Obama and His Social Media Presence

I keep on repeating this: what better way to get people engaged in something (being it learning or not) than just reaching them where they are and trying to “speak their language”? That’s what Barrack Obama’s campaign team decided to do. Besides their very interesting website that offers social networking features and a section that focuses on the mobile Web and offers ringtones and wallpapers, now they have decided to announce his running mate via Text Message (to those that send a TM with the message “hope” to the number 62262).

Interesting blog post on ViAspire from February 08 about Obama’s Web 2.0 presence.

Apart from my political beliefs, I believe this is a very smart move on engaging the younger generation and those who are always on the go… 

User-generated Encyclopedias Supervised by Experts

An interesting concept employed by Citizendium for instance, is that the crowds generate the content, but the “experts” inspect it for accuracy. Which brings more credibility and a more vast array of information. Since the “experts” will mostly “correct” minor errors, there is ore time to be dedicated to more content generation. 

The “crowdsourcing” element combined with the expert review side of it creates an interesting approach to the credibility issue in realm of user-generated content (especially that of encyclopedia-like environments)..

Any chance there could be something like Citizendium in educational environment that takes this approach? An environment to which users would add/edit/review content based on their “status” within the community? Multi-media content such as embedded videos, slideshows, images, flash objects would also enrich that environment… The media as an aid to learning, not as a means purely…

Screen Capture – iPhone 2.0

Wondering how to get some screen shots of your iPhone’s applications to create tutorials or maybe just to show off on your blog? The iPhone 2.0 platform has a built-in screen capture functionality. Explained here by Gizmodo.

Enjoy!

iPhone 2.0 Applications

Has anyone been surprised by the new iPhone apps?

Some amazing ones…

Like Loopt.com that lets you know where your friends are on a Google map…

Others like Evernote.com that let you take photo notes, audio notes, etc (all sync’ed to your profile on their website)…

One of my favorites is the Shazam app which RECOGNIZES a song when you play it next to yourt phone and tells you the title, artist, album AND lets you buy right there… Amazing… So, when you are preparing some learnign material that you need THAT song that is playing on the radio but you don’t know its name: Shazam!

Cool apps… I even use the iPhone as a book light now

Matt – Building a Web Application in 32 Hours

I have to admit that,typos aside, TechCrunch remains one of my favorite sources of information on technology, especially Web technologies. I suppose that unmerciful deadlines and the increasing speed of publication everyone ends up committing some spelling mistakes (I have noticed this especially in academic press). Well, let’s not get into that. TechCrunch and other tech blogs are still a good source of information if you want to stay informed on the latest technologies that can impact you somehow.

All of us that are involved with Instructional Design somehow (instructional designers, teachers, programmer, learners) can benefit from adopting or developing emerging technologies. At least playing with it…

Personal conversations with Thiagi, an expert in training and instructional design, reinforced even more my belief in quick but “quality” development.

Here is the most recent post from Ryan Carson, when invited to post on TechCrunch.com. In this post he discusses the process he and his colleagues from Carsonified Design underwent to design, develop and implement a simple Web application called Matt (a multi-account Twitter Tweeter) in 32 hours. The original post has valuable tips for quick application development such as:

1. The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative. Turning off your phones and email and just focusing on something new and exciting will do wonders for your energy level.
2. It could generate some amazing buzz around you and your company or products.
3. You’ll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
4. It will push your team to learn new skills. For example, Will, our head of sponsor relationships, spent the whole week doing PR – something new for him.

Can we apply these principles (and others which Ryan’s team experimented with) when developing learning technologies and applications? Have you had a similar experience Let’s share it here.

PS.: you can find a video tour of “Matt” on their main page. If you look for “Matt Carsonified” on Youtube, you will find some videos they created throughout their “Matt 1 week”.

Open Source Alternatives to Web 2.0 Services On Your Local Server

Open Source ReadWrite Web Alternatives - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Open Source ReadWrite Web Alternatives

Please visit the link above and give me your feedback in the “comments” below. Thank you.

Another buzzword: EduPunk

It is ridiculous… it seems like all people focus on these days is on coming up with the next stupid “buzzword”… even if all it means is to dress up old concepts in to new clothes… seriously… I feel sorry for those who are still trying to come up with Web 3.0 and such… or should I call them WebPunks? 

The definition of edupunk, as see in Lisa Neal Guatieri’s article on eLearn Magazine from July 2008: “an educational approach that combines creative drive with a maverick attitude…in which the educator—or possibly the student—designs the tools for teaching and learning.” While a valid definition for innovative and creative educators/learners, this creation and re-creation of technology for learning situations, as also stated in the same article, has been happening for quite sometime (if not throughout all of mankind). It is called Instructional Technology, being the people involved innovative or not, being the technology being flawed or not… I, particularly, see no need for such buzzword… But that is just my humble opinion…

From Steven Downes’ blog.

