Month: December 2010

This holiday season we’re taking a break at TechChange from bringing you the latest developments in technology, education and social change to focus on something a little more fun.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to travel a fair amount by plane and in that time I’ve developed a strong love for the SkyMall catalog. Lets be honest, who doesn’t enjoy reading about the latest innovations in dog castles, personal massage devices, and Big Foot statues?  On a recent flight I came across a number of new technologies designed to make our lives easier.  I figured why not write a blog post to document these revolutionary breakthroughs and provide some gift ideas for this holiday season?
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Remember to toast the birth of the World Wide Web this Saturday—just don’t buy it a drink. It was only twenty years ago that Tim Berners-Lee loaded the first webpage. Now it’s such an indispensable aid to modern life that researchers are evaluating not if, but how it’s rewiring our brains. That is of course if you are one of the lucky third of the population that has access. The pace of adoption, however, must make one feel optimistic that soon children won’t remember a world where it hasn’t been possible to ‘ask the internet’ from a mobile.

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Deck the halls, wrap some presents and pour yourself a tall glass of eggnog: Cloud storage gives you one less thing to worry about this holiday season.

Unfamiliar with cloud storage? Cloud storage is a place that ensures your personal computer files are safe in the event of a computer crash, theft or accident.  We’ve all heard the horror stories of someone’s computer crashing and the subsequent loss of irreplaceable family photos and important documents. Just recently I was in the Apple store and overheard a grieving woman recount how her toddler spilled milk on her laptop. She lost all her files.  I personally have a lot of memories stored on my computer, which I’d be quite devastated to lose.

So how can you have peace of mind when computer hardware is so fickle?  With a cloud backup service you can upload your data remotely, use it to host your files and ensure everything is backed up and safe.  Here are some of the perks of floating your data on a cloud.

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On July 4th 2009, Emin Milli — blogger and one of the Alumni Network founders —spoke at “a Heinrich Böll Foundation roundtable dedicated to a democratization process in Azerbaijan, where he criticized the Azerbaijani government strongly.” Four days later, on July 8th 2009, he and Adnan Hajizada — blogger and co-founder of the OL! Azerbaijan Youth Movement — were attacked at a Baku Café by unknown ‘sportsmen.’ The bloggers were arrested and the following days they spent in detention — which turned into months — became a blow-to-free-speech headline in cyber history.
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Romeo Dallaire may be best known for his book titled Shaking Hands with the Devil. Since retiring from his illustrious military career, he has taken on a new task – to end the use of child soldiers in war. He is the first to admit that this is no small task, and Dallaire has gone on record to say “I have been leading this fight for over five years, without a force behind me. I’ve come to realize that this is not something anyone can accomplish alone.” And with that realization, Dallaire has turned to social media for help.

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TechChange is excited to launch a new blog series dedicated to e-Learning for educators and trainers.  The series will highlight emerging technologies, best practices in instructional design and pedagogy, and important industry trends.

The very nature of the way we learn and the way we teach are continually transformed by the implementation of online technologies in education and training. According to a recent report, Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009 online enrollments in higher education are increasing at a rate of 17%, far exceeding the meager 1.2% overall growth in higher education.  More than one in four higher education students now take at least one course online.  Increases in distance learning enrollments at community colleges are even higher at 22%, according to the Instructional Technology Council’s Distance Education Survey Results.

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In August of this year, Keith Lane, professional photographer and a member of the TechChange team, went to Haiti to document, through photography, whether and how the country is recovering since the devastating earthquake in January. I had a chance to sit down with Keith and ask him about his trip, what he observed and what he imagines the future holds for Haitian people. (more…)

Yesterday, Jumo released its beta platform to the world, but the launch was far from seamless.  Founded by Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes, Jumo bills itself as a “social network for the social sector.” At TechChange, we spent a few hours on the new site and here are some of our first impressions.

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