Month: October 2005
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1:1 laptop initiatives move forward
Perhaps following the lead of visionary state governors like Angus King, Massachusetts state governor Mitt Romney proposed a plan last week that would provide a laptop computer for every student in grades 6-12 by 2007. The article quotes the following from the proposal: Pencils “are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for…
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Introduction to XML workshop
Introduction to XML workshop 5 Oct 2005 TTU Advanced Technology Learning Center Taught by Bosah Chukwuogo All markup languages have similar characteristics XML is eXtensible Markup Language – extensible: capable of being extended – markup language: a system for marking or tagging data to indicate its logical structure – it is just a markup language…
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Notes and Thoughts on Negraponte’s $100 laptop speech last week
Andy Carvin posted the audio from Nicholas Negraponte’s address last week at the MIT Emerging Technology Review conference today on the MIT $100 laptop project, and this evening in my Microcomputer Applications class we are listening to this audio file and reflecting about it. Here are my notes from the first 30 minutes of the…
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Veteran Oral History Interviews and the TTU Vietnam Center
We need students to be engaged in “History That Matters:” Educational activities that truly engage students in ways simply reading a textbook and writing an essay cannot. We also need to engage students in the process of CREATING multimedia, not just merely consuming it. Having access to a robust variety of “voices from history” like…
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Lucrative high tech crime
The September 28, 2005 BBC article “Boom times for hi-tech fraudsters” is pretty scary. Just as people are continuing to offer amazing services and share ideas via the web on a daily basis, so also do criminals gain additional tools and resources for advancing agendas of evil and wrongdoing. 🙁 The growth of “botnets” using…
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Video game medical applications
NPR’s story from September 27, 2005, titled “Using Video Games to Manage Pain”, is included in the NPR Technology podcast for last week– subscription info and RSS links are on the NPR podcast directory. Medical doctors and researchers are interested in whether interactive games can provide sufficient distraction for children to help them manage pain…
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Blog Search Tools
Google is supporting a new Blogger search tool: http://search.blogger.com. I have not personally used this, but will in upcoming weeks. My favorite blog search tool remains Technorati: www.technorati.com.
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AASL conference blog invitation
The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) is inviting a select group of attendees to help blog the conference. Very innovative and forward looking. Even more flexible, however, is just getting ANYONE to blog the conference using a common tag with Technorati. That’s what attendees at WebZine2005 did successfully in Sept 2005.
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Google Planimeter and Pedometer
Google Planimater (www.acme.com/planimeter) is an incredible tool that lets you calculate real-world areas using Google Maps, for any polygon you desire. It is just unbelievable. I especially like the “hybrid” map view that shows both a satellite and map view of the area you want to measure. Try it out, measuring the area around your…
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In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law
Michael Geist’s “In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law” includes a collection of 19 essays about current and future proposals relating to intellectual property issues in the 21st century. Amazingly, this book is available as a series of free PDF downloads. The essays are organized into three different parts: PART ONE: CANADIAN…