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Barbara Lindsey

Global Voices Online » About - 0 views

  • With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?
  • These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting
  • At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world. We aim to do the following:
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  • Global Voices, though headquartered at Harvard Law School, is a co-operative effort of contributors from every continent and dozens of countries.
  • 1) Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world 2) Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves 3) Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution
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    With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?
Barbara Lindsey

Speed Up Your Research with ChunkIt - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

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    Watch the video--well worth the 7 minutes it takes to view. Could prove invaluable for your current and future research needs.
Barbara Lindsey

Using Twitter for Language Study « IdeaLogues - 0 views

  • So how do you find non-English-writing Twits? Serendipity:  Search Twitter for a term you’re interested in, see who’s talking about it.  For example, I searched for “Dokdo,” hoping to learn more about the controversy between Japan and South Korea over the islands known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, and found Mojin, a Japanese Twit I now follow. Twitter Search’s Advanced Search Page:  Select the language you want, put in words you’re interested in, and see what you get.  Note that for Japanese I’ve found it to be a little difficult to use actual Japanese words for some reason… Use FriendFeed’s Rooms to find interesting Twits in your target language.  Here’s a Japanese Room I belong to; here’s a Japanese News Room, although more of the links are in English. Search the followers and followings of a Twit you like.  For example, I like the NHK (Japan’s version of PBS or BBC) Twitter feed, and have found some interesting Twits to follow from the list of who NHK follows.
Barbara Lindsey

FSEM 100C6- Toys as History - 0 views

  • Our readings for this upcoming week’s meetings have all been chosen by you and your classmates in our FSEM workshop.
  • This well-selected item offers an analytical framework to consider and raises relevant questions for our discussion of the other articles and links listed below. Key themes include objects and toys, their relationship with the formation of identity, and our own explorations of the object, toys, and playthings that children (and adults) share.
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    Great use of blog for class collaborative work.
Barbara Lindsey

The Alexandrine Dilemma | the human network - 0 views

  • People were invited to come by and sample the high-quality factual information on offer – and were encouraged to leave their own offerings. The high-quality facts encouraged visitors; some visitors would leave their own contributions, high-quality facts which would encourage more visitors, and so, in a “virtuous cycle”, Wikipedia grew as large as, then far larger than Encyclopedia Britannica.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How does the actual quality and perception of quality of wikipedia affect its acceptance by academia?
  • It wasn’t the server crash that doomed Britannica; when the business minds at Britannica tried to crash through into profitability, that’s when they crashed into the paywall they themselves established.
  • Just a few weeks ago, the European Union launched a new website, Europeana. Europeana is a repository, a collection of cultural heritage of Europe, made freely available to everyone in the world via the Web. From Descartes to Darwin to Debussy, Europeana hopes to become the online cultural showcase of European thought.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But it appears that they and the sites they link to will not allow for unfettered use of their content. Current, restrictive copyright laws are in place, it seems.
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  • there is an almost insatiable interest in factual information made available online
  • rbitrarily restricting access to factual information simply directs the flow around the institution restricting access. Britannica could be earning over a hundred million dollars a year from advertising revenue – that’s what it is projected that Wikipedia could earn, just from banner advertisements, if it ever accepted advertising. But Britannica chose to lock itself away from its audience.
  • under no circumstances do you take yourself off the network.
  • t seems as though many of our institutions are mired in older ways of thinking, where selfishness and protecting the collection are seen as a cardinal virtues. There’s a new logic operating: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.
  • In a landmark settlement of a long-running copyright dispute with book publishers in the United States, Google agreed to pay a license fee to those publishers for their copyrights – even for books out of print. In return, the publishers are allowing Google to index, search and display all of the books they hold under copyright.
  • Each of these texts is indexed and searchable – just as with the books under copyright, but, in this case, the full text is available through Google’s book reader tool. For works under copyright but out-of-print, Google is now acting as the sales agent, translating document searches into book sales for the publishers, who may now see huge “long tail” revenues generated from their catalogues.
  • Since Google is available from every computer connected to the Internet (given that it is available on most mobile handsets, it’s available to nearly every one of the four billion mobile subscribers on the planet), this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.
  • When CD-ROM was introduced, twenty years ago, it was hailed as the “new papyrus,” capable of storing vast amounts of information in a richly hyperlinked format. As the limits of CD-ROM became apparent, the Web became the repository of the hopes of all the archivists and bibliophiles who dreamed of a new Library of Alexandria, a universal library with every text in every tongue freely available to all.
  • We have now gotten as close to that ideal as copyright law will allow;
  • For libraries, Google has established subscription-based fees for access to books covered by copyright.
  • Within another few years, every book within arm’s length of Google (and Google has many, many arms) will be scanned, indexed and accessible through books.google.com. This library can be brought to bear everywhere anyone sits down before a networked screen. This librar
  • The library has been obsolesced because it has become universal; the stacks have gone virtual, sitting behind every screen. Because the idea of the library has become so successful, so universal, it no longer means anything at all. We are all within the library.
  • The central task of the librarian – if I can be so bold as to state something categorically – is to bring order to chaos. The librarian takes a raw pile of information and makes it useful.
  • At its most visible, the book cataloging systems used in all libraries represents the librarian’s best efforts to keep an overwhelming amount of information well-managed and well-ordered.
  • Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project. I can’t tell you why this is, I can only tell you that it looks very foolish and naïve.
  • because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this. We have become a data-centric culture, and are presently drowning in data. It’s difficult enough for us to keep our collections of music and movies well organized; how can we propose to deal with collections that are a hundred thousand times larger?
Barbara Lindsey

