Lots of Eyes…

Apollo in Beta

Adobe (nee: Macromedia) has at last released a beta version of their hotly anticipated Apollo desktop environment that has the potential to offer application developers an easy way to write cross-platform desktop applications. Apollo basically is a browser-less shell that allows people to run applications written in Flash, JavaScript , CSS and HTML to run natively on Mac and Windows desktops. This is important because security restrictions on web-browsers make it impossible to access files on the local computer’s hard disk, and ushers in a new era where the operating system becomes that much more irrelevant.
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo

Digital Campus

Dan Cohen and his cohorts from GMU’s Center for History and New Media have started a new podcast called "Digital Campus,” which looks at the digital revolution from the perspective of higher education. The first podcast had GMU History professor Mills Kelly talking about using Wikipedia in his classes in a constructive manner. Rather than banning kids from citing it, (“They’re going to use it anyway”), he used it as a teaching experience to help students understand the role of perspective and characterizing Wikipedia as a different kind of scholarship, “a community of enthusiasts… using lots of eyes.”
http://digitalcampus.tv/

Many Eyes Visualization

Martin Wattenberg, a researcher at IBM’s Visual Communication Lab has put together an interesting website that explores the social aspects of data visualization. They provide a place for people to upload sets of data and apply a variety of dynamic visualization to it, such as topological maps, geographical maps, tree maps, and a wide variety of charts and graphs. The ability to do this is great on its own, but they make these visualizations public, and invite people to explore them. Viewers can create and share a “snapshot” of the settings to show some aspect with others.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app

Data Visualization in Shopping?

Crisyshop has a nicely done AJAX-based visualization tool they call the ShoppingPath, which links a graph with information and pictures for consumer product items . I don’t think I’d really use it for anything, but it’s worth looking at for a hint at how innovative sites can integrate interactivity and data together.
http://www.crispyshop.com/

Ask City Drawable Maps

Ask.com has a very nice feature on their mapping web app that let you explore maps coupled with limited data searching that makes it easy to draw annotation on top of the map’s view, and save those “snapshots” in permanent links that can shared with others. Enterprising social studies teachers could have a field day with this, making elementary school geography boring rote memorization worksheets come alive.
http://city.ask.com/city

Fat Maps

The University of Sheffield is offering an interesting twist in visualizing geographic data on maps. Rather than simply highlight the area by changing its color, as most GIS displays will do, the country changes is shape to give an idea of its size. For example, one map shows the world warped by the relative numbers of elderly people.
http://www.worldmapper.org/

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Audio of the Week

Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham, the founder of Yahoo Store and now the force behind Web 2.0 business startup venture capitalist/incubator Y-Combinator, talks about his book, Hackers and Painters, (a good read) which paints a compelling story on the similarities between hackers and artists.
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail164.html (audio)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom (book)

Book of the Week

Interaction Design by Bill Moggridge. Industrial designer and principal at the highly regarded IDEO design firm has produced a great book that looks at interaction design historically through interviews with the designers of the mouse, Macintosh, Palm, Grid, and 37 other design breakaways. The book is a joy to read, the pictures great, and the systematic definition of interaction design as a field is very timely. It’s long, but easy reading with lots of pictures.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262134748/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Mix and Mash…

Mix and Mash Tools

An interesting phenomenon is taking place in the web-world. It started when companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and others started to open up access to their websites at a lower level than simply visiting their web-pages. They started offering web services that made it possible for other web pages to access information automatically from their sites and transparently use the raw information in their own web pages.

A bunch of websites sprang up that used this interconnection mechanism to link two or more such web services providing a unique site that offers something the other two never intended to do. The programmableweb site lists over 1,600 such mashups including the canonical housingMaps, which linked people’s classified ads on craigslist with Google maps to plot their locations dynamically on a map.

As captivating and easy this was in concept, creating mashups required a fairly nuanced level of programming skill. Not anymore. TechCrunch profiled a number of websites scaffolding the process of making mashups so anyone can quickly create sophisticated dynamic web applications. I played with all of them to see how they worked because of a project I’m working on at VCDH, and all are free:

• Yahoo Pipes
  Yahoo has made a graphical tool that lets you drag elements and create a pipeline of actions between them. For example, you could add a text box that asked you to type the name of dog type, and then drag over a Flickr web service to show pictures of five dogs of that type in my town. It’s a simple example, but they have though out the problem well and pipes can be linked to other pipes and publish (the dog example is here). While the mechanics of coding are eased using Yahoo Pipes, it suffers from being too close to the actual structure of web-coding. The app is kind of slow and a little buggy, but shows great promise.
  http://pipes.yahoo.com
  
