What I Learned During My “Sabbatical” at the MIT Media Lab (Part Two)
Why Inventing Technologies for the Disabled is Not Just Right but Smart Business Q. What do a child with autism, an Iraq war-veteran amputee and a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s have in common? (Other than having disabilities that begin with “A.”) A. They are all the early adopters of radical new technologies that will make all our lives better in the future. For my entire career as an entrepreneur, I assumed that developing innovative technologies for people with disabilities, while the “right thing” to do, was not a particularly promising business proposition. Within a year of becoming director of the
What I Learned During My “Sabbatical” at the MIT Media Lab (Part One)
Also, like an academic, I wrote a book during my sabbatical. The book is about the highly unorthodox research and researchers at the Lab, titled “The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform our Lives”. At the Lab, not taking risks is the biggest risk of all. Crazy and wild-eyed ideas and inventions emerge from what appears to be chaos. Some of these seeds survive and grow into innovations that can improve our everyday lives, disrupt industries and even transform society.
Scratch: Create & share your own interactive games, music & art
Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. Scratch As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, Intel Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Google, Iomega and MIT Media Lab research consortia.
Releasing the Music In Your Head
Dan Ellsey and Tod Macchover on TED Talks, Macchover (the man behind Guitar Hero) of MIT's Media Lab , talks about Hyper Score. Ellsey,a composer with cerebral palsy uses some new tools to write and perform his own beautiful music. Very cool.
