Cultural Change in Technology

As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation. Trump and the populism that’s rampaging around the world today, marked by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and rising inequality, is greatly amplified by the forces the GDE has unleashed. For someone like me who saw the power of connection build a vibrant, technologically meshed ecosystem distinguished by peace, love, and understanding, the polarization and h...

 Learning is Intrinsic to Games

As one gamer has said, “In a game, you want to learn because you’re playing it, and if you didn’t want to learn, why would you be playing it?” (Selfe & Hawisher, 2007, p. 1). For this very reason, games are uniquely powerful tools that help teachers understand how to build empowering lessons and shape how students experience learning. Each game is a curriculum unto itself; each game is a unique engine that can reengineer learning experiences. Every game gives the player an opportu...

 Whole Earth Catalog Purpose

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this p...

 Artificial Intelligence VS Intelligence Augmentation

IA, or Intelligence Augmentation, is all about empowering humans with tools that make them more capable and more intelligent, while traditional AI has been about removing humans fully from the loop. The traditional torch bearer for IA is Douglas Engelbart, who laid the seeds for much of the Personal Computer revolution with his famous Mother of All Demos in 1968, where he demoed the computer mouse, hypertext, windowing, videoconferencing, and more for the first time. Douglas Engelbart was foc...

 Game-Based Learning VS Gamification

Game-based learning is another great way to empower your students to engage with intellectual problems. They get to experience the fiero rush that comes with knowing that they successfully overcame a challenge. That’s right: game-based learning is different from gamification. Gamification is about making a non-game into a game. Game-based learning usually refers to using actual digital video games as a classroom tool (although, traditional non electronic role playing and board games work ex...

 Homo sapiens' Adaptability is Our Greatest Adaptation

All tools are externalizations of originally integral functions. But in developing each tool man also extends the limits of its usefulness, since he can make bigger cups hold liquids too hot or chemically destructive for his hands. Tools do not introduce new principles but they greatly extend the range of conditions under which the discovered control principle may be effectively employed by man. There is nothing new in world technology's growth. It is only the vast increase of its effective r...

 Buckminster Fuller's Advice to a Youth

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or Try making experiments of anything j^ Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are inten...

 What People Can Achieve Grows Exponentially

The mathematics of cooperation of men and tools is interesting. Separated men trying their individual experiments contribute in proportion to their numbers and their work may be called mathematically additive. The effect of a single piece of apparatus given to one man is also additive only, but when a group of men are cooperating, as distinct from merely operating, their work raises with some higher power of the number than the first power. It approaches the square for two men and the cube fo...

 Science Works from Approximation to Approximation

I have no patience with attempts to identify science with measurement, which is but one of its tools, or with any definition of the scientist which would exclude a Darwin, a Pasteur or a Kekulé. The scientist is a practical man and his are practical aims. He does not seek the ultimate but the proximate. He does not speak of the last analysis but rather of the next approximation. His are not those beautiful structures so delicately designed that a single flaw may cause the collapse of the who...

 A Mechanic Should Sit Down Among His Tools

As the component parts of all new machines may be said to be old[,] it is a nice discriminating judgment, which discovers that a particular arrangement will produce a new and desired effect. ... Therefore, the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world.