Serendipity35

Have You Binged Yet?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:10:00 -0400

It has been a week - have you Binged yet? Microsoft's new search engine Bing just popped into my field of view a few days after it went live June 3. If you went to Microsoft's live.com site, you were redirected to Bing. There were over 1500 stories written about Bing the day after the announcement. They have also released a mobile version since then.

The page looks bright with a changing background photo, so it is not like the vanilla Google page. If you don’t have Microsoft SilverLight installed, you might get a message to install it - without it some features on Bing won’t work.

Bing. Odd choice for a search name. My first thoughts were the social networking platform Ning, the screen capture tool Jing, the Bada Bing Club from The Sopranos, nerdy Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day (good film) who likes to say “Bing and bing again!” or Chandler Bing on TV's Friends or columnist Stanley Bing. TRIVIA: The working codename at Microsoft for Bing was Kumo which came from the Japanese word for spider as well as cloud. At least those have some references to search engine "spiders" and cloud computing.

Microsoft calls Bing a "decision engine." I did a search on that term (using Google) and found decisionengine.com. Guess what that site is all about? Bing! It's a promo site by Microsoft. Good planning on their part. The idea is that Bing will give you not just a pile of results, but will make some decisions for you about the results. I didn't find that to be obviously the case. I typed the string "airline ticket Newark Miami" into Bing and Google and I can't say that one was more helpful than the other. Paid results on top, ads on the side, a pile of possible links below. I still needed to make a decision on what to click.

There are actually a number of sites that dig into search - like searchengineland.com - so I'm not interested here in the technical side of Bing or whether or not it has overtaken Yahoo or can beat Google.

Some features I noticed:
- search suggestions as you type
- related searches ("Explorer pane") on the left side with your search history (You can clear it or turn it off too.)
- not obvious, but it uses semantic technology to make some decisions (supposedly from PowerSet which Microsoft purchased in 2008)
- You can save and share search histories if you also use Windows Live SkyDrive, Facebook, or with email.

Is Bing different enough to make me switch from Google the way Google got me me to leave behind Yahoo? Not yet. Let's see if people start to say that they "binged" something the way we say I "googled" it.

Redefining Universities Part 2

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:09:00 -0400

Some additional resources to continue the conversation started last week about how universities A) are changing B) need to change C) are having change thrust upon them - you choose.

Don Tapscott has been on this track for awhile now. Check out this video of his presentation on the tvo.org site. There's a a good conversation on this with him and others on This Week in Tech podcast called "Steal This Diploma" at http://twit.tv/197.

Three books by Don Tapscott that address this generation that has been "bathed in bits." Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, the earlier Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

His new article, "The Impending Demise of the University, has a gloomier title than my own post.

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril."

A Million English Words

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:09:00 -0400

According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), at the current pace of a new English-language word being created about every 98 minutes, English will cross the Million Word Mark on June 10th, 2009 at 10:22 am (Stratford-on Avon Time).

I don't envy them doing the addition. There are always new words under consideration.

In Shakespeare's time, there were less than 100,000 words. Of course, Willie added about 1,700 with his own writing. And all that in an age when there were only about 2 million English speakers.

“The Million Word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first, truly global Language”, said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.

He says that there are three major trends involving the English language today:
1) An explosion in word creation; English words are being added to the language at the rate of some 14.7 words a day;
2) a geographic explosion where some 1.53 billion people now speak English around the globe as a primary, auxiliary, or business language; and
3) English has become, in fact, the first truly global language.

That millionth word might be one from India, China, or England. There is a long list of possibilities on their site.

It might be chiconomics - the ability to maintain one’s fashion sense or chicness amidst the current financial crisis. I really hope that, if only for Shakespeare's sake, that the millionth one is NOT recessionista or octomom or sexting or mobama.

How about the environmentally-conscious choices: Green washing (re-branding an old product as environmentally friendly) E-vampire (an appliance or machine on standby-mode, which continually uses electrical energy).

A few possibilities have been around long enough that I thought they already were "official" like: slow food (food other than the fast-food variety) and locavores (someone who eats locally produced foods) and defriend or defollow (dropping someone from your social network).

It is the "English Conquest."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05162009/photos/graph.jpg

You can find out all possibilities with their meanings and follow the English Language WordClock counting down to the one millionth word at LanguageMonitor.com.

Will There Be California E-textbooks?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:18:00 -0400

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that e-textbooks could be one way that his financially challenged state could save money. But the state Superintendent of Public
Instruction, Jack O’Connell, said in the San Francisco Chronicle that expecting to save money in this way is "a pipe dream."

Schwarzenegger’s plan is not to produce in-house wikibooks as other groups have started to do, but to have textbook publishers offer
books digitally "for free" in exchange for the state purchasing other products produced by the publishing companies.

The state actually had the California Open Source Textbook Project
back in 2002 that planned to create e-texts for K-12 use. They had partnered with Wikibooks, but the project never finalized any books.

Teachers and Students As Makers

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:17:00 -0400

The OER Commons project (open Educational Resources) and ISKME (The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education) launched an open-source curriculum competition called the Sun Curve Design Challenge.

ISKME is an independent, nonprofit research institute that helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create human-centered, knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success. Their approach is to recast teachers and students as collaborative "makers" of curriculum and media.

What is the challenge? If you had to grow your food using efficient and sustainable processes, where would it take you? What science and technology could support your ideas?

So, the annual Maker Faire was a good place to launch the project. It's all about educators and students collaborating as inventors and being inspired and guided by concepts of scientific inquiry and design thinking. The results of their efforts will be released as open resources.

Sun Curve was created by INKA and inventor-sculptor, Paul Giacomantonio as an experiential and experimental laboratory system. Its system combines hydroponic, organic food production with aquaculture, renewable materials, and solar energy in a self-contained laboratory system.

The Sun Curve installation and its inventors serve as points of inspiration for teachers and students to study the science involved and to challenge themselves to build their own working solutions to challenges of food production and environmental impact.

At Maker Faire in California this year, Paul Giacomantonio answered questions from students, teachers, and other attendees about the Sun Curve. An estimated crowd of 80,000 visitors went to the Faire and saw the OER Commons and the Sun Curve science lab and hands-on design studio. They were able to develop learning materials and see student designs.

30th Anniversaries

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:32:00 -0400

A little nostalgia about good old 1979. Did you know that in March 1979, Philips demonstrated their Compact Disc publicly for the first time? Wow, 30 years ago. That's a lifetime in tech years. In fact, CDs seem to be coming to the end of their useful life as a technology. I went looking back at 1979 when I read a piece about the 30th anniversary of the first killer application for the business world - VisiCalc. (I think that's a pretty safe claim.)

First, let's back up two years to 1977 when the Apple II was introduced at the first West Coast Computer Faire. The school I was teaching at in that era had TRS-80 computers (maybe a Commodore PET was in the building too), but the Apple II came with color graphics! Those early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, but then came the 5.25 inch floppy disk drive and interface called Disk II. That is why the Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the VisiCalc spreadsheet program in 1979.

VisiCalc created a "business market" for Apple and I think it gave them their real push against Commodore and Tandy.

It was conceived by Dan Bricklin, refined by Bob Frankston, and developed by their company Software Arts. (Distributed by Personal Software; later named VisiCorp)

On Bricklin's site, danbricklin.com, there is plenty of history about the development of VisiCalc, and you can download a working copy of VisiCalc. (Lotus gave permission to post a working copy of the original IBM PC VisiCalc spreadsheet program from 1981. You can run it on a PC under MSDOS under Windows.)

Luckily, what I really associate with 1979 is still running well, patches and bug fixes all applied - my marriage.

TeacherTube MySites

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:12:00 -0400

TeacherTube, a YouTube for teacher videos, is something I wrote about back in 2007 when it launched. Now, like YouTube, they are offering TeacherTube MySite which is a co-branded version of TeacherTube for your school's (K-12 school, college, university or organization) media content.

Typically, schools will upload class videos, school documents, or audio recordings. The school gets a lot of admininstrative controls. You decide what to remove, approve, add, upload.

Of course, it doesn't have to be for the entire school - it could be a showcase for the media of your class or organization in a safe setting. You can allow staff or students to upload media to your site to expand it. You can also customize the look & feel of your site using their designs, adding a background or uploading a logo. You will also have the choice of your own personalized site URL.

It has some privacy and security settings, so you can make your site as visible or as hidden as you want. A personalized MySite will contain no ads. And you can choose to moderate everything on your site - approve members, videos, or comments.

Here's the big BUT - it is not a free service. They have several pricing plans. One option allows you to add more than 20 members/users for just $5 per user with unlimited public views for a year.

I liked the original idea of TeacherTube - teachers uploading videos they created for other teachers to use. I like the idea of allowing schools or teachers to create their own branded site-within-a-site for their content. I have done that with a channel on YouTube for students in my grad course. It's easy and convenient. It's also free. PLus, the YouTube EDU area offers many of the same features. So, I have my doubts about the viability of the "business model" for TeacherTube MySites when there are places to host your branded content without fees.

Redefining Universities and How We Teach and Learn

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:02:00 -0400

A colleague sent me a link to an op-ed from the New York Times titled "End the University As We Know It" which calls for a major overhaul of the traditional university. It is by Mark Taylor, chair of the religion department at Columbia University. He thinks it is time to scrap the the mass-production university model that separates disciplines, actually encourages academics to work on irrelevant topics, and produces too many graduate students.

"Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)."

Does Taylor have any solutions? Yes, he has six suggestions, and believes we should begin with graduate programs and then the undergrad programs.

1. Getting rid of academic departments and making academic work all interdisciplinary
2. Developing interdisciplinary programs that focus on “real” problems
3. Increasing collaboration among institutions using the Net, so that schools don't create redundant strengths
4. Moving away from traditional, citation-packed dissertations in favor of research presented in more contemporary digital formats
5. Helping grad students plan for a life beyond scholarship
6. Imposing mandatory retirement and abolishing tenure so that faculty are responsive and productive.

Though all of these have been suggested over the years, they sound pretty radical packaged this way. I think these times of a bankrupt General Motors, failing newspapers and old media like broadcast television, film and music that haven't caught up are especially ripe times for these ideas. Colleges can be seen as similar institutions that have not responded to changing technologies and economic shifts.

I would add to his list my own list of terms that we deal with in our classrooms that are being redefined - whether we agree with these new definitions or we resist changes to the definitions.
1. WRITING - What is formal writing? What is informal writing? I think we all agree that a research paper fits the former, and that student lecture notes is the latter. What about discussion board postings, blog posts, collaborative documents...?
2. READING - If a student listen to an audiobook, is that reading? Can watching a video presentation take the place of a "reading" for a class?
3. LITERACY - Digital literacy? Media literacy? Web literacy? What does it mean to be literate if reading and writing are changed? (see "Literacy? Which One?" and "NCTE's New Literacies")
4. PUBLISHING - see #1 If I publish a blog post that is hit (read) by 50,000 people, how different is that from publishing that same text in a magazine that has 50,000 subscribers (readers)?
5. OWNERSHIP/INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY/COPYRIGHT - a huge topic. Who owns a collaborative web page? Who wrote a wiki article? How is the open everything movement changing these areas? What is copyleft? Does a Creative Commons license actually protect a work? We say we want students to collaborate (and the "real world" of employment tells us it is an essential skill), but do we encourage it, or do we fear it as a kind of cheating and plagiarism?
6. RESEARCH - Not only the way we do it, but the way we publish it and use it. If I set up RSS feeds to pull content into my reader, am I doing research? Is an RSS feed a research assistant?
7. PRIVACY, especially online, has a new meaning. How much of you is online? How much have you deliberately shared and how much is just there? How private is your classroom, your content, your students' work?
8. CLASS HOURS - The meaning of "work hours" expanded starting with the telephone and in an age of the Blackberry, virtual workspaces and more. It has also happened to "class hours." A decade ago, the only teachers really using course management systems were those teaching at a distance to "online students." Now, every student is an online student and many teachers are using a CMS, blogs, social networks, wikis and other tools to continue the classroom discussion and activities beyond the 3 credit hours listed in the catalog.

I will be presenting in a workshop next week that is part of Seton Hall University's Teaching, Learning & Technology Summer Series. I plan to talk about redefining these topics, so I would appreciate your thoughts on any of them to share with the participants. Are these things being redefined already? Do they need to be redefined, or do we need to maintain traditional definitions in academia? Are there other topics that should be added to the list? Comments appreciated...

Catch the Google Wave

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:11:00 -0400

Bryan commented on my recent Android post and alluded to Google Wave. Wave is a under-development app that pushes what is possible in the browser. It was given a developer preview at Google I/O. There is a video (80 minutes) of I/O you can view (including a few crashes).

Google Wave is for communication and collaboration on the web. It will launch later this year. It is open source and they will rely on the community to help build the tool.

It is conjecture now, but I can imagine this tool easily being used for synchronous communication in courses. I can also imagine a time, not so far in the future, when we can build our own "learning management system" using free and open tools. Take note Blackboard.

Google defines a wave this way:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

They demonstrated using Orkut with Wave, so I guess Orkut is still very active though it still has not gained a big user base in the U.S. (I haven't used it in any serious way since 2006.) Of course, Wave also works with an Android phone or iPhone.

Some parts of this app aren't even supported in HTML 5, so it is pushing the walls of the box.

Perhaps, Wave is an answer to the question "What would email look like if it was just being developed today?" Real-time collaboration. Natural language tools. Wave's concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time.

If you are on the tech side of things, watch their tech video. Developer types can learn how to put waves in your site and build wave extensions with the Google Wave APIs. Google Wave uses an open protocol, so anyone can build their own wave system.

This is all (standard procedure for Google) very "beta" for now, but you can watch the video, sign up for updates and, if you are the tech type, learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.

Tell Your Story In 30 Slides

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:34:00 -0400

Passing along this from Slideshare. It sounds like an interesting class assignment even if you don't care about the contest aspect. Since storytelling is already pretty popular at SlideShare, it seems a good fit.

