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Beyond Google -
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Posted by Mr. Byrne at 2:12 PM
Labels: Google, Internet search, teaching technology, Teaching With Technology, Technology Integration, web search, web search strategies
5 comments:
SIS Media Specialist said...
Geesh Richard, another great resource; like your posts are not enough. Many, many thanks. I have followed your blog for about a year and have learned SO MUCH. I understand you are from CT. Any chance we can get you to the joint annual CASL/CECA (Connecticut Association of School Librarians and Connecticut Educators Computer Association) conference next year?
October 24, 2009 10:35 PM
Mr. Byrne said...
Yes, I am originally from Connecticut. In fact, I went to CCSU for freshman year. I'd like to come to CASL/CECA. Can you send me an email? richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers
Thanks.
October 25, 2009 6:47 AM
Linux and Friends said...
Thanks for the amazing document.
I am aware of a few of the resources listed in the document. However, many of the others are new to me. I will definitely check them out.
November 2, 2009 9:45 PM
dunnes said...
I visited and bookmarked four sites from this post! Thank you for the great resource. Students want to use Google rather than stick to the school library catalog, but they need more instruction on how to do this. I have seen too many children search with ineffective terms, and then waste time clicking on their random results.
November 8, 2009 12:38 PM
Lois said...
Beyond Google is a great resource. I wish I had your skills for taking what you learn and putting it together as you do. I love reading your daily blog.
November 15, 2009 10:04 AM
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Beyond Google: Improve Your Search Results
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/10/beyond-google-improve-your-search.html While working with some of my colleagues in a workshop earlier this week, I was reminded that a lot of people aren't familiar with tools
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll
eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces
other reader's aids
codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.
technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.
fourth great change, electronic communication
movable type to the Internet, 524 years;
writing to the codex, 4,300 years;
codex to movable type, 1,150 years;
would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself.
Internet to search engines, nineteen years
search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years;
continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.
continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts.
every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.
news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
News is not what happened but a story about what happened.
aving learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened
newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events
We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission
Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.
Unbelievers used to dismiss Henry Clay Folger's determination to accumulate copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare as the mania of a crank.
When Folger's collection grew beyond three dozen copies, his friends scoffed at him as Forty Folio Folger.
eighteen of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio had never before been printed
only two were reprinted without change from earlier quarto editions
extual stability never existed in the pre-Internet eras.
Piracy was so pervasive in early modern Europe that best-sellers could not be blockbusters as they are today
They abridged, expanded, and reworked texts as they pleased, without worrying about the authors' intentions.
question in perspective by discussing two views of the library, which I would describe as grand illusions—grand and partly true.
o put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
We have come to the problems posed by Google Book Search.
Google proposal seemed to offer a way to make all book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web
will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization
Electronic Enlightenment, a project sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation of Oxford
scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment
notably American Memory sponsored by the Library of Congress[1] and the Valley of the Shadow created at the University of Virginia[2] —have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of databases on this scale
will make research libraries obsolete
2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States.
1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line.
If Google missed this book, and other books like it, the researcher who relied on Google would never be able to locate certain works of great importance.
On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.
For books under copyright, however, Google will probably display only a few lines at a time, which it claims is legal under fair use.
3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize
Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete
5. Google will make mistakes.
Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better.
6. As in the case of microfilm, there is no guarantee that Google's copies will last.
all texts "born digital" belong to an endangered species
7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available?
4. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology.
No single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller will do justice to the endless variety of editions. Serious scholars will have to study and compare many editions, in the original versions, not in the digitized reproductions that Google will sort out according to criteria that probably will have nothing to do with bibliographical scholarship.
8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
ts physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books,
Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library.
I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.
he research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
"
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Where Giz readers talk about stuff we're not already posting about
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SEARCH RESULTS
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links for book Library Mashups by chapter. See also delicious.com/librarymashups
n Library Mashups, Nicole C. Engard and 25 contributors from all over the world walk readers through definitions, summaries, and practical uses of mashups in libraries. Examples range from ways to allow those without programming skills to make simple website updates, to modifying the library OPAC, to using popular sites like Flickr, Yahoo!, LibraryThing, Google Maps, and Delicious to share and combine digital content.
