My Thoughts A Year Ago…

In August 2012 I was writing my thoughts while eating, and getting ready for my computer class. It was a sunny day as almost all days in OC California… I had worked in my online courses and I had this vision about what I wanted to have in the near future.

First  I imagined myself composing images, movies, songs, blogs with the perfect fit of my way of thinking. Second, I had thought that most of the time you do not see what is behind  the screen or how the traffic  in the internet is moving or if you can see who stopped by your things, besides the people that you know and commented or sent a signal that they where there. It was like a mysterious box of limited information in plain sight. Also I wanted to share with the internauts, in general, the brands, institutions, organizations, places, that wowed me to glorify and perpetuate their existence. My apps I imaged could be like my personal assistant, trainer, tutor, planner… I wanted to have my special robot to remind me, to advice me , to be my special tool for all the things I knew I will required  precision and accuracy; let’s say my Swiss Army knife of the 21 Century.

Huy! I wanted something that can count and check my calories intake; my weights, and my burning calories, predict my perfect next meal. And do the same counting and checking and predicting for all my activities; the mental and the physical ones. My robot is for me so different as it is portrayed everywhere, it is not an entity but a series of devices, or a device that can include for my body to have my vitals, and for my exercise to record my position, effort and precise movements to induce the maximum potential of my health and brain.

I went farther, while I was typing I wrote, why the typing? When it could be a device which can fetch my thoughts… all my thoughts… the deepest ones… the ones that I don’t even know I have… (Very controversial  now I see) I went on; How about if I can have a conversation with somebody else in my mind… the energy that we can save, the waist that can be avoid… We can be all so synchronized that, we actually can have space for the wilderness, time to restore Nature and pursue the evolution of societies… Well that was then. From a year to today I am totally amazed of how much it has been accomplished!

At my online school, Udacity; I just read an article where the goal is going to be, and I quote; “…the creation of  a piece of artificial intelligence that sits there, watches you learn, and helps you pick the right learning venue or task, so you’re more effective and have more pleasure.” (Sebastian Thrun)

The number of applications downloaded just in December was two billion; the most popular were Google Maps, Facebook, and You Tube. So people, like to know where they are, and where are they going. People like to socialize and communicate with friends. People like to watch videos, to learn, to buy, to entertain, to send messages, and more.

Our phones are our agendas, portal to games, music, movies, conference rooms, learning environment, physical trainer, animate our household, monitor rooms, experiment, situations… This is now; it is a huge non stopping trend. Our watches can have our vitals. Apps can take a pic of a portion of skin and send it to be analyzed for possible cancerous cells. Yes, indeed we are making progress. Maybe I have the same thoughts of many more persons that I had imaged. But I know that we are living in a singularity, so this is what we are expecting according to the analysis of trends… It is fascinating to see what we have foreseen just some months ago.

Tutor planned for Udacity

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Sebastian-Thrun-on-the-future-of-learning

Does free education pay? A conversation with Mary on MOOC business models.

