Cool Interactive Display

This not really related to anything we are talking about in class but I thought this video was cool. An interactive multi touch display:



I could see where it could have some pretty cool applications with education software, especially science software. Here is the link to the original page. It is from NYU's computer science department.

Office 2.0 Conference

After reading Bryan's post:

Collaboration and Web 2.0 Applications

I followed some links and found the Office 2.0 Conference. If you are wondering what Office 2.o is hear is quote from the page:

"Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home."

Oh no a computer that follows me wherever I go! My worst fear is realized!

No seriously. It seems pretty cool. If you check out some the site sponsor that have some interesting offerings. I don't see it as an end to desktop applications or free applications for everyone. Maybe the end to desktop office applications.

I would be interest to know if there are any open source "Office 2.0" applications. I could imagine some big organization like UF hosting their own Office 2.0 version on their servers. Then anybody with UF ID could log into to use it .

Camstudio: Free Camtasia Alternative

So I was looking for a program to record a video for my job and I found a free alternive to Camtasia, Camstudio . It is free and open source. I have not tried Camtasia but it seems it might do a lot more than this one. For my purposes though Camstudio was great. It is very easy to use. It records to AVI using different compression codec. I found the MPEG-4 setting was better than the default one.

Also it will export your file to a flash, swf file for the web.

Here is a video I made with it.

Book Review

I am going to review Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity for my book review. I like quote for a book review:

Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us.

I am interested in how the control culture effects society at large and education. I think technology is bringing up a lot of issue about media/cultural control that have been dealt with before. I also believe it is political as the rules of media ownership have been loosened over the last few years. I think the "Net Neutrality" issue will affect online education as it might harder to deliver educational content over the web.