Google Summer of Code

Here's another great way to encourage or support Sakai OpenSource development, too!

Google's Summer of Code: http://code.google.com/soc/

Bottom line:  Student earns $5000 (and a tee-shirt!) for a successful summer project contributing to one of many open source activities. Read the FAQ at http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/faqs .

Student application deadline is 8 April.

From the FAQ, Google Summer of Code has several goals:

1. Create and release open source code for the benefit of all
2. Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
3. Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers
4. Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer (think "flip bits, not burgers")
5. Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette)
6. If you are a student with a "geekier" nature, please consider applying.
7. If you are a professor and have a student who shows talent for making the stuff behind the stuff work, please encourage that student to consider applying.

Need to generate or create a Word Cloud?

A quick Google search for "word cloud generator" or "create word cloud" will produce varying results of free online word or tag cloud makers. I personally think the best of these is Wordle.net. Wordle allows you to quickly create a visual representation of keywords and their frequency. The below is one I generated from my own Curriculum Vitae or CV [PDF]:

Re-Post: 24 Killer Portable Apps For Your USB Flash Drive

Article: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/09/02/24-killer-portable-apps-for-your-usb-flash-drive/

This article by Lee Mathews covers the gamut of useful little applications to take with you. Some of the topics and applications suggested are from the categories: Encryption, Web and Internet, Peer-to-Peer, Maintenance and Support, Multimedia, Document Handlers, File Management, and Portable Launchers.

Re-Post: Dealzmodo Hack: Make Your Old USB Stick Into a Digital Multitool

Cool idea to revive the use of (old) USB drives: http://gizmodo.com/5101651/dealzmodo-hack-make-your-old-usb-stick-into-a-digital-multitool?skyline=true&s=i

With 8GB flash drives available for under $20 and 32GB drives edging into the mainstream, nobody can blame you for shelving old USB sticks. But there are a surprising number of uses for those rickety, sub-gigabyte keychains.

There are nearly endless ways to bring a USB stick out of retirement, and they're not just gimmicks: virtually all USB sticks, 32MB USB 1.1 dinosaurs included, can be repurposed into anything from a lifesaving troubleshooting tool to an entire portable OS. Here are your best options ...

TagCrowd, OpenCast, Sakai & more ...

Seen during Kate Ellis' presentation at the Sakai Regional Meeting (Conference) #VTSakai08, she used and mentioned a couple of really cool things. Here's just a few of these:

1. The TagCrowd tagline is, "Create your own tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency." Very cool! TagCrowd: http://tagcrowd.com/
2. OpenCast: The Opencast community is a collaboration of higher education institutions working together to explore, define, and document podcasting^? best practices and technologies. Through blogs and email lists, the community offers guidance and information to help others choose the best approach for delivering rich media online. OpenCast: http://www.opencastproject.org/
3. TweetScan: Download your own personal Twitter archive! You can download a portable web page and CSV file with your message archive including replies. Our database goes back to December 2007 and is the most comprehensive available. This can be free or whatever price you set. Use your message download to: Archive past exchanges, Publish links and quotes, Follow up on past projects, Access offline, View and reconnect with contacts. TweetScan: https://www.tweetscan.com/data.php
   

Sakai-specific

1. IU has a Sakai Mod called, "Enter Student View". Very useful and wanted!
   

Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook

Of extreme interest today is the fact that Google has finally come out with MS Outlook syncronization--for FREE. It only supports you main Google Calendar, but it will sync one way or two ways if you want it to.

Other useful tidbits:

Microsoft Outlook Tip: Access Google Calendar Directly From Outlook
Very useful if you're looking to integrate the Google Calendar directly into the Outlook suite. It's not a sync, but it's an additional page or item in your list.

OggSync
A yearly pay-for service (~$30) will literally do all of the syncronization between MS Outlook 2003 and 2007 and any/all of your Google Calendars as you like. The setup is easy, and the service is worth shelling out the measly $30 for, although the free version will sync up to 3 days back and 3 days ahead. You can choose to sync one-way (either Google-->Outlook or Outlook-->Google) or two-ways. You can also select how often it will happen. There are only two drawbacks: Outlook will need to be open and running OggSync to complete the sync tasks, and if your Google Account password happens to have an ampersand (&) in it, the OggSync login screen in the configuration screens WILL FAIL. (Be sure that your Google Account password does not have an ampersand (&) in it and everything will go smoothly.) Truly a great product for those of us who have to coordinate multiple calendaring accounts and devices.

