Do you tweet on Twitter?
Then you might like to Twhirl as well.
There are many little tools you can use for your Twitter conversations, but my twitter client choice for now is Twhirl. Are teachers twittering? You bet. Check out the first Twitter Mashup from sujokat (Sue Tap).
Looks good doesn’t it? Functionality is excellent.
There is a bit of a thing happening with Campus Editions. First I learnt about Edublogs Campus, a nice new offering…. and then rather belatedly I heard about Firefox Campus Edition.
The Firefox campus edition comes pre-installed with StumbleUpon (for discovering websites, photos and videos), FoxyTunes (lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser) and Zotero (for clipping web notes and to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.
Providing this tool will make it imperative for us that students have good information and critical literacy skills to navigate successfully in this environment in order to think deeply, creatively and fairly rather than plagiarising or operating outside a creative commons approach to online media.
It’s marketed as being everything you need for a well-rounded College Life!
According to Mashable
It’s probably fair to say this is a marketing drive to get Firefox installed on student laptops before they head back to school.
I wonder, did anyone actually install this on their student machines? I like to be quite choosy about the Firefox addons I use – some of which are great. I think I would prefer to apply the same approach to customizing student delivered web browsers.
……is a neat new entry into a teacher’s toolkit – if you’re brave enough to give it an experimental go!
ThatsMyMouse allows people to passively interact. Just by navigating through a web-page you can interact with the people on it. Since it’s written in JavaScript (and supports all major browsers) it works for 95+% of visitors after a website places a single line of JavaScript on their page. You can see, talk and interact with anyone who browses to the same page as you.
Mashable also wrote about this simple but brilliant gimmick that they dubbed a Social Browsing Widget.
Playing around with it after an alert by Alec Couros on Twitter, I thought that it could be used as a good focus point for discussing a topic on a web page, or even webpage design.
Contribute to the discussion of the tool for Alec at ThatsMyMouse. Alec’s captured text transcript will help you discover more.
The way it could be used is governed by the comment field, which you position with your
mouse after writing the text. The comments don’t stay on screen for long, so it’s not about marking up a page with comments, but rather having a fun tool – perhaps online with other classes – to throw some ideas around and generate discussion.
Try this out on your wiki some time soon 🙂
6.00 am on Saturday morning, and at last it was my turn to join one of the classes for live blogging A Whole New Mind with students from Arapahoe High School.
Some weeks ago Karl Fisch (you’ll remember his Did You Know 2.0? video) put out a call for people to participate in ‘live blogging’ over a series of weeks, and you can see the timetable of these events at AWNMLiveBlogging. Luckily for me I could make the Period 6 timeslot on a few of the dates.
I’ve just completed my first session with these fabulous students. The record of just this one class group is at Smith 9H07-08.
What I can’t capture here was the opportunity to hear the fishbowl discussion technique in action. Using MeBeam, a web-based video chat tool, I heard every fabulous word of discussion, along with my fellow bloggers Christian Long and Gary Stager.
Yet another wonderful way to add flexibility and creativity to learning as a multimodal conversation.
Photo: 油姬
That’s what it’s all about …. lets keep an eye on these developments!
The DataPortability technical blueprint uses OpenID to provide decentralized identity. OpenID 2.0 Attribute Exchange (AX) is utilised for discovery of user service details. XRDS/YADIS are utilised to provide the details of the various services a user employs.
As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.
Its the weekend and time to relax. So here I am surfing the Net – and what do I find?
Imagine this scenario – what would happen to our social networking endeavors if we all lost connection to the Internet? Some of you may have been following Afterworld, the first television series to be made available on mobile phones and the web simultaneously (each of the 130 episodes is just over two minutes long). This animated sci-fi series tells the story of life on earth after an inexplicable global event which renders technology useless.
More than 95% of international telephone and data traffic travels via undersea cables. So sometimes there is an accident! What does happen when something goes wrong?
Passport reports:
The Arabist, an anonymous blogger based in Egypt, sarcastically predicts “complete social breakdown” when people find themselves unable to update Facebook every few minutes. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that. Internet users from Cairo to Calcutta are either without the Web or their service is operating at a fraction of its normal capacity.
The culprit? A ship off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, dragged its anchor and snagged two major underwater telecommunications cables. Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.
Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.
It’s happened before, and will happen again. Passport explains that it’s unclear when normal service could be restored to the affected countries. I wonder how blogger Julie Lindsay is managing in Doha? and if she still has steady access.
Oh, I see she is in Prague …… and busy blogging about the ECIS conference! I recommend a visit to the slides of her presentation on Personal Learning Networks. She captures the key points beautifully.
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International Society for Technology Education’s (ISTE) Second Life space provides a venue for educators to network and learn from each other about real-life education opportunities and best practices in Second Life.