• Teqlo
  Teqlo takes pipes to the next level in terms of ease of use. It is built on top of OpenLaszlo, a powerful Flash-based Ajax framework and is very application-like in its feel. For example, I made a “teqlet” where I added an eBay search box, and when I clicked on the results, the item’s info was added to a Google spreadsheet and its location mapped onto a Google map. Connections between the three main objects were defined by creating any number of interactions that defined actions and reactions. It currently only runs on Firefox but looks like it will be a great app when it grows up.
  http://www.teqlo.com/www.teqlo.com/files/Intro_To_Teqlo.html (screencast)
  
• Dapper
  Dapper has two complementary tools: one for people who want to share content on their website with others and is a nicely done “mashup maker” that makes it easy to “scrape” existing web pages for the data they contain, rather than relying on whether or not the make of that page has provided a webservice. The scraper tool is amazing: You choose a web page to look at, interactively select areas to scrape up as fields, groups those fields into tables and provides you with a public URL that can generate an XML file, RSS feed, email alert, or Google mapped result.
  http://www.dappit.com/
  www.dappit.com/dapperDemo (screencast)
  
• Openkapow
  Openkapow is more of the same page scraping scenario as dapper, but instead of relying on a web-based, application, it uses a Java-based downloadable program (available in Windows and Linux only). While Dapper has only limited programmability, Openkapow has a more robust graphical language for making sophisticated queries.
  http://openkapow.com
  
• Proto
  Proto tries to blend desktop apps with the web. Like Openkapow, it too is a Windows download as opposed to a webservice and provides access to embedded Flash and a Visual Basic (VB) development environment. It is a very slick application that builds on VB’s promise of making drag and drop programming by using components as opaque building boxes, and drawing connections in a pipeline between them. Each component has published properties and methods, and you can build upon them and then publicly re-publish share. This is a decidedly Windows-centric approach, and is not really web-based because even though the source data may be live, the viewing must be done from a Windows desktop with downloaded software. That said, it seems very powerful and useful in business situations.
  http://www.protosw.com/www.protosw.com/products/intro-movie (screencast)

All of these mashup makers are flawed in some way, but I really like the direction they are taking. The ability to use the myriad of resources on the web as interchangeable building blocks will help move us into the next phase of the promise of the Internet some pundits have called Web 3.0.

Grammar Girl Podcast

An Arizona technical writer, Mignon Fogarty has created a popular podcast that helps make learning grammar a little less dull. The free podcast can be subscribed to via iTunes, RSS, or listened to directly on your computer
http://grammar.qdnow.com

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Audio of the Week

Steven Pinker on Words and Rules. Harvard psychologist and writer Steven Pinker gives a riveting talk on the structure of language, using irregular verbs as an example. He is a funny and engaging speaker, and even if you aren’t interested in language, the talk is completely absorbing. His books are great too, The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and my favorite, How the Mind Works are must reads.
http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/bi/audio/BIStevePinker030406.mp3

Book of the Week

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think. Stanford psychology professor B.J. Fogg has written a good look at how computers can be used a persuasion tools and takes a critical look at the elements involved. Fogg calls this field captology, and it is a useful taxonomy to look at how computers are being used to change people’s attitudes and behaviors
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Video...

Online Video Overview

Highly regarded Web2.0 blog Read/WriteWeb has posted a good roundup of the various companies providing online video services including search, editing, storage, etc. There are a surprising number of players in this market space.
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/online_video_index.php

Next Vista

Following the trend for user-generated video, New Vista is hoping to be the open-source UnitedStreaming for teachers. UnitedStreaming is the Discovery Channel’s popular video streaming service that slices up video content into small chunks and identifies their congruence with school standards for approximately $2,000/year. Developed by a ex-educator Rushton Hurley, the videos look good but are not tied to standards and there is no formal ratings system.
http://www.nextvista.org/

formatpixel – Online Publishing

This is an absolutely beautiful Flash-based tool for publishing high-quality presentations on the web, weaving text, vector and raster graphics into very slick online presentations that look kind of like the printed books you can make in iPhoto, but online. The details are amazing, with little touches (the page turns for example) that make this an incredibly well designed tool. There are a number of plans from this UK-based company, ranging from free to $80/ year.
http://formatpixel.com/

Adobe and Photobucket to Make Online Editing Site

Veteran video application developer Adobe and upstart web-based photo/video sharing site Photobucket have announced a joint effort to produce a simple video editing web app to merge video, pictures, and sounds using effects. According to Tim O’Reilly’s Radar blog, the site will be live next week.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/photobucket_to.html

Blackboard.com Plays Nice on eLearning Patent

After receiving a seminal and very broad patent for online learning management systems, 800-pound gorilla Blackboard.com says they will not pursue open-source potential infringers such as Moodle and Sakai. Their patent, 6,988,138 appears to be very broad and could have had a stifling effect on innovation, although the Sakai Foundation still has some lingering concerns. There is a nice translation from patent talk into English here.

