Monday, October 11, 2004

Scientists Define Murphy's Law [Slashdot:] 9:09:00 AM      .

Radio Re-Volt: Broadcasting For The Common Man [Slashdot:] This might be an interesting lecture hall solution on a budget when combined with student fm plus usb storage devices.  Alternatively, talking displays that are unobtrusive becaue they broadcast only low power radio (powered by solar panels) could make nature trails more educationally enhanced without spoiling the landscape with signage.  --BL 9:03:59 AM      Google It!.

Robots Do The Darndest Things [Slashdot:] 8:50:30 AM      Google It!.

ZPhotoSlides 2.0 released. The ZPhotoSlides development team is proud to announce ZPhotoSlides 2.0 for Plone [Plone RSS] 8:48:46 AM      Google It!.

UK ID cards to be issued with first biometric passports. 'Voluntary' nature of first phase now even more debatable [The Register] 8:44:00 AM      Google It!.

People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid. A group of British scientists believes people should be viewed as 'superorganisms,' made of conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells. It's a sensible view, given that human bodies contain more than 500 bacterial species. By Rowan Hooper. [Wired News] 8:34:32 AM      Google It!.

World’s Largest e-learning Programme Rolled out to Indian Schools. Over 4,000 pupils from schools in four regions of India will have free access throughout the month of November to the prestigious Heriot-Watt SCHOLAR online learning system, thanks to the British Council and SCHOLAR’s publisher Interactive University ( [Online Learning Update] 8:29:03 AM      Google It!.

Going Nomadic: Mobile Learning in Higher Education - Bryan Alexander, Educause Review. The combination of wireless technology and mobile computing is resulting in escalating transformations of the educational world. The question is, how are the wireless, mobile technologies affecting the learning environment, pedagogy, and campus life? T [Online Learning Update] 8:27:41 AM      Google It!.

Scaling Up: From Web-Enhanced Courses to a Web-Enhanced Curriculum - Robert E. Wood, Innovate Online. In the past decade, the most important technological innovation in higher education has been the enhancement of academic courses with Web-based information and tools. With and without course management systems, instructors have progressed from using wh [Online Learning Update] 8:26:41 AM      Google It!.

flickr object. flickr foto Volcano Types Diagram available on my flickr Volcanos are often classified by plotting their degree of "explosiveness" (y axis) and height of the erpution column (x axis).... the largest and most dangerous eruptions have high values of both. Roll over each type for examples. Note- this example is here is purely for showing how flickr can be used to create "hotspot" learning objects.... my geology knowledge is extremely rusty! Want to create a simple "learning object" (whatever you believe that means...)? Flickr offers a slick, little known means to add "hotspots" to images, so you can create labeled diagrams, or document a process where parts of the image can be labeled by notes that pop up. I saw this recently in something Brian shared that shows a flickr image that through this method, demonstrates the process for making a pie. At first I missed the significance, as I thought it was just the pictures... but when you follow Brian's link to the flickr image you get more than the image- it is annotated with hotspots of descriptive text when you roll the mouse over a region of the image. I just rolled this quick example together, using an image I had created for our Writing HTML tutorial, dusting off the geology cobwebs, it is a graph used in introductory geology to help classify volcanos. When you roll overthe image in flickr, you get short explanation or detail related to the region of the diagram. This is done easily in flickr when you edit a photo, and click the small icon for Add Note. A region is added to your image which you can drag to resize and reposition over a part of an image, and then compose the note associated with that image. Hotspot type diagrams have many uses in learning- e.g. identifying parts of the nervous system for an anatomy and physiology class, diagraming a sentence structure for English, clarifying composition for music theory, illustrating the location of engine parts for an engiineering class... on and on. How many of our course management tools offer a simple hotspot tool? Too busy 'managing'.... Flickr may not be the be-all tool for creating so called "learning objects", but anyone can quickly take an image and add annotation to it. Object or not, it is yet another cool layer of flickr. [cogdogblog] 8:15:19 AM      Google It!.