Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web
Just as once we moved from agrarian, home-based apprenticeships to industrial, school-based education, now we're moving to a new kind of education, driven by computers and the internet, customized, interactive, and learner-controlled. Allan Collins explains the pros and cons of the new model, and argues that students around the world are shifting to new, diverse modes of learning.
Joel and Jeff discuss the value of Deep Blue, the Five Whys process, and whether programmers should blog.
Sal Khan's response to the crisis in education is Khanacademy.org, a site that lists a vast and growing collection of his YouTube video lessons in math, physics, chemistry, biology, and economics. In this conversation he discusses his teaching philosophy and methods with host Jon Udell, and explains why he abandoned a career in financial services to become a new kind of teacher.
Dr.Moira Gunn catches up with internet pioneer and author, Jaron Lanier to discuss his new book, You Are Not a Gadget...a Manifesto, where he discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design.
Joel and Jeff discuss GitHub, the value of formal code documentation, and how to decide what features belong in the next version of your software.
The FCC is scheduled to deliver a national broadband strategy to Congress in February 2010. Scott Mace and attorney Jim Baller discuss the FCC strategy, early-round stimulus funding, the role of municipalities, and success stories such as Bristol, Virginia's fiber-to-the-home service.
Although the definition of cloud computing can seem somewhat cloudy, it's a good thing to understand for business. Canonical's Simon Wardley argues with humor that "the cloud" represents a natural marketing-cycle progression for IT; from innovation, to product, to service utility. Given the constant pressure toward commoditization, business must keep up, and consider offering cloud services. He introduces Eucalyptus, a tool to build, experiment, and test-deploy virtual enterprise cloud computing.
In his densely informative presentation, Cullen Jennings, Cisco's Distinguished Engineer talks about Network Address Translations (NATs), how they work, what's going on and more importantly, why we should care. Jennings looks at if and when we're really going to run out of IP addresses, how ISPs are using this to avoid the network neutrality push, and the disturbing implications ISP 'Carrier Grade NATs' have for application developers and end users alike.
Doug Day is the author of an open source library for reading and writing iCalendar files. He has also created an online validator for the venerable -- but still underutilized -- calendar format. In this conversation, Doug Day and host Jon Udell discuss why and how the validator can help bootstrap a pub/sub calendar ecosystem.
Wikipedia isn't just a resource created by volunteers, it's also a highly social project, a test-bed for researchers, and a source of valuable data for scientists studying community behavior. This panel features some of the wiki community's top contributors, who present the latest trends, issues, and knowledge from Wikimania, the annual international Wikimedia conference.
