eCROP Blog

If a quick definition of literacy is the capacity to both understand and create what goes on a page, then to determine current literacy needs we must be able to compare what happens on paper pages with what happens in 21st century communication on Web pages. Is the digital palette on the left a sufficient summary of the major forms of composition on the web? Of the elements on this palette, how are these Web forms being combined and integrated with the historical precedents of literacy? By what strategies will public education incorporate these forms into public school curriculum for all students? A more in-depth treatment of digital literacy is also available online.

The social networking site for professionals, LinkedIn, provides a great question/answer service, LinkedIn Answers, http://www.linkedin.com/answers/ And like many such sites, LinkedIn provides permanent links to a question. This is a key feature for building a web page of questions and tracking responses generated by an individual or by a team.

The CBR Networking Initiative has created a wiki site with the goal of building an online handbook for those engaged in community based development and research, http://www.cbrwiki.org/.

Entrepreneurship Mashups Concept: given the host of web 2.0 composition tools and resources on the net, the potential exists to create entrepreneurship processors for composing a new business. Since the concept of " The World is Flat " is only marginally realized, aggregating mashups at higher levels accelerates the world's capacity to add value to its systems. Doing so makes the highway to flatworld more inclusive. The question is fairly straight forward. Given a set of steps or procedures for creating a new organization, whether business or non-profit, what web 2.0 etc. tools match each step? As there is no magic formula, there are many sequences that can work, just as there are many recipes for a good meal. Elegant recipes turn out great meals in the fewest possible steps. So, the challenge is on - to design and create a set of elegant processors for startups and beyond. Let's coin a phrase: The Flatworld Processor Define/describe and name the entrepr...

The XO (MIT's $100 laptop) and Classmate (the $200 laptop from Intel) were competitors. Now the mashup is on . XO is has set the lot size from 1 million to 250,000 at $176 each. Intel will apparently sell their model in any quantity at $200. The new goal is to design code so that programs developed for one will work on the other!

As the Web as idea processor gains acceptance, educational systems have an opportunity to engage the community in developing intellectual operating systems. At their core lies a concept at the heart of creativity and innovation. A question. How does one nourish and distribute a crop of interesting questions? What does the post-question processor look like? Use these question to guide further planning and organization.

We work and play in a three dimensional world. We jump into 2 dimensional space for our textual and photographic information and most of our compositions. Creating in 3D used to mean sculpting rock, clay and other media. In digital environments, it also meant significant costs for software and hardware to create 3D images. A pair of programs have changed the cost to computer users, Google Earth and SketchUp. See samples of Google Earth at www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/03/expecting_lots.html . See video tutorials of SketchUp at http://sketchup.google.com/tutorials.html