Graham Glass, etc.

Presenting EDU 2.0 at Educared

I'm currently at the Educared conference in Madrid, Spain. It's the largest education conference for Spanish speaking people in the world, so I was honored to be invited to present my views on the future of education.

Most of the 2,000-member audience were Spanish, so fortunately they provided simultaneous translation via radio units. Here are a couple of photos taken during my talk, which show the huge projection screen at the back of the auditorium.

Most of my presentation was about general trends in education, such as open resources, distance learning, personalization, web-hosted platforms, project-based learning and virtual worlds.

I finished up with an overview of my own company, EDU 2.0.

Now that the system has been translated into other languages, I hope that similar speaking opportunities will pop up all over the world!

Ron Paul's New Hampshire TV Ad

Concise and to the point:

Ron Paul Podcast

Check out this great interview of Ron Paul by Adam Curry. Unlike many interviews, Ron Paul is given plenty of opportunity to dig deeply into his philosophy and stance one a variety of topics.

Remember the 5th of November

Ron Paul has a huge following on the Internet, and it's great to see some of his fans come up with creative ways to boost his cash reserves. My favorite one right now is "Remember the 5th of November". Here's a quote from the site:

Please join us this November 5th for the largest one day political donation event in history. Our goal is to bring together 100,000 people to donate $100 each, creating a one day donation total of $10,000,000.

I've been donating to Ron Paul's campaign every week for months now, so this is a great way to continue to contribute and have some fun along the way.

If you want a small federal government and a non-interventionist foreign policy, I highly recommend that you visit Ron Paul's site to learn more.

Adventures with Guru.com

Our edu2.0 education site has been translated from English into 5 new languages so far by our team of volunteers. Our online translation system makes it pretty easy for teams of translators to work on the same language, and our moderation system allows translators to work on a language even when it's live.

We've found it hard to find volunteers for some languages though, so we decided to try Guru.com to find some freelance translators. I posted translation projects for 6 new languages a couple of days ago, and we already have around 50 bids from translators around the world. The translation involves around 10,000 words and the average bid we're considering is around $300. So with any luck, we'll soon have Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, French and German versions of our site for a total cost of around $2,000.

I'll write another post soon about how the Guru.com experience turned out.

Leonid Afremov

I am very impressed by the art of Leonid Afremov, and just decided to purchase the following print:

Amazing DNA Detective Work

This video is a great example of DNA detective work.
If you're interested in evolution, you'll really enjoy it!

The many faces of edu 2.0

Although most of our time on edu 2.0 recently has been spent on adding non-glamorous but useful features such as Rubrics, Custom calendar events and a Community-generated database of schools, we've also made good progress on internationalization.

The site translation is entirely powered by volunteer members and now includes versions in Danish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portugese, Spanish and Italian. We hope to add Chinese, Russian, Korean, Japanese and several other languages soon.

For fun, here are some screenshots of the current versions:

Brazilian Portuguese:

Danish:

Italian:

Portuguese:

Spanish:

It's very rewarding to see a single codebase leveraged in this way to provide free educational resources to a worldwide audience. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing the Chinese version!

A Brief History of Religion

Check out this site for a 90 second animated history of the spread of religion. One of the things that this animation makes clear is the strong correlation between a person's religion and where they're born.

 

NY For Ron Paul

Here's a fun video that promotes Ron Paul in typical shoot-from-the-hip NY style: