Chromebooks Are Now Officially Available

One future vision of computing, web-based ChromeOS Chromebook devices, are now available for everyone to buy. I have been using my pilot Google Chrome OS Cr-48 notebook since Dec 2010 and the instant on web-only OS has completely replaced my netbook. Cloud services and Chrome applications have matured considerably in this timeframe and will continue to evolve for the better in the next few years.

There are numerous product reviews and analysis of this new strategic class of products. This article, "Google Believes Less is More", sums it up quite well.

Future of Education using YouTube

I just happened to watch a CNN News Video about the future of education using YouTube. After seeing this news segment I checked out the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006, by Salman Khan. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,300 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

I have spent many hours searching YouTube and the web looking for videos like all these. The nice thing about the Khan Academy is that is uses YouTube and organizes 1000s of original Khan videos in once place. I think I will be spending a lot of time in the future viewing these videos with my kids and for myself.

Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has put together a 'rock star' software engineering team including John Resig, creator of jQuery.