This product is a better user experience than reading a physical book. But it’s also a prime example of identifying a neat technology, and then finding a reason to use it in school, which is ass backwards.

Educators need to figure out what they want students to learn, and then find a technology that helps them learn it. Students could play forever with this book, but all they would learn is Al Gore’s view of how we solve our environmental problems. They would not learn contrary views, and they would not be taught to think critically about whose views they accept.

The successors to textbooks surely will be digital, but they won’t be a textbook at all.

They won’t be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year’s Texas controversy;

“chapters” won’t reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of scholars and educators;

in subjective areas, they won’t require students to memorize particular “facts” and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and

they won’t impose a “one size fits all” approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who collectively decide that no one should have “ownership” over what is taught in schools. It will leverage a curated collection of the best free content online, supplemented by some traditional textbook content in the sciences and math.

I was just thinking that there are already names for this sort of thing. We call them applications, interactive multimedia presentations, even websites. If someone put that in front of me and asked, “Do you know what this is?” I would confidently have several names for it, and book wouldn’t make the list. And I’m a huge fan of ebooks, I have two Kindles, so I don’t think it’s just that I’m biased towards bound material.

I’d really like to see some reading comprehension statistics on things like this versus more linear presentations of information too. I’m not just being critical, I’m genuinely curious about whether being able to interactively explore presented information leads to better, worse or the same retention as reading through it in the more traditional linear, guided way.

What’s made Google search, Facebook, the iPod, and Firefox household names? They all keep interaction to a minimum. The best presentation of content is the one which requires the least number of clicks and choices. Information overload is daunting: Few clicks and choices means more people stay and use your site. Avoiding interaction seduction allows you to create interfaces that are easier to learn and faster to use with surprisingly delightful interfaces. As an example, we’ll see what Google search would have looked like if the Lobby For Advancement Of Carpal-Tunnel Syndrome had got their way.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuELwq2ThJE

Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it’s first week of operation. After Humanized was sucked into Mozilla, Aza became Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. When not working (ha!) Aza enjoys playing music and punning.

This is a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click. 

The future use of multi-touch technology is expected to rapidly become common place. For example, touch screen telephones are expected to increase from 200,000 shipped in 2006, to 21 million in 2012.

While Touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, Multi-Touch systems enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, allowing for the use of both hands along with chording gestures. These kinds of interactions hold tremendous potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. Multi-Touch systems are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for collaborative scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

A demostration of Augmented Reality…the seamless mixing of the real and the virtual. Quite simply, this is the future. AR has unlimited potential, the potential to give us virtualy anything anywhere.

For many of those interested in AR, one of its most important characteristics is the way in which it makes possible a transformation of the focus of interaction.

The interactive system is no longer a precise location, but the whole environment; interaction is no longer simply a face-to-screen exchange, but dissolves itself in the surrounding space and objects. Using an information system is no longer exclusively a conscious and intentional act

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web. With deep compassion for the human condition, his projects troll the Internet to find out what we’re all feeling and looking for.

This is truly amazing project. The ways in which he wields technology to help us better understand, and thus appreciate, our fellow man are, quite simply, brilliant. I wasn’t able to see his recent “I Want You To Want Me” done with Sep Kamvar but judging from this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZUaXDm4qik), it turned out beautifully. The documentation of their process is also worth a peek: http://www.iwantyoutowantme.org/process.html

I believe this could be a very sophisticated framework to build next generation learning content. At present we are mostly waiting for head-mount display technology to mature. When we have a full color sunlight-readable overlay display with an apparent resolution of about 90dpi at 2feet (say, 180 arc-seconds) this will really take off.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9KPJlA5yds

The car is just an example but think how far the e-learning industry can go with this technology. There are already some prototypes with children book and story telling out there in the market. I think we need companies to invest in custom content development projects in this platform. I believe this will change the way we perceive online learning.