The Bookshare Web Reader is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE 9.0 and above. It allows readers to adjust font size, colors and display format, and takes advantage of Google Chrome’s features to allow students to read books multi-modally, with word-by-word highlighting and text-to-speech.
"we are providing you with a great tool from TED that allows teachers to use engaging videos to create customized lessons. TED Ed Beta enables you to use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-ED, or create lessons from scratch based on videos from YouTube."
We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting.
So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.
The five forms of filtering break into two categories: judgement-based, or mechanical.
However, even experts can’t deal with all of the information available on the subjects that interest them – that’s why they end up specialising.
As we gain skills and knowledge, the amount of information we can process increases. If we invest enough time in learning something, we can reach filter like an expert.
There can also be expert networks – in some sense that is what the original search engines were, and what mahalo.com is trying now. The problem that the original search engines encountered is that the amount of information available on the web expanded so quickly that it outstripped the ability of the network to keep up with it. This led to the development of google’s search algorithm – an example of one of the versions of mechanical filtering: algorithmic.
heingold also provides a pretty good description of the other form of mechanical filtering, heuristic, in his piece on crap detection. Heuristic filtering is based on a set of rules or routines that people can follow to help them sort through the information available to them.
Filtering by itself is important, but it only creates value when you combine it with aggregating and connecting. As Rheingold puts it:
The important part, as I stressed at the beginning, is in your head. It really doesn’t do any good to multiply the amount of information flowing in, and even filtering that information so that only the best gets to you, if you don’t have a mental cognitive and social strategy for how you’re going to deploy your attention. (emphasis added)
I've been seeking a way to explain why I introduce Diigo along with Information fluency skills in the E-Learning for Educators Course.
This article quickly draws the big picture. Folks seeking to become online teachers are pursuing a specialized teaching skill that requires an information filtering strategy as well as what Rheingold calls "a mental cognitive and social strategy for how you're going to deploy your attention."
These tools motivate students to learn, share, and develop presentation and collaboration skills needed in their future careers. Teaching them how to do this now means we are preparing them for their future effectively! Rarely will a student have to fill out a bubble test for their careers, but trust me many will have to prepare presentations, brainstorm ideas, be creative, and collaborate on teams through ICTs.
Focussing on the digital revolution and ignoring the pivotal role that a good school library can play is to achieve only a percentage of what is possible - regardless of how good it seems , it's just not good enough!
"LoudLit.org is a good place to find free audio recordings of famous works of literature. Many websites do this, but what makes LoudLit unique and useful for teachers is the option of reading the text online while listening to the reading of the text."
Cathy Oxley on 23 Nov 09" Beyond Google - AddThis Posted by Mr. Byrne at 2:12 PM Labels: Google, Internet search, teaching technology, Teaching With Technology, Technology Integration, web search, web search strategies 5 comments: SIS Media Specialist said... Geesh Richard, another great resource; like your posts are not enough. Many, many thanks. I have followed your blog for about a year and have learned SO MUCH. I understand you are from CT. Any chance we can get you to the joint annual CASL/CECA (Connecticut Association of School Librarians and Connecticut Educators Computer Association) conference next year? October 24, 2009 10:35 PM Mr. Byrne said... Yes, I am originally from Connecticut. In fact, I went to CCSU for freshman year. I'd like to come to CASL/CECA. Can you send me an email? richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers Thanks. October 25, 2009 6:47 AM Linux and Friends said... Thanks for the amazing document. I am aware of a few of the resources listed in the document. However, many of the others are new to me. I will definitely check them out. November 2, 2009 9:45 PM dunnes said... I visited and bookmarked four sites from this post! Thank you for the great resource. Students want to use Google rather than stick to the school library catalog, but they need more instruction on how to do this. I have seen too many children search with ineffective terms, and then waste time clicking on their random results. November 8, 2009 12:38 PM Lois said... Beyond Google is a great resource. I wish I had your skills for taking what you learn and putting it together as you do. I love reading your daily blog. November 15, 2009 10:04 AM Post a Comment Links to this post Beyond Google: Improve Your Search Results http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/10/beyond-google-improve-your-search.html While working with some of my colleagues in a workshop earlier this week, I was reminded that a lot of people aren't familiar with tools
