Imagining the future

Futuristic videos are a way of imagining the future. Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, which showed how a professor might one day use a networked computer, was one of the earliest and most influential. A more recent one is Prometeus - The Media Revolution, which depicts the Google-owned virtual world of the year 2050.

We have collected links to some works that "imagine the future" at the bottom of our class home page. They include other videos, an excerpt from the talk given by Lyndon Johnson when the US Public Broadcast System was announced, and early visions by important computer scientists.

Can you find other examples of visions of the future?

Audio editing at National Public Radio

This segment of the NPR radio show On The Media illustrates the behind the scenes editing that NPR uses to make their shows sound so smooth and articulate. Listen to the segment (just over ten minutes long) or read a transcript -- it may help with your editing skills.

Web services at Arizona State and Northwestern

Universities are growing rapidly and per-student budgets are falling. Arizona State University is using Gmail and other Google services to cope with this dilemma. In doing so, they hope to exploit Google's accelerating IT technology improvement trajectory and the increasing efficiency of the Internet as an application platform.

For more on the Arizona State project see:

• Economist article
• Launch and rationale
• Core vs. context.
  
• Strategic technology alliance.
  

Northwestern has also gone with Gmail and Google Apps for students.

Should our university be utilizing Google services? For what applications? What other services might we use to advantage?