Online Image Editing Webapps

Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch ran a review of a half-dozen Ajax or Flash based online image editors, including Fauxto, Picnic, Picture2Life, PXN8, and SnipShot. Looks like the largely free, web-based webapps may give Photoshop a run for its money soon. Most of these webapps allow you do edit a picture already up on Flickr, eliminating the need for multiple uploads.
www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/04/online-photo-editing-overview

BubblePly Video Annotator

BubblyPly has an interesting product that posts a new spin on copyright issues on mashed up media. It’s free site allows you to point at a video somewhere on the web and without copying it, allow you to add text bubble-style annotations to it, and republish it as a new URL.
http://www.bubbleply.com

Mux Video Conversion

Video artist promotion site Cruxy had introduced a free online service that will convert video from one format to another. Mux uses Amazon’s S3 data services to store and process the video, so it’s kind of the poster child for a Web 2.0 application. It can convert QuickTime, MPEG 1, 2 & 4, Flash, WMV, and AVI files.
http://mux.am

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Audio of the Week

Douglas Rushkoff: Renaissance Prospects. Rushkoff is the author a many great books about media and culture, in particular, Playing the Future, and Coercion: Why We listen to What They Say. This presentation looks at media in context of the influence of values and culture.
47 minute Presentation at the 2004 Pop!Tech Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail243.html

Book of the Week

Douglas Rushkoff’s most recent book, Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business and encourages people to focus in on their core competencies rather than succumbing to the mass hysteria of “thinking outside the box.” It’s more interesting than it sound and while it’s about business, the lessons apply to other endeavors too. I’ve enjoyed all of Rushkoff’s books.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060758708/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Shaping Things…

Footnote: “Access” Millions of Original Documents

This is a fascinating idea with a dark cloud. These guys have made a deal with the National Archives to provide online access to some 4.5 million primary source documents with a Flash/AJAX-based image browser/annotator. If it ended there it would be interesting, but they’ve added the ability for people to flag certain parts of documents and annotate them for transcription, names of people, dates, and locations. These annotations can be searched and become context to the document, forming an invisible army of annotators and transcribers. The problem is money. Aside from a couple of documents, all the images I was looking for were “premium content” and cost $9.99 per month. Granted, the Archives are open to this access from anyone, but I feel funny about paying for government resources, twice.
http://www.footnote.com/

S3 Browser

An open-source browser to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has been released. The Mac-based browser makes is easy to upload, download, and browse “buckets” of information stored. Amazon S3 is a service provided by Amazon designed to provide high performance, easy to use and low-cost database online storage. They charge no upfront fees and charge by the amount of data stored ($0.15/GM per month and $0.20/GM of data transferred). Data is accessed through REST and SOAP web service protocols.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3

Microsoft’s Grava Educational Software SDK/Toolset

Microsoft will release a platform this coming fall that will supposedly make it easier for non-programmers to develop educational software. Grava was jointly developed with ETS will enable media-rich interactive programs in Windows, and smells suspiciously like a “Flash-killer.” It is based on the new GUI maker embedded in the new Vista programming SDK and in .NET that is miles beyond Microsoft’s traditional application development tools in terms of ease of use.
https://connect.microsoft.com/Grava
www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=6816

The Ad Generator

For his MFA thesis at Parsons The New School for Design, Alexis Lloyd confirmed my suspicion that advertisers pull most advertising concepts from their derrières. His Ad Generator remixes and randomizes real corporate slogans into seemingly meaningful new slogans coupled with images pulled automatically from Flickr. Very entertaining. The show is different each time you view it.
http://www.theadgenerator.org/

Zoho Notebook

The maker of a whole suite of online office-like tools, Zoho, has previewed an interesting new member to their ensemble. Zoho Notebook is kinda like Google Notebook meets Microsoft OneNote, an interactive online scrapbook to store and share with people. It stores a variety of different media types (audio, video, text, RSS, links, etc.) and promises to use RSS in interesting ways to collaborate. The Zoho suite is pretty good, mainly free, and worth looking into.
www.zoho.com/notebook

