Mr Tony's Geography Stuff

This chart is pretty straight forward, yet it clearly lays out the difference between 20th and 21st century Globalization patterns. Through modern invention and progress in technology the world has become a place where connections can be created at the speed of light. Through technology, the world no longer has to wait for the physical movement of goods and ideas, at the touch of a button information can be in anyone's hands 

This animated GIF of the technological changes within the music industry is fascinating.  First the Vinyl, then cassette, and the CD each were the dominant product for a time.  Today, digital music has superceded any "hard copy" format and that changes how we interact with music.  Musicians aren't trying to make a great album with 10 memorable tracks that blend together; those that spend time resisting these changes to the industry were definitely on the wrong side of history. 

This is pretty awesome!

So many of the educational discussions these days are touting the newest technologies (many of which I embrace).  Too many though, I fear, are willing to abandon tried and true "old school" pedagogical strategies in an attempt to incorporate the latest and greatest.  Just because it's new doesn't inherently make it better.  This video is a comical reminder that some old technologies and old strategies are worth keeping.  Let's keep some paper in the educational system. 

Augmenting human potential with smartphones

Talk about Eurocentrism. I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia for its value as an informal source of information; if I need to learn about a topic I am not familiar with, Wikipedia is a great place to get a preliminary idea of what I am learning about. It's disappointing to see the distribution of information on the site is so skewed, considering that there are so many other regions of the world with long, rich histories, than just those encompassed within the circle shown in the map. I feel like that is symptomatic of a number of issues currently plaguing western academic circles- we tend to not view the rest of the world as being important, which is not only untrue, it's both insulting and ignorant. I hope this disparity is addressed and corrected over the course of the next couple of years.

This site allows you to 'paint' with words. Simply type in the text (a single word or a longer passage) then choose a text size and colour. Click on the main screen, move your mouse and the words will be 'painted'.

You can save your work too.

I presented at CATS Conference on the use of social media in the academic context.  These are questions of our time that we collectively devising an answer to it.

This links to a page where tweets on Twitter are tracked in real time and displayed on a dot map.

Questions: What regions have the most tweets? Do you think there are differences between what people tweet about in one part of the world versus another? What can you infer about the areas where there are no tweets reported?

Globalisation and the Internet; The US superpower and its softpower

You need to open this page in Google Chrome. It will not work using Internet Explorer.