There's talk nowadays
in publishing circles about a new device for books, called a
ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it in your hands like
this.... Has a very nice little graphics screen, theoretically,
a high-definition thing, very legible.... And you play your
books on it.

Blended learning describes a process or practice; hybrid pedagogy is a methodological approach that helps define a series of varied processes and practices. (Blended learning is tactical, whereas hybrid pedagogy is strategic.) When people talk about “blended learning,” they are usually referring to the place where learning happens, a combination of the classroom and online. The word “hybrid” has deeper resonances, suggesting not just that the place of learning is changed but that a hybrid pedagogy fundamentally rethinks our conception of place.

Pegasus Global Holdings, LLC, a private international technology development firm, is creating CITE to be the largest scale testing and evaluation center in the world.

CITE will represent a 20th century American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square acres. CITE’s test city will be unpopulated. This unique feature will allow for a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents.

CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing “end to end” testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities and the private sector.

These innovations, if brought forward to the point of manufacturing, are essential for the United States to regain manufacturing superiority and to train and put a highly experienced and well educated workforce back to work – while at the same time helping to change the environment for the better through commercialization of advanced innovations in energy, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare and the environment.

And maybe I live in the future more than many, but I realized that sort of not having a future was inhumane in that part of what meant to be human was to have a future, was to look forward, was to in some ways be future oriented and live in the future a little bit. I think that is part of what being human means because when I didn’t have a future I felt my humanity shrinking.

I started my career writing about travel, but very early on I had an opportunity to participate in an online world and I began to write about that as a foreign country. That’s where I got involved in the future by actually experiencing it online.

When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement for the market economy. But gift economies and market economies have operated side-by-side for much of history.

The real story is that their founders thought of the gift first, and the means of supporting it second.

Thinking about ants and their networks of communication and gift, I can't help but think of the internet. In 2005, Paul Rademacher reverse-engineered the JavaScript code for Google Maps, wrote a program to scrape Craigslist apartment listings, and overlaid the Craigslist listings on Google Maps. It was the first web mashup.

It's hard now to appreciate how clever that was at the time. Today, most web services offer free APIs, and it's common for people to use multiple APIs to build something more intelligent than any of the individual services. APIs serve as a mechanism for communication and gift.

We publish vivid and provocative essays from leading practitioners in technology and the arts, exploring the relationship between humans and technology. All material is released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike license. Food for thought!

After reading the Mother Jones piece, I deleted the Path app. Each user’s relationship with a new social product hangs by a thread of social connections and trust. I was on the fence about Path — only two of my actual friends use it — and when I have a choice, I’d rather not trust carelessly sexist people (or the companies that hire them) with my data, attention, or time.

The derailing attacks and defensive tweets are typed by fingers belonging to actual humans in front of keyboards.

We’ve all said dumb, offensive shit. This is what friends are for: they help you be a better, kinder human.

In one respect, hacking is an act of hypnosis. As Hotz describes it, the secret is to figure out how to speak to the device, then persuade it to obey your wishes.

Founded by a revolutionary partnership between Intel and VICE, The Creators Project supports visionary artists across multiple disciplines who are using technology in innovative ways to push the boundaries of creative expression.

When I taught at Harvard in the Art History department, and the students asked the faculty to talk about their favorite work of art, I said - the alphabet.

Very few people ever hold language in their hands.

Writing for format.

Amber Frid-Jimenez is a designer whose recent research explores the role of design and technology in the formation and disintegration of communities under unstable conditions. Her work investigates the cultural mechanics of the network through experimental platforms and visual systems. Frid-Jimenez is an associate professor at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen, Norway, a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands, and an affiliate artist at the MIT Program for Art, Culture and Technology.

I'm shamelessly exploring a few of the thoughts that Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have been toying with for the past two years or so: atemporality.

In one way it's the triumph of the new over the old. On the other hand it doesn't really care about the distinction between the new and the old, in a manner that's dissimilar to the postmodern notion of the pastiche. In this regard we return to Bourriaud's idea that our understanding of time, and thus the future (and the past), are about how we cluster various signs together. By branching out in different directions instead of moving from step one to two to three. Having quickly flipped over to check my mail and messages it occurs to me that a tidy example is the use of threaded and branching messages on facebook, gmail, twitter etc. 

Literature isn’t alien to technology, literature is technological to begin with.

Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks.

There was a time we were doing interesting websites. But this is more interesting.

We will get those ideas by watching what people are putting together by themselves.

The most power comes when we give people the power to do things themselves.

“How do we maintain human agency in a world that is being consciously programmed to defeat human agency?” These are questions that have existed at the onset of each new technology, and it's the artist's role to preserve human agency.

In short, these are the people of the screen.

It's totally normal to lust after the hottest new geeky gadgets. It's also cool to put some thought into what we buy, and what we throw away.

A 0 to 1 startup involves low financial costs but low non-financial costs too. You’ll at least learn a lot and probably will be better for the effort. A 1 to n startup, though, has especially low financial costs, but higher non-financial costs. If you try to do Groupon for Madagascar and it fails, it’s not clear where exactly you are. But it’s not good.

 [Q]uery whether most [startups] are operating in technology mode or globalization mode. You know you’re on the right track when your answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in X. But the truth is !X.”

Every sort of media will be pulled into the flow: soon, television will be repurposed as yet-another-media-type and played in the stream like audio is now.

This is all happening because we will naturally gravitate to the place with the fastest tempo, because the best stuff appears there first. Paradoxically, the places with the strongest flow will seem the most calm, because we won’t be jumping from the stream to the browser and back again a hundred times a day: we will stay in the stream: media content will be harvested, and pulled into context for us.

This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.

Technology inevitably trumps ideology.

We invent ideologies to cope with technology.

The I Am Zlatan biography app is our take on a new format to present important stories about people who made an impact.

In January last year, the head of LG R&D said that it had produced a plastic, e-ink 19-inch color display — the same size as a tabloid newspaper. The amount of energy (and money) that we would save if we used e-paper instead of paper would be astronomical.

He says that there is some evidence that a user’s emotional state affects typing rhythms. But just as people can recognize a familiar song even if it is mangled by inept musicians, so, too, he hypothesizes, could software recognize one’s distinct “core rhythm,” which would be “perceptible even through the noise of emotion, fatigue or intoxication.” He adds that the notion of core rhythm has not been experimentally confirmed.