Last weekend I attended the NAACE Conference in London, and attended Doug Dickinson’s “RUWeb2” presentation. He played a snippet from the following video, which challenges educators to rethink their views on education in a world of Web 2.0, mobile technologies, and rapid content creation and sharing:
What are readers’ thoughts? I agree whole-heartedly with the intentions of the challenge. Wikis, blogs, podcasts and online collaboration and networking tools have massive potential to transform 21st century education in a positive, empowering way.
I’ve written before on the blog about the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in allowing us to automatically receive new content from our favourite websites:
For some time now, I’ve been using Google Reader in combination with iGoogle as my web homepage. This allows me to collect together all of the content that matters to me (newsfeeds, email, del.icio.us favourites) in one place for easy access.
Yahoo Pipes is a service that takes managing your feeds to a new level. By allowing you to combine together multiple feeds into a single feed, you can effectively create your own view of the world, based on the topics that interest you. Imagine Pipes as like having your own personalised magazine delivered to your door every day. Pipes also gives impressive levels of control over the feeds - you can, for example. filter feeds on particular criteria, reorder feeds, truncate feeds and so on.
Some great links I’ve collected over the last couple of months:
Picnik - online image editing
Picnik is a fantastic online image-editing application. You can upload images from your computer, or pull images into Picnik from Flickr, Facebook or Picasa. It even allows you to search Flickr for photos from inside the web application, narrowing your search down to Creative Commons images if you wish (so that you can legally modify and redistribute derivative works). Once you’ve opened up an image, you can perform basic image manipulation on it from inside your browser - crop, rotate, resize, brightness, contrast - and more sophisticated changes like removing red-eye, or sharpening the image. There are even some nice effects - black and white, sepia, vignette, frames and so on - that you can apply to your image, and text and diagram tools to annotate your pictures. Once you’re done you can reexport back up to Flickr or download to your computer.
A basic account for Picnik is completely free. A premium account at $24.95 / year, gives you more effects. It’s really interesting to see more and more feature-rich, intuitive applications moving from the desktop to online. Picnik is brilliant - check it out.
There’s more Flickr-related fun at fd’s Flickr toys - a huge set of tools for playing with your Flickr photos to make posters, calendars, CD covers, you name it. If you aren’t using Flickr yet, what kept you? It’s the best image-sharing application on the web.
Over the last few weeks, gadget-lovers in the US have been going crazy for Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Estimates indicate that about 700,000 of the devices were sold in the first weekend of sales in the States at up to $599 each. Expect the hype around the iPhone in this country to build dramatically prior to its launch in Europe before Christmas. The iPhone will be the “must have” gadget for Christmas 2007. Parents of teenagers need to either prepare their wallets, or their resolve, for the direct hit that the iPhone is likely to make upon their lives.
For those who haven’t seen details of the iPhone, here are some links you might find useful:
Early reviews of the iPhone in the US have been largely positive, and 85% of those who’ve bought one would recommend it to a friend. While there are some obvious deficiencies to the device as it currently stands - no video camera, no Flash support, no support for third-party applications, no cut and paste (!), plus of course the expense - I believe that the iPhone may give us clues to the educational possibilities of the next generation of handheld devices.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the most powerful, versatile and efficient way to browse new content on your favourite websites. However, it’s not very easy to explain exactly how it works!
Here’s a fun video that does a great job of describing the basics:
Disclaimer: The opinions presented here are those of the author alone. They in no way represent the opinions of Wolverhampton CLC, Wolverhampton Local Authority or Wolverhampton City Council.
Over the last few weeks, gadget-lovers in the US have been going crazy for Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Estimates indicate that