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai - CNN.com - 0 views

  • One tweet from "Dupree" appeared to be coming from inside one of the hotels: "Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor." A group of Mumbai-based bloggers turned their Metroblog into a news wire service, while the blog MumbaiHelp offered to help users get through to their family and friends in the city, or to get information about them, and has had a number of successes. Flickr also proved a useful source of haunting images chronicling the aftermath of the attacks. Journalist Vinukumar Ranganathan's stream of photos were published by CNN and other major broadcasters. iReport.com: Are you there? Share your photos, videos and stories A Google Map showing the key locations and buildings with links to news stories and eyewitness accounts, and CNN's iReporters flooded the site with their videos and images of the terror attacks.
  • However, as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies. For example, a rumor that the Indian government was asking tweeters to stop live updates to avoid compromising its security efforts was published and republished on the site.
  • As blogger Tim Mallon put it, "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.
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  • What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted. A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media. Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information
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    Neha Viswanathan, a former regional editor for Southeast Asia and a volunteer at Global Voices, told CNN, "Even before I actually heard of it on the news I saw stuff about this on Twitter.
Barbara Lindsey

Classroom 2.0 LIVE-Resources for 12-12-09-Cell Phones as Classroom Learning T... - 0 views

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    Resources for Liz Kolb's Classroom 2.0 Live presentation on December 12, 2009.
Barbara Lindsey

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting | The Penenberg Post | F... - 0 views

  • But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
  • Like early filmmakers, some of us will seek new ways to express ourselves through multimedia. Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobil devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.
  • where there's chaos, there's opportunity
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  • For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter. Imagine a biography of Wiley Post, the one-eyed pilot from the 1930s who was the first to fly around the world. It would not only offer the entire text of a book but newsreel footage from his era, coverage of his most famous flights, radio interviews, schematics of his plane, interactive maps of his journeys, interviews with aviation historians and pilots of today, a virtual tour of his cockpit and description of every gauge and dial, short profiles of other flyers of his time, photos, hyperlinked endnotes and index, links to other resources on the subject. Social media could be woven into the fabric of the experience--discussion threads and wikis where readers share information, photos, video, and add their own content to Post's story, which would tie them more closely to the book. There's also the potential for additional revenue streams: You could buy MP3s of popular songs from the 1930s, clothes that were the hot thing back then, model airplanes, other printed books, DVDs, journals, and memorabilia. A visionary author could push the boundaries and re-imagine these books in wholly new ways. A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.
  • Serious literature, and even perhaps much fiction will however, will be published in old book form…or maybe in the current “text on screen” form. The point of reading fiction IS to imagine your own characters and use your imagination…that’s why you read rather then watch a video about it!
  • Traditional books (especially literature) will be relegated to smaller, specialty houses and self-publishing, in its infancy, will boom!
  • The question is, how will the media companies (not just book publishers) respond? We're already seeing the effect on newspapers, as their ad revenue (and business model) collapses. Perhaps history can offer another analogy: When home refrigeration became affordable, it posed an existential threat to the large ice-delivery companies. Some of these firms manufactured ice by the ton in order to warehouse and deliver it at retail. They saw the threat, but not the opportunity - didn't realize the value of their core technology, the ice-making equipment itself. They saw only the falloff in their retail delivery logistics model. Had they licensed their chillers, they could have made a fortune. Likewise, buggy-whip-makers could have retooled as purveyors of leather goods for automobiles.
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    But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
Barbara Lindsey

Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - Boing Boing - 0 views

  • Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.
  • The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.
  • And in this case, it's especially poignant, since Kyle's workflow actually matches the practices of real-world programmers and academic computer scientists: coders look at one anothers' examples, use reference implementations, publish their code for review by peers. If you hired a programmer who insisted that none of her co-workers could see her work, you'd immediately fire her -- that's just not how software is written. Kyle's prof's idea of how computer programmers work is exactly what's meant by the pejorative sense of "academic" -- unrealistic, hidebound, and out-of-touch with reality. Bravo to Kyle for standing his ground!
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  • I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer
  • Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."
  • Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?
  • The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.
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    Thx to Russel Tarr
Barbara Lindsey

academhack » Blog Archive » Seriously Can We End This Debate Already - 0 views

  • What you want from a secondary source is a good introduction to a concept, that is mostly reliable, up-to-date, entries for as many topics as possible, connections to where to go to learn more, and easy and ubiquitous (as possible) access. A secondary source is not an in depth analysis which upon reading one is suddenly an expert on said entry or topic, it’s not designed to be. It is just a good overview. No secondary source is going to be completely accurate, or engage in the level of detail and nuance which we want from students, or that is required to fully “know” about a subject.
  • The issue is not that Wikipedia is or is not reliable and thus should be banned in academic environments, rather the issue is that Wikipedia is a secondary source and thus should not be treated as a primary one.
  • Wikipedia has substantial advantages over any prior encyclopedia model.
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  • The breadth of knowledge, its ability to be linked to other knowledge, its cost (free), its up-to-dateness, and its preservation of editorial discussions (it records not only the article but the discussion which produced said article) makes it far more useful. And that doesn’t even begin to address things like how much easier Wikipedia is to use for mash-ups and data extraction, repurposing the information for other reference works.
  • Instead lets talk to students about how appropriately to use secondary sources, how to understand how encyclopedias function, how all encyclopedias are biased, all knowledge is discursive, and focus on teaching students how to judge credibility and accuracy instead of outsourcing it to people at Britannica.
Barbara Lindsey

Parents Are a Secret Weapon Just Waiting to Be Discovered | Edutopia - 0 views

  • These high-performing schools, say Henderson and Mapp, focus on building trusting, collaborative relationships among teachers, families, and community members. They recognize, respect, and address families' needs, as well as class and cultural differences. And they embrace a philosophy of partnership in which power and responsibility are shared.
  • partnering with parents isn't the reality in many schools throughout the country.
  • The most recent MetLife Survey of the American Teacher (the insurance company has conducted an annual teachers' survey since 1984) sheds additional light on this issue. According to the study, new teachers consider engaging and working with parents their greatest challenge (beating out obtaining supplies and maintaining order and discipline in the classroom) and the area they are least prepared to manage during their first year of teaching.
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  • a less-than-welcoming atmosphere, language and cultural barriers, insufficient training for teachers, and lack of parent education or parenting skills.
  • the fifth type of parent involvement: including parents in the decision-making processes at school. (See "Six Types of Parent Involvement," below, for the full list.) Although such partnerships are difficult and require all parties to move out of their comfort zones, they provide the greatest hope for deep and lasting changes in our schools.
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    These high-performing schools, say Henderson and Mapp, focus on building trusting, collaborative relationships among teachers, families, and community members. They recognize, respect, and address families' needs, as well as class and cultural differences. And they embrace a philosophy of partnership in which power and responsibility are shared.
Barbara Lindsey