Harvard Business Review 2007 Breakthrough Ideas

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article containing essays by technoratis Clay Shirky, Duncan Watts, Michael Schrage, Linda Stone, Dave Weineberger, and Eric von Hippel. They pontificate about emerging ideas in a variety of fields. The article is free until Feb 6th.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0702/article/R0702A.jhtml;jsessionid=0JB2ELYCIQCKWAKRGWDSELQBKE0YIISW?type=F#section20

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Audio of the Week

The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More

. Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz gives an engaging talk about his book that questions the American value that the more choices we have, the better off and happier we are. The book is great too.
54 minute Presentation at the 2004 Pop!Tech Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.html
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom (book)

Book of the Week

Shaping Things (2006) by Bruce Sterling. A thoughtful little book about design and the nature of human-created objects in our world, Shaping Things looks at the roles of objects, their makers, and their impact on the world. www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262693267/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Tagging...

ESPGame / Google Image Labeler

There are a number of experiments in trying to harness some of the things people can do well, but computers can not, such as describing the contents of an image. Tim O'Reilly has coined the phrase "bionic software to describe them.

CMU computer scientist Luis Van Ahn introduced a novel way of tagging images using a game. In the ESPGame, people are paired up with an anonymous partner and both are shown an image and asked to type tags that describe it in a small amount of time. Each player does not know what the other is typing and gets points when they agree on a tag.

The game is apparently so compelling that Ahn had to put a 15-hour continuous play limit out of moral deference to America's employers. The tags are fairly accurate and he has a number of fascinating tweaks. His video of his talk at Google is very interesting. Ahn claims that he could tag all of the images on Google in less than 3 weeks.
www.espgame.org
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler (Google's version of ESP Game)

Polar Rose

Swedish startup Polar Rose also tries to use social web techniques to identify pictures and the people and objects within those pictures, coupled with some 3D facial recognition algorithms to attach human context to images.
www.polarrose.com

Steve: Art Museum Social Tagging Project

The Steve project asks users to tags works of art in various museums in an effort to improve access to museum collections through the use of a folkasomic approach to identifying key words with artwork.
http://www.steve.museum/

They Say, I Say: Dialogical Writing

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff propose an alternative to teaching kids the five-paragraph essay in their "They Say, I Say" approach which uses a dialogic approach. Kids are encouraged to treat their writing as a conversation using structure to help scaffold arguments by incorporating other people’s ideas and reacting, contrasting, and expanding upon it.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~ggraff/research
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3270 (lecture)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393924092/stagetoolscom (book)

Random Fact

Apparently the actress Hedy Lamarr, who played Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah" was as inventive as she was beautiful. She holds the 1942 patent (2,292,387) on the first spread spectrum (a.k.a. frequency hopping) technique for sending secret messages over many channels.
www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT2292387

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Audio of the Week

Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated. NYU professor Clay Shirky lays out the case that rigid hierarchies and taxonomies, like the kind libraries use to organize access to information may be a dinosaur, related more to physical convenience than effective access in a virtual work. He is engaging, articulate, and convinced me of the increasing value of folksonomies.
44 minute Presentation at the 2005 Emerging Technology Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html

Book of the Week

Beautiful Evidence (2006) by Edward Tufte. The latest addition to Yale professor Tufte’s four volume set of beautifully realized books on information visualization. If you haven’t read “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” that’s probably the best one to start with, and well worth the journey.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0961392177/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Audio...

Online Audio Editing

A number of innovative webapps have been popping up that make it easy to upload, mix, edit, and store sounds. SpliceMusic has a 5 minute demo of how it works. All the content is available under a CreativeCommons license, so it can be freely shared. JamGlue has a very slick Flash webapp along the same lines. Both webapps allow you to download your final mixed audio as an mp3 file, or play it from their site.
http://splicemusic.com/
http://www.jamglue.com/

Free Audio Content

ccMixter is a part of the CreativeCommons and provides access to thousands of freely available sounds and music. The freesound project is a collection of links to many sounds available under cc licenses and uses innovative search techniques from AudioClas to aid discovery. Magnatune uses a juried review process to keep the quality of their audio selection high, and provides a venue for artists to sell their audio, or give it away.
http://www.ccmixter.org/
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
http://magnatune.com/

