Month: July 2008

NECC CatchUp

One nice thing about NECC is that many presentations are available after the convention has ended. If this opportunity is new to you, you can locate these resources at http://www.kzowebcasting.com/necc/.

I have been taking advantage of this opportunity for the last several days. Today I watched Chris Dede and colleague describe Edtags. Edtags is a social bookmarking site for educators. The primary focus is on tagged links to educational content, but some additional services are available.

I have operated my own bookmarking site for several years. It made sense to me to create a core of focused educational resources for a target audience and then allow this audience to expand this list. My site began as a resource to extend our books, but I have expanded the purpose to include resources of more general educational value. My site and the Harvard site are both built on an open source project named Scuttle and we have each modified the open source resources to extend services.

I would recommend the NECC session available through the link above as a way to understand some of the key ideas behind these sites and what makes them different from general purpose bookmarking sites.

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Filtered at the San Antonio Airport

Free wifi is a good thing. I carry a wireless USB stick, but the connection is slow.

I was pleased to see that the San Antonio airport has free wife, but then I discover that “social networks” are blocked. Evidently the “work” I do is not considered a “legitimate business need”. What is that supposed to mean. Perhaps this is how the kids feel.

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Open source software expands available hardware

I attended Steve Hargadon’s presentation on open source assuming I would learn about new programs and how to find them. There was some of this and this topic may have been the take away for many participants. The new perspective I gained had more to do with hardware.

Hargadon claims that we could likely meet the goal of putting computers in the hands of every students if we would continue to use old computers with open source software. Simply put open source software offers the opportunity to extend the life of older equipment. Hargadon provided an example setup consisting of cast-off equipment – a server and old laptops with hard drives and batteries removed. This type of hardware/software configuration may be sufficient to allow students to participate in Web 2.0 applications. I use several open source programs and I must admit that I am not certain why the demands of these programs are less demanding, but I take his word for this reality.

In addition and I have not considered this issue before, the environmental cost of manufacturing and recycling computers is substantial. Getting more years out of existing hardware reduces this impact on the environment.

Some open source links:

k12opensource.com

k12opentech.org

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Not to be a whiner, but


whiner

Originally uploaded by grabe

There seem to a great number of closed sections this year. This always happens to a limited degree, but the % of closed sessions seems much higher this year. Folks are having to make decisions about sessions that amount fo skipping every other session to get into the sessions they really want to attend. It is not obvious why this is the case – the general attendance is down this year (approx 11K). Perhaps this facility does not offer enough large rooms.

Time to go stand in line. 🙁

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Where have all the bloggers gone?




aloneinblogcafe

Originally uploaded by grabe

What title to attach to this video?

Cindy has a reception to attend and then we are moving on to the Tech4Learning reception. I thought I would be able to socialize in the Bloggers’ Cafe. It looks like the bloggers have given up for the day. No more profound thoughts to share. Just me and my friend the policeman. Not sure what he thinks I am doing here. NECC citizens, the Bloggers’ Cafe is being carefully guarded.

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