from coriander to ginger: putting the spice into RSS feeds!

Netvibes has in the last week released publicly its new 'ginger' version which has a lot of added features and functionality compared to its earlier 'coriander' release. For those not au fait with netvibes, it's a great way of organising information and bringing together all your interests into one simple web-page (but allowing multiple tabs in which you can structure the info). Exploiting RSS feeds from other websites and using a range of 'widgets' to provide links to email, weather, news, maps, etc, I've certainly found it to be a really useful tool over the year or so in which it has been my browser's home page.

One of the key aspects of the new version is the ability to develop a separate page which you can make available publicly - called 'my universe'. Applications in higher education for example could include building a reference site that links to the latest feeds from relevant academic journals providing a handy resource for students and researchers. My first stab at a universe can be seen here and it probably makes more sense to look at an example than try to understand my muddled explanation thus far!

Anyway, its free and, once you get the hang of it, indispensible!

Games & civic engagement

Can computer games really be educational? MIT World this month has a recording of a discussion on games and civic engagement. The panelists are Mario Armstrong and Ian Bogost. You can watch it here.

50 Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story

Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium gave a presentation about digital storytelling at the NMC Regional Conference a few months ago and posted it online. You can view it here and listen to the audio track also using slideshare.

More details are available at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways

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Audio Books Publishers to Drop DRM Sofware

The New York Times published an article yesterday publicising that "Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books".

This stripping of DRM (Digital Rights Management) software will effectively allow downloaded materials to be transferred between computers, iPods, etc. It is hoped that stripping away the anticopying software will encourage a "renewed growth in the audio book business".

Online seminars

Innovate: the journal of online education (for which this blog has long had an RSS feed - see listing on right hand column) has a new series of papers and accompanying online seminars coming up in March. The journal invites paper authors to use Adobe Connect software to provide live online presentations and these later become available for viewing in their archives. During the event attendees can post questions using a text chat tool or, for a limited number, using headsets/microphones. Whilst Adobe Connect also allows video during the presentations, Innovate's versions are based on audio plus PowerPoint.

Forthcoming events are:

• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 11:00 AM: Let Me Learn with My Peers Online!: Foreign Language Learning Through Reciprocal Peer Tutoring
• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 2:00 PM: Learning at a Distance: Engaged or Not?
• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 3:00 PM: Online Teaching and Classroom Change: The Trans-Classroom Teacher in the Age of the Internet

And previous topics include: Online Course Development; Podcasts for Engineering Education; Games, Avatars and Education, etc. The full listing is available here.

Learning & the Social Web

John Breslin's talk was well received with a jam-packed room of eager listeners. He has popped his slides onto slideshare for anyone to view.

You can see them at http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/learning-and-the-social-web/

John Breslin and Data Portability

John Breslin's take on data portability:



Of course, John is coming to give a CELT talk tomorrow, 12.30 in AM207. His title is Learning via the Social Web, and he intends to

look at some popular applications from the "Social Web": blogging, wikis, podcasting, social networking, social bookmarking, etc., and examine the usage of these tools in the education domain.

Encyclopedia of Life - First Release

It's nice to be able to follow up on a story as it develops. Earlier in this blog we discussed the ambitious "Encyclopedia of Life" project and linked to an eloquent presentation by one of its principal founders, E.O. Wilson. Today, the BBC reports that the EOL is now releasing its first 30,000 pages and continues on target to document 1.8 million species by 2017.

You can access the current public release at http://www.eol.org/

Intralibrary Conference

A number of representatives of the NDLR (National Digital Learning Repository - Ireland's national resource for higher education) and others from NUIG are currently at the IntraLibrary Repositories Conference in Edinburgh listening to and presenting papers on various aspects of digital repository design and use. Intrallect have used the occasion to outline some of the key features of the new release (version 3.0) of their software.

It is fascinating to see the wide range of users of Intralibrary from across the international HE sector as well as to learn of future plans for interoperability with other web services, VLEs and other systems.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is the world's first all-software audience response system. Unlike other voting or polling solutions, you don’t have to buy expensive proprietary hardware or “call for special pricing,” you just sign up and create text message polls in literally minutes.

Polls can be embedded into Powerpoint presentations and the students respond using their mobile phones. The results are updated live onscreen!

Of course, it's not available outside the US (yet!).

The Film Based Teaching Machine

The photo here is one that appeared in a book published by Harper & Brothers in 1962, entitled '1975: And the Changes to Come', written by Arnold B. Barach and the Kiplinger Washington Editors, predicting how technology would change our lives in 1975.

The caption associated with this particular photo is: "Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom. "

I think we might have achieved this one? Although, I can't remember - have we decided that repetition exercises are good or bad, or does it depend ...?

A Vision of Students Today

I'll let the video speak for itself. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.