FixMyMovie - Upload, Fix, and Share Your Movies Instantly

Fix Your Grainy, Dark, Low Resolution Videos for Free--High-Tech Video Enhancement Service for Cameraphones, Digital Cameras, and Webcams

If cell phone videos suck because they are dark and grainy, FixMyMovie aims to solve that problem; however, FixMyMovie cannot solve poor directorship--that's still your problem.

In truth, this site and service completely blows me away. It's one of many "new" applications coming out that allow a person to do instant video editing from the comfort of a cell phone, laptop, or any place s/he has a live internet connection (i.e., "internet anywhere = anytime, anywhere applications").

Another software-and-website combination (that I've mentioned before) is Worth1000.com. They offer A.viary.com which is a similar approach and service focusing on Adobe Photoshop-like image and photo editing. Check these both out. I doubt you'll be disappointed.

video collaboration, e-meeting and web conferencing on the Internet

video collaboration, e-meeting and web conferencing on the Internet

Google bought this company back in April of 2007. I wonder if/when it will be going somewhere ...

Create an ETD Using Adobe Acrobat

Create an ETD Using Adobe Acrobat

Attention all Grad Students! This is a VERY USEFUL site!

Point all those weary and tired graduate students to this page when they are ready to convert their document into the acceptable ETD format. It's a heck of a lot easier to do it this way than to do it in MS Word 2007--trust me, I'd know.

Wired Campus: Project Aims to Build Online Classroom With Latest Web 2.0 Features - Chronicle.com

Wired Campus: Project Aims to Build Online Classroom With Latest Web 2.0 Features - Chronicle.com

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Wired Campus noted that Howard Rheingold has won a grant in the Digital Media and Learning Competition to put all of the social-collaborative community tools (aka, Web 2.0) together in the classroom.

As Howard Rheingold commented back, "For those interested in a more complete description of the project, which includes the toolset, curricula (syllabi and teaching notes), resource repository (started here), video documentation and instructional material (in the vein of the first several entries), and the community of practitioners: the text of the award application."

Trendalyzer's Other "Like" Tools

RSOE EDIS - Emergency and Disaster Havaria Information Service - AlertMap: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?lang=eng

Rich Internet Applications for Language Learning: http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/ RIAs are web pages with multimedia interactivity embedded into them. CLEAR's RIA can be created with no programming at all.

Interactive Map: http://www.cer.jhu.edu/index.cfm?pageID=351 The Interactive Map Tool is loosely based on a map metaphor, but isn’t bound to just creating maps. It allows the user to create a hierarchical structure of informational pages that can be nested. Nested pages can include anything from plain images to video and audio files, all with accompanying description text. The sites created in the Interactive Map Tool helps students understand the connections between concepts and spatial context in a way unlike any other. The Interactive Map Tool is loosely based on a map metaphor, but isn’t bound to just creating maps. It allows the user to create a hierarchical structure of informational pages that can be nested. Nested pages can include anything from plain images to video and audio files, all with accompanying description text. The sites created in the Interactive Map Tool helps students understand the connections between concepts and spatial context in a way unlike any other.

MIIM Project: http://maps.umn.edu/ Open Source Web Mapping in K-16 Education. MIIM is a web-based application that introduces K-12 and post-secondary students to principles of geography and GIS. MIIM makes use of several open-source projects, including Mapbender, MapServer, and PostgreSQL.

Tracing the Visitor's Eye: http://www.girardin.org/fabien/tracing/ So far the investigation of spatio-temporal patterns of people mainly rendered a quantitative understanding of the city. In our study, we intend to leverage implicit spatio-temporal data (i.e. latitude, longitude and timestamp) with the richness of people-generated information. Our approach is to consider that uploading, tagging and disclosing the location of a photo can be interpreted as an act of communication rather than a pure implicit history of physical presence. For this purpose, we retrieved from Flickr, large amounts of photo taken by thousands of users in the world’s most photographed cities. Based on the time, explicit location and people’s description of their photos, we design geovisualizations. They reveal patterns of tourists and citizens consuming a city, such as the flow of people between city attractions (see figures below), the monuments areas of influence or what is happening with day/night and working/weekend periodicity.

