Back to School with Free OpenCourseWare

Four years ago, MIT made a committment to sharing the educational materials from all of their undergraduate and graduate courses online, making it free and accessible to people around the world. More than 1400 courses from their OpenCourseWare site , ranging from Aeronautics to Nuclear Sciences to Writing and Humanistic Studies is available through written syllabi to video lectures....

Rural India Connects to the Internet

According to a Reuters article, the 1,753 residents of the farming village of Hansdehar have chosen to connect to the world via the Internet, in hopes that the Indian government might take notice of the poor condition of their infrastructure. From a link on smartvillages.com,  Internet users can see pictures of the village,...

Ten Technologies Change the World

John Voelcker, an interactive media strategist, released a review of the top ten technologies that are changing the world. His list is based on technologies developed by social entrepreneurs who thought through the development , usability and financing of their solutions. 

Voelcker's list is as follows, followed by summaries (based on his paper) of what these products actually do:

1....

Google Book Search: The Debate

The Washington Post published an interesting article on Sunday about Google's Book Search function.  With the University of California recently adding its massive library to the book-scanning process, this idea of creating a comprehensive digitized library of all the world's books seems like a reachable goal.  This move, which opened the University of California's network of 100 libraries and some 34 million books to Google's scan-and-search framework is a landmark event in Google's quest of digitizing every book ever written....

Learning Languages the Web 2.0 Way

As a current student of Mandarin, I've been looking at the resources the web has to offer to help extend my classroom learning.  The result of my search has been a few sites that are using innovative strategies to help foreigners learn Mandarin and, hopefully, turn a profit in the not too distant future. ...