Just a few years ago, it seemed nearly everyone, in academe and out, was hailing the wiki as the next great transformative technology — or, at the very least, a tool worth getting a bit excited about. Fast forward to 2009, though, and much of the enthusiastic talk has died down.
So says Renay San Miguel in an article for Linux Insider, and he’s got something of a point. Wikipedia aside, there really aren’t many heavily hyped wiki projects, and social-networking tools like Facebook and Twitter seem to have stolen the spotlight. So Mr. San Miguel wants to know: “Have wikis lost their mojo?”
Have Wikis Run Out of Steam?
30 April 2009
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Emerging Trends, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Wikis | 
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Posted by Oscar Retterer
Amazon to offer free cloud services to academics
30 April 2009From macworld.com: Amazon is inviting students, educators and researchers to apply for grants that will give them free access to the company’s hosted computing services.
The company expects to dole out up to $1 million per year worth of services, depending on the quality of the applications, it said.
Amazon has already made the offer to a few universities. Last year, 300 students in Harvard’s introductory computer science course used Amazon Web Services to learn firsthand about virtualization, scalability and multi-core processing, according to David J. Malan, lecturer on computer science at Harvard University.
[More]
Leave a Comment » | General | Tagged: Cloud Computing, higher education | Permalink
Posted by harryhaddon
Google Expands Service to Detect Swine Flu in Mexico – NYTimes.com
30 April 2009To Aid Mexico, Google Expands Flu Tracking
New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: April 30, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Google has released a new version of its Flu Trends service that is tailored for Mexico in the hope of helping health officials and others track the spread of swine flu in that country.
Google Flu Trends, which was first released in the United States, in November, tries to track the incidence of flu based on the ebb and flow of searches for keywords related to influenza. The company called its Flu Trends for Mexico experimental because unlike in the United States, it does not have historical surveillance data to validate that its search data correlates to actual infections.
Leave a Comment » | Emerging Technologies, Web 2.0 | Tagged: google | Permalink
Posted by Teb Locke
Designing Learning Spaces for Instruction, not Control — Campus Technology
29 April 2009Never before has it been more viable for educators to put instruction front and center of learning space design than now. Never before has collaboration with students and peers and with the world been more possible than now. So why are our learning spaces still so reminiscent of the past? Why are these spaces still so constrained?
[Source: Campus Technology]
Leave a Comment » | Learning Spaces | Tagged: classrooms | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Rare and ancient written works go online
29 April 2009National libraries and the U.N. education agency has put some of humanity’s earliest written works online. The antiquities range from ancient Chinese oracle bones that might be more than 3,000 years old to the first extant European map of the New World, dating back nearly 450 years. The collection is in seven languages and also includes a 16th-century map and an 11th-century manuscript.
[Source: eCampus News]
Leave a Comment » | Online resources | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Academia.edu – Social Network for Academics
28 April 2009Academia.edu does two things:
- It displays academics around the world in a tree format, according to what university/department they are affiliated with.
- It enables an academic to have an easy-to-maintain academic webpage.
Leave a Comment » | Emerging Trends, Social Media/Networking | Tagged: Academia.edu | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Tech University of America – Only $99 a Month
28 April 2009Steve Cooper launched Tech University of America in March 2009 to provide zero-tuition higher education to people around the world. He started with one survey course, Tech 100, and one handpicked student. Based on initial traffic at their website, he expects 100 students by August and 1,000 by December. He plans to seek both regional and national accreditation.
Cooper talks about the apps that he thinks will transform higher education. Is he a visionary?
Leave a Comment » | Education, Emerging Trends | Tagged: Tech University of America | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
What does one billion equal?
23 April 2009The number of iPhone and iPod Touch application downloads from the Apple iTunes App Store in the first nine months.
Leave a Comment » | Emerging Trends | Tagged: iTunes App Store | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
The Karelia iMedia Browser – An extensible browser for your media
23 April 2009Do you like the media browser that Apple includes in some of its applications, but wish you could use it from any application? Now you can.
Download the free Karelia iMedia Browser and use it whenever and wherever you need to access your library of photos, music, videos, and bookmarks. (Requires Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” or 10.5 “Leopard.”)
Leave a Comment » | Tools | Permalink
Posted by Oscar Retterer
Court flunks high schoolers’ appeal on plagiarism database – Ars Technica
22 April 2009Can plagiarism-busting website TurnItIn.com archive complete student papers for use in its detection database? Four high school students claimed copyright infringement, but a federal appeals court says it’s just fair use.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/headline-here.ars
Leave a Comment » | Education | Permalink
Posted by Teb Locke
Charles Wachira
harryhaddon
Oscar Retterer
Teb Locke
