In a short but provocative piece at edge.com Berkeley’s Marti Hearst suggests we will see text decline in favor of video and speech based interactions in the future. This is not the first time the predictions for the power of new media have been made (David Jonassen infamously predicted in 1982 that the book [...]
The secret to academic infamy and citation is to find some evidence (I use the term loosely) that any new technology either enables or disables its users. Facebook, fresh from causing cancer, as if that were not enough, is now apparently the cause of poor grades. Leading researchers (well, at least a doctoral student at [...]
Indiana University’s School of Education has received a federal grant of $3m to study how technology is used in the classroom and to what effect. Am pleased there will be more data on this since some of us have conducted significant reviews over the last decade that raised serious doubts about the claims made for [...]
Two news stories breaking today point to the range of information issues in contemportary life. First, researchers at CIT and UCLA have developed a super dense computer chip that is the size of a white blood cell, opening the door to another level in computational design. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange is adopting new [...]
If you’ve dabbled in online auctions or sales you will no doubt have wondered just how reliable are the various reputation ratings sellers report to convince you of their integrity. Interesting news this week from researchers at CMU who report that fraudsters in online auctions and selling sites can be reliably identified by the pattern [...]
So now it’s over, and while for many in the US it was all a bit hard to understand, for the rest of the world this competition is the highlight of the sporting calendar. Forget the results however, there were several fascinating informational aspects to this year’s cup that should be noted. Leaving aside the [...]
There is much interest in attracting new students, especially female, to computer science and it has not gone unnoticed by some in that discipline that there is a real image problem. The Computer Research Association, a grouping of some 200 academic departments in computer science and engineering, is doing its best to put the sex [...]
Just back from CHI in Montreal (great city, so-so conference) I noticed how many people on the airplane were reading the Da Vinci Code. On both sides of the aisle I saw fellow-passengers with copies, and a third with another Dan Brown book. As if this was not bad enough, the O’Hare bookstore in which [...]