Web 2.0

Presidential Twitter Debate

Very interesting story on NPR about the current presidential twitter debate going on between the Obama and McCain camps. Listen to the store here.

Weekend Edition Sunday, June 22, 2008 – Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a Web site that focuses on the intersection of politics and technology, talks about the Twitter debate between presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama. He also discusses the forum’s upcoming conference.

The story also discusses how Web 2.0 and the internet has and will change democracy, and it even ponders how our country would be different had our founding fathers had access to the internet.

(You can listen in on the twitter debate here or here.)

Wordle

I had to do a quick post on this b/c it’s just too cool to only post in Jaiku about. Wordle takes text and creates a word cloud out of it.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

So, I took my resume, copy/pasted the content into Wordle, and out popped my Wordle resume…

wordle-resume

So basically, you can take a document and quickly see what concepts you focus on. Definitely interesting. (Thanks Jeremy!)

Dilbert Blazes New Trails in Online Sharing?

As I was reading my daily dose of Dilbert, I noticed something in the new widget that displays the comic strip: a button that lets you embed the comic on your site. Like this:

Dilbert.com

I’m guessing since this is the official site, then this is totally legal. Dilbert may not be the first to do this, but it is the first time I have notice anyone that lets you actual embed their content on your own site for free. This is an interesting break through.

There are basically two types of sites that are popular on the Web: content-based sites and services-based sites. Services-based sites are usually pretty good about giving you a widget of some kind that can be embedded on your site – see the Jaiku widget at the side of this blog. Content-based sites have been pretty slow to offer tools like this. Sure – they have RSS feeds or even links to “Digg” an article or whatever – but rarely ever some type of code that lets you put their content, or a widget with their content – on your own site.

I think this could be a great bonus for educators if we see this happening more often. Just think about it – if you see a good article in an online newspaper that would be great for your course – just embed the story in your course blog instead of a link. A really sophisticated widget might even have commenting functionality.

Anyway – just a side note that I found interesting today. I need to get back to my series about the three C’s of social networking for education now….

Instapreneurs in Education

Greetings guys and gals! Great to be back … kind of. I do miss my little gal. Janelle is doing *great*, by the way. :)

I read an article recently in Wired called Rise of the Instapreneur. The article discusses sites that allows anyone to upload designs/blueprints for furniture, houses, clothing, etc., and a user/shopper can browse through these user-generated ideas and actually purchase the final product. It gives the example of a man who designed a piece of furniture, uploaded the design document to a site, made it available to shoppers, and so far two of his pieces have been sold.

So I began to think about how this could affect education, and I began to realize how learners increasingly have the opportunity to get a type of on-the-job training. It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 has affected the areas such as journalism and creative writing with the inception of blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, etc. Students’ work can immediately be published for the world to access, critique, and potentially collaborate with. Now people can publish their ideas and potentially make a profit. What started with sites like Cafe Press that provide the ability to upload homemade graphics and instantly get them printed on t-shirts, ballcaps, etc. is evolving into sites that will allow learners to publish their ideas/projects for the world to peruse and potentially purchase. As a learner, teacher, consumer, and potential designer, I’m intrigued.

Teaching a Class Entirely Through YouTube

I read an interesting article on Wired Campus today called “What Happens When a Course Is Taught Entirely via YouTube?” The basic idea was that a class was taught entirely through YouTube – class interactions were filmed and posted, discussions happened through comments, etc. Of course, this design does violate just about every Instructional Design standard in the world. Not surprisingly, the instructor felt like it was a failure.

I have to say – of course it was. Why design a course entirely in YouTube, only about YouTube? Here are some of my thoughts on this:

  • Why not make it on something more interesting than just YouTube? Why not try to do something on art, history, culture, or a hundred other topics more suited for the medium?
  • Why not use Google Videos in the first place – and keep the videos private?
  • Why not use Google Groups to discuss the videos, and upload other assignments?
  • When you use a site that was not built for social presence, of course you are going to lose social presence and immediacy. Try using some tools that can increase social presence, like maybe Google Sites?

Just taking these suggestions in to account would have negated most of the criticisms on the accompanying blog post. Most of these reflections I would have predicted before the class even happened, but I think this was still an interesting experiment. I am interested to hear if anyone has used Google Sites to teach a course? I am setting something up in there now, and it is an interesting free tool.

Is Moblogging Ready to be the Next Big Thing?

According to Wikipedia, “a moblog is a blog published directly to the web from a phone or other mobile device.” Usually, this is in the form of photos, but videos, text, and audio can also be an option. Moblogging has been around for a while, but seems to have flow under the radar. Many online photo and video sites allow users to share what they capture with their cellphone. Blogger allows users to email in blog entries along with attachments. Several services allow users to record podcasts through their phone.