Tell Us A Story in 30 Slides - The weather is heating up, schools are letting out and it's time for a sizzling summer contest. Presentations are a great medium for storytelling, allowing you to mashup words and pictures, and storytelling is pretty popular at SlideShare, so we are proud to be co-hosting this summer contest with our friends at Fuze Meeting. They have a great new online meeting service that allows you to present your content online in beautiful HD quality.
Your entry to the contest can be about anything. A story about you, your travels, or something you love. Just tell it with words and pictures and in 30 slides. Everyone who enters the contest gets a free Fuze Meeting account ($270 value). More on how to enter contest here. Also check out this article about how to build community using Slideshare.

Fuze Meeting & SlideShare "Tell A Story" Contest

Invasion of the Androids

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:09:00 -0400

Photo by Cedric

According to a New York Times tech blog,Google Android is making a bid to take over the smartphone market by the end of this year with probably 18+ devices that use their open-source operating system scheduled for 2009 release.

These Android units will be made by perhaps nine separate manufacturers. Right now, it is just HTC (T-Mobile G1 and HTC Magic for Europe), but add Garmin, Samsung, Sony Ericsson to the invasion force.

This invasion won't be an easy one though. Google expects the tougher competition for U.S. carriers to slow the adoption rate here compared to Europe. (The second half of the year and especially the end-of-year holidays are their big sales time.)

Android phones won't just roll over the competition. BlackBerry (Research In Motion), the new Palm Pre, and talk of a new Apple iPhone model that might be announced in early June will all offer a strong defense.

Android software is also up against Microsoft's latest version of their Windows Mobile software, Apple's iPhone 3.0 OS, whatever might be new in the BlackBerry line and Palm's new webOS. To further fill the crowded skies of mobile signals, Nokia has a Symbian platform and there are also some Linux-based handsets that will appear by year end.

Open Textbooks (and more) From OER

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:37:00 -0400

I have written a few times about the open textbook movement, but there are other significant efforts beyond the sites I have discussed.

Open textbooks address problems of access, high cost, and in avoiding outdated static content. Students may be most interested in significantly reduced costs. (K-12 school districts
would also be interested in reduced budgets.) I would hope that faculty would be interested in providing more dynamic texts.

I wanted to post something today about Open Educational Resources (OER) which offers teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. The resources often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.

The kinds of materials you will find in OER includes:
- Full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes.
- Interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics.
- Adaptations of existing open work.
- Electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
- Elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets, and activities that are aligned with state standards.

You can do a search and generate a list of Open Textbooks curated on OER Commons on subjects ranging from calculus to Chinese and from eMarketing to physics.

Generally, an open textbook has a license allowing it to be used, shared, modified, and printed without charge to the user. They can be available to download and print in various file formats from the
content provider or an OER repository. Open textbooks include public domain books, existing textbooks with alternative licensing, and new textbooks created specifically as OER. Offered for free online, they can also include easy ways to print low-cost and customizable sections or entire copies of the book.

What Kind of Tech User Are You?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:29:00 -0400

Is Facebook your window to your social world? Is your mobile device the last thing you put aside before shutting the light out at night? Or does the deluge of digital information leave you flat and the ring of your cell phone leave you cranky?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a survey online that will place you in one of their Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users. (The group had previously done a similar typology of tech users incorporating
attitudes towards the mobile web and released the report “The Mobile Difference.)

You can take the 14 question online quiz and find out which of their 10 types is closest to your behaviors.

According to them, I am a "Digital Collaborator."

You use information technology to work with and share your creations with others. You are enthusiastic about how ICTs help you connect with others and confident in your ability to manage digital devices and information. For you, the digital commons can be a camp, a lab, or a theater group – places to gather with others to develop something new.

You can also answer their survey on What Are You Doing Online and explore their data. For example, an April 2009 survey found that the number of online adults who have used online classified ads has more than doubled in the past four years. Almost half (49%) of internet users say they have ever used online classified sites, compared with 22% of online adults who had done so in 2005. On any given day about a tenth of internet users (9%) visit online classified sites, up from 4% in 2005. The study points to the growing importance of such sites to internet users and reflect the changes in the audience for classified ads – both those who place them and those who make purchases – that have devastated a key revenue source for traditional newspapers.

Commencement Speakers

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:26:00 -0400

It is the season of commencement speeches. I have sat through a few myself this past week. Despite a few decades in academia, I can't really recall ever hearing one that had any lasting impact on me.

It is a tough gig - one I would not want for myself.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, told students that rewards will come to those who go out and make mistakes because they take new chances. He also suggested that they will need to turn off their computers and phones "and discover all that is human around us." He recommends they use the live search of the real world and that "Nothing beats holding
the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps."

