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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ben Rimes

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Ben Rimes

Tagxedo - Tag Cloud with Styles - 10 views

www.tagxedo.com

wordle tagxedo word cloud wordcloud

shared by Ben Rimes on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Ben Rimes on 13 Apr 10
     
    Word clouds on steroids, Tagxedo takes the popular word cloud feature of Worlde and turns it into an art form with different shpaes, color schemes, fonts, and many more features. Also allows for uploading of different shapes with a "pro" account.
Ben Rimes

Pennsylvania Civil War Trails in Google Earth - 10 views

www.pacivilwartrails.com/...index.aspx

civil_war history social_studies google_maps

shared by Ben Rimes on 07 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Ben Rimes on 07 Apr 10
     
    Explore historic places, monuments, and museums from Pennsylvania about the Civil Way in Google Earth. State Historical markers are included with short "story stops", battlefields, and several panoramic photographs that cover significant locations. Every placemarks includes links to other locations nearby of interest and direct links to the Pennsylvania Civil War Trails website with additional information.
Ben Rimes

Educational Games, Worksheets & Homework Help for Kids, Parents and Teachers | Game Cla... - 5 views

www.gameclassroom.com

games interactive

shared by Ben Rimes on 07 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Ben Rimes on 07 Apr 10
     
    A directory of educational games, interactives, and activities vetted by veteran teachers to ensure that they meet educational guidelines and standards. Although the directory is advertisement free, the sites linked from it are usually not.
Ben Rimes

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes.com - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...09textbook.html

shared by Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • “In five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks,” said William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools. “They can be better than traditional textbooks.”
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09
       
      What sort of strain would something like this put on many school district's limited bandwidth and IT resources? Just this fall, our online 5th grade math program has encountered numerous problems. When more than just 4 or 5 teachers are using the online text with students, it bogs down the entire network, and brings learning to a crawl. Eliminating traditional paper-based and paid textbooks will not save any money, but rather shift the funds into IT invetment in order to deliver increasingly larger videos, media, and other open-content resources.
Ben Rimes

Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy. - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine - 4 views

www.slate.com/2184487

web2.0 wikipedia digg democracy

shared by Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The same undemocratic underpinnings of Web 2.0 are on display at Digg.com. Digg is a social-bookmarking hub where people submit stories and rate others' submissions; the most popular links gravitate to the site's front page.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09
       
      Interesting that the word "undemocratic" be used for the discription of the Web 2.0 underbelly. While true, the whiz-bang magic of scripts, bots, and other technological "gatekeepers" are constantly altering what flesh and blood individuals have contributed, the programs meant to serve as custodians are themselves written by humans. The tools that we choose to employ do not make the process of web 2.0 any more undemocratic, rather just that much easier to engage and maintain as relevant. The term democracy itself is difficult to define narrowly (http://www.democracy-building.info/definition-democracy.html). There is no clear determination of how a democracy should be run, but rather a system of democratic beliefs, values, and fundamental rights. Provided that any system meets the needs of a democratic group's values and freedoms (liberties), then one could argue that it is indeed a full fledged democracy. There is more importance on the groups' rules and processes possessing a quality of fluidity and malleability in order to meet a changing environment.
  • at Digg.com. Digg is a social-bookmarking hub where people submit stories and rate others' submissions; the most popular links gravitate to the site's front page.
  • While both sites effectively function as oligarchies, they are still democratic in one important sense. Digg and Wikipedia's elite users aren't chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They're the people who participate the most. Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn't feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it's curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they've sought to supplant.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09
       
      Perhaps the problem of disenfranchised and disengaged youth that exists in Europe and the U.S. today isn't that they aren't participating in a healthy way within our democracies, but rather they've found more engaging democracies to participate in online.
  • Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09
     
    Observing and comparing the "democratic" practices that constitute major web 2.0 sites.
Ben Rimes

Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica - CNET News - 7 views

news.cnet.com/...2100-1038_3-5997332.html

wikipedia accuracy britannica

shared by Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • In response to situations like these and others in its history, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has always maintained that the service and its community are built around a self-policing and self-cleaning nature that is supposed to ensure its articles are accurate.
  • Ben Rimes on 29 Sep 09
     
    Brief of s study completed by the journal Nature about the accuracy of Wikipedia as compared to the accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Ben Rimes

The Future of Less: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education - 0 views

futureofless.blogspot.com/...edupunks-are-transforming.html

openglobal week2 edupunk

shared by Ben Rimes on 17 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions
  • "We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."
  • Hulu.com, launched just 18 months ago, is widely considered to be the first Web site to prove that mass broadcast-television viewing as we know it can and will shift online. Hulu did that by being attractive, well-designed, and easy to use, and by having a viable business model with actual paying advertisers -- and soon, subscribers.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • He has also offered five of his courses to anyone on the Web for free; he donates his own time to review nonenrolled students' work, awarding a signed certificate in lieu of course credit. Wiley's most recent open course was formatted as an online role-playing game, with students divided into "guilds" completing "quests" -- a learning community inspired by the world of online gamers. "If you didn't need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university," Wiley says. "We all realize that content is just the first step."
  • If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
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