EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
June 5, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
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on eduglu – part 1: background – D’Arcy Norman dot net
From D’Arcy Norman, something that fits in well with my LMS revisioning schema. Wonder how it relates to something like Profilactic?
tags: darcy, dnorman, eduglu, ple
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EduGlu is a concept that
came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 – almost exactly 2 years ago – as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple – a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it’s really quite hard – how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?
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wpng-calendar from Google Code
Integrating Google Calendar into a WordPress blog
tags: google, calendar, g-cal, googlecal, wordpress, blog
April 12, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
March 30, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
Listen to your maps with Wild Sanctuary | Tech news blog – CNET News.com Annotated
tags: conservation, google-earth, nature, science
Users can explore various sounds, and see their placement and contextual information on the map. What’s interesting about these “soundscapes” is that they can show the difference in an area before and after environmental impact both with visual maps and sound as. Several examples were given show instances where a once lush diversity of animal noises became quiet, following climate change, human settlements, logging, etc.
How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci « Wandering Ink.
tags: curiosity, learning, teaching
eLearn: 10 Web 2.0 Things You Can Do…To Be a More Successful E-learning Professional Annotated
tags: downes, edtech, productivity
The following list was inspired by eLearn Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lisa Neal’s blog post “Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional.” We’d like to offer the “Web 2.0 Edition” of Lisa’s list:
- Listen to a conference presentation. When you run across conference presentations while reading your RSS feeds (EDUCAUSE Connect is a prime source, as is OLDaily), save the conference site as a bookmark and revisit it to hear a presentation.
- Record a 10-minute presentation about something you are working on or learning about, either as audio (use Odeo) or video (use Ustream), and post it on your blog.
- Do a search on the title of your most recent post or on the title of the most recent thing you’ve read or thought about. Don’t just use Google search, use Google Blog Search and Google Image Search, Amazon, del.icio.us, Technorati, Slideshare, or Youtube. Scan the results and if you find something interesting, save it in del.icio.us to read later.
- Write a blog post or article describing something you’ve learned recently. It can be something you’ve read or culled from a meeting, conference notes (which you just capture on the fly using a text editor), or a link you’ve posted to del.icio.us. The trick here is to keep your writing activity to less than 10 minutes—make a point quickly and then click “submit.”
- Tidy your e-portfolio. For example, upload your slides to Slideshare and audio recordings to Odeo and embed the code in your presentation page. Or write a description and link to your latest publication. Or update your project list.
- Create a slide on Zoho. Just do one slide at a time; find an image using the Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr and a short bit of text from a source or yourself. Add this to your stick of prepared slides you use for your next talk or class.
- Find a blogger you currently read in your RSS reader and go to their website. Follow all the links to other blogs in their blogroll or feedroll, or which are referenced in their posts. Well, maybe not all the links, or it will take hours, not ten minutes.
- Write a comment on a blog post, article, or book written by an e-learning researcher or practitioner.
- Go to a website like Engadget, Metafilter, Digg, Mixx, Mashable, or Hotlinks and skip through the items. These sites produce much too much content to follow diligently, but are great for browsing and serendipitous discovery. If you find something interesting, write a short blog post about it or at least a comment.
- Catch up on one of your online games with a colleague—Scrabulous on Facebook or
Backgammon on Yahoo.
Or make a Lolcat. Or watch a Youtube video.
Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Wiki collaboration leads to happiness Annotated
tags: collaboration, fosspreso, wikinomics
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April 18, 2007 at 8:14 am · Filed under Web 2.0
I blogged awhile back about swirling rumors that Google would be rolling out a presentation tool to augment their existing web office suite. Turns out those rumors have a basis in fact. According to c|net news:
“Google is adding a feature to its Docs & Spreadsheets Web-hosted software that will enable people to create presentations and slide shows, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Expo.”
On the one hand, this is exciting in that it is strengthening the single venue approach to web office apps. On the other hand, is Google a day late and a dollar short when you consider the concept of “small pieces, loosely joined.” With all of the screencasting, slide sharing apps out there, how will Google’s product stand out from the crowd?
Guess we’ll have to wait and see. The article says soon but no specific release date was provided.
[tags]google, presentation, google-office, weboffice, powerpoint[/tags]
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April 7, 2007 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
New bar codes can talk with your cell phone | CNET News.com Annotated
With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.
Motion-sensing comes to mobile phones | CNET News.com Annotated
- Who needs a Wii when you have your cell phone?
- post by edventures
The same technology used in Nintendo’s popular Wii video game console that lets you bowl strikes and hit tennis volleys like you’re Venus Williams is also making its way into mobile handsets.
www.sifry.com: State of the Blogosphere / State of the Live Web
- This page has links to the quarterly state of the blogosphere reports coming out of Sifry.com going back to October 2004.
- post by edventures
KickRSS :: Create An Aggregated RSS Feed
Education Week: Let’s Abolish High School Annotated
Were our young people
always required to attend school, and were their work opportunities
always limited to babysitting, yard work, and cleaning the floors at fast-food joints? Were they
always subject to so many restrictions? Are teenagers
necessarily incompetent and irresponsible, as the media tell us?
GeoRSS Home
- From Slashdot:
Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!’s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard.
- post by edventures
April 6, 2007 at 10:26 am · Filed under Web 2.0
A lot of buzz has been generated over the new Google feature that allows you to build your own maps and share them with others. C-Net news has a great video overview of this new tool which appears to allow you to include a number of different media such as images, YouTube videos and probably even audio. What a terrific way to augment boring history classes, eh? Have the students develop a map where they can include the who, what, where and when – key speeches, personal stories, timeline events – while exploring how things came to be. How much more likely are you to have engaged students who will actually remember some of the material they not only studied but built? So Will, this may not be new, but it is news! Let’s spread it!
