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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Europe split on Google book plans - David Reid, BBC Click
Google's $125m deal with the American book industry is on hold. Google plans to put millions of the world's books online and create the world's largest virtual library by 2010. The company has already scanned 10 million out-of-print books as part of its Library Project. Google plans to charge people for access to its large online collection of books and to act as a selling agent of books through its Google Editions. Critics fear it is creating a monopoly over information, and are unhappy at the firm digitising titles against the wishes of many authors and publishers. (0) comments
Windows 7 borrowed 'look' of Mac - BBC
A Microsoft executive was quoted in an interview as saying "what we've tried to do with Windows 7...is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics". The comments, by partner group manager Simon Aldous, appeared in UK computing trade magazine PCR. Microsoft countered that Mr Aldous was not involved with the development of Windows 7. (0) comments
Wikipedia's future in Africa - Dave Lee, BBC World Service
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has big ambitions for the developing world. Expansion into Africa and other non-English speaking areas is a top priority for Wikipedia, site founder Jimmy Wales has said. Speaking on the BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme, Mr Wales outlined the next step for the online encyclopaedia. "When we look at the vision I have for Wikipedia - which is a free encyclopaedia for everyone in their own language - we're succeeding, we feel pretty good. But we still have a long way to go." (0) comments Friday, November 20, 2009
Transcript of CNET Conversations with Eric Schmidt - Molly Wood, CNet news.cnet.com
Eric Schmidt: Google Wave is a similar, new effort within Google to try to redefine the way people communicate, primarily using e-mail and instant messaging. And what's neat about Wave is once you're in the Wave, your usage, based on our testing and our early use, is very different. It's the blend, if you will, of electronic mail, Post-its, updates, obviously, there's a lot of sharing, use videos and photos, and so forth. And it looks like it's going to be quite successful. Again, how would we map that against the existing e-mail systems? We don't know yet. (0) comments
Current Twitter trends: Google Wave - the Independent
Google Wave has shot back up into the top of Twitter's list of trending topics on the morning of Friday, November 13. Internet giant Google has been successfully using viral marketing to promote its new social networking software called Google Wave. Twitter users not yet signed up to Google Wave continue to ask their friends, followers and anyone who will listen for invites to the service that lets you collaborate in real-time on emails, documents and IM chats. (0) comments
Google Chrome OS: Do you believe the hype? - Asia CNet
As with most products that have the name Google attached to them, Google Chrome OS is generating a lot of hype--and, if this TechCrunch post is true, we'll finally get to see if it will live up to the hype.Don't get me wrong: I agree with what Google is saying that it's all about the Web now, and that ironically operating systems were designed in an era before the advent of the Web. So yup, they want to rethink the OS with Google Chrome OS just as they want to rethink e-mail with Google Wave. (0) comments Thursday, November 19, 2009
Progressives Seize 2.0 Meme on Twitter - Ole Ole Olson, NEWS JUNKIE POST
Progressive activists on Twitter have begun organically taking over the 2.0 meme for hashtags. The pattern is growing and appears well on its way to going viral. What is a meme? According to Wikipedia: “The term Internet meme is a phrase used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet, much like an esoteric inside joke. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although this concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.” (0) comments
Gov 2.0: Transparency without accessibility? - By Alice Lipowicz, Federal Computer Week
When a redesigned Recovery.gov Web site was unveiled last month to track the distribution of stimulus dollars, it was touted as another example of the Obama administration’s push for greater transparency. But the technology and design of the site left one segment of the population less than satisfied. Advocates for people with disabilities found a number of accessibility flaws on the site that jumbled the spending data or otherwise put it beyond the reach of people using screen readers and other assistive devices. (0) comments
Ride the Wave: Google Wave Destined to Make a Splash - Shannon Grippando, University of Tampa Minaret
In case you haven’t heard, Google has a new toy in the works set to launch later this year: Google Wave. And just as they wowed the world with Google Maps and their oh-so-simple Gmail service, Google Wave will revolutionize the way we communicate and collaborate on the web forever. It’s that amazing. Google Wave’s simplicity is its deceptive strength (0) comments Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Cloud computing envelops EDUCAUSE talk - Dennis Carter, eSchool News
Conference sees attendance drop from 2008, but remain steady despite a slumping economy that has colleges trimming travel budgets. The 2009 EDUCAUSE higher-education technology conference in Denver Nov. 3-6 saw campus IT administrators present ways to preserve technology budgets during an economic downturn that has devastated many institutions' operating budgets and endowments, while several vendors emphasized the value of moving campus IT to cloud computing. (0) comments
E-Mail 'Biggest' Security Risk, Microsoft Says - Jabulani Leffall, THE Journal
An organization's security has a lot to do with its e-mail system, a top security manager at Microsoft suggested. "Messaging is fraught with a lot of challenges," said J.G. Chirapurath, Microsoft's senior director for identity and security, in a phone interview. "It comes down to the integrity of the information and who is seeing it. It's all about secure messaging because when you examine the world we live in, e-mail really is the biggest attack vector, as well as the biggest leak vector." Microsoft's big news Monday was the release of Exchange 2010. However, the company simultaneously released a security solution for the new e-mail server called Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange. (0) comments
Districts Get To Work Making Themselves Safer with REMS Grants - Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
