RSS in plain English - Ideas for student-made help videos

Here’s a great video about RSS (Real Simple Syndication). RSS is the heart of how blogs work, and how you can easily get great content to come to you instead of searching the Internet for it.

If YouTube is blocked at your school - you can find the video here at the CommonCraft website.

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Local entrepreneurs to get solid advice

Local entrepreneurs to get solid adviceOracle executive will speak at business awards dinnerBy KATHLEEN GALLAGHER
kgallagher@journalsentinel.comPosted: April 11, 2008

Tim Keane says Wisconsin's entrepreneurs spend too much time talking to each other.

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Harvard Crimson describes green light for academic publishing

A story this week in The Harvard Crimson is headlined: Motion To Allow Free Online Access To All Harvard Articles details the move:

While its ways are sometimes criticized as opaque, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences took a big step towards openness yesterday, passing a motion that will allow Harvard to freely distribute scholarly articles produced by FAS professors.

The motion, which passed easily at yesterday’s Faculty meeting, grants Harvard a non-exclusive copyright over all articles produced by any current Faculty member, allowing for the creation of an online repository that would be “available to other services such as web harvesters, Google Scholar, and the like.”

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Teaching like the pros do

A New York Times story today on the golf page reports that Tiger Woods’ coach Hank Haney has taken over as director of instruction at the International Junior Golf Academy located on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. This is a top school for which some students pay as much as $47,000 a year. The academy is free of the conventional general educational traditions and mores that shape a very great deal of the schooling experience. Golf is also unapologetically competitive. The academy will do what it judges most effective to teach golf to its students. With that background in mind it is instructive to note that podcasts and Web-based instruction are part of the mix, as reported in the article:

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A few presentations

I'm almost done posting presentations I've done over the last few days :). I delivered an online session to the Emerge conference early this morning on Technology and Community as Identity.

I'm currently in Fairbanks, Alaska...and this morning, I delivered a presentation to a group of designers on the Big Picture: Future of Education. While I'm pleased to have received the invite to return to Fairbanks, I feel a bit conflicted in that Chris Lott (situated in Fairbanks) is every bit as capable of synthesizing and expressing key trends in society and technology (though he would do so with a more poetic/artistic flare).

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2008 Tools/Sites/Extensions I Use List

Since it’s still close to the first of the year, and since if I remember to do it at the beginning of ‘09 it would be an interesting comparison (I think), let me follow the TechCrunch meme and make a list of the tools and sites I currently use on a regular basis. These are in no particular order, btw, and the only requirement here is that I use it at least once a week, but I’ve put a * next to the ones that would probably be near the top of the usage list. Here goes: WordPress*Skype*Gmail*Google Search*Google Reader*Google Notebook*Google NewsGoogle Calendar*Google Docs*Firefox*FlickrNingElluminateAudacityWikispacesDelicious*NetvibesPageflakesJingMindMeisteriTunesiPhotoSkitchTwitter*TwitterificNeoOfficeYouTubeJottRhapsodyPandoraWikipediaAmazon

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Real Student Journalism

Bud’s thinking about getting his kids involved with YourHub this fall, the community news portal for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. It’s a great idea, and it of course makes me yearn for the classroom once again. There’s just so much I could be doing with my journalism kids: blogs, rss, social research, wikis, Skype interviews, podcasts, photo stories at Flickr, all published to a dynamic online newspaper space of our own design. (Out here in the hinterlands of New Jersey, there isn’t a YourHub to work with yet…) My goodness how things have changed in just the past couple of years.

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Male or Female?

Got this current an email in this day and age … couldn’t resist:

Subject instead Ladylike You brawniness not be endowed with familiar this, on the contrary, a abundance of non-living
objects are gender express, in truth either workman by way of alternative ladylike Here are some
examples:

FREEZER IMPEDIMENTA -  Male
They paralyse universe in vogue, nevertheless you bottle peep equitable past as a consequence o them.

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Student Contest - Open Source Software Development

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest

Google has announced a new effort to get young people involved in open source development. Student contestants will have the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development, from writing code and documentation to preparing training materials and conducting user experience research.

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The Best Ten Websites For Students To Learn About Computers

I’ve gotten into one of my “list-making” moods this week. I was inspired by a request from Karisa Tashjian (a staffperson at the Rhode Island Family Literacy Initiative) for sites to help English Language Learners with computers, so came up with this one.

This list is categorized a little differently from the majority of my other “The Best…” lists. Instead of ranking them from the best to the very best, I’ve picked a couple of sites that each fit into specific sub-categories of knowledge that students would need to have about computers.

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