daily-all 01/07/2014

• How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business | Wired.com

  • Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think.
  • Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.
  • To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.
  • To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the machine.
  • “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”
  • “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well.”

• Fixing The Economy | Gaslamp Games

  "eally cool game mechanic because it takes mastery of this commodity production cha"

  tags: economy games game mechanic production investment

  • This holds intrinsic fascination to people of certain personalities (hi!) but it can get really messy really fast if handled poorly and could well alienate players whose focus is more on something like narrative, combat challenges, or characters.
  • I don’t know about you, but this stuff gets me really excited.

• Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks

  • If there's hope, frankly, I think it's offshore.
  • I am suggesting secure, accountable devices with digital signatures built in. They're cryptographically time-stamped, their voice signals and photographs are cryptographically overwritten, proving their source. They are tamperproofed, and very sternly verifiable, and usable as proven evidence in courts of law.
  • It's alarming when our Congress does dumb things and our institutions look like they're caught all flat-footed, but you know, we don't have some extra, better Congress stashed away in an attic; this is Washington, and this is it. We don't have an extra American population, either; dumb, pampered, red-white-and-blue, whatever, we are them. Adversity has its uses. We're learning a lot about ourselves by going through this. If we can just manage to make some fresh mistakes, we may end up in some place really interesting, better than we had, not all damp, crooked, and muddled, but clearer and more sensible. We should hope for that, and work for that.

• The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2014

  tags: sterling state world

  • Without a circle of friends -- such as the Well -- trying to get a handle on what's going on may be impossible for any individual who wishes to dis-inter-mediate from official channels -- except for trained researchers, journos, futurists, etc

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.