Web 2.0 Tools for Educators

Brian Benzinger on a blog called "Solution Watch" has written a 3-part series on Web 2.0 sites with potential use for educators. I haven't read the entire series yet, but so far it looks like a great summary - if nothing else just for the list. Check it out.

A Day Without the Internet

Scott Adams (author of the hilarious Dilbert comic strip) writes a funny, and at times very thoughtful, blog. He posted yesterday on what it was like without the Internet for a day. His reaction sounds very much like what mine would be (particularly when he talks about driving somewhere without checking it out first in Google Earth).

Scrybe

There is a very exciting product about to be released in a public beta. Currently you can only see it in a video, but it is already generating a lot of buzz. It is an online organizer (calendar, notes, task list, etc) and if the video is accurate, this is one of the most amazing web-based services I have seen. It is doing some things with AJAX that I have not seen anywhere else. Check it out.

The Zone of Mediocrity

Kathy Sierra has (yet another) great post on her "Creating Passionate Users" blog regarding the Zone of Mediocrity. A definite must-read for anyone tired of doing things the usual way.

Finally!

Whew! It took me years, but at last I finally found it.

Google Earth for Educators

There is a nice post on the Google Earth Blog regarding the use of this amazing software in education. I can't imagine teaching a class without it - I look for excuses to use it when I'm teaching the youth group at my church.

Student Collaboration

I went to a very interesting session today from the University of Pennsylvania. They created a social bookmarking system that allows students, faculty and librarians to tag, create and share content. It was modeled after del.icio.us and it was a great example of the use of Web 2.0 technology in education.

There are some other interesting sites emerging that enable student collaboration outside of the classroom. One is stu.dicio.us which allows students to post their class notes online, and uses a tagging mechanism to link notes from the same class. Another example is NoteMesh which uses a wiki to create a collaborative work space for students to share.

Educause Day 2

Today started with a fascinating keynote from Ray Kurzweil. This is one very smart fella. He started off by reciting the past predictions he has made that came true. It sounded a lot like ego to me, so I started to check out mentally, but I realized later that he was doing it to set the stage for some remarkable predictions he made later in the presentation. He spent considerable time going through a series of slides showing the exponential growth in computing power and a similar trend downward in cost. His basic premise is that we can predict the future because the trends are exponential and predictable. Here are a few of his predictions:

• Artificial red blood cells that will oxygenate your tissue so much more efficiently that you will be able to sit on the bottom of your pool for 4 hours
• Images will be sent directly to our retinas from eyeglasses and will provide a full virtual reality. Eventually neural implants will provide all of our senses with input, making the virtual world indistinguishable from the physical world.
• Computers will disappear as they are integrated into our clothing or eye glasses
• Full reverse engineering of the human brain
• Computers passing the Turing Test.
• Non biological intelligence
• Human life expectancy will accelerate rapidly in our lifetime - adding a year to the average life for each year of development after they completely decipher the human genome
• The Olympics will be cancelled because advances in biological sciences will make human bodies perform in ways we cannot even imagine now

He demonstrated a prototype of a phone that automatically translated spoken words from English to French and back. Two people speaking dissimilar languages could communicate over the phone with ease. He predicted this capability would become part of our cell phones within 10 years.

It was pretty amazing stuff and if he hadn't shown how good his track record is, I might dismiss it as science fiction. Very exciting stuff!

I went to a couple of other sessions on student-centered design and open source alternatives. Another good day, but it will be good to head home tomorrow.

Educause Day 1

I'm at the Educause conference and had a good day today. Here are the highlights:

Vinton Cerf gave the keynote speech and it was pretty interesting. His basic premise is that the term "computer science" is a misnomer because virtually none of the principles of science apply to software development. We can't predict how many bugs will be in software, how bad they will be, or how to effectively eliminate them from future code. He had a really good point, but didn't really offer a solution to it. He used the term "iPod Generation" which I have been using for a couple of years in various presentations. I thought about suing him for copyright infringement, but seeing that he invented the Internet, I thought I would cut him a little slack.

I went to a fascinating session on using gaming as an educational mechanism. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro created an economics course that is presented as a video game. The quality was amazing - it was exciting to see people in higher education doing something so innovative and responsive to this generation of students. This is something that Marc Prensky has been talking about for some time now.

I did a presentation on our new system - My Academic Plan (MAP). I had a good audience and had some very positive feedback. (And yes, I once again made a shameless plug for this blog, so if you are reading this as a result - welcome.)

The last session was a very thought provoking discussion of a growing movement in higher ed to create a next generation community source Student Services System (SSS). I loved their emphasis on service and the need to create a robust, extensible framework to offer high quality services to students. It gave me a lot to think about.

This was the best day I've had at a conference in a long time. Looking forward to tomorrow...

Mexico the Sequel

Back in April I posted about a trip to Mexico I took with the youth group from my church. Our students formed a real bond with Julio and Laura and their kids and our kids wanted to do even more for them. I figured over time the memory would fade and our students would move on to other ideas. I was wrong.

They raised $465 from the youth group and wanted to go back down to Mexico to buy the family a bed and anything else they needed. So on Saturday we headed south again and, once again, it was a wonderful experience. It turned out to be Julio's birthday so it was a great surprise for them to see us (we had no way to get hold of them ahead of time so just had to hope they would be home). We were able to buy them a bunk bed for the kids, a dresser for the whole family and bags of food. Laura and Julio cooked us a delicious meal and we got to sit in the house that we built - and that they turned into a home. It felt like a big family - American and Mexican.

I had a busy week last week and another one ahead of me so frankly I really didn't want to spend the whole day on the road, but I was so glad I did. It's such a great experience seeing a group of teenagers doing something so completely selfless. It did my heart good.

And, I got to be geeky also! When we go down to build houses, the logistics are handled by the people at Amor Ministries. This time we were on our own and had to find their house which is on a dirt road somewhere between Tecate and Tijuana. Fortunately I had marked the location of the house in my GPSr and used Google Earth to figure out which roads to take to get there. Then I found a great little program called GEtrax which allowed me to track our position in real time in Google Earth on my laptop (it used cached images since I had no Internet connection). It was great technology used for a great cause.

Emerging Technologies

I ran across an interesting article today on one of the tech sites. It is an interview with Jason Pontin from MIT on some of the emerging technologies that are not IT related. There is a lot of fascinating stuff going on out there - check it out.