People use education online in very different ways. Some use it entirely to learn, others as a platform to help them to have a better job. Others use online education just to mingle around trying to decide what to do. The ones that don’t like the idea at all and feel threaten by it and just go and look for flaws in the system. The moles, that are the intentional ones, and the ones that are just saying out loud whatever they please everywhere. Other users of online education are the owners and/or associates of other institutions that have been looking at massive learning as a menace to destroy their own training services business and the competition. Well, that is the market... How to convince them that this is an enormous effort that needs everybody involvement, participation and will? How to make them realize that is a win-win situation with prosperity and gain for everybody? Sometimes people see only one part of a situation instead of looking at the whole transformation of a system… How dare you to threat well established institutions? One thing that is totally favorable is that many excellent universities are having an online model; with the hope that they are going to be recognized as equal as the traditional certification of knowledge. The thing is that we cannot have a better world if we don’t have educated people. How can we have a critical mass of humanity going in the right direction, taking the right decisions, doing the correct activities and make money with it? It is already perfectly established that for the students is free or almost free. There is going to be a head-hunter situation and kind of an employment agency to have revenues. There are online shops with memorabilia with logos of the institutions for fans. There is going to be special contracts with firms that required special training. Also worldwide renowned universities that are participating are going to have agreements with other universities or branch out the online model in different continents. So, what else? There are online students that are using the online classes to get better grades in the institutions they are studying, so that goes underground. How about the persons that are going to continue their entrepreneurship and use the knowledge acquired for their solely benefit; that is another absolutely one side free benefit. How about countries where the black market is a mayor way of living and they are going to copy, use, translate, make profit of the knowledge that is shared. That is another way of not getting pay for the efforts and it can also destroy the good will of some people. I think negotiations, talks, agreements, tailored contracts, and advertisement need to be involved. I rather have in the side of ads of my Facebook full of things that I like and promoting permanently my online school than other institutions that are already there just annoying me. Or in all the other sites I participate. Why are people so reluctant to advertise? Like Pinterest, that is a site that could easily sell the pins… which is already happening but with many steps to follow and to search for. Ads can be very muted or not, I would like to choose from a set of different styles of adds of the brands that I like than to have imposed things that I don’t even care about. And that is a completely change of structure of how online marketing is imploding in the costumers instead of showing off and promote brands. I know there are some people doing that already and they get paid, because they need to write or do something that involves the promoted brand. I think it should be the option for everybody to choose what is going to be done with the ads that are in their sites without further compromise or not.

Other thing that it needs to be accurate is if a real living person is using the online services which can be corroborated with many tools, and it is happening right now.

 In a final thought I would like to share with you, that, the other day I was listening a TED talk about how other online educational institution is doing. The talk was informative, but at the end the way that people reacted was totally uniform in a matter of seconds which only you have that kind of reaction if people is going just to pledge adherence?! To move crowds, to be in tempo with the masses is a talent that needs to be cultivated by online educational institutions. To inform people, to send news, to prepare events is something that gives the character of any school, to feel the alma matter  can move mountains and make prosperous agreements.

D A T A

Collecting data is the thing  this time, the more data you have, the more powerful you look to others. Information is a very useful thing. It is like a miracle fertilizer for business. How do you reach your clients, how do you find friends? How do you find your treasures, or your bargains? How do you find your ambiance, your mood like place, site? How and what do you learn? For what?
 Google has its searching machine and it is 10 times bigger than Facebook. But Facebook has 900 million members with tons of data of  people. We can see data business blooming, the trade of edata has begun, not recently but it seems like it is in vogue now. How the big collectors of data businesses are going to use the public data, or kept the private, private? It looks like all contenders are in their marks ready to sprint for a race of huge proportions. I read three articles about the same topic. One from technology review from MIT about Facebook, another from Scientific American about  Artificial intelligence. Also one from Gabriel Weinberg's Blog: Moving the needle. And one from Udacity... all of them talked about data.
The big questions are how is Facebook going to use all data to improve advertisements without upsetting users and regulators? Google had already deal with the same questions. People is talking about the powerful tools of Artificial Intelligence to manipulate large quantity of data if you have it or have access to it. Others give you the critical steps to build your own search engine or Internet business and the tools to use specific data. The pioneers in massive education are talking about how people acquired knowledge, in other words organized data in the human mind that is going to produce new data. This last one is the most innovative.
The Like button, the search browser, the specially custom site for you, the sophisticated one that is willing to give you extra super useful information with good taste or scandalous flavor. All of them marvelous practical things we are using and relying on them.
Are we going to be able to predict trends, originate changes, promote good causes, be really informed? Or are we going to be manipulated, summoned, carry on, extrapolate to extremes? The engineers, the scientists, the mathematicians, the statiscians, the computer savvy are the ones with that power... no the politicians, or the religions, or the philosophers like in past times. So it is time for the other side of the hard core thinkers to make humanity to evolve.
Even now, just writing  blogs, uploading images, sharing music, watching videos, voting, posting coments, sharing email without direct intent all of us are promoting the ideas mentioned in the articles, there is people that don't realize that every time we communicate, we are advertising something or someone. Sometimes when people realized that; they don't like it. The social nature of humans make us be in a constant state of communication or socializing, it is part of us. We trade every single time. We are social entities that even with our appearance we are saying something. Now the data is there, we are able to make learning machines that are going to give us the target with all the accuracy, with all the precision to reach anything we want.