03.24.06
Posted in General, Learning Theory at 9:12 am by Norm Garrett
I was reading my subscribed RSS feeds the other day and I came across this site that just fascinated me. After I had spent nearly an hour playing around with it, I thought that I needed to share it here. The site has been set up by George Mason University and it deals with the linquistic characteristics of a variety of English speakers. You can click on a spot on the globe and then listen to a native of that area read an English paragraph. What’s really interesting is to see how different all of the native speakers of English are. It’s also fun to quiz someone else and see if they can pinpoint where a speaker is from.
Included in the site are demographic data about the speakers and the phoenetic text of their rendition. The site demonstrates how a project can be disseminated with the Web in ways we could never imagine before. If you visit the site, think how an English or foreign language teacher might use the site to demonstrate linquistic concepts. Kudos to GMU for this.
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03.22.06
Posted in Web 2.0 at 9:35 am by Norm Garrett
I just read an excellent blog post (on WebMonkey) by Tim Ziegler. It is one of the best analyses of Web 2.0 that I have read. It is thorough and separates the hype from the facts. Web 2.0 has become an interesting subject because it is viewed (depending upon the perspective) as everything from a panacea to all of our ills to being dead in the water and nothing more than overblown hype. In between, there are many viewpoints:
- Web 2.0 will greatly enhance our ability to collaborate, which is a good thing
- Web 2.0 will greatly enhance our ability to collaborate, which is not a good thing
- Web 2.0 will give power to the masses
- Web 2.0 will give the masses information overload and, more importantly, serious information quality problems
- Web 2.0 will allow ordinary people to publish, giving that power to the masses
- Web 2.0 will fill our lives with trivial, unsubstantiated, poorly researched (if researched at all), and ubiquitous junk information
Are any of these true? Certainly, some must be. Read Tim Ziegler’s post to get a better handle on it and see what you think. What do I think? I think the jury’s still out. There is an old saying among programmers and software developers that goes like this: “Do you want your software developed quickly, correctly, or cheaply (select any two)?”
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03.20.06
Posted in General at 6:24 pm by Norm Garrett
I ran across this link and ended up spending a lot of time browsing this collection. Librarians and archivists at the University of California at Santa Barbara have been collecting wax cylinder recordings and have managed to digitize thousands of them in their Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project. All of these recordings are public domain and can be freely downloaded in either original format (unedited WAV file) or in MP3 format files. They can also be played with a handy player that is built into the web page. The era is 1900 to about 1920 and you can listen to political speeches by Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and others, or music by a variety of individuals. There are thousands of recordings on the site.
If you have an interest in history and some time to burn, check out this site. It has a good search engine and gives you complete library references on the recordings you are listening to.
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03.10.06
Posted in Conferences, Future at 11:06 am by Norm Garrett
If you are looking for a good conference that lets you do some real interacting with your colleagues, try the Faculty Summer Institute at the University of Illinois. It’s an informal conference aimed at educators who are interested in distance learning, online courses, etc.. It is mainly organized by ION (the Illinois Online Network) at the University of Illinois. I have worked with ION for a number of years and they really are pioneers in the area of online learning.
I have spoken with the organizers about the format and topics for this year and it looks better than ever. It will not only have the usual presentations on timely topics, but will have some tracks and groupwork in those tracks, so there will be an opportunity for hands-on collaboration. In addition, the collaborative technologies we like to talk about will be used (conference blogs, wikis, etc.) in the conference itself. I highly recommend attendance if you are interested in online learning.
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03.08.06
Posted in General, Society and Technology at 9:28 am by Norm Garrett
David Shenk, in his book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, speaks of the “2×4 effect,” the idea that we are so overloaded with information that in order to get someone’s attention, you (figuratively) have to hit them over the head with a 2×4. An interesting article on the CNet blog talks about an O’Reilly tech conference (the O’Reilly conferences are generally premium conferences in the tech world) pondering the idea of getting one’s message across when everyone is already overloaded with information. In fact, the attendees are generally so overloaded that sessions at this conference lasted no longer than 15 minutes, mostly to appease their “continuous partial attention.”
What is happening to our attention spans with our attempts at multitasking and our severely overloaded senses? One of the speakers, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice-president said:
“… technology can’t exist for technology’s sake. It needs to answer the question, ‘Does this product improve my quality of life?’ Wikis might be best for brainstorming, while cell phones are ideal for crisis management. Do you really need to access a Wiki on your cell phone? Only if you’re brainstorming about a crisis.”
How’s your attention span?
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