From the Laptop of Jeremy Irish

If school was invented from scratch today, with the technology now available, what would it look like?

We're seeing teaching reinvented through the Khan Academy, TED talks, M.I.T.x, and a very brilliant idea, flipped classrooms. Lectures are being recorded and replayed outside the universities that created them. Classrooms of the future will be to reinforce the lessons that were viewed for homework.

It makes sense to have students learn from the best teachers, and use classroom time to reinforce those lessons. And if lessons could be stack ranked you could get the best curriculum that money doesn't have to buy.

I look forward to seeing how these new sites and programs evolve.

I don't support SOPA, or PIPA or dogs sleeping on sofas. But it turns out Wikipedia decided to black out the english version of their web site because they really, really don't support them.

As a result, I didn't have access Wikipedia for a full 24 hours, and that turned out to be a good thing.

What I realized is that I was using Wikipedia as a crutch instead of doing my own research, which is pretty much what I used to do in school with Encyclopedia Britannica (or at least the volumes we owned from picking them up at the grocery store every so often. I did a lot of reports on subjects that started with P, for example, not owning every volume).

So, like when the power went out of my house, I had to get out of my comfort zone and do things a little different. I found new web sites to get the answers I needed (and the communities around those subjects), and actually found differing opinions on the subject that weren't relegated to a discuss page. In other cases I came to my own conclusions doing my own research, instead of relying on the expert on Wikipedia - who frankly ends up to be the one with the most time on their hands to edit the topic.

So thanks Wikipedia for going dark. It helped to decentralize information and made me smarter. I'm not sure if I plan to go back to you as often as I used to.

Everyone will eventually have their own operating system running in the cloud.

If you look at computers over the years, computing power has moved like a pendulum from a centralized infrastructure to a distributed one, then back again. This is usually based on the cost of computing power, cost and accessibility.

Internet access has been the same way. Before Internet Service Providers there was AOL. Eventually this centralized infrastructure for content was replaced by billions of web pages and millions of web servers. Now content has shifted back to centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I propose that the majority of what we do with our personal computers will soon move to the cloud, just like enterprise systems are today. Everyone will have their own server running in the cloud, storing their data, their email and their social graph.

How will this happen? A company will create a layer on top of cloud computing platforms like Azure or Amazon’s EC2 that supports a one click installation of a personal OS in the cloud. This will happen when cloud computing becomes affordable enough that a mainstream customer (or an early adopter) finds value in having an always available, always running operating system with very little (if no) maintenance.

What this means for us is that we will have the ability to have our own decentralized, customized Facebook, Twitter, and data storage.  We will want this because we want control of our data, our social network and our online persona. By owning our own OS in the cloud we can decide how information is presented to us, what features we want, and how we want to share our own information.

If there was a Facebook or Twitter killer, this would be it.

(I know what some of you may be thinking. ChromeOS is an OS for the cloud today. But it is restrictive since it only creates a platform for Google’s cloud solutions.)