Howard Rheingold's Public Library

Yesterday, Jose Picardo (I highly recommend his blog) posted a quick guide to annotating using Diigo. He created the video for his students and if you're considering using Diigo with your students it could be very useful for you too. The video is embedded below.

www.freetech4teachers.com/...to-annotating-using-diigo.html - Preview

diigo socialbookmarking

"Simulations and the Future of Learning and Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experience, are must-reads for anyone interested in the seismic changes to teaching and learning that are being brought about by the interactive learning tools which have been developed and refined in the past 10 years.

Aldrich is no armchair theorist. His work is informed by years of simulation design which led to, among many other things, the award-winning Virtual Leader, a widely-used simulation designed to teach leadership skills. Moreover, he continues to serve as an international consultant on issues relating to simulations.

His most recent effort, The Complete Guide to Simulations & Serious Games, is described on the book flap as an "encyclopedic overview and complete lexicon for those who care about the next generation of educational media." This book differs from Learning by Doing in that it doesn't seek to distinguish the wide and various categories of simulations—how simulations differ based on their structure and content and why those differences matter. Rather, it seeks to "present and distinguish between the different mechanisms" related to simulations, so that people who create simulations have a shared understanding of the concepts they use in conversation with one another. "

elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm - Preview

gaming2learn

Good screencast/video: "Professor Daniel Willingham describes research showing that learning styles are a myth"

www.youtube.com/watch - Preview

pedagogy

"Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities."

mahara.org - Preview

educational_technology

"The mind as constructed by orthodox cognitive science excludes artifacts. The current paper challenges this by using Gregory Bateson's radical notion of the mind, according to which the mind is a system whose boundaries are demarcated by context, rather than by stable physiological boundaries, allowing thus for the inclusion of artifacts. The cognitive science orthodoxy is challenged through the identification of five problems concerning its treatment of the synergism that can develop between artifacts and human agents. Insights from cybernetics and activity theory are used in commenting as to how these problems can be alleviated by adopting Bateson's radical notion of mind."

findarticles.com/...ai_n32007946 - Preview

thinking_tools

"Animated and programmable LED tattoos connected to your brain? You could show off your latest Flash animations, watch TV on your arm, or have a built-in PDA screen. The possibilities are endless. Perhaps more than simply a fashion statement, you could use such LED tattoos to display medical information about your body such as blood-sugar readings. A recent article in MIT Technology Review describes a new type of super-thin silicon transistor that can be embedded on a dissolvable silk-based film and can do all of that."

hplusmagazine.com/...tattoo-you - Preview

sensors

"Use this tool to find the Flickr page of a photo with its URL. Enter the URL address and the tool will find the address of the Flickr page for you.

You can also drag this FlickrID bookmark onto your browser bookmarks bar. When you are on a Flickr URL, click in the bookmark."

flickrid.com - Preview

flickr images useful

"Earlier this month, Duke released "Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism," a report based on a workshop held in July. The report is full of interesting ideas for applying technology to journalists' challenges. Here are a few of them.

Information Extraction, Integration and Visualization

A new set of tools would help reporters find patterns in otherwise unstructured or unsearchable information. For instance, the Obama administration posted letters from dozens of interest groups providing advice on issues, but the letters were not searchable. A text-extraction tool would allow reporters to feed PDF documents into a Web service and return a version that could be indexed and searched. The software might also make it easy to tag documents with metadata such as people's names, places and dates. Another idea is to improve automatic transcription software for audio and video files, often available (but not transcribed) for government meetings and many court hearings.

The report also suggests developing "lightweight" templates that enable journalists to create data visualizations based on XML or spreadsheet files, and tools that help them organize their findings in a timeline. As the report points out, reporters working on in-depth projects often create chronologies in lengthy spreadsheets or text documents. A better tool would let journalists "zoom in, tag events for publication, turn on and off players or events and otherwise use them effectively," the report says.

The Journalist's Dashboard

Here the Duke report suggests that journalists need "a tool with which to spot what's new and what's important in the flow of daily information." A dashboard could include:

* A news alert system similar to Google News that scanned only the sources specified by a beat reporter,identifying the originating publisher and the number of other sites that linked to the item;
* A tool helping journalists keep track of their sources, including news items about that person and citatio

www.pbs.org/...ogy-starting-to-add-up328.html - Preview

comm217

"People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. However, a survey of leadership conferences from Weber Shandwick shows that there is a significant increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops. The challenge is how to adapt to presenting with the back-channel."

pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations - Preview

presentations backchannel

"Whilst speaking with Daniel Foster at TechSmith I decided to create a short video that shows you how to use the free Audacity audio-editor to gain more control over your audio editing than CamTasia provides.

