EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
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
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite 
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
February 24, 2007 at 8:50 pm · Filed under EdTech, TechTalk, Web 2.0
This post was written in and posted from Word 2007. The latest version of Word allows you to post to a number of popular blog engines with some limitations. I didn’t have any problem connecting to my blog, but I wish that the ability to upload files to my Flickr account was built in to the interface. I’ve attached a quick image to see if Word 2007 can post to the blog I host.
UPDATE: Worked pretty slick. Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for bringing this to my attention. For those who would like a tutorial, check this link.
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Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
February 10, 2007 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
February 10, 2007 at 11:51 am · Filed under Random Thoughts
November 21, 2006 at 1:02 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
Well, it’s been just over a year since I started this blog and I just hit my hundredth post!
So post 101 is to just to say happy birthday to my blog (and to another Scorpio, me!), to cheer its best day to date of 527 hits on 11/16 and to raise a virtual toast to another year of learning, creating and growing.
Cheers!
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August 19, 2006 at 8:44 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
Now that I have transferred my hosting service, it seems that I can now post from third-party apps such as the built-in service in my browser of choice, Flock. I’ve been using Flock since I heard about it in beta last October. They have come a long way indeed!
technorati tags:flock, blog, editor, post
Blogged with Flock
August 1, 2006 at 2:21 pm · Filed under Higher Education, Random Thoughts, TechTalk
Skimming my feeds yesterday I came across a post by Stephen Downes commenting on a post from Michael Feldstein about the announcement by Blackboard that they had secured a patent on, get this, the Learning Management System!
Dave Cormier had a great post and it sounds as if EdTechTalk will be developing a conversation around this very subject as well as the impact of DOPA this Sunday, August 6th at 8 pm EDT.
Then Will Richardson joined in with details on his Skype convo with Dave and metioned that
“the day the patent was awarded, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement…”
So what is an institution to do? One of the conversations over on the Moodle forum (requires free signin and you may need to cut and paste the URL once you log in) asked:
“If University X pops its head up as thinking about swapping to Moodle then BlackCT smirk to themselves as they say ‘you do know we hold the patents to the VLE, would you want to swap to a system we might sue out of existance?’”
I don’t have that answer but I have no doubt that it will impact the direction our institution chooses in the future.
February 24, 2006 at 1:57 am · Filed under Web Expressions
At the end of this lesson, students should be able to:
- Discuss and defend their personal concept of netiquette
- Explain their philosophy of ethical network behavior as it pertains to:
- Personal privacy
- Legal issues such as libel/slander
- Intellectual property
- Copyright law
- Creative commons
- Explain the concept of the Creative Commons
- Identify and explain the different “licensing” levels that the Creative Commons provides
- Explain the concept of “open source”
- Explain the concept of “public domain”
- Explain the difference between a copyright and a patent
Netiquette
What is “netiquette?” Netiquette is a set of guidelines which help to ease the disconnect that can exist in online communication. Wikipedia has a wonderful article on netiquette. Albion.com has another good link.These are general rules of the road, but there are also more specific guidelines that cover such technologies as email, blogs and instant
messaging. Cyberjournalist.net has opened a dialogue on blogging ethics. Harvard’s Martin Kuhn has a paper (in PDF format) on blogging ethics as well. Rather than read the entire paper, focus on Appendices A and B.
Assignment:
Post a blog entry that details your own “code of ethics.”
Remember that we are expecting two posts a week at this point in our class.
Privacy
A topic that always seems to fire our passions is that of privacy. With the advent of the Internet, this has become almost non-existent. Whether the problem is offering too much personal information as in the case of many MySpace profiles or whether it is businesses with poor data management skills or even corporations falling victim to crackers, privacy and in particular identity theft is a growing concern. Wikipedia has a decent entry on data privacy.
USA PATRIOT Act
Sometimes concerns over a lack of privacy come as a result of legislation, such as the USA PATRIOT Act. If your eyes glaze over at the thought of reading a legislative bill, Wikipedia has a summary that might make a bit more sense. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an article that highlights their perspective as does the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Libraries Association (ALA).
Automated services
Try to answer this question:
What are Internet or web “bots” and what impact might they have on one’s privacy?
Check this Wikipedia link to get yourself started.
Intellectual Property
One of the challenges any student faces is that over what constitutes fair-use of intellectual property. The U.S. Copyright office offers the legal standard, but the folks at Lamson Library have a number of wonderful books that deal specifically with copyright law as it pertains to the type of projects we will be creating.Here are a few more links you should check out:
Creative Commons
One answer to the vexing problem posed by the fundamentals of copyright law is the Creative Commons project. In this project, authors can assign a number of licensing options ranging in their level of restriction.Here are a few questions for you to answer:
- How many different Creative Commons licensing combinations are there?
- How is this different from public domain material?
- How is this different from open source material?
- What benefits can you see that might come from the expanded use of the Creative Commons concept?
Assignment:
Try creating something uniquely yours (it does NOT have to be very intricate) and post it to your blog. Give it a creative commons license following their directions for including the appropriate identification.
February 20, 2006 at 1:53 am · Filed under Web Expressions
My apologies for being this late but between a sick child and the power outage of the last couple of days it has been difficult to post. That
being said, here is your mission:
Given what we uncovered last week in both our class and at the Security Fair, and taking into account what you have discovered in your explorations, pick one aspect of network security and awareness and speak to it. Bear in mind that beginning with this post, we will raise the bar on our professional presentation and style. This means that spelling, grammar, context and content will be critical components of all posts from here on out.
For those of you who already began a post on the Security Fair, simply update that entry with an eye toward one specific aspect that held meaning for you. I look forward to reading your posts and encourage you to begin to take a look at the work of your classmates and post comments where appropriate.
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