You didn't have to sit through the speech at UPenn, but if you want to check it out on Google's YouTube, the speech is available. With a running time of only 12 minutes (and no hot sun to endure), it is doable. The video doesn't give us a view of the students, but I doubt that they were very different from others I have seen lately - which means a good number of them were using their cell phones while he spoke.

Memorial Days

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 25 May 2009 02:01:31 -0400

Created with Stripgenerator a free project to embrace blogging and comic strip creation culture.

Using Streaming Video As Prewriting

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:20:00 -0400

I did a session this week for faculty about using video as a pre-writing activity. I'm starting to think of video - especially when it is segmented into clips about specific things - as very similar to using readings.

I know that students who are given a choice of viewing two 10 minute video clips on Shakespeare's language or reading about 20 minutes about it will more often choose the videos. I also know that many instructors are uncomfortable with equating doing that reading with viewing the videos.

I also know that you will encounter some of the problems and benefits no matter which one you assign. Let's say that I want my students to read or watch background materials before a class. I want to start the class with a discussion about those materials. The students who did the reading and those who watched the videos will both be bale to contribute to the discussion. Those who did not read or view will not be able to add much to the discussion. Not a big difference.

As a quick sample, I created on-the-fly a playlist of three videos that I could use to have students get some background for a discussion on how today's English shows the influences of the past. This first video I found on YouTube is a discussion of a Spanish/English connection which might be of additional interest to our PCCC Hispanic students.  "Shakespeare and the Spanish Connection" from the University of California http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBXWn00Cc-8 runs 28:10 minutes. This documentary covers key relationships between the two theater traditions of Spain and England, including materials from performances in New Mexico and California.

"Debate Over a Pure English" is from the larger The Story of English. I selected a 4 minute clip titled "The Inkhorn Controversy" which refers to a debate among English scholars over whether the English language should eliminate Latin and Greek words and return to its Anglo-Saxon roots. It is from our Films On Demand subscription collection (which is why I can't link to the actual video here). The feature I like with the service is that I can bookmark clips from a longer video and give students a link to it.

A longer video is an episode from the Charlie Rose program called "Shakespeare in Literature and Film" (PBS -57:47) It's great that is available freely on Google Video, but I can't "bookmark" or excerpt the video. At best, I could provide a time reference for students and they could fast-forward to it.

Here are some resources I suggested that are freely available. The advantages in using these are that there is no subscription, no username/password required, and, in some cases, they can be embedded into a webpage. The disadvantages are that you cannot bookmark or excerpt them, and there is no guarantee that the video will still be available online in the future.

These sources are "educational"

1. http://www.techreview.com/video/   at MIT
2. http://wws.princeton.edu/webmedia/ at the Princeton Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs
3. http://teachertube.com/ an online community of teachers sharing instructional videos The videos range over the entire K-20 levels.
4. NJVid http://www.wpunj.edu/njvid/ is a very new project that is now collecting both commercial video and content produced by NJ colleges and groups for streaming distribution. PCCC is a beta site for 2009. A sample title already there is "Newark : the slow road back," a 58 minute film made 20 years after the 1967 riots that is in the Government, Politics, Law section of the collection.
5. Many universities have their own YouTube channels, such as the University of California on YouTube and other groups such as Internet2 offer video for the higher ed community - The Research Channel

Here are a few sources that offer good "serious" video:

1. http://www.edge.org/edge_video.html
2. http://www.ted.com/   TED Talks

I would also recommend these "commercial" (but free) video sites. Yes, there is a lot of entertainment programming here (All work and no play...) but there is also g=good news, talk and documentary content.

1. http://www.hulu.com/
2. http://boxee.tv/
3. http://www.veoh.com/
4. http://current.com/
5. http://tvjersey.com/ has Jersey-centric video that might be useful to those of us here in NJ.
6. "cable channels" such as The History Channel http://www.history.com/ offer much of their content online
7. http://www.cbs.com and other networks offer many of their shows online. For example, I could see a teacher using segments (and they are segmented) from a program like CBS' 60 Minutes.

Wolfram Alpha: A Computational Knowledge Engine

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:18:00 -0400

Stephen Wolfram is a theorist best known for his work in cellular automata and the computer program Mathematica. His company, Wolfram Research, launched Wolfram Alpha this past weekend. It had a few opening weekend technical glitches, but the new "computational knowledge engine" is live.

Wolfram Alpha (or WolframAlpha or Wolfram|Alpha, I have seen all three online) is not a search engine, but I'll bet that Google is watching Alpha closely. It has also been described as an "answer-engine."

It answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from public structured data. It gives you an answer, unlike a search engine which provides a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer. "Computes" is a good way to describe the engine which is built upon Mathematica. The answers are often numerical and sometimes will be presented as visualizations (charts, graphs etc.).

