22 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
  2. Feb 2024
    1. In Mrs. Swinton’s garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it inperpetual leaf.

      An eternal summer in ypur own home? Is there a world where you can choose which season you want to be in?

  3. Aug 2023
  4. Aug 2022
    1. One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter.While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
  5. Jun 2022
  6. May 2021
  7. Mar 2021
    1. Why the future book never arrived? I might posit that the book we want needs more context about us (perhaps a commonplace book?). If it had this then it could meet us where we are and help to give us the things we need.

      An Algebra text would be dramatically different things to a 4th grader, an 8th grader, and a college math major. It could still be the same book, but hide or reveal portions of it's complexity depending on our background and knowledge of its subject.

      Perhaps it would know our favorite learning modalities and provide them based on whether we're motivated by stories, audio, video, data visualizations, or other thoughts and ideas.

  8. Feb 2021
    1. The eyes of the Fair are on the future—not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow

      The importance of looking ahead but not trying to predict the future

    2. It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day", and it allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow".
    1. With side-by-side displays, the never-built Memex desk would have let a user compare and create links between microfilm documents.

      In 1948, Vannever Bush predicted the web using a conceptual prototype called the memex.

    1. Researcher Alan Kay, believing “the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” mocked up a wirelessly connected tablet-like computer for kids in 1968. His “dynamic book,” or Dynabook, was among the most influential computers never built.

      Alan Kay predicts tablet (iPad) in 1968.

  9. Sep 2020
    1. But the academic experience could be continually refined and improved with the level of obsession that a company like Apple puts into improving every aspect of their customer experience.

      Echos a similar idea of "stickiness" that I wrote about back in 2011.

    2. There are two polar opposite narratives about the future of higher education that are both gaining traction at the moment.

      To extend the discussion, let's connect Michael's post to another thoughtful thinker about the future of higher education, Bryan Alexander. Specifically, two of Bryan's posts from roughly the same time (late September 2020):

    1. I believe that the bulk of institutions that will truly succeed going forward will not be those that win online, but on the contrary, those that do a good job establishing, maintaining, and conveying unique local experiences. Schools must reach inward to provide rich, meaningful, lasting, engaged experiences for their constituencies so people come, stay, and come back. Online, we call this “stickiness” and that will be EDU’s new metric for success: how sticky are you?

      I was reminded of this idea of "stickiness" that I wrote about long ago while reading Michael Feldstein's excellent recent 21 Sep 2020 post on the future of higher education during the time of COVID: Reports of Higher Education’s Death Have Been Moderately Exaggerated.

    1. In other words, what might the world look like if the pandemic continues at around the present level for several years?

      For another perspective, see Michael Feldstein's 21 Sep 2020 post, Reports of Higher Education’s Death Have Been Moderately Exaggerated.

  10. May 2020
    1. For as science fiction writer William Gibsonacutely observes, the future does not arrive all at onceeverywhere

      He also added that the future is already here, but only for a small number of us.

  11. Mar 2019
    1. we are simultaneously living along two curves

      Or maybe even better: along three, negotiating curves, like Gramsci's idea of residual, dominant, and emergent cultures.

  12. Feb 2019
  13. Sep 2018
  14. Nov 2017
    1. In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

      For once, this lede isn’t buried.