Jess M's List: Personal Web

• At what point does the volume of historical scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?
• The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess.
• History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes. “When you’ve got too much information to be able to process it all, you’re not sure how to find meaningful patterns within it,”

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• We're constantly trying to improve the quality of your search results. One of the ways we're tackling this is by personalizing your search experience. After all, you're the only one who actually knows what you're really looking for.

• Now researchers at MIT's Sloan School of Management hope to make websites better at selling products by making them adapt automatically to each visitor, presenting information in a way that complements that person's style of thinking.
• While quite a few sites, such as Amazon.com, offer personalized features, many of those sites adapt by drawing information from user profiles, stored cookies, or long questionnaires. The Sloan system, however, adapts to unknown users within the first few clicks on the website by analyzing each user's pattern of clicks.
• The user, he says, shouldn't even realize that the website is personalized.

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• we find ourselves awash in petabytes of information of widely varying quality.
• traditional ways of disseminating knowledge have grown well beyond our capacity to assimilate information
• Now, the profound growth of scholarly output has made it a formidable challenge to try to stay current, forcing many of us to retreat into narrow fields of inquiry,
• So, in our haste to prepare ourselves for Academe 2.0, let’s recognize that the old analogue academe has already overwhelmed our capacity to gather, read and assimilate the research, analysis and collected wisdom of our age
• we are researching without having an impact, speaking without being heard and writing without being read.
• Can we not elevate the scholarship of synthesis and interpretation back to the highest rank of professional inquiry, recognizing the remarkable talent needed to bring together in a readily digestible form the accumulated insights of thousands of scholars?

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• "learner-centered" or "student-centered" design. This is more than just adapting for different learning styles or allowing the user to change the font size and background color; it is the placing of the control of learning itself into the hands of the learner
• Unlike constructivism, which states that learners attempt to foster understanding by meaning-making tasks, chaos states that the meaning exists— the learner's challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden
• pervasive belief that information is something meant to be shared
• Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along.
• The idea here is that students will have their own personal place to create and showcase their own work. Some e-portfolio applications, such as ELGG, have already been created. IMS Global as put together an e-portfolio specification [19]. "The portfolio can provide an opportunity to demonstrate one's ability to collect, organize, interpret and reflect on documents and sources of information. It is also a tool for continuing professional development, encouraging individuals to take responsibility for and demonstrate the results of their own learning" [
• e-learning content is syndicated, much like a blog post or podcast. It is aggregated by students, using their own personal RSS reader or some similar application. From there, it is remixed and repurposed with the student's own individual application in mind, the finished product being fed forward to become fodder for some other student's reading and use.

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• Since it launched in 2006, Twitter has attracted more than a million users, including a growing community of educators.
• Teachers who are fans say they appreciate the easy-to-use tool as a quick way to network with colleagues. They like being able to ask and answer questions, learn from experts, share resources, and react to events on the fly.