We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Envisioning the learning revolution
Although I have become increasingly frustrated with Skype over the past weeks due to all sorts of incompatibility issues with other users’ Skype versions, camera problems and painful recording experiences of Skype calls which led me to temporarily switch to another program, I have always been an ...
First of all, I am not an analyst nor do I own any stock in any public company. The last time I did invest in a promising Internet company ended in a disaster, thanks to Deutsche Telekom. Nonetheless, I believe the Facebook stock is undervalued. Everyone who believes in the company will tell ...
One year ago I wrote an article for Big Think with the title walking across campus whilst sitting on your couch in which I introduced my readers to the AnyBot, a rather exciting concept but at $10.000 / piece unfortunately also costly and probably not affordable for the average school or family. My ...
It’s all but a secret these days that online education has developed itself into a hot market as founders, developers and investors get attracted to the vertical and now take it more serious than some 2 years ago. What many people have criticized so far was a reluctance from most of the top ...
This is follow-up to last week's post on crowdfunding and the opportunities it could provide for the so called teacherpreneurs. Let’s take it as an alternative to the traditional forms of funding open to educators such as see, angel or even VC funding or the various incubators dedicated to ...
Online education only seems to know two markets these days. Whether you look at companies who offer solutions for individual or lifelong learners, but also in the K-12 space and higher education you’ll basically see a ton of free or very low-cost products and solutions, and then there are the ...
When I started to blog about online education back in January 2009 frankly no one cared. If you take a look at the major tech blogs today you notice that this has changed quite significantly over the past six months. Education became a hot topic for a variety of reasons. One of them is that ...
In today’s post I would to draw some conclusions about language learning based on two studies that reached me recently. The first study is a so-called Language Barometer language learning community busuu.com conducted amongst more than 45.000 of its users and held in March of this year ...
A survey for Birmingham Science City amongst 500 15 year-olds across the UK came up with some pretty telling numbers about how technology changes society at its roots. When asked whom they ask when a particular question occurs 54% of students answered Google or other search engines. Only 26 ...
I think, there is little doubt that tablet devices have drastically changed the way a growing part of the population is consuming content. My iPad has quickly become my main device for online media consumption from text to video and audio and right from the start the iPad has been hailed as the ...
This week I came across an interesting study by Latitude Research via the MindShift Blog. In collaboration with LEGO® Learning Institute and Project Synthesis, Latitude asked children from across the world to write stories, imagining that a robot companion would be part of their everyday life, at ...
Rumors and, according to 9to5Google, even evidence is surfacing that Google is testing out a new physical product on its campus, Google Glasses. 9to5Google already wrote about this project back in December 2011 and now claims that their tipster has seen a prototype looking like Oakley Thumps ...
According to an article in today’s Irish Examiner, Martin Callinan the Garda Commissioner of Ireland aims to wipe out online bullying with a new safety campaign. A survey conducted by the National Parents Council Primary and the National Centre for Technology in Education found that 55% of all ...
Many, including myself, wondered if today’s Apple announcement would be the kiss of death for digital textbook startups like Kno, Inkling and Chegg. Now, it seems as if Apple as well as the three big publishers Pearson, MacGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt did not plan to attack the college ...
Two days ago Babbel, one of the language learning communities I had previously covered here on Disrupt Education, turned 4. I remember that I found the project on Facebook, connected with one of the co-founders and got an invite to the closed beta. Back then I was still teaching languages “offline ...