A peek into the future -- uh, past

A new partnership between Google and Popular Science Magazine has made available the entire 137 year archives of the magazine. Though I'm only a little familiar with the mag, I would imagine there are a number of ways this could be used by instructors. For example: history projects, evolution of technology discussions, changes in writing style over 137 years...and the list could go on. Check it out and relive your great-great-grandfather's youth.

Problems with Google Scholar for Scholars

Google collaborated with many academic libraries to make many scholarly material easily searchable. But as Peter Jacso from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa points out in this article, the biggest problem with Google Scholar (and also Google's Book Search) is the poor job Google has been doing with the metadata associated with these materials. When Googling, most people don't care much about metadata, but faulty metadata can provide an inaccurate picture of the value of a resource to researchers. For example, materials are often categorized under incorrect author names or assigned bloated citations counts. All of this can be a factor for ECC students or faculty who are relying on Google Scholar as a research tool. It can mean inaccurate citations or search results that favor less valuable materials. It's good to keep this in mind when encouraging students to think critically about their information sources.

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.

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.