Alpha is also not a "semantic search engine" which will index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one of them, but it will try to interpret your query.

If you type in a month/day/year, it can pull any data about that particular date. I tried my birth day. Wikipedia has no "answer" to that. Google has more than 4,170,000 results. Neither of those is satisfactory. Not that this is very heavy research, but I was born on a Tuesday ("Tuesday's child is full of grace.") and I have been on the planet for 20,299 days.

I entered my hometown and it guessed (based on my IP address) that I wanted the city by that name in New Jersey (Correct). I tried putting in my zip code and it told me the number in Roman numerals, the prime factorization and the binary form of it. Hmmmm... With the preface "zip code," it found the town - and the average household income, average house value, that there are 5920 mail receptacles, that the temperature is 55 degrees and the humidity is 35%.

Alpha doesn't need to be populated with information since it is pulling current data, so it has the basics on Passaic County Community College as well as NJIT (though I needed to write out the college names).

I input "population of Newark, NJ / Paterson" and it tells me 1.873, gives me the populations of both and a chart of the history of - something - it's not labeled, so it might be Paterson or Newark or something else.

I input "Microsoft Apple" and it guessed I wanted stock information and it gave a bunch of it, including a comparative chart. (Microsoft is worth more but their ups and downs have actually been very similar.)

Now, final test. Totally not mathematical or data. I typed in my surname, expecting either nothing to show up, or a slew of data I don't want public (like my salary, home phone, etc.). Instead, it interpreted Ronkowitz as "Boskowitz then Boskovice,Jihomoravsky,Czech Republic" which, of course, is not me. The weird thing is that little village is just a few hours drive from my grandparents birthplace and hometown. Try that Google!

Try some pre-formatted sample queries in discrete math, technology, words and linguistics, sports & games, music or education.

I definitely recommend that you watch the introductory screencast before giving it a trial run. The video does a nice job of showing examples from simple to complex.

ABC News Teams Up With Twitter

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:54:00 -0400

Here's a strange new use of Twitter. The ABC News program Nightline is teaming up with Twitter to develop a new program called NightTline. This 30 minute program will be hosted by the show's anchors and correspondents, but it will offer a forum for viewers to simultaneously discuss and debate the news of the day using Twitter.

You can watch the program online at the show's page at ABCNEWS.com and you watch (in the traditional sense) via ABC News Now, the network's 24-hour digital channel.

They will be adding some new tech (like a visualization of Twitter using Pixel touch screen technology).

The first episode was broadcast on May 13th (12:30 p.m. ET).

Nightline's anchors and correspondents already had more than 1 million Twitter followers before this new program.

Is this traditional media trying to jump on a trend? Is this really news? Will it last?

"Nightline" page at ABCNEWS.com

Nicholas Flamel and the Philosopher's Stone

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:08:00 -0400

From my Teachable Moments file...

In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Nicholas Flamel is the creator of the "Philosopher's Stone" which allows its owner to live forever. (In the United Staes, that book was titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the publishers, no doubt, believing that the whiff of philosophy would chase away young readers.)

Mr. Potter is fictional, but Nicolas Flamel lived during the late 14th and early 15th centuries in France. A scholar and scribe, Flamel did devote his life to trying to understand a mysterious book filled with encoded alchemical symbols that some believed held the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone. Some people believed that Flamel actually did create such a stone - though his death in 1417 made that harder to believe. He would be 666 years old now.

The incredible interest that young readers have shown for the Harry Potter series (adults too - I am a big fan of the books) is just the kind of open door that should have teachers taking students inside the real world of the books. The appearance of a new movie in the series this year will rekindle that interest.

Nicolas Flamel was a successful scrivener and manuscript-seller who developed a posthumous reputation as an alchemist. An alchemical book, published in Paris in 1612 as Livre des figures hiéroglypiques and in London in 1624 as Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures was attributed to Flamel.

The publisher of that book said in the introduction that Flamel had made it his life's work to understand the text of a mysterious 21-page book he had purchased. It may have been a copy of the original Book of Abraham the Mage. (Is this starting to sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel?) The myth surrounding him is that he succeeded at making the Philosopher's Stone (which also turns lead into gold) and that he and his wife achieved immortality. You can visit Flamel's house which is now the oldest house in Paris.

Michael Scott has written a young adult novel, The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. Though it runs about 375 pages, it is available for a limited time free from Powell’s web site in a pdf version, and, of course, you can buy a copy in the format that Flamel would have actually used himself - magical paper.

And you can point students to many sites online with information about the real side of the books they love.

For example, on the U.S. National Library of Medicine website (sounds like actual research!) there is information on Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter that includes Flamel and other historical figures. Maybe the next time you send them to the site it will be for a science or history assignment.

