As we’ve previously noted in this space, in December 2009, 10 red balloons were deployed from locations throughout the U.S. as part of the DARPA Network Challenge — a competition to “explore the roles the Interent and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.” The challenge: to be the first to submit the coordinates of the 10 8-foot red weather balloons. And the winning team — a group of MIT students — received a $40,000 prize. At the time, according to DARPA, “a senior analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency characterized the problem as impossible” using traditional intelligence-gathering methods. […]

Earlier this fall, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) issued a new solicitation for FY 2012 for its Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, providing three different research categories of funding. The deadline for the first category — Exploratory Projects — is December 15. From the solicitation: Through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, NSF seeks to integrate advances in technology with advances in what is known about how people learn to:   better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology; better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to […]