Good brief ovrview of a presentation by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Hans de Zwart writes, "They are convinced that it is feasible to store all the world’s knowledge." And they have been doing an admirable job of it, scanning 3 million books (and making them available for free online) as well as web pages, audio and video archives, and more (I look forward to being able to contribute all my text, audio and video to the archive one day, and they are of course free to take whatever they want now). They have already stored massive amounts of data - 10 petabytes - and have learned some interesting things about how to deal with that. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Video, Audio]

Report of a fast-paced session on MOOCs at Learning 2012 by Curt Bonk - slides are available at TrainingShare (direct link). I found this interesting"If you want to be a leader in the MOOC space then there are a few things you could do. Each of the following points was backed up by some news item or article: .." and then we have a list of a couple dozen things, like "offer something novel," "be first," "set bold audacious goals," etc. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: none]

I think this is excellent news: "Moodle HQ has decided to move away from native mobile Moodle app development and will switch to developing with HTML 5 and the open source mobile development framework Phonegap." This is instead of following the herd and making separate cloud applications for each mobile platform out there. "This will allow developers to work on a single codebase and compile a release for all mobile platforms simultaneously." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Source]

This would have been a fun conference to attend, with contributions from people like Stephenson, Turkle and Sterling. Hans de Zwart offers a pretty good summary of a number of the presentations. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: none]

It takes a bit to get to the important part of this article, but you can see the lead-up to it: "There is a whole set of people working on creating social networks without a center (e.g. BuddyCloud or Status.net or distributed filesystems (like OpenAFS), alternatives to GoogleDocs (LibreDocs) and mesh networking (like Village Telco with the Mesh Potato). There are even people who are trying to separate cloud storage from the cloud application (Project Unhosted). These are very important project that have my full attention." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Project Based Learning, Google, Networks]