November 20, 2009
Fate and technology have pummeled many professions since 1963, from bookseller to travel agent to auto worker. But teachers have resisted the powerful forces reorganizing industry. The dream of the teacherless classroom has remained just that.
Today the dream has returned. Thanks to broadening Internet access, advances in multimedia and the market potential of millions of historically underserved learners among the developing world’s youth and the rich world’s adults, modern versions of the doughnut building are flowering globally: systems through which chunks of teaching can be “scaled up,” in business jargon, and beamed to hundreds of thousands worldwide.
[Source: New York Times]
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Education, Emerging Trends, Hybrid/Online Learning, Online resources | 
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Posted by Oscar Retterer
November 20, 2009
Curriki is a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world. It includes an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them.
More info…
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Posted by Oscar Retterer
November 14, 2009
URL shorteners like bit.ly present some profound problems for the health of the web: for one thing, they might vanish if they company that provides them goes bust (for some other things: it exposes your internet browsing to surveillance by random URL-shortening companies; it exposes you to malware and phishing attacks, and so on).
The first problem — URLs can vanish — looks like it may be solved soon. Many URL shortening companies are escrowing their databases of shortened URLs with the Internet Archive, an honorable, established nonprofit. If the companies go bust, their URLs will be redirected to the Archive and thus persist.
via URL shorteners suck less, thanks to the Internet Archive and 301Works – Boing Boing.
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Online resources, Tools, Web 2.0 | 
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Posted by Teb Locke
October 26, 2009
If you’re like me, you like to make the most out of what little free time you have. One way of finding ideas for activities without wasting precious minutes is by searching online. But sometimes the process of browsing the Web can suck you in and waste more time than it saves.
This week, I tested a tool called Goby (pronounced go-be), www.goby.com, which works as an activity search engine to help you find things to do. It tries to be simple enough so that you can get some ideas and start doing the things you want to do rather than wasting hours in front of the computer.
Read more.
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Posted by Charles Wachira
October 20, 2009
Wolfram Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” with a name that rolls right off the tongue, has until now lived solely as a Web site that can provide cool data results to certain queries. Now, though, iPhone and iPod touch owners can avail themselves of a brand spankin' new $50 Wolfram Alpha app.
You can ask Wolfram Alpha to compute plain-language problems as diverse as “mother's father's nephew” or “9 years six months twelve days from yesterday” or even “population density United States vs France.” You can also feed it mathematical queries like “taylor series x^2 sin^3(x)”.
via Wolfram Alpha launches $50 iPhone app | Software | iPhone Central | Macworld.
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Posted by harryhaddon
October 14, 2009
Free and open collaborative resource draws scholars from across disciplines.
The proliferation of Web 2.0 social networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and even Flickr got some people thinking: Which scholarly disciplines need better ways of researching, collaborating, and communicating, and could a social networking model play a role?
“Bioethics and applied ethics scholars are very interdisciplinary in their work,” said Kate McCready, EthicShare project director at the University of Minnesota, “The departments that most bioethics and applied scholars studied in and received degrees from don’t have the same names as the departments where they now work. They came from philosophy, religious studies, medicine, public health, etc., but now work in ‘bioethics.’”
[Source: Campus Technology]
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Posted by Oscar Retterer
October 14, 2009
Google Docs received an overhaul this week that makes it easier for users to share items, upload documents, and stay organized. The new tweaks also brought a slight change to the Google Docs homepage with a more uniform and simpler look.
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Posted by Charles Wachira
October 14, 2009
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — It is a rare criticism of elite American university students that they do not think big enough. But that is exactly the complaint from some of the largest technology companies and the federal government.
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Posted by Charles Wachira
