teachnology : news

I’m sorry but I just have to say this. I cringe every time I use the term “learning object.” There, I feel better now.

Dan Mitchell and Will Richardson are talking about Learning Objects. As I read their posts I noticed that my son was actually using some real, tangible Learning Objects… As I looked around the living room floor, I also noticed that they were “distributed.” Now we need an aggregator to help collect them. As for notification, the best method is to walk across the carpet barefoot. This method seems to be the best I’ve found when looking for distributed “learning objects” of this type.

Russell Beattie Notebook
Russell Beattie points to a very nice Mozilla/Firefox extension…

It allows you to edit your web page’s CSS in the left sidebar and watch the change in realtime in the browser pane.

I installed this on Firefox and it works very well. Just call it from the Sidebar submenu and the CSS of the page that is currrently in the browser window shows up in a pane to the left. Start to edit the CSS and see the changes instantly. This is great for experimenting on the fly.

Shirky: VoIP - Plan A vs Plan B

Plan B, however, is resistant to this strategy, because while it creates the same value as a phone call, it does so without any of the mechanics that regulation attaches to. No dialing, no phone numbers, no phones even, and, most ominously for the incumbents, no charge to the end user. Vonage may be competition, but they don’t undermine the idea of charging the user the way Skype or Yahoo Instant Messenger do.

An interesting piece by Clay Shirky. As I read this, I kept thinking of the voice conversation that Tom Hoffman and I had recently using iChat and how well that worked. Could hear him clear as day. Also makes me think about my school and how all of our classroom lack telphone service. Some type of hybrid system that interfaces the building phone network with the our data network would go a long way to getting phones in our classrooms.

Hey, Gang, Let’s Make Our Own Supercomputer

Some class science projects get out of hand.

That is certainly the case with Patrick Miller’s graduate course in do-it-yourself supercomputing at the University of San Francisco. On April 3, his students plan to assemble the first “flash mob supercomputer” in the school gym.

While brainstorming about how to build a home-brew computer powerful enough to be added to a list of the world’s 500 fastest computers, Mr. Miller and his students, along with Gregory D. Benson, an associate professor of computer science, came up with the idea of an electronic barn-raising. They decided to build on the concept of flash mobs, the sudden Internet-organized gatherings with no particular purpose that became an unlikely fad last summer.

I like the fact that after they make their try to join the list of the top 500 supercomputers, the computer will be reorganized to serve as the host of a giant multiplayer video game tournament.

The Stanford Daily Online Edition

Increasingly more Stanford professors are using “Weblogging”, more popularly known as “blogging”, in their classrooms. Traditionally used for online social networking — people write diary entries and others reply — blogging is now being used so that students can post messages and participate in discussions.

Ann Davis points to this article and I find it timely. Yesterday I started my Technology Across the Curriculum class at Pacific Univeristy. It is a 2 credit class for students working on their teaching certificate. As I did last term, I am using Moveable Type for a class weblog. The syllabus, assignments and such are posted there, along with other posts that might be of interest to the students. Next session students will begin to use a MT weblog to post assignments and respond to readings. Am going to attempt to teach them about Trackback…. We spent a good part of yesterday’s session learning some of the finer points of weblog use. I’ll post more on this later…

Six Apart is participating in DEMO 2004, and this morning we made some big announcements regarding mobile features for TypePad. You can see some of these features in action at our DEMO or Bust! moblog.

New mobile features from TypePad include, mobile posting to blogs from multiple authors, audio annotations to camera phone posts, and a new Palm client for TypePad.

This is what I’ve been working on for the past several months. It’s a combination of a custom J2ME based mapping client, weblog service and location alerting system. It’s being sold to carriers, not to the general public, but you can play with the public weblog site above. This is the piece I developed. It still needs a lot of hardening and ever more features need to be added to keep up with the TypePads of the world, but in general it’s your standard weblog service, but with the integration of location information and maps.

I have to admit… I’m a sucker for these type of phone applications.