Geek Books and the Digital World

I have become a fan of books from O'reilly publishing. They are famous for the "Hacks" series and in fact, if I were teaching a statistics class I would strongly consider using Statistics Hacks.

But, that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about. As a tablet pc user I do a lot of reading on my HP Tabletand one of my favorite finds has been O’reilly’s “online books” website called safari. The shelf life of a good technology book isn’t always that long, but with this service I can read the whole book through, and if it’s good enough, I can order the paper based book at a 35% discount (what?? that’s amazing).

I pay 20 dollars a month to be able to have 10 books on my virtual bookshelf. Once a book is added to the bookshelf it has to remain there for 30 days. But, even though I can only have 10 books on my bookshelf (they have to be on my bookshelf, otherwise they can't be read), the search function can find subjects across the entire library of publishers (what?? that’s amazing). If the search turns up a book that's not on my bookshelf, I can add it--that is, if I have open slots on my bookshelf.

The downside if there is one—the bookmarking tool is a bit clunky. But, the good news, use Diigo and not only can you bookmark the page, but you can even store the paragraph clipping for future reference. Because the site is password protected you will need to login to Safari, before clicking your diigo bookmark link.

Tags: Bookmarking, Digital World, Ebooks, Learning, TabletPC

Cooperation and Collaboration in Higher Education

Google Code - Updates: UW and Google: Teaching in Parallel Annotated

Big Business (Google) collaborates with Higher Education (University of Washington) to teach students about Grid Computing. And that's not all, UW invites other universities to get in on the action. This is a great story with awesome potential.

A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version).

Earlier this year, the University of Washington partnered with Google to develop and implement a course to teach large-scale distributed computing based on MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

The goal of developing the course was to expose students to the methods needed to address the problems associated with hundreds (or thousands) of computers processing huge datasets ranging into terabytes

Tags: Learning, Higher Education, Open Source, Teaching, Distributed Computing, Google

Mind Mapping Meets Wikipedia

As a strong advocate for any tool that aids the learning process, I have to give a PG rating (Pretty Great) to http://www.wikimindmap.org. So, let's say for instance that we want to continue our learning on RSS news feeds.

1. Visit the site http://www.wikimindmap.org
2. Set the appropriate language, which if you're reading this you'll probably want to set it to en.wikipedia.org.
3. Enter a topic like RSS

or go directly to the results by clicking below: http://www.wikimindmap.org/viewmap.php?wiki=en.wikipedia.org&topic=RSS

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Mind Mapping, RSS, Web 2.0

Can Brittanica Do This?

New Tool Mines Wikipedia Truthfulness Annotated

I happen to really like wikipedia--especially as I'm trying to keep up with the latest "tech" jargon. In the world of academia, however, it has its detractors. And understandably so--mature and wise scholars sometimes can be tricked by the accuracy of an entry, so it is no wonder that young students may get tripped up. A software tool like the one in this article could really help Wikipedia be a more trusted tool in the classroom. As the article states it's not fool-proof, but the reality is that our students, I hope, will be applying critical thinking skills to anything they read.

A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version).

• Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly.
• Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
• he software will color text some gradation of orange if there is reason to doubt its content. The deeper the orange, the more likely it is malarkey.
• by analyzing the reputations of the contributors responsible for each line.
• In general, the less tinkering your work on Wikipedia engenders, the more trustworthy you are deemed to be.
• For example, in an extensive entry on the old Commodore 64 computers - http://tinyurl.com/2dbggk - the Santa Cruz software tags just three lines, each an unfootnoted statement of purported fact.

Tags: Digital World, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Web 2.0

A Great Overview of RSS Newsfeeds

I recently wrote a paper in which I talked about the value of RSS newsfeeds. In my blog reading I ran across this video that is a very good (and easy to understand) overview of RSS.