ISTE sponsors an ‘in world’ group, hosts weekly networking socials and topical events, and sponsors a twice-monthly speaker series. At their recent meeting (1 pm Sydney time on Tuesday) Jo Kay aka jokay Wollongong was the guest speaker. Jo shared information about the various projects she is involved with in Second Life, including the Islands of jokaydia, where she is supporting a growing community of educators and artists in Second Life who are exploring various strategies for the use of virtual worlds in their practice.
Yep, I’m a resident of Jokaydia – so I went along help out, and to listen to Jo, to share with the ISTE colleagues, and to learn more about educational opportunities or events held on Jokaydia.
What I was amazed about was the fact that I could attend this meeting – on the third day of work in my new school. In my school district role last year, I was not able to get access to Second Life on the district network. Nor can most schools seem to get this organized. 
But sometimes we have unsung heros amongst us. The Joeys Head of ICT – Gary Evans – had me up and connected in 24 hours ! Fabulous work Gary. As a result he had time to drop by the meeting, and join Simon and Andy who I hope will assist me in some SL work later in the year. (Normally Gary is in his shirt and tie! like all staff at Joeys- this pic was taken on a frantic non-teaching day).
Perhaps it’s the Marist School that makes a difference. Back in my district of Catholic schools, it was Dean Groom, the Head of ICT at Parramatta Marist College, who made SL access possible – so that the students could join with the TeenLife project, Skoolaborate. Brother Pat at ParraMarist is as passionate about educational opportunities for his boys as my own Headmaster is for our Joeys boys!
In all this, its our IT managers who are the unsung heroes, without whom we could not do all that we do in our schools in all forms of e-learning.
Thanks Dean for all you did to help out last year. Won’t forget to keep reading your blog and learning from your work with your boys. PLUS your hacking of technology objects are the best 🙂
Thanks Gary for all you’ve done to help me out this year already. Joeys is very fortunate to have your leadership. Can’t wait to see what else is possible. Perhaps the sky’s the limit?!!
2008 heralds new directions for me – and I have had a wonderful start at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill here in Sydney.
Joey’s is a wonderful school with an imporant history amongst our Sydney schools, and is exemplified by a strong academic and sporting tradition. A ‘joeys boy’ remains a ‘joeys boy’ for life, due partly to the boarding school environment and partly to the Marist community of learners.
A recent twitter question asked me “what is Marist?”
As a Marist School, St Joseph’s College derives its charism from the founder of the Marist Brothers, Saint Marcellin Champagnat (1789 – 1840). A priest of the Society of Mary, St Marcellin was a man of warm personality, deep faith and great vision. The Christian education of youth, particularly those of rural areas, was his first love, following the terrible religious persecutions of the French Revolution. That is why he founded the Marist Brothers in 1817 at La Valla, a little village in the Loire region of France. Marcellin’s pastoral approach to students epitomises the daily work at the college and drives the values of this community of learners
“WE MUST LOVE THEM AND LOVE THEM ALL EQUALLY.”
Like many schools, St Joseph’s College is also undergoing a transformation in e-learning.
As Head Library & Information Services I’m looking after the Resources Centre and its team, where we will focus on literature, literacy, research and a strong integration of e-learning initiatives. We are going to undergo something of a transformation starting this year and into the future – and this journey of change will become part of my blogging narrative. There may be something in our journey that inspires your own adjustments to the exciting demands of 21st century learning.
Hear are some images of the outside entrance area of the Resource Centre.
Here’s an interesting find from the Information Architects Japan. This is sort of appropriate given the release of The Horizon Report – a fun way to map trends for 2008!
This time we’ve taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.
Enjoy the clickable online version. You’ll notice that it incorporates people, tools, and a variety of media services. Unfortunately there are lots missing – as spotted by Gary Barber on Twitter, who mentioned Seesmic as an example. Fun anyway.
The map is available two formats – ready for you to use.
1. Big, A3 PDF
2. Clickable online version
Thanks to an alert by Vicki Davis for the information that the 2008 Horizon Report 
is available now from the Horizon Project wiki and will be announced to the world January 29, 2008 at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. Thanks also to Gabriela Grosseck who sent a direct link of the Horizon Project pdf to me via Delicious.
Analyzing the five year history of the Horizon Reports, they have identified seven metatrends that have emerged with some regularity:
This is there analysis, but they hope that readers will weigh in on these metatrends.
They also look back to past Horizon Reports to ask “Where are they now?”
In addition to analyzing the MetaTrends of the last 5 years, this report outlines the major emerging technologies for college level education in the next 5 years including:
1 year or less
2-3 years
4-5 years
Interesting!! Read more about Horizon Report now ready from our wonderful Cool Cat Teacher, Vicki Davis and follow her advice about tagging to share information.
judyoconnell.com 