Topics covered include:

* Removing background noise (you can do this for all the audio or just sections)
* Silencing periods with breathing and lip-smack noises
* Fading in and out to cover-up harsh cuts
* Dynamic range compression
* Normalisation
* De-essing using the volume control

"

blog.procasts.co.uk/...y-5-minute-screencast-tutorial - Preview

video screencast useful

"We live in an increasingly virtual world. We interact over email and IM; we meet new people and keep up with friends via their online profiles. We are continuously building a vast record of our various transactions, a personal portrait in clicks, words and video. And our communications are becoming integrated into the walls of our homes and offices, a ubiquitous blanket of connectivity.

This virtual world is wholly synthetic: the design of the underlying system shapes how you appear, what you can see and hear, and who has access to what. As designers, we are responsible for thinking about the impact of our creations: we can envision a future in which technology expands our sociability, making an extraordinarily creative, communicative and cooperative world, but we can also envision a dystopic future where friendship has become a conduit for marketing and awareness of universal surveillance choreographs our every move."

ocw.mit.edu/...index.htm - Preview

syllabi social_media

"The ZoomAtlas geo-social networking site is the largest, most detailed, lifelike map of the United States that blends satellite imagery with capabilities for users to personally update properties. Through site-customization tools users can update map details including roads, railroads, waterways, sidewalks and property lines to miniscule landscaping details like grass, flowers and bricks on residences, restaurants, schools, parks, workplaces and more. Beyond updating location-specific aesthetics and details from the past, the map enables users to post information and notes for family and friends at important locations in their collective lives. "

www.zoomatlas.com/company_aboutus.html - Preview

mapping collaboration wiki

Course by Brin, Page, Schmidt

www.academicearth.org/...ure-mission-and-business-model - Preview

video google

Free video courses from top universities

www.academicearth.org - Preview

educational_technology video learning

"The following video shows you how to upload a list of tweets from a simple .txt file and schedule them to go out at a future time using an online software program called Socialoomph.com. "

www.vernongirl.com/...ater-using-socialoomphcom.html - Preview

twitter useful

"Our customers have been asking to embed EtherPad in their websites ever since we launched. Today, we're excited to announce a preview release of Embeddable EtherPad for the developer community, which allows EtherPad documents to be embedded in other web pages.

We have big plans for Embeddable EtherPad, and there will be enhancements in the weeks and months to come that make EtherPad embedding easier. In the meantime, if you know a bit about iframe elements, you can get started right away."

etherpad.com/...embedding-etherpad - Preview

etherpad educational_technology

"October 20 was the National Day of Writing. As a way of celebrating, I invited students to spend a few minutes writing a story about a world without writing. The catch was that the students would be writing in groups of 7 or 8. We used a site called Etherpad. Each student could contribute to the story and also have a side discussion about the story they were writing. One of the coolest features of Etherpad is the ability to “replay” student writing. Etherpad doesn’t require registration which was ideal for getting students writing quickly."

discovery.caryacademy.org/...collaborative-writing - Preview

collaboration educational_technology

For this activity, we would like for you to take a step back from your role as a participant in some social networks and to take a moment to assume the role of ethnographer. Social networks are texts - let's take a look at them as such. Below is a list of several popular or niche social networking sites. Either log in using an existing account, create an account, or borrow Bud's account (Bud has an account on most of these), and take a tour through the networking site with the following list of questions present in mind.

You might wish to copy and paste this list of questions to wherever it is that you take digital notes and jot some thoughts down while you take your tour. Feel free to skip questions - the goal of this activity is not for you to fill out a worksheet, but to think about how the social networks and networking tools that we use shape the way that we use them. In addition, be mindful of how our students approach these sites, and how we might build our classroom networks to facilitate the bahaviors that we value, rather than using the tools that come along.

etherpad.com/eteacher-readingsocialnetworks - Preview

educational_technology social_networks

"hat made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact."

www.zenmoments.org/my-favorite-liar - Preview

credibility critical_thinking

"We're building the first up-to-date, interactive map of today's changing nonprofit landscape. If you're a member of the foundation or grant-making community, engaged in nonprofit work, or just interested in mapping and data visualization, please join us!"

nonprofitmapping.org - Preview

mapping visualization