Tools

This post is not about "naming and shaming" innovative web content providers, who are making great strides in bringing interesting multimedia content to end-users.

It's just a small story to remind us that web 2.0 is not always as "accessible" as we think. For educators, perhaps it's a yet another reason to prefer open content. And it reminds us that commercial constraints and IP issues continue to prevent the web from being as "global" a resource as the educational community would like.

This is how I received the error message: browsing Jason Kottke's popular website kottke.org (now described as "a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0") , I noticed that, in a post about the film Koyaanisqatsi, Jason had linked to the popular video site hulu.com.  But I couldn't actually see the video content - all I got was the above message.

Is anyone using Leximancer as a knowledge management or data mining tool in their org? And if so how are you using it?

http://www.leximancer.com/

This podcast features an interview with George B. Adams III, Associate Director for Programs, Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University. Our interview was recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

nanoHUB provides users with “fingertip access” to over 70 simulation tools for research and education. Users not only launch jobs that are executed on the state-of-the-art computational facilities of Open Science Grid and TeraGrid, but also interactively visualize and analyze the results--all via an ordinary Web browser. nanoHUB middleware hides the complexity of Grid computing, handling authentication, authorization, file transfer, and visualization, and letting the researcher focus on research. This approach also helps educators bring these tools to the classroom, letting them bypass the difficulties of Grid computing and focus instead on learning science and engineering.

Presentation given by FR Nordengren, Des Moine University.  He is an education technology strategist and works in the college of health sciences.  His job: Assess student engagement with technology, find out how we can maximize the current tools we use.  Create a formal faculty mentoring program. 

23 Things - Helene Blowers (Librarian) She set up a way for staff to study 23 contemporary tools on the web, they were incentivised and challenged to learn about these tools.

He decided that he needed the FedEx arrow (look between the e and the x) - if you have no budget and you need a person to think about your product, tell them that whenver they see the fedex arrow to think about the product. 

So borrowing from these two sources, he came up with 12 resonable tools to represent what Web 2.0 is all about - that the faculty could review, research, study in 10 months.  Things such as RSS feeds, google documents, blogger page, flakes, google alerts, tagging information, podcasting, facebook, wikipedia, flickr, ect.

James Varn, Director of Faculty Development, Mississippi Valley State Univ., gave this presentation.  Not quite sure there are still people out there who are not familiar with Google docs anymore.  However, there are probably some people who may need to know what you can do with google documents. He suggests that chat within Gmail works really well.  He gave an overview of Gmail and google docs.  The advantage of google docs is that everyone can contribute, you can track the document revisions in real time.  You can control who has access to the document.  You can conduct peer reviews, work on group projects, review history of revisions, will convert to word or pdf formats, use it for brainstorming or project papers for comments.  Google docs allows you to insert comments, compare revisions to determine work each student has contributed.  Google docs also has spreadsheets and presentations.  Google groups is nothing more than a discussion group.  You can create a discussion topics, add people to the discussion, etc.  Goggle talk is just a basic instant messaging app.

...is amateur software development.  No sooner to I promise my family NOT to bring my laptop home from work than I do what I've done many times: set up an account on my wife's eMac.  I've tricked out the machine with a tool chain, but I've discovered a few problems:

   1) I installed the DarwinPorts and MacPorts port management tools, only to discover they work with Xcode 3.0.  So...

   2) I downloaded Xcode 3.0 (1.1 GB) only to find it doesn't run on OS X 10.4.11, only 10.5.  Remedy?

   3) Download Xcode 2.5 (997 MB), remove Xcode 3.0, install Xcode 2.5, and discover that a) DarwinPorts and MacPorts don't appear to run with an earlier version of Xcode.  What's more installing the smallest piece of ported software wants a command-line version of Subversion installed.  So...

   4) I find and download a Universal binary for Subversion, only to find it won't install.  I have to find an earlier version.

I happened onto a quite wonderful blog on tech and teaching. Learning Technology Teacher Development Blog for ELT.

The blogger, Nik Peachy, describes himself as "...a freelance learning technology consultant, trainer and content designer. At present I'm developing a Business English course for Second Life. I also work on a number of websites aimed at EL teachers for British Council and IATEFL."

The blog often points to new tools that are promising additions to a teacher's arsenal of digital tools. I established a test phone web site that is well designed for the cell screen. Another tool is a clever way of annotating photographs. Peachy adds video demonstrations on use of many of the tools.

Visit. Bookmark--better yet, socially bookmark.

This is a post I wrote for a Sloan-C workshop I'm currently participating in. I had to pick a Web 2.0 tool and evaluate it. I thought some of you might find it very useful! :)

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I'm finding creating a screencast using Screencast-o-matic is entirely too easy! It's simply a quick and dirty way to do a full screen capture with mouse motions. I used a Mac with OS X 10 to do my screen capture, as I've had trouble finding anything easy to use for screen captures that also capture mouse movements...or at least not as easy to use as Macromedia Captivate for the PC. My main complaint about S-o-matic is that you can't edit the screen lengths. I have quite a delay on a couple of the slides that in Captivate I can easily re-time. However, for a quick student hint or help, it can't be beat. It's cross-platform (thank you Web 2.0!!) and very simple to use. I found it very intuitive, actually, but I also have experience with Captivate, and the interface reminded me of Captivate a bit in the recording feature.  

Here's the URL to my screen capture. I captured how to create a new page in this wiki, of all things! ;)

So of course I post about the blogs@pgsit project and Penn State gets hit with a massive power surge -- that knocks out the xServe they are sitting on, corrupts the database, and makes the service not work for two days ... well, thanks to the work of Chris Millet (who isn't a server admin at all) we are back and things are flowing again. I would expect some podcasts today or tomorrow ... the posts that are there are very good. Take a look. Thanks!

I've been writing about the Blogs@PGSIT project at my other sites (here & here) for a couple of weeks now ... the PGSIT, or PA Governor's School for Information Technology, is a program that I have administered here at PSU for the last six years ... it is a five week program on our campus that brings the state's best and brightest here to learn about technology. We do all sorts of things with the scholars, but this year we decided to give them a read/write space to use for a little bit of everything -- modeled after our beta, blogs@si project. They are posting thoughts, assignments, podcasts, vodcasts to the site. We built the space on Drupal and it has been an amazing success (so far). We are excited by what we've seen and really think that spaces like this are better at supporting the classroom than a standard LMS. At any rate, I thought this community would like to take a look at what is going on ... just remember, the only rules we gave them was to be responsible and take ownership of the space. So far, so good!