BlogDay 2007 from Downunder

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Today it is BlogDay!! an event to foster more connections between bloggers and a way to get to know other bloggers with other interests from other countries.

Thinking about the global context, I thought to myself “if there is only one blog from the whole world that I am allowed to read for the next 12 months what would I choose?”.

Without hesitation, my choice was John Connell, because he keeps me in touch with a diversity of things – culture, history, society, philosophy, technology, news, ideas, creativity, and just good fun. Thanks John.

However, since I blog downunder right here in Sydney Town, I’ve decided to highlight 5 blogs (so hard to choose!!!) from Australia rather than other countries, to promote our emerging culture, point of view, and attitude in the global conversation, and to say ‘thanks’ the the aussie bloggers that I have added to my reading list this year!

Drop by (if you haven’t already) and enjoy the read.

Sue Waters at Mobile Technology in TAFE has done a stunning job promoting mobile technologies, e-learning and m-learning tools and strategies, is always investigating new and challenging ways of incorporating Web 2.0 into the education experience.

John Pearce at My Other Blog teaches in a primary school in Victoria, but his work draws on the global conversation to drive his thinking and practice in his own school. As John says, the whole Web 2.0 scene is moving so rapidly it is only via that web itself that you can hope to keep up.

Melinda Phillips at The Parramatta Learnscope Team blogs with a special purpose – to challenge her project team to explore Web 2.0 for professional learning and teaching in a ’21st century’ way. Great guidance and good reading. Melinda is a great person to work with 🙂

Chris Betcher at Betchablog teaches in a school in Sydney, does great professional development sessions, and runs From the Virtual Classroom podcasts which are a bit of a hit.

Cindy Barnsley at Thinking 2.0 teaches in country Australia and dreams (and writes) about technology to enhance students’ learning, with a focus on blogs, wikis and digital storytelling. I love her quote that drives her blog:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Alvin Toffler

There are MANY blogs in Australia and the world that we all love dearly. I couldn’t survive professionally without them. THANK YOU 🙂

Technorati Tags: BlogDay2007

Literacy and Web 2.0

Posted on August 29, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

On Monday I had the opportunity to provide a short presentation to educators interested in Literacy and Web 2.0. This presentation is just a simple ‘discussion starter’ and a bit of inspiration. We enjoyed ourselves 🙂

Some new things about information distribution…

Posted on August 29, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

CreateSpace is the new name of Amazon’s on-demand self-publishing service for the super long tail of books, audio CD’s and film DVD/Blue-ray. Products automatically get an ISBN number(a huge draw-card) and are listed on Amazon.com, including “Search Inside” for books. This extends what is on offer, when compared to Lulu and other self-publishing sites.
The National Archives in USA and CreateSpace will be publishing movies from its collection of over 200,000 public domain films, raising some interesting copyright issues i.e. will public domain files ‘go viral’ either online or via home CD copies?

Getting into Google explains that Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

Barry Shwartz reports that Bloglines released a new public beta of their popular web-based RSS reader. The new Bloglines beta is optimized to run well in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox.

The new beta has several new features including a customizable start page with drag and drop AJAX functionality, three feed viewing options including a “Quick View,” “3-Pane View,” and a “Full View.” New enhanced AJAX drag-and-drop makes feed management and ease, plus a new “Unread System” that makes marking feed items clearer, quicker and easier.

No need to worry, Read/Write Web has a comprehensive review of the new beta Bloglines, plus there is a lot of coverage at Techmeme. You can also read Gary Price’s write up at ResourceShelf.

These three things – nice juxtaposition don’t you think?

Blogging that collaborative continuum!

Posted on August 28, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Thanks to a post by Janet over at Fusion Finds I was reminded that the third annual Blog Day is August 31, 2007. (I missed this last year!).

BlogDay is an event to foster more connections between bloggers. A way to get to know other bloggers with other interests from other countries. On Friday the 31st, write a post describing 5 blogs you recommend. Preferrably blogs that are different from yours in culture, point of view, and attitude. Notify these bloggers and tag your post with BlogDay2007. This is a great way to connect with other bloggers and pass along some link love.

Go on, join the power of the crowd!

Better still, visit Fusion Finds: Educators Integrating Technology. I discovered Janet’s blog as a result of a comment on Heyjude – see the power of comments? I love the workshops, the ideas, and the models that I can adapt to my own needs here in Australia. I think I will use these ideas to build further on Judy’s Web 2.0 notes for my new learners. What will you find to excite or enjoy?

Search engine wizardry

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

I’ve always been curious about the information architecture behind search tools – infrastrucure and alogorithms. As I am not a mathematician or a programmer, some answers can become too complex.

However, I have found a couple of gems about Google. The first takes us back in time to Stanford University and two eager students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, working on a large-scale prototype search engine. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine introduced some key ideas that we are now familiar with – but which were revolutionary and which underpin the force of Google today.

We know from The Google Story just how different the Google setup is. David Carr in How Google Works explains:

Google buys, rather than leases, computer equipment for maximum control over its infrastructure. Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt defended that strategy in a May 31 call with financial analysts. “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures,” he said.

Google does more than simply buy lots of PC-class servers and stuff them in racks, Schmidt said: “We’re really building what we think of internally as supercomputers.”

Previous search engines had not analyzed links in the systematic way that Google did – all part of the original ideas of the two young researchers. If you’d like more answers to your question, How Does a Google Query Work, provides a few clues.

But Niall Kennedy, a web technologist has also come to my rescue with his post on Google phrase analysis where he explains that a few more details about Google’s possible analysis of page text is available from a recently published patent application by Googler Anna Patterson from June 2006. The application details how a search engine like Google might analyze text phrases, date-based topics, and associate a web page with related topics, even if the specific topic does not appear in the document itself. The 22-page document further emphasizes Google’s current work on “shingle” analysis to discover important phrases and concepts.

He provides a neat Google search diagram for muggles like me!

Tagging – for the fun of it?

Posted on August 24, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Folksonomy has become an important part of information sharing structures via the web – formal and informal. Folksonomy is the “vocabulary” or collection of tags that results from personal free tagging of web resources for one’s own use and the aggregate collection of tags that results from a group tagging project. Tagging systems are possible only if people are motivated to do more of the work themselves, for individual and/or social reasons. They are necessarily sloppy systems, but for an inexpensive, easy way of using the wisdom of the crowd to make resources visible and sortable, there’s nothing like tags 🙂

[Photo Credit: From Rashmi Sinha: A cognitive analysis of tagging]

Tagging for Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing explores these issues and shows the power of tagging to encourage conversations.

Coming up with the perfect tag is the problem- or is it? Subject analysis does not come naturally to the folksonomy crowd. Tags and the Power of Suggestion is a light-hearted consideration of some of the underlying influences of ‘natural’ approaches to organisation.

If you just want to delve further into tagging, then The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools might be just what your are after:

Tags – for some, one of the best ideas on the web, for others, merely a visual distraction. Yes, we’re talking about those loosely defined categories which are usually organized into cute little clouds. Looking for tag-related resources can be tough, so we’ve dug up 30 tools and resources that every seasoned tagger should check out.