New Majic Website!

The MA in Journalism students at NUI Galway have launched a new website this week, called Majic.ie. Their site contains video reports of student clubs and societies, along with podcast interviews of Galway musicians, storytellers and students (although they maybe still working on this section, as some interviews didn't play for me).

Several of the stories are of direct interest to the campus community, along with local, national and international news pieces.

It's a great showcase of new media for these students, and worth a peek...

Objectified

A very cool trailer of an upcoming documentary about how objects impact on our lives:


"All these physical objects in our lives...there is no critique of them...very little discussion on how these things really, really affect us"
No explicit reference here to "learning" technologies, but you get the point...

news online

In 1981 they started online newspapers in San Francisco. Interesting enough little video clip below, but the 'punchline' is the final statement at the end regarding time and cost!

HASTAC Awards

The HASTAC (pronounced 'haystack') awards for digital media have been announced and there'll be a showcase even in Chicago in a couple of weeks time. About HASTAC:

"The Digital Media and Learning Competition is administered by HASTAC (TheHumanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), a virtual organizationcommitted to innovative forms of collaboration for thinking, learning, and research acrossdisciplines and fostered by creative uses of technology. HASTAC’s infrastructure is generouslysupported by Duke University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.More information is available at http://www.hastac.org/ "

A revolution in games technology

Tired of having to buy powerful PCs or expensive games platforms to play the latest games? Wouldn't it be good to play on any device connected to the internet:PC, Mac or TV?  Well at the Games Developer Conference today (as reported on the BBC website), a totally new approach which exploits the latest broadband connectivity (there goes much of Ireland! oops!) Onlive have just previewed their streaming games system which they have been 'secretly' developing in partnership with many of the main games companies and which they intend to launch later in the year. It will do all the processing at their servers with streaming high-definition video to your local platform of choice, paid for on the basis of a monthly subscription.  For more info, view here.

Too close the the truth to be comfortable????

interconnections

Analysing over 300 million website interactions at over 97,000 online publications, researchers at Los Alamos have compiled a map which shows the linkages between different academic disciplines. They identified when someone is reading an article in one field moves over to an article in a different topic, revealing the boundary-crossing between domains. Plotting it out in a diagram paints a rich illustration of how fields link and overlap with one another.

Howard Rheigold's Social Media Classroom

Howard explains in this video his 'kludged together' set of web tools for an online learning environment.

tied in knots?

Fed on from stephenfry's twitter tweets, have a look at this excellent reflection on cables in modern life!

charge my car will you? i'm off for a spin in a few minutes

The biggest limiting factors in a move towards electric vehicles, and indeed one of the fundamental limitations of battery technology itself, has been the fact that rechargeable batteries have only a limited number of recharges available to them and take a considerable amount of time to charge back up to full capacity. Various 'solutions' have been mentioned regarding electric cars, such as having 'refueling' stations along major routes where the entre battery is replaced. As regards the limited number of recharge cycles this means that we continually increase the amount of highly polluting battery waste. 

A major new development was announced earlier in the week in which, with just a small modification of the battery production process, it is now possible to build batteries which can be recharged at high speed and which have a longer overall lifespan.

More on Teaching with Twitter

I finally gave in to Twitter about 2 weeks ago. It is fun, certainly, and I'm getting pointers to interesting resources that I might not otherwise have found. I have yet to be convinced about its value in the classroom, or outside of the classroom, but I'm keeping an open mind.

Here's a post from Steve Wheeler at the University of Plymouth, giving his 10 top uses of Twitter for Teaching. He also has some links to other people who have used Twitter in their teaching.

Mouthwash, vodka and some rice - LoTech solutions from Down Under

Some LoTech solutions and words of wisdom from Paul Boutin at the Sydney Morning Herald for those who have ever had to face the trauma of crashed hard drives, dirty disks or dropping a mobile phone into the toilet (this tip may be particularly relevant to those with children).

Read on here.

Behind the scenes - in plain English

Ever wondered how the Common Craft folk (...in plain English) produce their nifty little videos?

Well, all is revealed in their latest offering.

twitter twitter tweet tweet

So many people are talking about it, it's probably now passing rapidly from being 'hip'. Hmm. However, twitter is fun and can actually be used for learning (if you use your imagination!).

tele-vision

Michael Wesch's twitter stream from the "Future of video" provides a link to an old archive movie explaining the wonderful new technology of television. It actually does a great job, but the inherent sexism (wait till the end) is an amazing social commentary.

One Laptop per Child device appears in NUI Galway

Just spotted! A laptop device from the "One Laptop per Child" project, was seen today in the Arts Millennium Building foyer in NUI Galway, just outside the CELT offices.

The owner - an overseas student - gave us a quick demo of the impressive device. He had purchased the laptop for his son, as part of their "Give One Get One" donation scheme at http://amazon.com/xo, which ended on the 31st of December. The device was small and light, with the green rabbit ears facilitating connection to the wifi network available on the ground floor. Three USB ports were visible on the side, along with the speakers, web camera and an SD card slot accessible when the screen was swivelled around. The screen also was adjustable to a backlight-off display setting, to reduce LCD power consumption.

Find out more about this amazing project directly from the OLPC initiative's website directly. As they say themselves, their aim is :

"To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. "

tweet, tweet

Gosh, is there anyone not talking about twitter these days? Seems to be all over the press. I guess the uber-geeks will have to look for something new to move onto, now that ordinary riff-raff like me are all a-twittter! Anyway, here's a little presentation at this year's TED (just a couple of weeks ago) from Evan Williams inventor of Blogger and Twitter (oh, and Odeo)......