Tags: Google, Learning, Teaching, RSS

Google Books Update

Your Own Google Books Library, and More Annotated

This update is provided by Philipp Lennsen who writes for one of my favorite blogs (Blogoscoped). I continue to be drawn to things that could change the classroom and I really think Google's initiative with Google Books has the potential to be an amazing teaching resource. A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety (including the full annotated version). your library is RSS-ified for others to subscribe to, and you can export it using another custom XML format listing title, author, ISBN and such. Importing books is possible as well by providing a list of ISBNs.

Google's embed dialog also allows you to directly blog something with Blogger, or add it to Google Notebook.

The Google Books project, formerly called Google Print (project name "Ocean"), continues to evolve aiming to become "the" book search center with an abundance of research options and data mining features, like maps integration, or the new popular passages.

Right now the biggest obstacle for users I see are the often confusing separations between public domain books, partner books and library books.

And why shouldn't I be allowed to clip fair use passages from copyrighted books, for instance?

In related news, the New York Times reports that both Amazon and Google will be entering the ebook market this year.

Tags: Classroom, Digital World, Learning, Teaching, Higher Education, Ebooks

Fair Use--An Important Topic for Higher Education

This is a fascinating topic. Especially as the younger generation seems to thrive on taking bits and pieces of various media (i.e. parts of a song)and re-mixing it into something for public consumption. Dan Tapscot and Anthony D. Williams covered this topic in their book entitled Wikinomics ("Prosumer" chapter, if I remember correctly). It seems that times are changing--Philipp Lenssen from "Blogoscoped" notes that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are backing a Defend Fair Use Initiative This is an amazing development! Microsoft thrives on a proprietary software, yet the latest version of the Office Suite (2007) is actually XML content and a zip file. In other words, the proprietary file format that was used in Office 2003 is now very "open" in Office 2007. What is this world coming to--the more I know the more confused I get.

CCIA - Defend Fair Use

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Books

The Future Classroom

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom Annotated

Anyone in higher education should take note of the following article. It makes me think of two questions that need to be answered as the needs and services the future student will expect from our higher education institutions continues to change:

1. Will open source software, like the wiki and Google Docs, replace the proprietary software of companies like "Blackboard" and "Microsoft Office" respectively? 2. Will retention of the higher education student be negatively impacted by the lack of the interactive web based tools like those cited in this article? A list of items that I highlighted from the article--see link at the top of this entry for the article in its entirety. At many colleges and universities, wikis are used mostly as a supplement to primary teaching tools like textbooks and labs, while other Web 2.0 technologies -- such as social networking sites like Facebook -- have become a staple of student life.

In one Boston College professor's classroom, however, wikis have become a primary learning tool, replacing textbooks and allowing improved collaboration among students.

Gerald Kane, assistant professor of information systems at the Chestnut Hill, Mass., school, has been using a wiki from SocialText Inc. as the primary teaching tool in his classroom since October, relying on the technology to integrate content from other Web 2.0 technologies like social book-making tools, RSS systems, and Google for his "Computers in Management" courses.

Some recent research surveys have found that some companies are investing in wikis, but the technology is used less heavily than other Web 2.0 tools like RSS feeds and social networks.

The survey concluded that companies are investing more heavily in Web services, RSS, podcasts, social networking and peer-to-peer networking

Working the Web Article from "University Business" April 2007 (author: Chelan David)

Working The Web Annotated

I enjoyed this article that was recently posted on the "University Business" Magazine website, authored by Chelan David. You may click the link above to see the entire article, or visit the "annotated" link above that I annotated through Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/). The highlighted quotes, that you could see by visiting the "annotated" link above are extracted for you below:

• The shift toward user-generated content is having a major impact on education
• Educators are taking advantage of photo and video sharing services, podcasting, wikis, blogs, and other social software to instruct learners through the latest in internet technologies
• Key aspects of the movement include web architecture that encourages user contributions, the continuous updates of software and data, and the freedom to share and edit content
• Think of social bookmarking as version 2.0 of the personal bookmarks on your browser
• In contrast to the bookmarks on your computer, social bookmarking sites are available to you from any computer. Also, you can: add tags (free-text keywords) to your posts; see what others are posting and what tags they're using; and sort items of interest by tag, project, or user