Kseniya Simonova - Sand Animation (Україна має талант / Ukraine's Got Talent)
Here’s an experiment using Tagul. I created a bundle in Google Reader of all 42 EdTech sites I follow, then created a word cloud using that bundle. The links only do a Google search, but the cloud is dynamic and will be updated every 12 hours. Here it is:
Roger Ebert’s New Voice
Clip from Ebert’s appearance on Oprah this week, previewing his new custom-made text-to-speech voice made using audio he had previously recorded before losing his ability to talk.
I’m tearing up.
Has Twitter killed RSS? Interesting question. On one hand, more and more people are turning to twitter for their news, updates and links. However, one of the most mainstream uses of RSS feeds is often ignored in these articles: Podcasts. A podcast is really just an RSS feed that contains audio or video. You can either subscribe in a traditional RSS feed reader, like Google Reader, or you can subscribe in a podcast specific reader, like iTunes. Either way, with hundreds of thousands ofpodcasts available, it’s not likely that RSS is going anywhere anytime soon.
The fascinating thing about podcasts is the combination of old media and new media.
When I first started reading about RSS feeds in the late 90s, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around why I would want to use them. The internet was much simpler, if not a little sparse back then. Then three things happened that changed everything for me:
Now we had a robust standard to send out the feeds. We had a web browser that had RSS integrated within it, a one-stop-shop, so to speak. But the big thing that had changed about the web, and what really mades RSS a necessity was blogs. The days of static content that was edited much like a text document were gone. Instead, we had published, periodic updates to sites that were organized chronologically.
It only made since that a chronologically updated site could be tracked by an RSS feed. Now, all you had to do was book a site’s RSS feed in Safari and the web browser would tell you when that particular site was updated. It saved time and ensured that you saw every post at a site, efficiency at its best!
A thumbnail is worth about one hundred words
Earlier today, we added a new view option to your Documents List: thumbnail view.
Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs
We’re happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you’ll be able to upload and…
The Noise 2 Signal Show
I’m exploring the concept of noise to signal and thought I might try a regular podcast/vodcast that provides quick tips to improve your noise to signal ratio.
So in the spirit of play and…
Very interesting TEDTalk from 1984. Cool to see Nicholas Negroponte talking multi-touch interfaces 25 years before they hit mainstream.
The reason I posted the video here, though, is for what he says about computers and education at about the 15:55 mark:
“…use personal computers as a pedagogical medium, but not as teaching machines at all. The whole notion is to use this as an instrument where there is a complete reversal of roles. The child is the teacher, if you will, and the machine is the student.”
He was talking computer programming, logo in particular, but I wonder if that same idea can be applied in the ways computers are used in education today. Instead of a student ‘learning’ from the computer by reading articles on blogs, they could ‘teach’ the computer by writing a blog. Instead of researching on Wikipedia, they can be adding to it.
Maybe I’m stretching the metaphor a little bit, but the video is definitely worth a watch. Oh, and if are wondering what happened to Negroponte over the last 25 years, among other things, he stared all of these:
I’ve wanted to start a blog for a long time. Not because I think I have a lot of important things to say, but because I think the process of writing a blog would be good for me. It would:
Others, particularly Andy and Amanda, encouraged me to start a Wordpress blog for the above reasons. I thought it was a great idea, started looking into Wordpress themes and hosting and now, a few months later, I have a tumblr blog. What gives? Read on to find out why I went with tumblr.
