Toward a Mobile University

A nice article by Cara Bonnet on Apple's recent AcademiX 2009 conference at Duke University. The conference was one of four regional conferences focused on spurring change in teaching and scholarship. This was a very high quality conference that featured a number of very interesting speakers in the lovely setting of the Washington Duke Inn here in Durham, North Carolina. Apple's Scott Morris did an excellent job designing the conference's format to stimulate collaboration between colleagues, feature national and regional speakers, and showcase innovative uses of Apple technology in emerging digital learning environments.

A Beautiful Math

A short film by Douglas Arnold and Johnathan Rogness of the University of Minnesota revealing the visual beauty of Moebius transformations in mathematics.

The video shows the four fundamental types of Moebius transformations (simple translations, dilations, rotations, inversions) and how complicated combinations of these transformations can be intuitively expressed in terms of the simple motion of a 3D sphere through which a light shines from a point source.

This is a beautiful and elegant example of how 3D visualizations can make something as complicated as combined Moebius transformations easier to understand and appreciate.

The full version is available here.

Reconstituted Worlds

This new video from GreenbushTV shows how you can discover a previously saved Open Cobalt virtual world using an in-world Web browser and then take steps to create a 3D hyperlink to that world after loading it from a web directory.

The capability of saving and accessing Open Cobalt worlds by leveraging the existing Web means that now anyone can create any number of virtual worlds and then make those worlds available to anyone with access to directories on which Open Cobalt's .c3d files are stored. It also means that our project is beginning to leverage already deployed Web infrastructures to support the distribution of, and access to, deeply collaborative virtual spaces.