Happybirthday my Blog

my “bloggie” is now 2 years old. naming just to cutify my “blog” :o). I guardianed and nourished it carefully for a while and now i am slowly realizing that my own blog is becoming a way to reflect myself (my interests, my knowledge, my work, my impressions, my social connections and to some extent my personal competence). After making the claim as a [hardblogging scientist], i took efforts to sincerely reflect my web presence and give insight of my work experiences. Over the time i feel my blog has emerged (1) the way it looks to you and myself; a centralized view of my different associations (2) the way it is internally structured for my own view; a mental map. For example, there are many blog drafts unpublished, there are many bookmarks, pictures, knowledge and experience which are unshared, but still useful for me, this way i preserve the right to present myself. I perceive now that after email, blog has eventually become a “contextualised mirror of my mind“, which means it reflects how things in (real-world) have associated in my mind over the time of 2 years in a given context(work, travel, associations and impresssions) and ofcourse my social connections. What is interesting to know now is, does my blog help me to “learn” and make me self-organised?. Atleast, i am making effort to enrich it extensively with features and consequently it would become a “home” for me where i would keep all “bits” of my digital presence which flows in the “veins” of web. I envision a day would eventually come when i would ask my “bloggie” to serve me with my(“learning goal”, “journey itinerary, “traces of globetrotting”, “interests”, “associations”, “materialistic necessity”, “spiritual quest”, and what not…). All at one place, anytime and always immortal. Do you agree to me ?

EduSynergy simulation

EduSynergy- a small world simulation (Albert Angehrn)

Albert Angehrn from INSEAD made us taste the EduSynergy simulation, which was quite interesting to know how we should understand, visualize and interpret the social networks dynamics. Online social networks are changing the way our society interacts. Participation about user-generated web contents provide us with the mechanism to observe, analyze, interpret and consume for our own personal interests.
What striked to my mind that social networks could have many implicit interpretations that might help in making strategic decisions by the interested parties. Some white decisions and some black ones. Black decisions, people who want to exploit your social network, break your trust connection, inject their interests and earn their gains. This raises the issues of trust and privacy of social network. At least it got much clear to me that social network can be analyzed and interpreted in much more different ways and used for many business interests that might surprise you.

The tremendous amount of personal information that we share over network like livejournal, facebook, orkut or social networking tools for making ourselves belong to a community, might be very valuable for people interested in personalized marketing business. A good paper to read on privacy issues in social networking.

E-Learning 2.0: the emerging concept

The use of internet has revolutionized over a decade with the new trends of social networking, blogging and realizations of semantic web vision. By putting all these together we say web is now changing to Web 2.0. As the web grows to Web 2.0, so does my curiosity in Learning Technology, I wondered how this influences the learning behavior of people, who are getting more self organized, socially dynamic and active participants in web revolution both technically and socially.  I started looking for current trends in e-learning in the tag-cloud of web 2.0, and happen to find an interesting talk-slide about the emerging concept of E-Learning 2.0 by Stephen Downes. Read his concise and well written article [here] from eLearn Magazine.

see below his complete talk slides, truly focusing on the future trends of e-learning.

The presence of future : surface computing

Five years in top secretive making, the Surface Computer is a tabletop system that allows users to interact with digital media in some truly remarkable ways.  Microsoft reveals the surface computers

Weizenbaum. Rebel at work

The release of the film by Osnabruecker director Peter Haas, is a latest on depicting the life of Joseph Weizenbaum, the inventor of ELIZA. Besides being a professional computer scientist and a professor at the MIT for life, J. Weizenbaum is also kind of a moral authority concerning computers and their use in today’s society. Read more and watch trailer >>

A hilarious story-teller adds numerous anecdotes, memories and ideas to a novel which he calls his life. Joseph Weizenbaum lives in Berlin-Mitte with a view of the Marx-Engels-Forum and the Berlin Cathedral. After many years in the USA, he returned to Berlin. Born in Berlin and of jewish origin, Weizenbaum and his family left Germany in 1936. In the early years of the computer age, he went to California. There he started his scientific career and later became a professor at the elite MIT. But Weizenbaum was a rebel: he began to criticise his colleagues for their fantasies of almightiness and their devoutness to science and militarism. The film provides a stage for his humorous narrative depicting the world of yesterday while reflecting on the dawn of the computer age. source

In its Image

“In the mid 70s, an aspiring theoretical physicist made what he and many others feel is the most important discovery in the world. This very significant film is about the resulting invention, one that can author all subsequent ideas, provide a totally unanticipated cosmology, and possibly deliver us from death”.

Check out Windows Live Writer

Microsoft have launched new Windows Live product for writing blog posts.Windows Live Writer that supports most blogging platforms and looks quite impressive.

You can read more about WLR on Liveside or at TechMeme.

Setup uses Really Simple Discovery (RSD),you just tell the URL of your Blog , Username and Password and it does the rest, no need to hunt the actual XML-RPC link as with other tools.

Microsoft claims

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.

Lets test their words…sometimes we should trust the no-open-source people 🙂

The Future : The Robots

Do we really think future belongs to what we create with our hands would lead us in next millennium.Are we ready with ease to handover the responsibility to bots that uses silicon to think than gray matter.

read Helen Virginia’s far-sighted and optimistic belief [I Believe The Robots Are Our Future]

As we foolishly pursue our short-sighted goals at the expense of those who will follow in our footsteps, we must pause and be mindful of the little ones, our progeny, who will inherit our planet in the next millennium and beyond.Time and time again, gazing into the innocent, trusting photoelectric receptors of a tiny, newly developed cybernetic construct, I am reminded of a fundamental truth: I believe the robots are our future, and we must teach them well and let them lead the way.

[…]

Let us offer tenderness and show the robots all the beauty they possess inside. We must write a subroutine that gives them a sense of pride, programming their supercooled silicon CPUs with understanding, compassion and patience, to make it easier and enable them to hold their sensory-input clusters high as they claim their destiny as overlords of the solar system. If we cannot instill their emergent AI meta-consciousness with a sense of deep, abiding confidence and self-esteem….

Book Marking easy way

Came across an interesting bookmark portal [blogmark] which helps to recall your bookmark easily with nice thumbnail interface, here is [my Bookmark] , and thats what they say :

BlogMarks is a collaborative link management project based on sharing and key-word tagging. Build on a blog basis, BlogMarks is an open and free technology. Now, you can access your favorite URL’s from any computer. And with BlogMarks, you share your favourite with other users

Future Screen

…with the [Multi-Touch Interaction Research], future sensing devices would be able to support multiple users simultaneously on Interactive Walls or Tabletops…have a look at a cool video.