Dabble DB

Google got the ball rolling by putting spreadsheets online as a webapp, but Dabble db puts data management to a new level by making the process of creating, exploring, and visualizing data using an online webapp. This 7 minute online demo gives a good overview of how easy they’ve made it.
http://www.dabbledb.com/

Pandora

Pandora is a great free online “radio station” (listen-only, no save) which uses some software developed by the Music Genome Project that has developed rated a set of attributes that has been used to rate thousands of songs. They ask you to identify music you like and they match those attribute to create a personal playlist containing songs the software “thinks” you will like.
http://www.pandora.com/

Pew Report on PodCasting

The Pew Internet Life folks have released another survey report, this one finding higher number (12%) of Internet users downloading podcasts up from 7% just six months ago. The distribution was relatively even across age and income, but nearly twice as many men listened as women. These are promising figures, even though only 1% listens daily.
www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_podcasting.pdf

BubbleShare

BubbleShare is an interesting webapp that makes it easy to create online slide shows by uploading your own photos, recording an audio track directly on the webapp, and adding cartoon-like bubble captions to pictures (kind of like Beavis and Butthead). Good potential for simple digital storytelling projects using stills, as a precursor to using DigitalStoryTeller, iMovie, MovieMaker, or Photo Story 3.
http://www.bubbleshare.com/

Deep-Linking Ruled Illegal

The common practice of linking directly to content on someone’s website when they explicitly ask you not to, was ruled illegal by a Texas judge. This is the first judgment about this kind of deep linking of content and while the defendant was clearly in the wrong in this one, it sets the stage for stronger copyright enforcement in the future.

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Audio of the Week

Malcolm Gladwell on "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking" Are our judgments influenced by the amount of information used in arriving at them? Does more information lead to better judgments? Gladwell is as engaging a speaker as he is writer and it’s worth listening to, even if you’ve read the book as he cites new cases.
50 minute Presentation at 2005 South by Southwest Conference www.itconversations.com/shows/detail478.html (audio)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316172324/stagetoolscom (book)


Book of the Week

The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky. As one of the founding fathers of AI, this book updates his notion of the mind as a collection of lots of smaller processes he talked about in his 1988 book “Society of Mind” (a great read).
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743276639/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Search...

Delivery Note

I will try to publish this newswire by the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month beginning next year. If you aren’t using an RSS reader, you might consider trying it out, as it helps alert you of periodically published things like this newswire. Check this article below for a short overview of using RSS.

Flamenco Search goes Open Source

UC Berkeley researcher Marti Hearst’s well-regarded search tool in now freely available and open source. Flamenco uses a technique she’s called “hierarchical faceted metadata” which makes it easier to surf through large amounts of material by making what would complex Boolean conjunctive searches simple to do. Check out the Fine Arts images demo at the Flamenco site.
http://flamenco.berkeley.edu

MPEG-7

This is not another movie compression format, but a rich standard for adding information to stored images to make them easier find once cataloged. Wikipedia has the best overview of it, but basically it hopes to standardize how one describes visual content contained in pictures and movies. There are some tools emerging, such as Caliph and Emir, that use MPEG-7 as an on-ramp for the Semantic Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-7

Calibrated Peer Review

This innovative technique models the traditional academic a peer-review process as a classroom teaching tool for kids to assess each other’s work. Developed by the late UCLA chemistry professor Orville Chapman, Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) has been used in over 500 schools (mostly undergraduate) and have quantitative studies that it improves learning by 10%, in addition to the new reviewing skills gained, and as reduction of faculty load.

In a nut shell, the teacher set’s up a writing activity, defines some rubrics for assessment, has the kids write the essay, then "calibrate" their reviewing ability with an internal activity that helps hone their reviewing skills. The kids then review (double-blind) three of their peers work according the rubric. Finally, the kids review their own essay. This idea has really resonates with me and looks potentially powerful for K-12 education
http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/
Educause has a good two-page summary of the project here:
www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI5002.pdf

OpenURL

A recent NISO standard called OpenURL has emerged and links a URL with keywords in the address (i.e., www.myurl?genre=book). Documents would provide a unique number at the end of each article, called the Document Object Identifier (DOI) which in theory will help stop link rot either by searching for the DOI, or using a service they provide called CrossRef, which provides cross-publisher linking.
www.dlib.org/dlib/may06/apps/05apps.html

