HeyKiki: A Platform for Crowd-Accelerated Learning

The future of peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing, or what skydiving has to do with interior design.

The digital age can easily be the holden age of human knowledge, with unprecedented access to the world’s information and ever-growing platforms on which to share it making us all students and all teachers — something TED’s Chris Anderson has so eloquently termed crowd-accelerated learning. But while digital platforms may be a powerful tool for theoretical knowledge, they leave something to be said for hands-on learning and the ancient art of apprenticeship. Startup HeyKiki aims to bridge the two by building an online platform that connects eager learners with skilled instructors offline. From billiards to Buddhism, HeyKiki helps you master what you always wanted to learn but never knew where to start — or, better yet, what you didn’t even know you wanted to learn until you found a fascinating expert in it nearby.

A localization engine helps you find like-minded activity enthusiasts and teachers in your area, and if you happen to have a skill you’d like to share, you can post your class, workshop or other instructional offering for free, Craigslist-style.

Part Skillshare, part Meetup, part School of Everything, HeyKiki is a skill and knowledge destination for the modern metro-Renaissance man and woman, a wonderful and promising intersection of self-initiated learning and the power of community.

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Designing Media: Lessons from Today’s Greatest Media Innovators

Design titan Bill Moggridge has formidable credentials — designer of the world’s first laptop, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, co-founder of design innovation powerhouse IDEO, and celebrated as a pioneer of interaction design.

His new book, Designing Media, is exactly the kind of ambitious, compelling volume you’d expect from his reputation.

The book explores the evolution of mainstream media, both mass and personal, looking closely at the points of friction between old and new media models and the social norms they have sprouted. From design to civic engagement to the real-time web, Moggridge offers a faceted and layered survey of how our media habits came to be, where they’re going, and what it all means for how we relate to the world and each other.

To be fair, Designing Media isn’t exactly — at least not only — a book: The tome features a DVD containing 37 fascinating interviews with some of today’s greatest media innovators, including This American Life‘s Ira Glass, Pandora founder Tim Westergren, prominent New York Times design critic Alice Rawsthorn, Twitter founder @Ev, statistical stuntsman Hans Rosling, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The laws of narrative are the laws of narrative. What engages us is what engages us.” ~ Ira Glass

Designing Media is out via MIT Press this month and atop our must-read books list this season.

via @HelenWalters

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Interactive Quixote: A Vision for the Future of Dead Manuscripts

The digitization of text has been a topic of increasing cultural concern in recent year and may often feel like fighting windmills as some of humanity’s greatest literary artifacts crumble under the unforgiving effects of time, tucked away in the world’s disjointed libraries. Now, Biblioteca Nacional de España, The National Library of Spain, offers an ambitious vision for what the afterlife of dying books could hold. Quijote Interactivo is an impressive interactive digitization of the original edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ cult 1605-1615 novel, Don Quixote. Though the site is entirely in Spanish, the sleek interface, rich multimedia galleries and charmingly appropriate sound design make it a joy to explore whatever your linguistic heritage.

A social widget even makes each of the 668 pages from the book shareable via email or on Facebook, and a transcription overlay makes the original 17th-century manuscript legible in Times New Roman.

via Quipsologies

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Jet Age: Entrepreneurship Lessons From The Sky

A drama-driven revolution, or what Sillicon Valley can learn from 1950s test pilots.

If you’ve ever seen Louis C.K.’s now-iconic Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy bit (which you absolutely should), you know not to take air travel for granted. And yet we still do. (For some meta-ironic full disclosure, we’re writing this from aboard Virgin America.) But a new book by New York Times correspondent Sam Howe Verhovek, released for the 50th anniversary of the Jet Age, pulls us back from our modern aero-complacency and reintroduces mystery, exhilaration and fascination into the world of human flight.

Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World is as much a design and engineering epic as it is a timeless manifesto for entrepreneurship and risktaking.

Though it explores the rich and turbulent history of commercial air travel as a force of globalization, Jet Age is not a history book per se. Rather, it’s part adventure story, part detective book, in which the technological marvels of the era are but a mere vehicle for the electrifying human spirit that underlies them, from the remarkable engineers to the brilliant businessmen to the fearless test pilots.

It is also a David and Goliath story we all love to hear, the one about the nimble little guy, in this case Boeing, taking a big gamble to eventually defeat the slow-moving behemoth.

The insight and inspiration in that story make it required reading for any modern entrepreneur struggling to break through with nothing but passion, character and — never to be understimated — the right team. Jet Age is a powerful reminder that it can be, and has been, done.

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