The problem is, there isn’t one application or site that lets you text in a message, picture, or video to site at the same time that you can record a video, and then format all of that as a blog entry. That would be a sweet online suite.

Also, if you can tell from the brevity of the Wikipedia article, moblogging just isn’t that popular either. I think it could have incredible educational potential. Converge Online published an article this week that looks at hoe one educator is using moblogs in class. Very interesting stuff. See the article here:

Moblogging in Schools

The article points to an actual moblog. Poking around those links leads to other moblog sites. I looked at those sites and saw that several of those are using several sites to hack together a true moblog. Interesting stuff.

Share Papers Online (Like Videos on YouTube)

Have you been feeling like its been a while since a new online web tool has been released? Me, too. I’ve seen several sites that are trying to be better versions of some other popular site, but nothing really that new. I have been seeing a few sites that combine ideas that already exist into a new idea. Scribd‘s new iPaper site looks interesting for educators.

What Scribd basically does is nothing new – on the front page they proclaim that you can “publish yourself online.” Plenty of sites do that, but Scribd (that is hard name to type over and over again) adds a different twist – you can share you papers like you share videos on YouTube. You can upload any popular file format – Microsoft (doc, ppt, pps, xls), OpenOffice (odt, odp, sxw, sxi, etc.), PDF, RTF, text, and even images – or just enter text directly into the website. Documents will get displayed in a Flash-based viewer like on YouTube, which you can also embed on any website that accepts code. People can even comment on your papers.

(SlideShare does does the same thing with PowerPoints, but also gives you the ability to connect your presentation to an audio file and synch a slide show with that file.)

Below is an example of an embedded paper (The 2007 Horizon Report):

Read this doc on Scribd: 2007 Horizon Report

Google for Educators

While it doesn’t seem to have as much of a social networking focus as the soon-to-be-launched Yahoo! Teachers, Google for Educators is already up and ready for anyone to use. It’s been around for a while, but I thought I would highlight it here since we haven’t yet (see Katrina’s post about Yahoo! Teachers for a reference on some of the interesting features being developed there).

What you really have with “Google for Educators” is existing Google tools highlighted for Educators and some nice extra information. They have an email list that tells you about upcoming GfE news, a good set of pages that tells how each tool (like Gmail, Docs, Page maker, etc) can be used in education (here is a good example of ideas for using Blogger in class), free posters for your classroom (including this nice, simple tips for better Google searches), and a discussion group for educators.

With Yahoo! also now creating tools for teachers, it could be interesting to see where competition might take both products. If Google takes this seriously, and really starts to integrate some of it’s existing tools, they could get a good lead in this area. But that will probably only happen if they develop an interest in it.

Yahoo! Teachers

Yahoo! Teachers, currently in beta, is a collaborative tool enabling teachers to easily collect, create, and share teaching materials with others. Yahoo recently opened up the site to beta users for educators wanting an early look at the new tool. Most of the information on the Yahoo! Teachers site and in recent news articles describes the Gobbler. This browser add-on allows educators to quickly grab content, media, and and even entire sites; organize that material easily into projects; create handouts and other teaching content from the gathered material; tag this content; and share it with the rest of the world. (View video demo of the Gobbler here.) Yahoo! Teacher looks promising as a fledgling social networking site for educators.

Zoho Writer Adds New Features That Educators Need

It’s no big secret that I have a lot of love for Zoho. Someday I would like to do a run down of all the tools that Zoho offers. That would be a huge post, or even a series of posts. Today I want to point out some new features of Zoho Writer that make it a great tool for educators – online and off-line.

The coolest news is that Zoho Writer now lets users edit documents off-line. This addresses the biggest draw back for people that weren’t sure about switching from Microsoft to any online document editor: how do you edit documents when you don’t have an Internet connection? Zoho Writer uses Google Gears to store copies of your documents on your local computer. The nice feature is that you can edit those documents and then sync them with your online documents once you go back online.

I tried this out today, and it works really nice. You edit the documents in your browser, even when off-line. Just click a link to switch from online to off-line. The only downside is that not all features are available off-line (like inserting web links or spell check). But a very nice start.

The great thing about this is that teachers wouldn’t have to worry about lost assignments. Work on papers off-line in class, sync with an online account, and students can work on them at home.

Zoho Writer has also taken online document editing to the next level by being the first to allow headers and footers in documents. This combined with a new “Page View” function (lets you see the print layout) now gives me just about every tool I ever used in MS Word.

But let’s not forget that this is all for free online. I am still pulling for someone to create a Moodle integration API.

Also, if you are interested, Zoho explained why they use AJAX instead of Flash for their applications. Good points.