Group items tagged

"Big data is the new business black. It's a catch-all phrase for the billions of transactions and other bits of information about their customers, suppliers and operations logged by businesses and governments the world over every day. Yesterday's storage problem has become today's strategic asset. Turns out there's gold in them thar files."

"This webinar will examine the social networks that have become established by educators. It will examine their scope, audience and the different tools that can be used to connect with these online learning communities. It will look at how teachers can connect to these communities with mobile phones, tablet devices and computers, online behaviour, how information is shared, how to control your content, how to find material and how to leverage this to best advantage. It will also consider some of the ethical issues and dilemmas that must be considered. "

The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England's schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary has announced. It will be replaced by an "open source" curriculum in computer science and programming designed with the help of universities and industry.

"Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a device that can render digital 3D content physically and which could change the way we interact with PCs ... In a video, the inFORM was shown to be used for 3D modelling, viewing bar charts, maths education and controlling media (like the volume of a radio), among many other things."

Asking "who would take my place" gives you all the information you need to start the more detailed aspects of succession planning, and is a question you should ask at least quarterly of your key personnel to ensure that you will not be left in a dangerous position should one of them suddenly depart due to injury, scandal, buses driven by aliens, or anything in between.

Who would tale your place?

"BlastFollow enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests en masse. This web site is a production of Triangle Information Solutions. To use BlastFollow, simply enter a favorite hashtag (for example, "americanidol") in the box below. Then, click the "Get Users!" button. After a few seconds, you will see the number of users who tweeted with that hashtag recently. Then, you need only enter your Twitter name and password and click "Blast!" You will start following all of those users. You can usually see the progress on a user-by-user basis."

"You've probably seen them in newspapers, magazines or other paper-based publications: two-dimensional bar codes, called quick response codes (QR codes). What are they? They have been described as paper-based hyperlinks, and this is a good description. You simply take a picture of a QR code with your smart phone, and you get redirected to a website using your cell phone's browser. They can also be used digitally-you can append a QR code to a Tweet, or they can be displayed on a web page to transfer contact information directly to a cell phone, for example. This technology is blurring the distinction between smart phones, digital destination and content, and paper-based communication mediums."

"In the course of the next 10 years, a new generation-Generation C-will emerge. Born after 1990, these "digital natives," just now beginning to attend university and enter the work- force, will transform the world as we know it. Their interests will help drive massive change in how people around the world socialize, work, and live their passions-and in the information and communication technologies they use to do so."

Think you know about searching with Google, then take this activity to find out how much you do know and at the same time inform an online research study.

DeweyDigger.com is a visual search portal where you can "Explore knowledge via the Dewey Decimal Classification; just clickety-click."  On the splash page you are presented with the main Dewey Numbers and an ever-changing interactive panorama showing images from these listings.  Next you need to click on an image to access a cloud tag of terms in that call number.  From there you can select a tag and then select a search or research tool to locate information.

Foller.me is a Twitter service that can provide you with the most detailed information about a specific Twitter user in the least amount of time! Here's how it works. You input a Twitter name into the searchbox and hit enter. Foller.me gets access to the profile of that user via the Twitter API, scans all the public info and the latest 200 tweets! In general, you'd read those 200 messages to get to know what that specific user is all about, right? Well you don't have to! Foller.me has done that for you already, and provides you only with the most significant parts of those 200 tweets. It builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, all based on the user's recent activity, AND excluding all stop words! Isn't that great?

This is a fabulous introduction to using Diigo in schools. "Welcome to Student Learning with Diigo. This site was completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of of ISLT 9440, Learning with the Internet, a graduate class, during the Fall 2010 from the University of Missouri. Educators, worldwide, have enjoyed the use of this social bookmarking site. Diigo is a great web-based tool for teachers to utilize, to motivate, and to engage students of all ages in the learning process. We invite you to explore the various features of Diigo. Become educated and informed on the powerful use of Diigo for student learning. Learn how this research tool can enhance classroom instruction and promote higher levels of student collaboration. As you navigate through our site you will see examples of valuable lessons and resources, all displayed for your use. Set up your account now. This research tool is every educator's dream."

"The Australian Government's cybersafety help button provides internet users, particularly children and young people, with easy online access to cybersafety information and assistance available in Australia. "

"Here we'll slowly but surely present our small team's effort to preserve, study, and document historic computers .. Have you ever wondered how the chips inside your computer work? How they process information and run programs? Are you maybe a bit let down by the low resolution of chip photographs on the web or by complex diagrams that reveal very little about how circuits work?"

Fascinating computer history project.

"As people share more information about themselves online, the internet, in effect, has created a public transcript of consciousness -- storing our thoughts, locations, social lives and memories in data warehouses all over the world. This has enabled technological advances and shaped our social interactions. It's also really freaked some people out. "

"We are suffering here and there from a cut-and-paste culture bred by the ease with which any of us can locate and save information. Sadly, Google and its relatives give us all a false sense of security and wisdom as we can search for something as elusive as "the truth" and Google delivers an answer in less than ten seconds. Enter "the truth" in Google, elect "I'm Feeling Lucky" and with little hesitation or needless strain or effort we have our answer."

An older but good blog post by Jaymie McKenzie that explores the wisdom we think we are getting when we totally rely on a search engine to deliver the 'answers' instead of activities that are more challenging and worthwhile.

SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save, into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account, and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you left before. What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in synch with what others are doing. In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace. Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently. In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editi

"It's a noble aspiration: being truly digital means no trees die, your information is searchable, sortable, and safely stored in the cloud. We now have access to great tools such as Evernote, Dropbox, and Google's suite of applications, which means that stuff you care about can accessible to you on almost any device and location; on your phone, tablet, and desktop, at home, at the office, and on the move. Yet paper survives."

Google has no shortage of services around the web, but those various information resources often seem disconnected. A new Google interface, called WDYL - or "What Do You Love?" - resolves that by bringing together previews of various specialized Google searches in one place.