SpaceX's Dragon to Become First Commercial Aircraft to Visit International Space Station

The title pretty much says it all. At 4:45am EST on May 19th, SpaceX will live stream the launch of their Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket. It's a huge day for space geeks such as myself, but I'm glad that the coverage is extending to the mainstream.

For all of the talk about budget cuts to NASA and ending the shuttle program, it's great to report on the future of space travel. I really believe that space (and the ocean) need to be explored to better understand what role we play in this vast universe. It's not about finding aliens, but about doing the science that's hard to do within the physical confines of Earth. But I won't lie and say I wouldn't be excited if we found a Mass Relay ...

Note that this is a demonstration mission, but assuming everything goes well cargo (and potentially astronauts) will be ferried back and forth in the future.

For more info check out their press kit.

Pay Attention When Using Your Tech!

I walk my dog nightly, and there are a couple of things that annoy me:

• People that call to my dog without asking
• People that touch my dog without waking
• People that wander into my path because they're not paying attention

While the first two are straight up disrespectful, the third is just as annoying.  Whether people are talking on someone walking with them, talking on the phone, or texting, my dog has almost been crush by the raggedy sneakers of some idiot.  

However, fining for texting is just stupid. It doesn't discourage the activity, and I damn sure don't want cops spending their time looking for people walking as opposed to solving real crime. 

I know I've been guilty of texting while walking.  To be fair, I try to be good about it  - I tilt my phone in such a way that I can see what is ahead of me.  However, I lose the sense of feeling when people come up either behind me or directly on the side of me. I've definitely been surprised by people, especially bikers and joggers, that come up quickly behind me as I'm trying to share my latest joke with the world.

Texting is an amazing piece of technology that let's you stay connected with friends without having to have an actual phone call.  No excuse to walk into other people though.

The good news is that I remember several annoying high school kids from Fort Lee, so that's a plus. Ticket them like crazy!

Online Courses for Free and Customized Educational Videos

Yup, it's me. High school was awesome.

I've been a huge fan of MIT's online OpenCourseWare initiative. For 10 years, MIT has made several of its engineering courses (and a few others in the Sloan business school) available online free of charge. Impressively, it was more than just a few PDFs - there was lecture videos, lab notes, problem sets, and exams.  It was truly an interactive way to learn for those of us proactive enough to seek out information online.

Now, Harvard and MIT are teaming up to offer free online courses. Similarly, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganan are also planning to offer free online courses. The two groups are using different companies, which will bring the competition needed to truly flesh out the best way to offer information online.  The best thing about these efforts is that they will be actual courses, which will be graded either by professors, peers or crowdsourcing.  While I doubt that you'd be able to use these for any actual course credit outside of the involves university, it's still a great idea.  Just think about what this can look like a generation from now. 

Hopefully, universities will be as inventive as TED, an educational video site, is when it comes to interactive educational video. They've just unveiled a great way to mix and match segments of videos as well as add annotations, quizzes, and other parts to create a product customized for a specific audience. This is great because sometimes it can be a pain to send someone a video and mention what part they should pay attention to - with this solution, the video itself can be as brief and contain the relevant text itself.  Cool stuff!

Here's to using technology to help improve education! And for free!

Philadelphia Science Festival 2012 Montage

Here's a photo montage of the annual science festival held in Philadelphia on April 22nd. It is one of the key events in a full week of science festivities - more info can be found at the Philadelphia Science Festival home page.

Flipping Education On Its Head

Its common knowledge that the United States education system needs some work.  But too often people throw technology at the problem without a plan.  Dumping a bunch of iPads on a school without a process on how to utilize it is an expensive recipe for disaster.

Thankfully, Arizona is doing the opposite. They are taking advantage of online lectures on sites such as YouTube and Khan Academy to create a "flipped classroom".  Learning a concept in class and applying it at home is flipped into learning the concept at home (using the online tools listed above) and turning class time into a large group workshop to apply that concept.  Fittingly, the idea began in Colorado and has spread via social networking to schools across the country.

This is a new concept that has many challenges. For example:

The biggest criticism of the flipped classroom is that some students don't have access to high-speed Internet.

To overcome this, some schools leave their computer labs open during lunch hours and after school. Others direct students to public libraries within walking distance.

Flipped classrooms are more likely to be in private schools, where more families can easily afford computers and high-speed Internet, some superintendents said.

As this teaching style gets tested, challenged, and improved, I hope that it can reach kids regardless of what school and socioeconomic background they are. Our schools need to get a little crazy and nontraditional to be able to break out of mediocrity.

Speaking of nontraditional, some enterprising students at Vanderbilt are developing a custom tablet that allows blind people to understand algebraic concepts using touch and vibration.  The video is so great that I can't really do it justice - check it out below!