Group items tagged

The Tablet: It’s the most anticipated product of the year.

Geo: The combination of GPS chips in mobile phones, social networks, and increasingly innovative mobile apps means that geolocation is increasingly becoming a necessary feature for any killer app.

Realtime Search: After licensing realtime data streams from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others, Google and Bing are quickly ramping up their realtime search.

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass.

"Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that's been true of every medium ever launched."

Shirky does not own a television. Americans watch, collectively, two hundred billion hours of television a year, and if online social media diverts even just a fraction of that time, he argues, that has to be a good thing. "As I say in the book, even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I'd still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV."

The act of teaching is fundamentally about sharing knowledge. OER embodies the purpose of teaching and is today’s most compelling manifestation of the core values of education in a digital world, that is, to share knowledge freely.

WikiEducator is a flagship project of the OER Foundation

Cape Town Open Education Declaration

I’m in the midst of a great book by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson titled Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, and they spend about 20 pages writing about why the system is so resistant to change. The bottom line, they say, is that “teaching is an inevitably conservative practice.” When embedded in institutions that protect instruction from systemic change, a conservative practice is reinforced by a conserving institution. It is difficult for teachers to implement substantially changed programs when they already have dedicated years adapting to what the traditional system of school offers (36).

great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake.

Google Docs has had a commenting system for almost a year now. That system is a good one that I use for commenting on my students' writing. In fact, I just finished commenting on half a dozen essays.

Right now discussions in Google Docs is only available for new documents. If you created a document prior to this morning, it won't have the discussion feature enabl

Earlier in the year, legislators had promised 100 Mbps by the end of 2015, but on Wednesday the Ministry of Transportation and Communication announced an intermediate step: 1Mbps by July 2010 for Finland’s more than 5 million citizens. The news, reported via the Finnish broadcasting company YLE, makes Finland the first country in the world to declare broadband internet access a right.