Interesting links: 5.21.10

Stanford's “Bookless Library” "Box by box, decades of past scholarship are being packed up and emptied from two old libraries, Physics and Engineering, to make way for the future: a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering."

Learning via place-based games "Augmented reality (AR) games combine real world experiences with virtual information ... Educators can create quests or stories for students to follow and introduce virtual characters students meet along the way ... [using] a mobile phone's GPS technology. It can capture geo-tagged audio recordings, photos and videos that student players can access when they reach a particular location or meet a particular character ... [who] can talk with students, provide information, exchange items or respond to tasks. Authors can also create virtual items that players can retrieve and exchange."   An example: "... students learn the effects of urban renewal policies on local neighborhood residents when they tour a once vibrant Irish neighborhood and hear from real and virtual residents about the destruction that took place years ago in the name of development."

Imagining the Internet "The opening ceremony of WWW2010 included a plenary panel offering perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the move to make data more open and accessible on the Web ... The panel featured Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; David Ferriero, archivist of the US; James Hendler a semantic Web expert from Rensselaer and moderator for the discussion; Paul Jones, UNC professor and director of iBiblio.org; Andrew McLaughlin, deputy U.S. chief technology officer; and Nigel Shadbolt, director of the Web Science Trust and Web Foundation."

WikiLeaks' founder's passport confiscated "Forcing [Julian] Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks. One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world. Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies."