XplanaZine

Here’s our take on news that matters for Monday, January 9. Today’s theme is discovery and here are a some links to headlines about technology that is changing the way we live and learn.

• Gaming — A New York Times article yesterday, posited that
  “‘Massively multi-player online role-playing games’ are challenging movies as the go-to entertainment for the 18-35 crowd. (The “King Kong” version was released the same day as the film.)” And, in a “too close to home” moment, USA Today ran an article this weekend discussing the use of “cheats” in online gaming and whether or not it is fair to be able to “buy” your success in a game rather than having to conquer all the levels. Oh, and Bill Gates said this week that the secret to success was making software more like video games.
• Blogging, Podcasting, and Vodcasting — Here are some interesting predictions from the UK creative company Audacious. And as proof that blogging makes a difference in communication, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said in a recent interview that blogging played a big role in the company’s communication strategy over the last year.
• Handhelds — One of the most obvious messages at last week’s CES is that no one is capitulating final sovereignty to Apple in the iPod wars just yet. A slew of new devices were rolled out in efforts to challenge Apple’s dominance. We’ll see how things shake out at MacWorld this week before we give any of the pretenders much of a chance this year. And, in addition to teaming with Yahoo on its Ready services for millions of users, Motorola is partnering with Google for search on cell phones.
• Social Networks –
  Google co-founder Larry Paige was dismissive backstage at CES this weekend when asked about Yahoo’s lead in the social networking space. His response was that
  “The data that defines you socially isn’t really that complicated, or that hard to collect.” Such may be true, but the thing we’ve learned about social networks to date is that they are only partly about technology. Collecting the data and providing the platform isn’t the issue — it’s getting the idea right so that people with interact with the data and with each other. Still Google has lots of experience with that as well. Oh, and if you didn’t already know, MySpace is the place to be for teens.

Now, here’s a recap of our favorite posts from the edublogging community from the past 48 hours.

• From Doug Johnson: Post on adjusting schools’ lobbying strategies at the federal level.
• From George Siemens : Post reacting to the “one-way only” approach that some designers/developers have to learning.
• From Kathleen Fitzpatrick : Post on RSS, the future of academic publishing, peer review, and tenure requirements.
• From Jesse Wilbur: Posts on Digital Universe and building a better Wikipedia (or not).
• From Albert Ip : Post on looking beyond 2020 and the implications of rendered physical realities in learning
• From Will Richardson: Post on the education dilemmas associated with the rapid increase in significant information.