Here is my map that I knocked out pretty quickly that tracks my active duty Naval career from home to boot camp to my last duty station and back home. I’m going to try and go back later to include some richer media.
Between this and the ability to create maps from Google Spreadsheet data, this is a great classroom tool for generating excitement and visual interaction for your students. If you haven’t tried this yet, I highly recommend it.
My suggestions for feature enhancement:
- Allow for ordering of sites to create a linear map tour – think mapping the major battles of the civil war in a chronological order.
- Ability to “lock” sites once placed – This is particularly helpful when trying to place accurate pins. I accidently moved my pin by tens of miles when I was attempting to draw a line and had to refind the street address of the prior location.
- A way to customize the My Map legend to include richer media.
- Tie this into one’s Google account for better and shorter URLs!!!
[tags]google, google-maps, map[/tags]
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April 5, 2007 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
UMichingan School of Information – MSI: Social Computing Graduate Program
- Interesting offering beginning in the Fall of 2007 but the site doesn’t give any indication that any of its courses are available online.
– post by edventures
Mozilla Labs: The Coop
- A prototype nextgen browser which obviously recognizes the value of Flock’s contributions considering the screenshots on the Lab page. I’m thinking that if Twitter support and shared webpage browsing were included that this could be a terrific real-time point-to-point collaboration environment. Wonder how much weight this is being given in the Lab venue?
– post by edventures
Epsilen Environment – An ePortfolio tool
- Currently providing free accounts to holders of a .edu email address during their beta period with the expectation that this will turn into a commercial venture aimed at K-12 and Higher Ed institutions, although not dismissing corporate utility. My test profile can be viewed at: http://jemartin.plymouth.epsilen.com
– post by edventures
Schoolhouse 2 – The homework manager for Mac.
- A free, education oriented OneNote equivalent for Macs which features:
- Tasks
- Notes
- File Attachments
- Classcasting
- Smart Notebooks
- Grades
– post by edventures
Create a custom Google Map from published Google Spreadsheets
- This tutorial allows you to create customized Google maps using your own data as maintained in a a published Google Spreadsheet.
– post by edventures
Swivel – a data presentation tool
- A wild tool for mashing up data and presenting it in graphic format online.
– post by edventures
March 15, 2007 at 11:09 am · Filed under TechTalk, Web 2.0
This is way too cool! Google Talk, a combination VoIP and IM app formerly only available as a locally run application, is now available to install on your own web page whether it be your Google IG page or your blog. So if you are on the road sans computer and you log into your blog which just happens to be running this widget, you have instant access to your contacts.
UPDATE: Upon reflection, this is only kinda cool. It is great that your G-Talk contacts are available from your own personal home page and embedded YouTube videos are a neat trick but it seems to me sort of an obvious next step. Obvious as in should’ve been done months ago. When I first saw this, I somehow read it to mean that the Call function was included which would have made this widget ROCK but in testing, it launched Google Talk as an external app so it is clear that the real time VoIP functions are not yet embedded in this widget. Oh yeah and while you can modify the height and width parameters, this really wants to run in its native 320×447 size to see all the neat new embedded functionality. It needs the same “pop-out” feature that the G-mail version boasts to be worthwhile. So hey Google, call me when you build in both of these features and I will upgrade your status to WAY COOL.
You check it out in action under my Google Shared Items widget in the sidebar. Note that this is not yet a true widget, just a script embedded in a text widget.
To find out more, visit the Google Talkabout page. To download it yourself, go to the gmodules page.
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February 22, 2007 at 12:20 pm · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, TechTalk, Web 2.0
Hot off the blog presses it appears that Google has finally gone official with their commercial release of Google Apps. I’m quite happy that they have included Docs & Spreadsheets and Shared Calendaring which I thought was an obvious omission when they first rolled the suite out. They’ve also embedded API and tech support for their paid service.
At first glance, it seems reasonably priced at $50/year, but upon further review the pricing structure is $50 per user per year. So rather than attract an audience in the small business, non-profit organization and small school higher ed markets, the pricing structure may only be appealing to larger organizations such as Disney’s Pixar. You can compare the feature sets between their Standard and Premier editions although the difference seems to primarily revolve around email storage capacity, service continuity and support, and the ability to integrate APIs and third-party apps. Incredibly, Docs and Spreadsheets is included in the Standard feature set so if you don’t require advanced integration points and don’t mind ads, don’t bother with the Premier at least until they roll out more features.
I’m still waiting/hoping/expecting integration with their Google Groups feature in order to support a small team approach to project management.
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February 7, 2007 at 9:29 pm · Filed under TechTalk, Web 2.0
So rumor is swirling around the Google-verse about where the company is headed next with its web office suite. Business Week has an article which opines that Google is not far away from offering a subscription based digital office and states that Disney and Pixar are already considering moving to Google and away from Microsoft. It is also expected that Google will soon integrate Docs & Spreadsheets into their office suite. This is something that I have been advocating on their feedback line for some time. That and integration with their Groups functionality too!
Another rumor floated out there is that Google is nearly ready to announce a new addition to their line, a competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint product, which is expected to be called Presently. My colleague Zach Tirrell points to code in Google Docs language file which specifies presentation details. This is seconded by a CNet blog opinion posted February 5th.
Feeding all of this is Google’s recent opening of access to G-Mail. No longer do folks need to be invited to get a G-Mail account. The doors are opening to the geek version of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. What will we find inside?
[tags]google, docs, presently, gmail, g-office [/tags]
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