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Chronozoom: A dynamic view of history, the universe, and everything

Chronozoom is an innovative dynamic animation of the history of the universe.


In their own words:
"ChronoZoom is an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information. This project has been funded and supported by Microsoft Research Connections in collaboration with University California at Berkeley and Moscow State University.
You can browse through history on ChronoZoom to find data in the form of articles, images, video, sound, and other multimedia. ChronoZoom links a wealth of information from five major regimes that unifies all historical knowledge collectively known as Big History."


Try out ChronoZoom here.

Open access to research journals

(Source: http://www.tdl.org/2010/02/open-journal-systems-and-academic-freedom/)

Academic publishing is a strange business: Researchers do not get paid by journals for their work, and neither do reviewers or editors. However, people (and libraries) interested in reading the journal need to pay exorbitant fees to access the articles. Without a full subscription, a single article can cost well over $30 (all written, reviewed, and edited by people for free). In addition, university research is mostly funded by tax money, as is the money used by public libraries to pay for access to articles written by the same researchers.

A current boycott of over 8,000 researchers of one of the largest academic publishers, Elsevier, aims to expose and change their agressive business practices (See The Cost of Knowledge).

It is in the very nature of academic knowledge that it should be widely accessible. More and more researchers are looking into alternatives, for example by making their articles available for free on their own websites, or by publishing in Open Access journals (see Directory of Open Access Journals or Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals).

Read more about Open Access of academic journals here.

Daily data flow on the Internet

Created by: MBAOnline.com

Science and math education in the U.S.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

The Gamification of Education

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

The Jedi Career Path

The Jedi Path (Source: Wookieepedia)

According the book "The Jedi Path", the career of a Jedi is challenging and can lead to many different specializations.

I created the diagram below to illustrate the different career paths of a Jedi (in the time of the Galactic Republic) [Click to Enlarge]:

The Jedi Career Path

If an initiate did not get accepted as a Padawan, he/she could join the Jedi Service corps or leave the order.

If a Jedi Padawan passed the Jedi trials and became a Jedi Knight, he/she could join one of three branches: Jedi Guardian (typically blue lightsabers), Jedi Consular (typically green lightsabers), or Jedi Sentinel (typically yellow lightsabers).

From an educational perspective, the Jedi career path is a good example of apprenticeship learning: An initiate becomes part of a community of practice, mentored by a practicing master who assigns increasingly more challenging tasks, and learns from observing the master in action. Such situated learning is often used in trades, music, martial arts and other sports.