Too much fun, must post immediately

As I was catching up on RSS feeds this morning (I'm a week behind) I came across a reference to Tabbloid. Tabbloid is an RSS aggregator, but instead of putting it into an easily browseable news reader format, it dumps the feeds into a pdf file as if you were reading a news letter. The file gets e-mailed to you for reading or printing out...

I actually prefer reading my feeds online, however, many times I have been frustrated that I could not get the feeds I want onto my Kindle Reader. If I can figure it out, and e-mail the pdf's to my Kindle address...I could get the news, readable anywhere, anytime, and only for $.30 a day. Although, I'll probably just have to move the files over from the computer everyday.

Google Wave and Collaborative Notetaking

The ReadWriteWeb Blog did a review of a potential use for Google Wave in the context of collaborative note-taking by students. Google Wave is a new technology (still unavailable to the general public) which will combine elements of e-mail and collaborative document creation. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Video Search Tool

VideoSurf is a new metasearch tool for online video resources that searches such sites as Hulu, CNN, Metacafe, ESPN, and Comedy Central. (Hopefully, they'll add more in the future!) It bases its searches on visual identification as opposed to only relying on text to locate a source. It also allows users to navigate through results to find "the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see". This may be a wonderful tool for locating video for instruction and educational purposes as well as providing new ways of accessing this medium for research purposes.

You Can Give a Man a Fish...

Gardner Campbell, in an article in the September/October Educause Review, wrote an article about the need to understand the media of all this instructional technology we've been implementing. His suggestion: Quit limiting the creativity of the students, and open up the possibilities. He's got some interesting ideas about how to create environments that might foster commitment from students, but would require commitment from faculty and IT in order to implement. Notes 1, and 4 - 6 are especially interesting.

An easy way to organize google searches...

Google Squared is tool that returns Google searches in a square/grid that are sortable by column. Some initial searches required some contextual starting points so that the application had a better idea of what to return. I tried "Models for Quality Online Learning" and it prompted me for examples. I entered QOCI, Quality Matters, and 5 Pillars. It returned these three models, and three other links related, but not as pointed as I had hoped.

I deleted some things, added one that I knew was missing and got a final square that I saved. Definitely something to take a closer look at and see if it can be used in your classes.

Update: Just tried to do some collaborative things: doesn't really allow it. In order to edit and change a table a user needs to save it as their own table. The changes are private. BUMMER. Still neat to create some nice tables of information quickly.

Teaching Online Classes from a War Zone

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about Cheryl J. Wachenheim, a North Dakota State University instructor of agribusiness and applied economics, who chose to continue teaching an online economics class while on active duty as a captain in the Minnesota Army National Guard stationed in Balad, Iraq. She comments on the challenges and benefits of teaching and interacting with her students from a war zone. We often think about the benefits that online teaching and technology extend in terms of flexibility to students, but it's also interesting to think about the possibilities online learning can present to educators and the challenging circumstances in which online learning can still prevail.

Best Free Reference Web Sites 2009

The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association just published a list of the best free reference websites of 2009. This includes some wonderful sites with great information such as ePodunk, PubChem, and Lexicool. Lexicool is a searchable directory of more than 6000 free online bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries. PubChem is a search tool for free chemistry information which divides the information into 3 areas: Compounds, Substances, and BioAssays. Finally, ePodunk is an aggregate of easily browsable city and county profiles - a wonderful source of local data. You may want to consider linking to any of the RUSA recommended sites in your classes, and the ECC Librarians would be happy to provide in class or online library instruction to educate your students about any of these resources and more.