A small Arizona district will be bringing in expertise to help put the finishing touches on school safety plans and training. An Oregon district will be hiring a part-time person to coordinate emergency planning. A sizable Florida district will be adding GPS and biometric identification systems to its rural school buses and compensating school leaders to complete emergency management training and update their schools' plans. These three school districts were winners--along with 105 other districts--of funding from the United States Department of Education's Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) program. The goal of the program, which speedily opened in March, closed in April, and announced recipients in July, was specifically to fund the creation or strengthening of emergency management plans and processes in schools. (0) comments Tuesday, November 17, 2009
School Librarians Lead the Social Networking Pack Among Educators - School Library Journal
Media specialists are more likely to join social networking sites than teachers and principals—and they’re more likely to adopt a variety of content-sharing tools for personal, professional, and classroom use, says a new report. “A Survey of K–12 Educators on Social Networking and Content-Sharing Tools” found a significant difference in attitude and behavior among the three groups, with 70 percent of media specialists, 62 percent of teachers, and 54 percent of administrators saying they’ve joined a social network. (0) comments
Google Wave Declutters The Inbox With Following Feature - Tech Crunch
This morning, Google is making a slight update to Wave to help users unclog their inbox from public waves. Previously, you could see public waves in your inbox, which was fairly annoying. Now for a wave to appear in your inbox, you need to “follow” the wave. When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. (0) comments
Google gives Voice to 'open standard Skype' - Cade Metz, the Register
Google has acquired VoIP startup Gizmo5, intending to roll the company's engineers into the team that develops the telephony application/controversy magnet known as Google Voice. Whereas Gizmo5 offers Skype-like software for calling people over the interwebs, Google Voice is a special telephony thingy that lets you use a single phone number for multiple phones - and turn your voice mails into emails. "While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience," reads a post on the official Google Voice blog. (0) comments Monday, November 16, 2009
YoYoBrain provides an online platform for improving teaching and learning.
YoYoBrain takes a different approach to learning by asking the question, ‘What if we test the content instead of the student?’ Consistent with the Department of Education’s increasing focus on teacher effectiveness, YoYoBrain’s learning communities, memorization tools for students and content-effectiveness reports for teachers guide improvement in study content and teaching approaches. The key learning component behind YoYoBrain’s platform is the flash card memorization tool, helping students set goals and keep track of progress over a period of time. Learners can either set the number of flash cards to learn each day, or YoYoBrain can calculate an optimal number of cards based on an upcoming test or exam date. (0) comments
Web 2.0 Becomes More Popular at Work but Brings Risks Too, Report Says - Hilton Collins, Gov Tech
If you use one of those ever-popular social networking applications for work purposes, or just for personal business while on the job, then you aren't alone, according to a recent industry report, but such usage can harm your network security as well. (0) comments
Women as Current and Future CIOs - Wayne Brown and Polley McClure, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 6 (November/December 2009): 110-111
The higher education chief information officer (CIO) has a very complex role. CIOs are required to have technical knowledge, higher education experience, communications skills, and political savvy — just to name a few attributes. In the past, CIOs have come to the role with a wide variety of professional experiences and educational degrees. Yet a large number of this current generation of CIOs are projecting their departure from the profession within the next ten years. This coming retirement exodus is cause for concern and raises questions about the people in the next layer down from the CIO in the IT organization: do they want to become CIOs, and are they preparing for this job? What can factors related to the current generation of CIOs tell us about future CIOs? In particular, do female CIOs and IT leaders differ significantly from their male counterparts? (0) comments Sunday, November 15, 2009
What Technology? Reflections on Evolving Services - Sharon Collins and the 2009 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, EDUCAUSE Review, vol 44/no 6
"As we go forward, I hope we're going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work." — Sergey Brin, Google co-founder Ten years ago, when EDUCAUSE established the Evolving Technologies Committee to consider the future of information technologies and how they would drive, or be driven by, educational endeavors, there were no iPods, iPhones, fluid webcam conferencing — and definitely not many thoughts about green computing. Times have indeed changed. Over the years, more services and the enhanced delivery of those services have moved to the forefront in importance. Institutions are now thinking of ways to use past and future technologies to streamline and positively affect these services for teaching and learning, research, and administration. Doing so is a two-way street: technologies need services, and services need technologies to be effective. (0) comments
National Survey of Student Engagement 2009 Report
Course management and interactive technologies were positively related to student engagement, self-reported learning outcomes, and deep approaches to learning. Course management technology was most strongly related to student-faculty interaction and self-reported gains in personal and social development. It is possible that the use of this type of organizational technology encourages contact among classmates as well as between students and their instructors. Interactive technologies corresponded most strongly with students’ self-reported gains and the supportive campus environment benchmark. Students who use interactive technologies are also more likely to say their campus environment is supportive and contributes to their knowledge, skills, and personal development. (0) comments
Seven Things You Should Know about Google Wave - EDUCAUSE (with thanks to Seb Schmoller)
Google is developing an application that has elements of existing communication tools but is built around a different model of how communication—and collaboration—take place. With Wave, users create online spaces called "waves," which may include multiple discrete messages and components—"blips"—that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which separate copies of multiple messages are not sent to different people; instead, the content resides in a single space. People go to a wave to access the content, respond to it, change it, replay it, send it to a blog, or add new material or attachments. (0) comments Educational Technology News Blog Archives OTEL - Ray's Home Page - Notebook - UIS Online - U of I Online - UIS Home Fair Use |
