I met Roland in Paris a few years ago, and he blogged for us every Sunday. I just learned of his passing. Rest in peace, Roland. Many of us appreciated what you did.

Roland passed away Monday in Paris. He was hit with a digestive virus that lead to a high fever and health complications beyond that.

Resident SmartMobs blogger Judy Breck recently shared the following in an interview with we_magazine:

“everything begins with the smallest unit, the individual. Like microlearning: ideas, meaning, and appropriate political action networks emerge as the patterning of micro nodes. Individual sovereignty is totally unaffected by your color, the slant of your eyes, or who is your daddy. The mobile computer can deliver what is known by humankind to each human node — each micro unit. The mobile device, unlike many school and social settings and networks, does not know or care about your color, eyes, or who is your daddy.”

Judy Breck has long advocated the infusion of knowledge networking into education. The following video interview with we_magazine captures the core of what she has been trying to explain for 10+ years in her journey to help inform us on the potentialities and promises of technologies in relation to education and learning.

we_magazine Interview with Judy Breck

Further reading: - From me to WE with mobile devices

The image above is grabbed from a demo at vimeo of the newly launched MixedInk platform for collaborative writing. More outcome oriented than a wiki, the process allows massive groups to weave their ideas and opinions into a single text. The demo gives a step-by-step explanation and the MixedInk homepage offers basics and a tour, with this introduction:

Connect, collaborate & be heard. MixedInk takes a fresh approach to collaborative writing. It’s a fun, democratic and elegant way for people to weave their best ideas together. (Plus, it’s free!)

One of the biggest challenges for not for profits, non-governmental groups and other volunteer run organisations isn’t funding, but time. Namely, your time.

While many NGOs have harnessed the power of social and participatory media to solve old problems, many others still lack access to the critical expertise and knowledge needed to move forward. In the past, those who might offer this expertise are often too busy to volunteer their time for on-site commitments. Thanks to mobile communications and some innovative thinking, a solution is now a phone call away.

Meet the Extraordinaries

The Extraordinaries turns your spare time into social good by “delivering volunteer opportunities, on-demand, to mobile phones, which can be performed on mobile phones in 20 minutes or less.”

Extraordinaries founders Jacob Colker and Ben Rigby came up with the idea to match busy people with volunteer micro-commitments wherever and whenever they may be accessed by mobile technologies.

“In essence, The Extraordinaries reduces the cost of information transfer. It allows a person with high expertise to transfer information to someone or some organization in need of that expertise at little or no cost.”

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
While we properly view this as satire today, I would bet my 1940s rollerskates key that down the decades there will be an internet connective device like this. The world does go around and around, don’t you know.

A Washington Post report today describes the preparations underway by the cellphone industry to meet the anticipated need of users, and do some new things. The article titled Inauguration Spotlights Cellphone Opportunities recaps the expected crush of calls and related challenges, and then adds:

AppTek of McLean is hoping many inauguration attendees will use its product that translates text messages into different languages. The company has licensed its technology to other online firms including TransClick.com, isec7.com and OnsetTechnology.com, and consumers can download the software to their BlackBerrys, PDAs and other smartphones.

“Everyone is going to want to speak to everyone else, regardless of the language,” said Mike Veronis, head of business development for AppTek.

AppTek is also working with DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s research lab, to develop handheld devices that can translate two-way conversations in real time. The device is intended for use by military and intelligence workers.

“Whatever starts to get funded by these government labs has the ultimate goal to become a mass-market product,” Veronis said. “That shows the government is moving that way.”

Both firms hope the mass text messages that helped fuel Obama’s campaign success will continue long after the inauguration.

“For the first time ever, more people are texting than making voice calls,” Titus said. “And the texting generation is the one Obama has been targeting.”

The notion that online social relationships should be dismissed as somehow “less real” than face-to-face relationships — or “real community,” whatever that means — is an old one. It’s a good question to ask, and all online information should be critically examined, including online relationships. But when people dismiss the possibility that for some people, the online world is not just real, but a lifeline, I think of Blaine Deatherage-Newsom. I still answer email from students, as I did more than a decade ago. In 1996, I was asked a few survey questions by a student who wanted to know if I would consider aborting a pregnancy if it could be determined in advance that the baby would have spina bifida. A few weeks later, when I heard back from Blaine about the results of his survey, I wrote “For Some, The Net Is a Lifeline” in a newspaper-syndicated column that I put online by myself.