Angel User Conference

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:42:00 -0400

Just a quick post tonight - the Angel User Conference starts tomorrow in Chicago. I will be curious to hear about what comes out of that event concerning the purchase of Angel Learning by Blackboard. The FAQs provided by Blackboard on the acquisition certainly don't answer user questions, but that document does say:

"We believe this is a great opportunity to bring the innovations and benefits of Blackboard to the ANGEL community and the key features and functionality of ANGEL to the Blackboard community. During the week of May 11th at the ANGEL User Conference, we will provide more information about the road ahead for both the ANGEL and Blackboard solutions."

If you are attending the conference, post a comment below and let us know what's being said by the companies AND by users.

You can follow the conference action via Twitter @auc09

Open Textbook Project

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:22:00 -0400

In April 2008, the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources CCCOER launched the Community College Open Textbook (CCOT) Project, funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with the goals to centralize critical open textbook information for use by community college professors and other interested parties, and to document sustainable workflow approaches for producing, maintaining, and disseminating open textbooks.

What are the ways to make free, open textbooks a sustainable resource for faculty and students?

We can start by asking, "What is an Open Textbook?" That is something still being defined, but some working standards are that it is:

- free, or very nearly free
- easy to use, get (download) and distribute
- editable so instructors can customize content
- cross-platform compatible
- printable
- accessible so it works with adaptive technologies

You can help shape and define open textbooks by adding your voice to the standards, guide development, and vetting procedure to review textbooks and recommend texts that meet those quality standards.

Right now you can browse textbooks by subject but reviews are just beginning.

Math is the first area that is being reviewed and there are open texts on Applied Finite Mathematics, Dimensions (geometry), Elementary Algebra and Fundamentals of Mathematics. For example, if you look at Understanding Algebra and then check a review of it, you can see the rubric being used and comments on each of the existing chapters.

There is also an online meeting place for those involved in the project at http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/ using the popular Ning social networking platform.

It Takes a Consortium to Support Open Textbooks is a good introductory article from Educause Review about the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources efforts.

Dr. David Yonutas, Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, at Santa Fe College reports the launch of an initiative at his college to promote the use of digital textbooks. His argument, which has bee well-recieived, includes:
1. Digital texts require computers. Fostering a "Go Green, Print Less" culture at our campus and digital texts are a component of this culture.
2. Students receive money for technology as part of their financial aid awards.
3. Faculty are reluctant to adopt a "You MUST purchase a laptop" policy at the college because of hardships of cost.
4. Many Netbooks now cost less than $300, so using ONLY two or three digital texts that are OERs OVER HIS OR HER ENTIRE CAREER AT THE COLLEGE would save the student more than enough money to purchase the Netbook.

Visit Community College Open Textbook Project

Connexions is an open-source platform and open-access repository for open educational resources, enabling the creation, sharing, modification, and vetting of open educational material accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime via the World Wide Web.

Mary Zedeck at Seton Hall passed on a link to a call for manuscripts for an upcoming special issue of Innovate on "The Future of the Textbook."

Innovate is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology to enhance education and training in academic, commercial, and governmental settings.

The projected publication date is December/January 2010. This special issue is on the future of one key element of “old school” education that survives in a Web 2.0 world: the textbook.The questions that the issue will explore are good questions for any discussion you might be starting on the future of textbooks. If you teach, how do your students feel about e-textbooks?

1. What will textbooks look like in the future? Will the textbook as we know it continue to exist in some recognizable form, or is the future of the textbook limited?
2. How will emerging technology (downloadable textbooks, Kindles and cell-phone-sized readers) transform the content, function, and uses of thetextbook?
3. How can textbooks be made accessible and affordable for disadvantaged learners and those in developing countries lacking the
resources to acquire and maintain print textbooks?
4. What is the current state-of-the-art in textbooks? How are K-21 educators already experimenting with e-textbooks and other innovations? What can these experiments tell us about the future of the textbook?
5. What role will wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies play in the
textbook of the future?
6. How can the textbooks of the future incorporate the best features of constructivist and authentic learning principles, by tailoring content
to individual learner needs (including the needs of disabled learners) or through other technological innovations?
7. How will textbooks shape the interaction between teacher and student and the role of the teacher in education?
8. What developments -- in technology, in funding, in pedagogical theory, and in politics and copyright law -- will be required to make e-textbooks readily available, especially to students in developing countries?

If you would like to contribute a manuscript on this topic, review their submission guidelines. Deadline May 31, 2009.

Reviewing Colleges With Unigo

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:00:00 -0400

We just passed that magic mark in the calendar when incoming college students made their decision about what college to attend. One new service that I came across is Unigo.

Unigo is a new platform and it uses current college students to add content - reviews, photos, videos, documents - with high school students who are looking to find out what life is really like at a college. (It covers North American colleges.) Users can also befriend content providers.