Microsoft Live Academic Search

Ever wanting to keep up with the Googles’s, Microsoft has an academic oriented search engine associated with their Live website. They have indexed a fairly wide selection of journals for full text retrieval (it uses the IP address to see if your institution is a subscriber for resources that need it. They are an active supporter of the OpenURL standard. Interestingly enough, they support FireFox as well as IE…
http://academic.live.com

Zotero

The digital history crew at George Mason University have released a free Firefox extension that makes it easy to collect, cite, tag, and annotate web-based resources from within the browser. It’s kind of a “RefWorks meets iTunes” and keeps the information locally so you can access it when you’re offline. The interesting part is that they will soon have a way to save these on the Del.icio.us online bookmarking site so the collected knowledge can shared and searched. They also plan to host their own server, so documents, images, and other media can be shared.
www.zotero.org

Riverdeep buys Houghton Mifflan

Irish Edutainment software publisher Riverdeep (Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego, Destination Success math and science) bought text book publisher Houghton Mifflan for $1.8B. This is a man bites dog scenario, as most people assumed textbook publishers would scoop up game makers, not the other way around.

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+ Audio & Book of the Week

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville talks about information architecture and what he calls ambient findability- “the capacity to find anything or anyone from any where at any time.” His book by the same name is short, very readable, and offers a good overview of the state of “search.” 47 minutes, recorded at the Emerging Technology conference in 2006

www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1154.html (talk)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007655/stagetoolscom (book)


Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Visualization...

Org Chart/Concept Map Online Wiki

CogMap is a free AJAX-powered site allows you to make and edit org charts interactively online. It could be easily used as classroom tool to create concept maps similar to Inspiration and Kidspiration online. The version tracker option offers potential to be able to track various versions of kid’s work and compare and contrast 2 versions.
www.cogmap.com

Visualizing Complexity

IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg has been working on ways to create visualizations that help bring meaning to complex sets of data. He and his wife create an amazing visualization of the popularity of baby names over time which really shows the power of highly interactive visualizations of data.
http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html www.bewitched.com/research.html

Visual Complexity Collection

Following on along the same theme, designer and Parsons professor Manuel Lima has put together a website that use innovative and compelling ways to display and/or interact with large collections of information. Well worth the visit.
www.visualcomplexity.com

Math Manipulatives

An interesting new category of software has emerged that offers small web-based interactive applications that address just one aspect and allows teachers and students to interactively explore topics such as adding fractions, the Pythagorean Theorem, fractals, etc. Explore Learning probably has the best collection, but is commercial. The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives has a large set of free modules and UVA’s Center for Technology and Teacher Education has a number of excellent “gizmos”.
www.explorelearning.com/
http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/bb_dlib.jsp (National Library)
www.teacherlink.org/content/math/interactive (UVA)

AJAX Timeline widget

MIT has offered up a very nice timeline widget that can be added to websites to provide highly a highly interactive way to scroll through chronologically arranged information using standard HTML web technology (no flash, activeX or Java needed). The timeline is completely data driven, so it can easily connect to almost any source of information, even realtime data.
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline

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Audio of the Week

Web 2.0 according to O'Reilly - This presentation by publisher Tim O’Reilly gives a great overview of the new world order he’s coined “Web 2.0.”
55 minutes- recorded April, 2005.
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail572.html


Everything Bad Is Good for You - Steven Johnson, the author of “Interface Culture” and “Emergence” talks about his latest book "Everything Bad Is Good for You," where he argues that ambient culture is making us smarter.
38 minutes- recorded at the PopTech conference in 2005.
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail774.html

Book of the Week

Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert – Sounds like a self-help book, but in reality is an extremely well written and fascinating look at on "affective forecasting" investigates how and how well people can make predictions about the emotional impact of future events by Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400042666/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill

Welcome!

Welcome to Bill Ferster's Instructional Technology NewsWire

The goal of the NewsWire is to highlight trends and make connections between research, products, technologies, initiatives, and practices that will advance the effective use of technology in K-12 education.

Every two weeks I will share items that are of interest to me related to the intersection technology and education, and hopefully they will be of interest to you as well. There will initially be a focus on what is called "Web 2.0" Internet tools, as I believe they potentially offer a lot to connected classrooms, as well as the upswell in user-generated media.

Weekly Audio

I am a big fan of listening to spoken word audio, and each week will recommend one or more podcast or conference presentation that I have found interesting. They can be played directly from your browser or downloaded to your iPod.

Got news?

If you have any items you think fit this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

For more information

Bill Ferster
University of Virginia
34313 Welbourne Road
Middleburg, VA 20117
+1 (540) 592-7001
bferster - @ - virginia.edu