tech-ed collisions

twittervision

I love mashups - here's one combining a couple of my favourite services. twittervision.

Filed under  //   Twitter   Web 2.0  
Posted May 23, 2007

2007 Web 2.0 Awards

Well, SEOmoz's 2007 Web 2.0 Awards have been out for a couple of weeks now. All the usual suspects are there such as technorati, bloglines, magnolia, furl, yahoo! local, craigslist, google docs, feedburner, 43 things, google maps, frappr, ning, flickr, picasa, linked in, digg, del.icio.us, pageflakes, and of course, YouTube. As you can see, there are quite a few google and yahoo! services in the mix. If you have a look at all the awards, you will find even more google and yahoo! services. What surprised me was the number of 'same old same old' in the list. Some of these have been around for quite a long time now and perhaps are just part of the fabric - we really depend on them and use them all the time. If you have a look at the criteria by which they are measured (usability, usefulness, social aspects, interface and design, content quality) it is easy to see why they are there (again). Since there are 'over 200 sites in 41 categories' there is a lot to look at so quite a bit of time and effort must go into producing these awards. It's really worth checking them out and seeing if you can find something that works for you. Here's a few interesting ones:

  1. donors choose - teachers submitting ideas for funding
  2. be Green - highly topical at the moment - look at the carbon calculator
  3. a couple of interesting hosted wikis (wetpaint, pbwiki) - check out the student/teacher example in pbwiki
  4. twitter - my views here
Of course there are many more to look at and it would take hours to go through the lot of them.

technorati tags:

Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted May 22, 2007

Interesting info if you have an Australian domain name

auDA, the Australian Domain name Administrator has released an interesting issues paper from their 2007 Names Policy Panel. From the auda site:

auDA's 2007 Names Policy Panel is currently reviewing the policy framework for .au domain names, including: * whether .au should be opened up to direct registrations (eg. domainname.au) * whether the policy rules for domain names should be changed * whether registrants should be allowed to sell their .au domain names. The Panel has released an Issues Paper, May 2007 which sets out the current situation and invites comment on suggestions and options for change.
This could have implications for all Australian domain name users, including closed domains such as gov.au and edu.au. The paper is here if you are interested.

Filed under  //   Internet  
Posted May 21, 2007

on Bubbleguru

When I get this to work (using javascript in Wordpress doesn't seem to be too easy for me), the accompanying video message should speak for itself. As I state in it, I am not sure whether this is a useful thing or a really annoying popup. However, I am sure some people will find some interesting uses for it. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted May 16, 2007

Google Trends

Ever wonder what Australians are searching for (at least on the Internet).  Here's an interesting article on their Australian blog.  Pity they didn't recognise other cities besides Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth.  The underlying tool - Google Trends - is  interesting to look at too. I'd like to see what educators / learners are searching for.  Maybe something similar could be implemented on edna, myfuture or some of the other services we run.

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Filed under  //   Google  
Posted May 10, 2007

RPL claims - an ePortfolio service?

We have been spending quite a bit of time looking at ePortfolio services lately and one of the interesting ideas that I have looked at is the JISC ePortfolio Reference model. ePortfolios address a wide range of applications and the idea of integrating simple services into an 'ePortfolio engine' has a lot of appeal to me. There are many services that could be integrated to form an ePortfolio solution including identification, authentication, blogging, artefact management, aggregation, syndication, competencies, presence, presentation, transcript validation, resume builder etc. Processing RPL (recognised prior learning) can be a problem for learners as well as institutions. Perhaps a service could be developed similar to resume builders (such as the Europass) that helps a learner document their RPL in a manner that maximises their chances for a successful RPL claim and also eases the processing of the claim by the assessor.

Filed under  //   eportfolio  
Posted May 2, 2007

the empire (content vendors) strikes back

More from Learning Impact..... Given the amount of discussion given to open content, it's only fair that the content vendors have an opportunity to present their perspective. So here's some comments from a panel of them.. on self publishing... ...not feeling particularly threatened by open content. Issue has been around for a while. ...open content may have a certain attractiveness in some community colleges ...open content may be a positive for publishers.. may 'surface some particularly gifted' work that publishers can pick up on. ..in academic world, there is real value in 'expert authors' rather than more open content which may have more traction in more journalistic work. on what type of content they think educators want.... eg full courses vs smaller digital assets, Learning objects etc. ...they want it all.... but what they particularly want and need is training on how to use new types of content. ...there maybe a difference between what faculty want and what students want. this needs to be taken into consideration. Interesting study - assumption that kids in college are digital natives is wrong. While they may be comfortable with technology for communications, entertainment, they don't know how to use technology to learn - they learned to learn through books. ...ebooks have a very low takeup. ...students don't read the book any more (whether printed or ebook).. will try to 'google' their way through a course. ...number 1 factor in what determines a student purchase is whether it will be used in the classroom by the teacher - regardless of whether it is electronic or printed. on ad-supported content... not yet tolerated in 'hard-core' teaching content - maybe in ancillary content. on Google... ...it appears that most of the students don't yet have enough skills to discern what is 'good' and what is not - yet. - this needs to be taught.

Filed under  //   content  

from Learning Impact

Some interesting thoughts to come out of IMS Learning Impact. Here are a few notes - they probably need to be expanded on but it's interesting to get these down as they occur: 'education is the only industry still debating the use of technology...' - comment about education in the USA but probably applies to many other countries. 'education...holds on to an agricultural timeframe (and many other outdated or irrelevant concepts)....in a digital age'. There also seems to be a lot of emphasis on making improvements in disaster planning/first responders - a bit of a sad reflection on the state of things at the moment. A great deal of the conference is dedicated to open source, open content and open services. Suggestion that the open content movement will follow roughly the same path as open source. Currently it is lagging a few years behind open source. For providers, particularly smaller ones, you can't focus on who you are and what you have done in the past, but must focus instead on the future. Focus on your brand and IP is not going to help you. Open source vendors must focus on decreasing the distance between the state of their apps and 'production' as a very high priority. 'Instructional design' is in a mess. Graduates in this area not equipped to develop content to meet the needs of todays/tomorrows learners - generally no experience in games technologies and it has been argued that this is a very important aspect of learning into the future. More notes and maybe a better put together post to come.

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Filed under  //   standards  

on Twitter

Listening to TWiT 91 over the weekend, I was really interested in the discussion on Twitter and how engaged in it some of the panelists were. For those not familiar with it I encourage you to go have a look. Its another social networking service that gives you 140 characters to type in what your'e doing right now. You can make this pretty public, setup a group of friends etc, send messages via the web, IM (AIM, Gtalk, .Mac, LiveJournal, Jabber) or your mobile phone. Having only just setup its pretty hard to really get the networking benefits just yet but it looks like an interesting way to collaborate and I am guessing could have some pretty interesting applications in educational settings. I understand there is a Google Earth mashup so that location can be incorporated which wouldbe really interesting. There's an api to mess around with and some snippets of code to embed into your sites which look pretty useful to.

technorati tags: ,

If Flash worked nicely (in this blog) you would be able to see what I have recently posted to Twitter below:

follow jleeson at http://twitter.com

Filed under  //   Twitter  
Posted April 3, 2007

Another great Google service

It's always interesting to see what tech companies announce on April 1st so here is a great April fool's product from Google. Free wireless broadband that just 'goes with the flow'.  Are there any other ones worth mentioning? Cheers, Jerry.

Filed under  //   Google  
Posted April 2, 2007