Tools and Neat Tools

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.