Several months ago I highlighted Quintura – a search engine that generates both hits and a tag cloud in response to a query. The tag cloud allows the user to modify the original search (click on a tag) for more specific results.
Quintura now offers a beta version of Quintura for Kids. This site applies the same principles but offers what the company sees as a fun interface with suggested content areas not requiring an initial query and a a database of kid-friendly content. Traditional queries are also possible.
A blog post from Weblogg-ed brought my attention to a New York Magazine article entitled “Say Everything“. The article examines the issue of adolescent online openness through a series of personal accounts. The article concludes the behavior we witness online is a function of the following factors:
THEY THINK OF THEMSELVES AS HAVING AN AUDIENCE
THEY HAVE ARCHIVED THEIR ADOLESCENCE
THEIR SKIN IS THICKER THAN YOURS
New ideas?
The concept of audience (imaginary audience and personal fable) is not new as a way of thinking about adolescent behavior. I remember this topic from my early days teaching Adolescent Psych – a kind of egocentricism in which one makes the assumption that others are watching leading to a personal preoccupation with the story being played out. Of course, the Internet as a stage is not imaginary, but as in the FTF imaginary stage, the individual is possible the one paying the most attention.
The notion that we are purposefully creating a personal archive is possibly akin to a personal diary.
So assumed audience and archiving are not new, but the intent to distribute and the actual access of others may be different.
They are tougher. I am not sure I agree – perhaps it is important to act like “you just don’t care.”
WikiMatrix offers an extensive list of wikis and their features. If you are interested in locating software to offer a wiki from your own server, this might be a good place to start.
I continue to run across impressive web applications. Web application is a new term for me, but I think this is an appropriate term to describe applications stored on a remote server run over the Internet using a browser. The latest find is the suite of resources made available by Zoho. Exploring the growing collection (write, spreadsheet, presentation, database) has taken some time. I have struggled to get some to work – I could not get the presentation application to display images I inserted in slide. However, other applications I explored were impressive.
Zoho Writer (image below) offers every feature I use in a word processing program. The application accepts uploads (doc, rtf files) and exports files in several formats back to the desktop if you would rather store your work on your own machine rather than online.
Again, I am not certain where Zoho is headed. Picnik (the image editing program I used to edit the image appearing above and the web app I described earlier intends to offer a “for pay” full featured version and a free reduced feature version once this company has attracted users and moves beyond beta). If you are concerned experimenting with your work products, I would make certain there is an export to desktop option and save often.
I finally was able to get Zoho Show (the presentation app) working – “kind of”. The difficulty I am struggling with involves getting images appearing during the construction phase to show when the slideshow is presented. At present, I cannot explain the variables that explain when this is a problem and when it is not.
The image (second slide) appears on the Windows OS, but not the Mac OS. Well, I was able to see the image when using Safari on the Mac, but the image was very faded. Nothing appeared on the Mac with Firefox. I am concluding this is not my fault (meaning I am not missing a plugin or something) and Zoho Show needs a little more work.
When I was a kid (as if that has ever changed), a snow day meant a break. Once a winter or sometimes once every other winter, we would get enough snow for school (now work) to be cancelled. I have not generated a meaningful post in a while and today was to be the day. However, it started snowing and walking in the snow and taking pictures seemed like a lot more fun.
So today I enjoyed the snow and tomorrow I will have to shovel the snow. Such is life. I am working on more informative posts, but enjoy the snow for now.
Watch the education blogs for the next day or so and you will likely see comments precipitated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Evidently, he and Michael Dell (Dell Computers) were discussing the role of technology in schools during a Texas conference on educational reform. Jobs reportedly suggested that technology would have little educational impact until unions stop protecting poor teachers.
What is interesting at present is that the blogs picking up on this story have been focused on whether a business leader should make such statements considering that the company he represents does well in the education market. I guess those concerned about Apple’s bottom line might take this perspective.
There seem to be many business leaders focused on education lately. We all have opinions on matters we understand only through peripheral vision. Often such views lack clarity, but sometimes a different angle brings new insight.
By the way, the conclusions in “Tough Choices or Tough Times” are far more critical of less competent teachers than anything Jobs said. Perhaps this report, which is far more likely to influence government eduation policy, was not read in detail by the same folks now critical of Jobs. So, if you consider criticism of weak teachers grounds for boycotting Apple, check out the list associated with Tough Choices or Tough Times – perhaps you should sell your stock in Viacom, Lucent, and Motorola. Wait – you should also give up your membership in the Toledo Federation of Teachers and the Communication Workers of America. I see a lot of Republicans on this list – wait there are a couple of democrats…
My personal experience with unions has been minimal – I did have a disagreement with a union rep when as a first-year faculty members in financially depressed New York state. I suggested that the last in, first out retrenchment policy did not encourage my union membership and the alternate “bargaining fee” seemed unnecessary because assurance that union policies were followed was not a service I needed. It was not that I felt the policy was unfair. It just seemed unfair I should have to pay to have it implemented. Perhaps I was young and foolish at the time.
There had to be a better way to make this same point. Perhaps – We need to find a way to offer incentives for effective teachers so that a greater number of capable individuals are attracted to teaching as a vocation.
The New Media Center (in collaboration with Educause) generates an annual prediction of emerging technologies that will influence education and learning. The idea is to identify influences during specific time periods – next year, two-three years, 4-5 years. The report is focused on higher education, but with the exception of technologies K-12 institutions might actively exclude or ignore (e.g., cell phones in second grade, faculty publication) I would think the trends would have general impact.
The predictions:
Coming soon
User-Created Content (flikr, YouTube, blogs – and tags)
Social Networking
2-3 Years
Mobile Phones
Virtual Worlds
4-5 Years
New Scholarship (new models of publication and recognition for publication)
MMEducational Gaming
They describe the identification process as research based (qualitative). It is in a sense – they comb the literature for themes. I would rather see some type of survey that quantifies how widely specific applications are used in actual classroom settings, but I suppose with the exception of the “coming soon” categories this would show very little. At some point someone needs to get beyond describing cool applications that exist here or there and attempt to identify trends that have encouraged a little higher level of adoption. Perhaps this organization should go back to the list of applications/activities identified a couple of years and now survey the frequency of adoption.
I found the wiki associated with this project to be more valuable than the actual report (no offense, but this is the same type of content that seems to be the focus of a couple of keynotes at most conference I have attended recently). The wiki offers plenty of links to examples, connects to del.icio.us links, and seems to develop the arguments in the report in more detail.
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