Visualizing the Quality of the Information

Wired,com's Wired Science Blog, published a quick overview of a new service on Wikipedia called WikiTrust. Content will be color coded based on a formula related to the reliability of the writer, and the number of reviews it has passed by editors. Don't know how it will play out in the context of ADA, but definitely will be worth a look when it goes live as a tool to evaluated information.

Although WikiTrust has been available as an add-on to the MediaWiki since November 2008, This current movement is to incorporate it into the live Wikipedia. Didn't see a date, but definitely something to watch for.

Wouldn't It Be Cool?

The other day my mind started wandering and trying to think of things that might help people interact easier with D2L and other online services. At about the same time I came across this on Engadget. The Razer Naga is a "gaming" mouse that allows the user to program key strokes in a program to a single button. There's a left click, right click, scrool wheel, 2 buttons for you index finger (apologies to my lefty friends), and then 12 more buttons for your thumb. Wouldn't it be cool if we could program button 1 to open up the window that picks your file from your desktop and puts it up into D2L and makes a link in the Content? Wouldn't it be cool if we could write a macro in Word that would take a word document and do the same thing?

OK, and THAT is enough silliness for Friday.

If you don't know, Engadget is a blog that pretty much dumps any kind of rumors, news, or silliness related to technology that they can find. A must read if you need to know everything you never wanted to know about all the new phone, gaming, audio, and computer gadgets that are coming out.

How Colleges Should Be Using Social Media

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed S. Craig Watkins, an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future about social network and the future of education. He speaks about the characteristics of this generation of technologically comfortable students and the manner in which technology is affecting instructor's teaching style and pedagogical techniques. Watkins also touches on concerns about privacy where higher education intersects with personal social network accounts.

Technology and Adult Basic Education

How can technology be used in the area of Adult Basic Education? Learn more about the infusion of technology in this area of higher education from the OVAE, the Office of Vocational and Adult Education. Key findings from adult literacy research and evaluations are included in this website.

Finding New Content Made Easy

Xmarks is a bit different than other online bookmarking services, in two ways:

1. It uses your browser bookmarks, also allowing you to sync up your bookmarks between different machines, and even different browsers.
2. It takes you interests and suggests other sites that may be of interest to you. (Hopefully some new things that you could use in a class.)

Now I'm not sure if it's going to be that easy to discover things, but it certainly sounds fun. Looking through my bookmarks is stuff on pirates, and games, and polymer clay, and a whole bunch of media watchdog and political sites. Wonder what it will suggest? I think I'll give it a try this week.

Tech-free Classes?

NPR has an interesting article about Jose Bowen who is a Dean at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Contrary to how it may sound, he is not actually anti-technology when it comes to teaching. In fact, he has created and uses online games as a way of teaching music history to his students. Bowen is advocating an inversion of current teaching models (such as lecturing) in which instructors wait until students enter the classroom in order to introduce them to class materials and content. Bowen advocates using technology to familiarize students with content before coming into the classroom and then use the classroom time to interact directly with the students, rather than lecturing. This may be a really useful way to structure classes at ECC in order to take advantage of the technology we have available while freeing up precious class time for more interactive and collaborative work.

eBooks for College and Universities for CHEAP!

Lets face it books are expensive and in the current economy the prices of text books for college is astronomical. In comes a company called CourseSmartwhich allows students and teachers to purchase ebooks at a much lower price than those found at your schools book store. The best part about it is that they are available online any time. It allows you to enter notes, bookmarks, and has a handy search tool. There are currently 7000 book titles in 900 course areas and 100 disciplines and growing.

CourseSmart LLC has content from some of the leading textbook publishers today including:

* Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group
* Cengage Learning
* CQ Press
* Elsevier
* F.A. Davis & Company
* John Wiley & Sons
* Jones & Bartlett Publishers
* McGraw Hill Higher Education
* Nelson Education
* Pearson
* Sage Publications
* Sinauer Associates
* Taylor & Francis
* Wolters Kluwer Health

CourseSmart came out with an iPhone application, check out the video below to see a demo:

The 5 keys to Mobile Learning Technologies

Learn more about mobile learning technologies in this article by Campus Technology. There are 5 key tips covered in this article that will help you learn best practices of mobile learning! The article has specific tips on i phone, and i pod touch as well.

TinEye: Reverse Image Search Engine

TinEye is an interesting new search tool that may be useful for research and teaching involving the use of online images. According to the Tin Eye site, "You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks." This can be very helpful for locating copyright information for presentations and for finding the best resolution of images to display in D2L and in online class material.

Virtual Higher Education Community

Edu1world provides a place for faculty and other educational professionals who are interested in working with Web 2.0 technology to collaborate, network, and share information regarding technology in the education industry. The community is a free service and provides valuable opportunities to share and collect information if time and budget restraints restrict you from attending “live” conferences.

Free Online Polls that you can use in D2L

Students demand more interactivity during lectures, they no longer want to simply sit and listen. Studies also show that the more interactive the lecture, students tend to recall the information covered in last weeks lecture. We've all heard about clickers or student response systems that can be used in the class while the lecture is presented on the board. But not everyone has access to that technology on campus, so is there an alternative? Maybe a free alternative? Well you're in luck! Thanks to PollDaddy.com you can:

- Have unlimited free polls with unlimited votes per poll.
- 14 PollDaddy skins to choose from or create your own in CSS.
- View poll results online, as XML, CSV, or subscribe to them via RSS!
- Add text, pictures and video to your polls.
- Full foreign language support.
- Block repeat voters by IP address or cookies.
- Create single choice or multiple choice polls.
- Close polls after a certain date, randomize answers, allow text entry 'other' field, show or hide results from voters and much more.

Check out my D2L Poll

Which Online School Shall I Attend?

If you are trying to decide which online school is best suited for you, take a look at a new web site that compares various online colleges.

Fraud In A Distance Learning Office!

See what happens in a distance learning office located at the University of Texas-Brownsvillle when too many people have administrative rights to CMS.

Some news...

Some interesting things have come up in the context of data and the control of the data now that more and more data is stored "in the cloud."

• Student sues Amazon.com (seeking class-action status) for the removal of a purchased book from his Kindle, rendering his class notes useless;
• Thoughts on Amazon.com and it's "control" over purchased data, and implications;
• FCC looks at Apple's App Store and practices on approving and removing apps;
• Podcast of Talk of the Nation segment: "Who Really Owns Your Data?" (mp3, transcript)

All have relate to things we need to keep in mind as we start using more and more of the Web in our learning environments.