April 2009 Archives

Francis Pisani has alread written on his blog about ''The Brain, respectively he has done an interview with Hugh Harlan, the founder of the company behind the software. And as it seems it Mr. Pisani a great fan of this tool. I had the honor of having a few lectures from him at the University of St. Gallen. One task we students had to fulfill, was to provide discussion material and maybe some answers to a question with the software. And so did I use The Brain. You can see on the screenshot of how my tiny brain looked after a week.

As I have tried, I would say extensively, the software I can tell you some things about it.

Jeff Jarvis explains in his book What Would Google Do?, how new economic principles have evolved and how he has grown into/adapted to this new system. He uses therefore illustrative examples from the new media industry (e.g. blogs such as his own buzzmachine.com and many more) but he also compares to the old world, where control of content and scarcity have been the rule. And he gives many examples of how young, innovative companies have emerged from the classical media market or have taken the chance to gain some momentum in the internet because the classical publishers have been too slow.

This article here should be an extended version, since it is used as a discussion base for the course "Digital Media" at the University of St. Gallen, which will take place next week. So as Jarvis puts it in his book: "Free is a business model" I will provide here a summary of the first, more important part for discussion, so that all of my colleagues can profit from my knowledge.

So as mentioned here, the book is divided into 2 respectively 3 parts: The first part covers the introduction and the "Google Rules" (no not the 10 Things Google has found to be true). This summary will focus on this part. Second part is called "If Google Ruled The World", where it is about different industries and how the principles from the first part would apply there. The final part is called "Generation G".

There have been recently a few posts about new tools for learning online, with videos or just with some books. As it seems, the learning goes Open-Source and I have to say that I really appreciate this.

The most recent example of E-Learning is Academic Earth. An initiative coming from the United States as many innovative things come from there. The site is reachable under Academicearth.org. The student or interested person will find there whole lectures and courses on video in good quality, as the example down below shows. There must have been also some effort to cut all these videos, in a way, that the slideshows of the lecturer are shown in the right moment.

What I think is really remarkable about Academic Earth, is the fact that the founders Richard Ludlow (graduated at Yale) and Chris Bruner (graduated at Stanford) have built in from the beginning the networking tools a modern student uses today. You can embed the videos easily (as you see above), can share them on different platforms such as Facebook, Del.icio.us... There are many things more, like downloading a movie, mail a link, rate it and so on. This is really something great.