I’ve done several workshops this year on using technical tools in the classroom. It often seems like problems that have been solved for years - like coordinating events or committee work (painfully ineffective through e-mail) - keep going unsolved because the technology to solve them is inaccessible to the people that most need it.
This [...]
I’ve been recommending that people planning a visit to an unfamiliar location search for photos in flickr ever since I saw Gridskipper’s Flickr Guide to the Planet over two years ago.
It occurred to me this morning that if we can so easily travel through space, why can’t we travel through time? And then space and [...]
We all use web apps, we all complain about those web apps, and some brave souls go out and build a better web app. I’ve noticed the emergence of the “Y app is what X should have been” group, and I’m curious about how successful these new apps are.
For example, Jaiku is what Twitter should [...]
I have to admit that when I first heard about Twitter, I really didn’t get it. I joined, poked around, and promptly ignored it for a few months. For those of you aren’t immersed in the trendy web tech culture, Twitter is a microblogging site where millions of people use the web, IM, or SMS [...]
Wendy Seltzer, the law professor who founded Chilling Effects, and who I have had the pleasure of having a few discussions with over the last year about education, law, and MythTV, has received a DMCA takedown notice for posting an educational excerpt of the NFL Super Bowl broadcast to YouTube.
The real irony of this is [...]
I filled in today for a colleague’s client-side web class. It was a last minute arrangement, and I didn’t really have an idea what the students had been working on or covering in the weeks leading up to my lecture. I began by showing Michael Wesch’s fabulous video on Web 2.0. It got a few [...]
Every so often I have a “what am I doing” moment about this site. It has provided me with a platform for experimenting with various web technologies, and also a place to share some of what I’m working on.
Daniel Livingstone quoted some of an e-mail message that I sent to a mailing list. If I [...]
I just read this enlightening article over at the Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog. This is a new idea that I haven’t considered before — do we hear these stories of hysteria because the established social order is threatened by girls empowered by technology?
I know that the media reaction to social networking, MySpace [...]
This week, I asked my introductory web development class of twenty-seven sophomores to share their first experiences with the “Internet” (I didn’t intend to put Internet in quotes, but it is because…).
Twenty-four of them said, AOL. AOL!
Even more amazing, none of those twenty-four remember using the web or even newgroups. Mostly, they remembered the chat [...]
Don’t you love when you start thinking, “Gee, I should write a program to do this…”, and a quick Google search reveals that someone else has already done so? And that it’s freeware?
Check out this free Outlook Web notifier utility. If you’re stuck with the web interface, you don’t need to continuously keep a window [...]