Technologies, technologies and more technologies...

I will make a brief list of some tools that I get acquainted with in the last year in my work as editor of the website Planeta Educação or as a teacher and researcher on the technologies of information and communication applied on education. There it goes:

1. Chrome;
2. Twitter;
3. Moodle;
4. Skype;
5. Firefox;
6. Blogger;
7. Wordpress;
8. Picasa;
9. Explorer;
10. Blip;
11. Kazaa;
12. e-mule;
13. Wikis;
14. AdSense;
15. Flickr;
16. Phixr;
17. MSN;
18. Second Life;
19. Lively; 
20. Google Maps;
21. YouTube;
22. Google...

Do you know all of them? I don’t think so. Some of them are internationally consolidated and are already established on people’s mind everywhere, such as, for instance, Google and YouTube. Used on a daily basis by millions and millions on every second, minute and hour of a day… They are set and, if we can say so, omnipresent. Besides them, we can also find in all machines, the navigators, such as the most popular [still] being the Internet Explorer; the one preferred by the specialists being Firefox; and to mobilize the market, the recent Chrome, by Google.

Other Technologies are more used by specialists or people who are seeking for the specialities offered by them, such as Picasa’s, Flickr’s and Phixr’s [that deal with pictures and images in general – for storage, difusion and edition]; e-mule and Kazaa [to download, socialize and create music, film and even advertisement archives] and Blip [set up your own radio station on web, with all the music you like]; MSN and Skype [instantaneous communicators on web that can substitute conventional telephone lines with great advantages on prices]; or Blogger, Wordpress and even Twitter [Blogger and Wordpress are the major services on creating blogs in the World; Twitter is a reinvention of blogs which is characterized by the limitation of words an individual can write].

Wikis created a new way to build websites, which is made on collective cooperation. AdSense is the way Google manages it’s publicity in order to divulge products from all enterprises, according to the webusers preferences, giving privileged space to big, medium and even small companies. Through Google Maps [and equivalents] it is possible to find places, companies, define routes, go underwater, see a town by using webcams… Second Life and Lively [also created by Google] created a web 3D, in which we can live parallel lifes as our characters, created by ourselves, called avatars on web. With our avatars we can study, buy things, date, travel, fly, make friends, join parties… All in the virtual universe… 

All this tools are being built according to a concept which will prevail in a few years [or months] for the virtual world, called by Nicholas Carr as the Supercomputer and by Eric Schmidt [Google’s CEO] as Internet on the Clouds. And what does it mean? It represents the idea that every single archive we have in the computers that are right in front of our noses, in their resident memories, will be passed to gigantic data bases freely offered to us by companies such as Google and we won’t even know where they will be resting [the data]… It is not the future, this is already happening…

By João Luís de Almeida Machado