A few weeks ago, twelve years after that column, I smiled to see this article about Blaine and Freegeek, the organization he supports and inspires. The text excerpt is written by Marie Deatherage, Blaine’s mother:

And of course last but not least there’s the meaning it has in my son Blaine’s life. As many of you know, Blaine was born with spina bifida and is paralyzed and lacks sensation below his armpits. This past summer, Blaine received an award for “Volunteer Extraordinaire” at Free Geek in recognition that for the past five years, every day Free Geek is open and he is not really really sick, Blaine has been getting himself up and ready to go in and help that amazing nonprofit organization. I get to see what it takes for Blaine to make his important contribution. What can I say? He’s my hero.

I’ve always know what Free Geek does for Blaine, but I was stunned to hear what he means to Free Geek. Recently some of his co-workers there shared some thoughts about what Blaine provides Free Geek. When I heard these things, my heart soared like a hawk. I wish every mother had the opportunity to hear people appreciate their son or daughter like this:

* “Recently my niece signed up to volunteer at Free Geek, opting to work her way through the Computer Build program to earn a free computer. My advice to her was, ‘Prepare to work independently, overcome great frustration, and when in doubt, stay close to Blaine.’”

* “Blaine’s tutelage was instrumental in my making it through the Build program at Free Geek (launching me into other areas of contribution), and I know he has provided similar assistance to hundreds, if not thousands of other volunteers there.”

* “Blaine is an amazingly knowledgable and patient instructor and coordinator of other volunteers. Despite his limited mobility, Blaine is able to help direct and answer questions of our volunteers, which in turn keep our organization running.”

* “Blaine is among the most valued members of the Free Geek community and of its volunteer labor force.”

* “Blaine helps teach others good work skills and reinforces the importance of showing up on time and doing your job with all you have, and he is always willing to learn more from others to share with his students.”

* “I have been very impressed with Blaine’s patient and consistently upbeat contributions as a volunteer with the Free Geek build program. He was extremely supportive and helpful to a young man from a Haitian refugee family who learned a lot from a series of afternoons with Blaine: about computers, people, tolerance and empathy from his supportive manner and patient instruction.”

* “He is a beloved member of our community. It’s impossible to work with Blaine without appreciating his cheer and warmth. I’ve never seen him get irritated, even in the most difficult times; His equanimity helps us all to maintain our own sanity. He’s an inspiring presence.”

Every year, John Brockman asks an interesting group of people to answer one question. This year, he asked about what we thought would be game-changing knowledge.

ANNOUNCING THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION - 2009

New tools equal new perceptions.

Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.

Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.

Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.

—————–

THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION - 2009

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

—————–

More than 150 essays in response to this year’s question have been published on the EDGE website at the following URL:

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_index.html

—————–

And here is an excerpt of my answer: Social Media Literacy

Social media literacy is going to change many games in unforeseeable ways. Since the advent of the telegraph, the infrastructure for global, ubiquitous, broadband communication media have been laid down, and of course the great power of the Internet is the democracy of access—in a couple of decades, the number of users has grown from a thousand to a billion. But the next important breakthroughs won’t be in hardware or software but in know-how, just the most important after-effects of the printing press were not in improved printing technologies but in widespread literacy. The Gutenberg press itself was not enough. Mechanical printing had been invented in Korea and China centuries before the European invention. For a number of reasons, a market for print and the knowledge of how to use the alphabetic code for transmitting knowledge across time and space broke out of the scribal elite that had controlled it for millennia. From around 20,000 books written by hand in Gutenberg’s lifetime, the number of books grew to tens of millions within decades of the invention of moveable type. And the rapidly expanding literate population in Europe began to create science, democracy, and the foundations of the industrial revolution. Today, we´re seeing the beginnings of scientific, medical, political, and social revolutions, from the instant epidemiology that broke out online when SARS became known to the world, to the use of social media by political campaigns. But we´re only in the earliest years of social media literacy. Whether universal access to many-to-many media will lead to explosive scientific and social change depends more on know-how now than physical infrastructure….(more at Edge.org)

Spanish researchers have published a study about the potential future impact of robots on society. They think that the potentially widening gap between the first and third worlds will cause a technological imbalance over the next 12 years. One of the researchers said that ‘just as we depend upon mobile phones and cars in our daily lives today, the next 15 years will see mass hybridization between humans and robots.’ So they predict that robots will be around — and inside — us.
Read more: ZDNet, Primidi