From Wired Campus.

Gliffy – an Online Alternative to Microsoft Visio for Flowcharting

Well, everyone is talking about Gliffy and I don;t want to be redundant, but I have to give my opinion about it as well. The program lets users collaborate on flowcharts and diagrams online. This is a very good and free (for public documents) alternative to desktop diagramming tools such as Microsoft Visio, OmniGraffle, FreeMind and many others, but with an advantage: besides being online with no extra plugin required, it also allows users to collaborate and co-author flowcharts and diagrams, which comes in handy when participating in some sort of creative process while geographically distant.

Even though the web application is an innovative technology that can not only compare but also outdo desktop applications and is definitely is ahead of everyone else in the online diagramming arena as far as professional look and feel is concerned, Gliffy is still a little glitchy (no pun intended) if not missing features. (I’m sure they will work on this soon.

One of the major flaws in it is the lack of immediate update without attaching a “version number to the file”. There are to bad outcomes of this:

1- If you and a colleague are collaborating AT THE SAME TIME on the same document you won’t immediately see the changes they’ve made to a document. I haven’t tested this on complex flowcharts but I wonder if there will be any conflicts between versions if both save their version simultaneously.

2- If you make any minor change to the document and decide to hit the “save” button, a new version number is attached to the document… So, a freak about saving stuff like me will have a v178 of a document after 20 minutes of editing and saving.

Another catchy thing about Gliffy (and it is part of their business plan) is how they only allow free accounts to create public documents and require users to purchase their premium account for unlimitted documents and the option of making them private.

Competitors can be:

• Bubbl.us
• MindMeister – more focused on “mind mapping”.
  
• Mindomo – same as above.
• Mind42 – Another collaborative mind mapping tool that stands out for the array of features ranging from keywords to speed up the process of creation to assigning icons to process and creating image nodes that import images from URLs.
• Comapping – not free but cost-effective and feature-rich collaborative diagramming solution.

Free Online Website Builders (WYSIWYG)

New technologies have made it easy for anyone to be a content author. The webmaster no longer has to be a highly specialized HTML coder. So, if you don’t have much experience in creating websites and need a What You See Is What You Get website creator, here is a list that might help:

 

Jimdo – great designs – no, this is not a martial art related website, it is a website builder that offers you  500MB of storage. Pretty reasonable space.        

Synthasite – you can even save your website to a folder on your computer to then upload to your student server for example.

Weebly – amazing looks!

Sampa – very easy to use.

Wix

New: SnapPages – Lets you build rich web applications.

New: Edicy

New: Websketch

New: BlinkWeb

 

and, of course, Google Pages.

Web 2.0 in Education

There is so much controversy over the term Web 2.0. Some people state that the digits “2.0″ determine a version, and that the Web is continuously evolving without need for a “label”. They claim that the assertion that Web 2.0 is more user-centered and interactive than Web 1.0 is not true. While new technologies (e.g. AJAX, a group of technologies that make possible for so-called Web 2.0 tools to be created) do mke teh Web more interactive, this interction and user-centered content generation was envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee since the beginning of the Wolrd Wide Web, not being a standard for this phaseof the Web only. https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-May/000399.html 

I do believe that the interaction made easy, the collaborative tools and the (normally) cleaner user interface of tools (visual literacy) make it possible for a more learner-centered learning approach mediate by these new tools. 
Vygotsky’s, Piage’s and other contructivist learning frameworks can be easily implemented online by means of the Read/Write Web. 

Resources such as “social bookmarking”, “social networks”, “group blogging”, “video/image/audio sharing”, wikis, tagging, and many other emerging tools enhance interaction on the Web. 

This interaction can bring more meaningful learning into place, learning that happens through social interaction, sharing of knowledge, etc. 

Web 2.0 tools you can try right now: 

create a social network on www.ning.com 
create a blog on www.wordpress.com 
create and share slideshows on www.slideshare.net 
create and share videos on www.youtube.com 
create and share a wiki on www.wetpaint.com 
create a microblog on www.twitter.com 
create microblogs for your classes on www.edmodo.com 
join Second Life on www.secondlife.com 

my blog on http://tweaklearning.wordpress.com 

If you don’t want to join anythign right now, just visit websites like these and you will see how much fun and interactive they can be… 

Educators should care about everything that helps their learners learn in meaningful ways… most teachers agree (or am I wrong) that learnign can be improved with social interaction (or am I wrong?). Research talks about informal learning being the means for most of our learning. Why not give it a try? These new Web tools matter to us because they matter to the learners.