JavaFX: Like Flash with Freedom

The Distant Thunder of Freedom Shall Liberate You From Flash

Do you watch videos on the web and stream them to your mobilephone? Are you addicted to YouTube, and love playing Flash-games on your mobilephone? Or like me, are you fascinated and work in the bleeding-edge discipline of Graphic User Interface (GUI) design of web-applications, or any other user-interface?

Time for you to taste the thunder. Discover JavaFX, the new and highly-sophisticated Flash-killer from Sun Microsystems. This will change the look-and-feel of everything on desktops, the web, and the mobile, ushering in a hopefully beautiful, rich, internet experience. This is going to be the future of New Media.

Check out the galleries of what it may do, here:
javafx.com/samples/index.html

So far, their kits are available for Mac and Win, though a Linux version may just come in anytime soon. I did manage to view the samples above in my firefox running Ubuntu Linux. Will write more about this soon. Stay tuned.

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Copyleft Diwali Greetings

My colleague, Dr. Savithri Singh, has creatively put together a selection of her photographs into a slideshow presentation, as a Diwali Greeting. Take a look, and share the light.

Deepawali Greetings

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: photographs greetings)

We Don’t Need No (Proprietary) Education.

How free are you to teach and learn?

Soon, the only atom of knowledge that will be shared freely by all educationists in the world, will be that knowledge cannot be shared freely by law.

This, because all curriculum, and even methods of teaching, are not only copyrighted, but also proprietary. Anyone who wishes to teach something will have to pay a license-fee or enter into some agreement, to do so. The burden of this, will of course, be passed on to the student.

The role of the teacher and the professor will pass through its most challenging phase this century. The confusion between the four discrete terms: information, skill, knowledge, and education, will finally come clear, and everyone in academia will be forced to examine what do they impart out of these four.

Fortunately, a few brave and intelligent thinkers are trying to forge an alternative vision, at least in education-curriculum. Among them is WikiEducator, a community for the realization of a free version of the education curriculum by 2015. wikieducator.org/India
They met at a Delhi University college in south Delhi, called Acharya Narendra Dev College,
andcollege.du.ac.in/ for a Learning For Content workshop. Details here: wikieducator.org/India/L4C_India_08.

I was invited to deliver a talk on vision and inspiration, as part of the talk by Dr. Andrew Lynn. The audience came from diverse disciplines in indian academia. Was wonderful to meet so many professors and educationists. Here are some photos from my talk:

[flickr album=72157608002754095 num=10 size=Thumbnail]

Dr. Savithri Singh just emailed me her collection of photos from the event, which prompted me to author this blog. We all had quite an intense and animated discussion during my talk, that was held jointly with Dr Andrew Lynn from JNU. A few colleges also talked about rolling similar talks and initiatives in their campuses. As usual, I am always game. In the meantime, Dr Savithri’s photos:
WikiEd08 pictures
and Even more WikiEd08 pictures.