learning

What are the conditions that surround insights, learning, and inspiration of the greatest sort? One aspect is to constantly reflect ideas off others, whether thru discussion, surveys, or prototypes. How to know whether an idea is ready for testing? Maybe they should not be reflected inside before being reflected by others...

drexler on nanotech

drexler sums up a lot of big ideas in the foreward to his updated version of "Engines of Creation".
- mass media treat debate as a sport; he doesn't make explicit the implication that they take out authenticity and blow up to absurdity the interesting parts, just like with football or baseball.
- on the internet: "readers of a controversial text can't easily see the best-rated criticisms, and so critics can't respond where would matter most"
- just as nobody would have believe nor understood in 1950 that a single small machine would replace a record player, pinball machine, telephone, and library, it's hard for us right now to believe his visionary claims that a 10kg machine can and will produce anything from solar panels to computers, and do it cheap and fast.

too bad wowio, where his book is posted to read for free, doesn't allow the debating functionality he mentions. Google does, sorta - but it needs better communication & interaction design.

online universities

what can we look for as metrics or goals of traditional college education that we want to aim to capture in new media? Obviously there is transfer of specific ideas represented as text/words - that's basic and already captured by the internet.
Here are some others I've heard:
- culture
- feedback
- motivation
...

Auto reference

When I cut and paste - even on this iPhone - it should record the provenance of the content in the background and store it with the text file.