VirtuKnowHow: Blooks, JetPaks & Pod Squads for Education

Whether via Blooks, JetPaks or Pod squads, increasing numbers of people and networks of the like-minded are getting a handle on the nearly limitless capacities of the virtual world. These products, unlike past generations of less collaborative tools, do more than just allow users to view cyber space. They actually package and direct the knowledge of the vast unknown in readily understandable capsules of knowledge.

In their own way, each of these gathers together large and small elements of information by the common factors associated with their substance. As such, if you wanted to know about the subject of dictionaries, for example, you no longer needed to Google the word and review 43,700,000 hits to understand the breadth of your interest—particularly if you have a 2-page homework assignment due in about 3 hours.

JETPAKS DO RUSSIAN: If your search hits upon a JetPak, one successful click can show you a package of information of definitions, active links to an unlimited number of specific examples, words of wisdom from other seekers of the same knowledge, and even images of what versions of the leading reference resource covers look like—so you can judge the books by their cover if you want to. A JetPak of Russian Dictionaries at http://jeteye.com, for example, includes five active links to various versions of printed and online books, notes on these and other resources and graphic representations of a Russian keyboard and a scanned sheet showing actual penmanship.