Alec Couros, a pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy and media at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Regi­na, spends his days (among oth­er things) help­ing new teach­ers become tech­no­log­i­cal­ly and media lit­er­ate. And he runs a well-estab­lished blog — Open Think­ing — that helps teach­ers stay ahead of the tech­nol­o­gy curve. Last week, he pulled togeth­er a very handy col­lec­tion of videos that touch on tech­nol­o­gy and media lit­er­a­cy. Most of the videos are infor­ma­tive. Some are down­right enter­tain­ing. Either way, it’s a col­lec­tion well worth perus­ing. Last­ly, I should say that Alec is one of the more dynam­ic Twit­ter­ers that I’ve come across. So give him a fol­low, and you can also find us on Twit­ter here (and Face­book as well).

For those in the US, have a good Memo­r­i­al Day. For all oth­ers, have a good day, and I’ll see you tomor­row.

There has been a lot of buzz around Wolfram|Alpha, the “com­pu­ta­tion­al knowl­edge engine” that was unveiled ear­li­er this week. To under­stand what this new engine is all about, you can watch this short­er intro­duc­to­ry video, or watch the lengthy talk above by Stephen Wol­fram at Har­vard’s Berk­man Cen­ter for Inter­net & Soci­ety. As you’ll see, Wolfram|Alpha isn’t real­ly about search­ing the web. It’s more about about answer­ing ques­tions, mak­ing com­pu­ta­tions, or pro­vid­ing “facts about things,” as Wol­fram says. When it pro­vides answers, it’s cer­tain­ly impres­sive. When it does­n’t (which hap­pens not infre­quent­ly), it’s less so. If you’ve played with it, let us know your thoughts.

“Brew­ster Kahle wants to cre­ate a free, online col­lec­tion of human knowl­edge. It sounds impos­si­bly idealistic—but he is mak­ing progress.”

More on Kahle’s mis­sion here.

via @Harvard_Press

If you’re late to Twit­ter, then this video cre­ative­ly explains what the recent buzz is all about. In a quick two min­utes, you’ll fig­ure out the gen­er­al idea behind Twit­ter and how to use it. And once you do, you can start to fol­low our Twit­ter stream right here. We also have a list of oth­er cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tions on Twit­ter here. Worth a look per­haps.

The pro­duc­er of this video, Com­mon­Craft, hosts oth­er videos along these lines on YouTube. Here are the most pop­u­lar ones.

Paul Levin­son, a pro­fes­sor of media stud­ies at Ford­ham in NYC, talks here about what Web 3.0 might look like. (Start the video at 17:23.) If he’s right, I’m not sure that even this gad­get geek (mean­ing me) wants to go there. This clip comes from a YouTube chan­nel called The Alcove, a pro­gram that fea­tures inter­views with var­i­ous influ­en­tial thinkers. We’re adding the chan­nel to our post called Intel­li­gent YouTube: 80 Smart Video Col­lec­tions.