They just measured relativistic effects between two atomic clocks differing by the speed of a fast bike rider and on length scales shorter than two feet. Boy, this world is amazing.
I met with Dennis Bartels and Rob Semper from the Exploratorium staff since I was nearby at the end of last week, and they shared the plans for their new building, scheduled for moving into around 2013. I’m already excited for them – they’ll be taking over two full piers of Fisherman’s Wharf in San […]
Gartner has published their annual Hype Cycle, a roundup of which technologies are where on the inevitable expect-too-much-too-early curve of technology hype. Gartner has characterized the typical curve along which most all technologies travel, beginning with high expectations, proceeding to disillusionment when these technologies, and then completing with a slow climb to productive use of […]
Though it’s been a couple weeks since my trip to Maker Faire, I still haven’t shared a number of interesting things from this and the conference the following day. First of all, I need to share one of the coolest must-have things at the Faire. The ShopBot. This is truly a transformative device, and is […]
Apparently, Google has been secretly making cars that drive themselves. They have logged over 140,000 miles of self-navigation and over 1,000 miles of navigation entirely free of human intervention, all on regular roads, including travels on highways, regular streets, and even down the famously twisty hills of Lombard St. in San Francisco. The New York […]
Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers is a fantasy adventure for students in grades 5-8, written by Concord Consortium board member, physician, and education reformer Pendred Noyce. In this first book in the Adventures in Lexicon series, cousins Ivan and Daphne travel through a magical land of words and numbers in search of the lost children of Lexicon, who have been lured away by mysterious lights in the sky.
I caught up on a few TED talks while descending into San Diego (Thanks, Virgin America!) One of them was the latest from Clay Shirky. Love that guy. In his TEDCannes talk on cognitive surplus, he describes that the world has over one trillion hours of free time each year to commit to shared projects. […]
The GENIQUEST project has been featured in the October issue of the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) peer-reviewed journal for secondary science teachers, The Science Teacher. The article describes how the project uses a multi-layered genetics model to permit students to breed dragons and examine their genetics.
Concord Consortium board member Larry Rosenstock has received the prestigious 2010 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education. Rosenstock is the CEO and founding principal of High Tech High (HTH), and received the Secondary Education prize for creating educational ideas that work and scaling them up to improve student achievement.
Well, Maker Faire was certainly all it’s cracked up to be. The energy of the movement is tangible, and the variety of the things people are doing is truly vast. There are definitely themes running through the Maker movement, and many involve technology in a variety of ways. Many of the more surprising examples are […]