I checked out some local New Jersey schools - NJIT, Rutgers, Seton Hall - to see what was being shared. The NJIT page had an image that certainly looked like an advertisement from the college, but when I checked with some people I know at NJIT, they had no knowledge that the university had purchased any advertising there. Now, there are non-NJIT ads on the pages.

Most of you reading this in the United States probably used the fat, paperback editions of the popular college guides to review colleges. When my own sons were applying, DVDs from the college were popular. But the current high schoolers expect to find the information they want online, and they don't necessarily trust the contenr provided by the college admissions office. That probably includes many of those college-sponsored student bloggers who are sometimes viewed as not really being "independent" bloggers.

Unigo doesn't have all the colleges covered at this point. PCCC where I am full-time doesn't have any presence and I was unable to find any two-year schools.

Blackboard To Buy Angel Learning

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:29:00 -0400

Blackboard Inc. announced today that it plans to buy Angel Learning, a rival course-management software company.

In 2002, Blackboard acquired a competing CMS, Prometheus, from George Washington University, and in 2005, they bought their main competitor, WebCT.

Blackboard will pay a reported $80-million in cash and $15-million in stock for Angel Learning. Both companies have approved the deal, and Blackboard expects the arrangement to become final by the end of May.

The Angel CMS was first developed at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis which started a company called CyberLearning Labs (later Angel Learning) to market it as a product to other institutions. The university is still the largest company shareholder.

The acquisition leaves Desire2Learn as Blackboard's main competitor. Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a preliminary ruling rejecting all 57 claims in a software patent that Blackboard Inc. had made to successfully sue rival Desire2Learn for infringement. That battle is still not finished and the re-examination process could drag on for years because of the many chances that Blackboard has to appeal... unless they buy out Desire2Learn too.

The Future of E-learning Is Social Learning

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:50:00 -0400

My title, "The future of e-learning is social learning," is taken from one of Jane Knight's short, introductory presentations on social learning in organizations. It's a simple enough statement, but I think it is quite true. If any educational results come from the explosion of social sites and tools in the past few years, e-learning is certain to be the first to be affected.

I have to say that the one online course that I amstill teaching addresses all of the tools she talks about in her presentation except for Elgg. (see below)

This introductory presentation covers: What is Social Learning? Social Learning platforms, and the role of Social Learning Professionals.

The future of e-learning is social learning

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

Elgg was started in 2004 and allows you to create your own online community. It is free and open source and powers all kinds of social networks in education, business and for individual hobbyists. It has good features, but since I teach within Moodle, I haven't felt the need to create an outside social network for a class.

You Don't Have To Quote Me On It

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:10:00 -0400

This morning, a friend sent me a message with a few lines that sounded like a quote from - a song? a poem? - probably expecting that I would get the allusion. I did not recognize it. So, of course, I did a search and it turned up in a number of places. But the one at the top was a site I haven't used in a while, and you may not know exists.

That site is Wikiquote which is a free online compendium of sourced quotations from notable people and creative works in every language. Since it is an offshoot of Wikipedia, it generally includes links to Wikipedia for further information.

You should check out the site, but I would also recommend that you experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can edit pages on the wiki (but your changes are not saved and can't "damage" the wiki). You will need to log in with a free account to start actual contributing to Wikiquote.

You can search categories such as People (Douglas Adams • Dante Alighieri • Aristotle • Emily Brontë • Buddha) or in Literary works (Dune • Fahrenheit 451 • Leaves of Grass • The Little Prince • The Lord of the Rings,) or in Films (Groundhog Day • Harvey • The Hours • It's a Wonderful Life • Life of Brian) and TV shows, proverbs and themes. Plus, because it is the Web, you will find people with new celebrity quoted there from viral, singing sensation Susan Boyle to the current United States Secretary of the Treasury,Timothy Geithner.

The Community Portal that gives you information on how to contribute to the wiki and a Village Pump area where users post questions.

Though Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotation. Tell me what you know," he also said "A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good."

If uou're not a wiki user of any kind, try these quotes on wikis from Ward Cunningham, a computer programmer, who is best known as the inventor of the first wiki, called WikiWikiWeb, and as one of the pioneers in patterns and Extreme Programming.

"Wiki has a feel of brainstorming, though it's not as interactive. You can do 10 minutes of brainstorming, and 30 minutes of analysis of the product of that brainstorming, and have something in 45 minutes. The pace on wiki is slower. You could write a page about an idea, or maybe a page about a bunch of ideas. Then you could come back in a week and see what's developed on that page."

"A wiki is always in the process of being organized. But for every hour spent organizing, two more hours are spent adding new material. So the status quo for a wiki is always partially organized."

"What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before."