Technology in the Middle » Blog Archive » In the Classroom: Global Collaboration - 0 views

  • Technology also determined how the project would end. Considering I was using the internet for overseas contact, I decided to look domestically for the conclusion. As a result of just a few minutes effort using emails I found three US museums (see below) who agreed to take our class interview projects for safe keeping in their archives. I was overwhelmed by the interest in our work and was amazed when the US National WWII Museum in New Orleans asked to have us provide links and information for their website. In conclusion, some simple email and wiki-site contact with a handful of schools brought the WWII period to life for Midwestern students in the US like nothing else could have.
  • Poland offered vivid stories and images of invasion, concentration camps, and families torn apart, and my students were able examine perspectives that were not to be found in our text book.
  • After blanketing the world with polite requests for collaboration things began shaping up. My 6th graders were set to work with schools in Turkey, Lebanon, and Morocco. My 7th graders were set to work with schools in Germany, Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, and most importantly Junior High #4 in Poland.
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  • My students were involved in two projects. One was collecting and discussing input from around the world on WWII, and the other was interviewing someone in their own life who had a connection to the war. The combination of the two projects proved powerful. The process connected them with friends and family who told amazing stories of their youth, they were able to social network with other students on the other side of the world, and we managed to slip in a good deal of history when they were not looking.
Barbara Lindsey

Virtual Libraries Are Teaching Treasures | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Another ambitious virtual library project is Europeana, an ongoing effort to digitize the archive, library, museum, and audiovisual collections of all the European Union's 27 nations through a single portal by 2010. "It won't matter which European country holds an item or whether it's in a library, museum, or archive," says Europeana spokesperson Jonathan Purday. "It will be possible to find it and bring it into context with other related materials."
  • "I can work from home when developing curriculum -- I don't need to go to the actual library," says the science and literature teacher, who works at the Lincoln Akerman School, in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.
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    Another ambitious virtual library project is Europeana, an ongoing effort to digitize the archive, library, museum, and audiovisual collections of all the European Union's 27 nations through a single portal by 2010. "It won't matter which European country holds an item or whether it's in a library, museum, or archive," says Europeana spokesperson Jonathan Purday. "It will be possible to find it and bring it into context with other related materials."
Barbara Lindsey

Education Week: Schools Seen as Inhibiting Student Tech. Use - 0 views

  • The report outlines some of the suggestions student participants have offered for improving the use of educational technology in their schools, including: greater access to Web tools and lessons in electronic formats, such as PowerPoint presentations and podcasts; use of educational games and simulations; and links to videoconferences from subject-area experts.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you think this is leveraging social networking?
  • Students, the report argues, are trendsetters in using technology in their personal lives and, more recently, to organize and complete schoolwork.
Barbara Lindsey

50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom | Smart Teaching - 0 views

  • sk students to create study guides for a specific part of the unit you’re
  • Make it a class project to collaboratively write a reference book that others can use.
  • Get your class to create a glossary of terms they use and learn about in new units, adding definitions and images.
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  • Encourage students to submit words that they had trouble with, along with a dictionary entry
  • Let your students share their collective information so that everyone gets a better understanding of the subject.
  • Encourage students to draft rules and policies for the classroom.
  • Make it a class project to create an FAQ for your classroom that will help new students and those that will come in years later.
  • Using a wiki platform, students don’t have to worry about web design, so they can focus on content instead.
  • Save links, documents, and quotes related to units or your classroom as a whole
  • Work with other teachers to create lesson plans and track students’ success.
Barbara Lindsey

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags - 1 views

  • what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
  • The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
  • It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
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