asynchronously.
Foo introductions
It's an enormous group. 98% build things, invent things, do things. Then there are a few of us who just write things. David Weinberger captured the sense of the introductions here. I'll try to blog sessions tomorrow - but it's likely to be hard due to all the activity.
So far, I've had some great talks about 3D printers (in 20 years, we'll all have printers in our homes, like dishwashers, that will print out new cellphones, new stuff we need), online identity formation, opening a university in a virtual world, and aggregating event data from all over the world. What I'm interested in finding out is how realistic new forms of online connection are, and hearing about great new things.