Friday, February 23, 2007

Google Teacher Academy - The shape of things to come. Google faces a daunting task. How do you index 25 billion web pages when text pages are created from usually merely 10,000 words? Google is doing a pretty good job at search results since they now command by some estimates 70% of the searches done on the internet. Google is shaping the way we perceive and learn about the world. How can teachers become a part of this important event in human history? The Google Teacher Academy was implemented to help teachers learn more and help others become more productive with Google technologies. The first Google Teacher Academy in 2007 is now over but more are planned. Acceptance and completion of the Academy allows you to become a Google certified teacher and an educational leader in the shape of things to come. [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs] 7:47:58 PM      Google It!.

Consumer Revolt Spurred Via the Internet. sas-dot writes "UK's newspaper Independent outlines the brewing consumer revolt being fomented on the web. 'Consumer militancy' is becoming ever more common, as individuals join forces on the internet to fight back against the state and big business. Businesses from banks to soccer clubs have been the target of these groups, in each case facing the fury of consumers who feel they have been wronged. For example, 'A mass revolt has left the high street banks facing thousands of claims from customers seeking to claw back some of the £4.75bn levied annually on charges for overdrafts and bounced cheques. More than one million forms demanding refunds have been downloaded from a number of consumer websites. The banks are settling out of court, often paying £1,000 a time.' Are these kinds of organized 'advocate mobs' going to be the future of internet activism?" [Slashdot] 7:29:28 PM      Google It!.

Microsoft Testing "Pay-As-You-Go" Software. seriouslywtf writes "Microsoft has quietly rolled out a pay-as-you-go software system in a few countries (South Africa, Mexico, and Romania) to test out how the public reacts to software rentals. Part of the current service includes a ~$15 fee per month to use Office 2003. If the service goes over well, Microsoft is considering extending the program to include other software or other countries. From the article: 'Are we moving towards a rental model for software? Despite the success of programs like Software Assurance, and the FlexGo program, it doesn't seem as if the traditional model of software sales is ever going to go away. Consumers still like the option of buying complete software packages. However, for places where the price of software keeps obtaining legitimate versions out of most people's reach, a rental program may be a useful alternative.'"[Slashdot] 7:25:48 PM      Google It!.

Mashups for Non-Programmers - an experiement gone slightly awry. So, we were one of the sessions first up at this morning[base ']s Moosecamp. At the last minute we decided to change the format; originally we had wanted to try and stay true to the [OE]camp[base '] ethos and do very little presenting and a lot of co-creating with the audience. But competition is fierce for attention at Northern Voice, and there are too many good sessions that I wanted to attend too, so we cut it down from theh originally planned 1 1/2 to 2 hour we had hoped for to a quick 45 minute show and tell, with the hope that anyone who got really inspired would meet us latter to get hands-on with the tools. D[base ']Arcy kicked it off and his set of examples worked pretty well, but right at the end, Pipes failed. Hard to tell if it was the Pipes app itself or an overloaded network conneection. I was up next, and even though I had a few Pipes-based examples to show, I luckily had a few others too in my bag. Unfortunately,>demoitis, you cruel beast. We at least tried to seize the moment and turn it into a teachable moment, illustrating that while there has been a true explosion of services, as [base "]non-programmers[per thou] we are largely subject to their availability whims.¬[sgl dagger] Brian followed on with a parable of his efforts over the years with Aggrssive, which while I know he is hard on the results I still think was and is a valiant effort to create a software package to allow us to host our own feed mashups, something many of us at institutions require if we want to introduce these techniques into production. And finally, Chris Lott brought a rock-solid performance, with hhis various experiments in Ning and Google Co-op working great. I don[base ']t noticed how many people we convinced that the potential for non-programmers to mashup content are there; that wasn[base ']t so much our goal. For me the session was meant as an experiment on how far non-programmers could in fact go, and hopefully there were at least a few in the crowd who were inspired to push on further. If you are interested, the wiki page that we used to organize the session is chock full of additional examples and technologies to start creating your own mashups. Good luck! - SWL Tags: mashups NV2007 [EdTechPost] 7:17:16 PM      Google It!.

Thoughts on SecondLife. IT management in higher education may or may not be aware of SecondLife. Basically it is the ultimate virtual playground for exploring opportunities for the classroom of the future, and SL is picking up serious momentum in our Tech Ed communities. However, It is so much more, but this post is about helping me to digest this opportunity from a university CTO's perspective. I believe SecondLife is important enough to justify serious research into this virtual classroom opportunity. There is something about visually experiencing the person you are communicating with that makes activity like chat and IM more effective. Combine that with relatively accessible options for distributing digital content and you have access to technology that we could never justify building or buying ourselves. Work is underway by many institutions; ours included, establishing a presence in the SecondLife world. Educators like Intellagirl are becoming famous and people are building businesses and careers in this virtual world. My advice to IT departments is for you to find out what your Tech Ed folks are doing in SL and look for ways in which you can support them. SecondLife identity: UniversityCTO.Maculate [EDUCAUSE CONNECT blogs] 7:13:04 PM      Google It!.

The Promise of Personal Supercomputers. Intel's "terascale" supercomputer on a chip is one of Intel's first steps toward massively multicore (multiprocessor) technology. The goal: test techniques that could make massively multicore technology faster, more energy efficient, and easy to ... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 7:10:13 PM      Google It!.

Scientists produce neurons from human skin. Scientists from Universite Laval's Faculty of Medicine have succeeded in producing neurons in vitro, using stem cells extracted from adult human skin.  Th... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 7:08:48 PM      Google It!.

Darpa Chief Speaks. "We're on the verge of having computers with densities approaching a monkey's brain, and it won't be long before we'll have a computer with ... the equivalent to neurons and almost human," says DARPA director Tony Tether. ... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 7:07:51 PM      Google It!.

MP3 Patents in Upheaval After Verdict. Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format. By SAUL HANSELL. [NYT > Technology] 7:05:58 PM      Google It!.