Simple small business software, collaboration, CRM: 37signals

Simple small business software, collaboration, CRM: 37signals

I want this. All of 37signals products, really. Basecamp for project management and collaboration; Highrise for client relations management; Backpack to organize and store it all in; Campfire to chat it all up with others (did I mention it's iPhone compatible?); and throw in Ta-da List and Whiteboard (collaborative writing) and I'd die happy. It's everything Google, but prettier and likely a bit more functional (since it's mostly a for-pay service).

Sweet, though.

academhack » Blog Archive » Twitter for Academia

academhack » Blog Archive » Twitter for Academia

A blog post about how one instructor uses twitter in academia, followed by many useful comments which are worth reading for further exploration.

Blogging Across the Curriculum

Blogging Across the Curriculum

I think I can say this is one of my new favorite Web 2.0 sites. It's not that the site is Web 2.0, but rather it gets back to the fundamentals underlying web 2.0--the writing! Of course, the writing (the message, the content) is what is important!

Short on time? Then check out the "How to Blog --> Writing for Weblogs" page. Those short articles are worth the read and will help when designing and implementing the blogging assignment.

2008-Horizon-Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

The Horizon Report 2008 edition has been released! It is available for download and the Horizon Project wiki is also online. Soon the report will be coming to FDI to be distributed among all faculty enrolled in the spring/summer tracks.

The Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. As stated in the Horizon Report itself, "[t]he project uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in each report, beginning with a survey of the work of other organizations and a review of the literature with an eye to spotting interesting emerging technologies" (2008, p. 8). It covers the key emerging technologies, the critical challenges we will face, significant trends (on the rise and in the past), and an analysis of the past five years of trends found in the recent evolution of emerging technologies.

50 Great Widgets For Your Blog

50 Great Widgets For Your Blog

I've checked out most of them ... and about 10 to 15 of them are pretty great. The rest are ... er ... well, it depends on what you want to to do with your blog and how many other accounts you want to set up.

MIT Sketching -- Now Technology Helps Teach!

This has got to be one of the coolest, most useful teaching tools I've seen in quite a while. It is not only a method of teaching, notetaking, and/or concept designing, but it does it in a way that is natural to that way we often describe or try to do things. Consider this, have you ever tried to explain an idea or device and ultimately just grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and drew it?

That's what this MIT professor has done. As my Mechanical Engineering boyfriend pointed out, I'm sure there are all kinds of settings that have to be set (gravity, friction, etc.) before it can be used as demonstrated, but as a relatively simple start to exploring statics (think buildings) and dynamics (think spinning wheels), it's a pretty cool way to go. The best part is that you wouldn't necessarily have to set up the room with actual carts spinning down ramps. (Which can be really time consuming and a bit chaotic!)



Le Boyfriend, has also suggested for further interest into virtual prototyping software, you'll want to check out Working Model 2D and/or Adams.

How to Describe Web 2.0 to Administrators

http://www.mtl-peters.net/blog/?p=181

"Web 2.0 is sometimes called the “Read Write Web”. I call it the “Read, Write, Speak, Listen Web”. It is an Internet that is no longer about passive viewing and linking . This new Interactive Internet is transforming the manner in which people all over the world are interacting, communicating and collaborating. In the last two to three years, we have witnessed an explosion of new information and knowledge available to anyone with an Internet connection. As educators, we cannot ignore the fact that our students are consumers, distributors, remixers, and creators of content from and to the Internet. They need models and guidance from trusted adults as they interact with others and with information. Reasons why educators should include web 2.0 tools and environments (i.e. blogs, wikis, forums, learning management systems, voicethread, podcasts) as part of classroom practices include: relevance to real world practices, access to authentic audiences, opportunities to learn and practice appropriate online conduct, global citizenship skills, information literacy skills of evaluation and authentication, skills in anchoring and filtering information, and opportunities to collaborate, as well as experience learning gains."

Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors

Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors

This is quite possibly one of the coolest ways to "see" your website as your users actually see and use your website. VERY USEFUL tool for anyone having to do some kind of web design/development!

Cover It Live -- Blogging Extraordinaire

Cover it Live: http://www.coveritlive.com/

At first, I was skeptical and confused. First off, how do you make a "live blog" more live than updating information as you go? Second, on a technical level how would a "live blog" be done?

The Cover It Live Demo explains it and shows off its strengths very well. I cannot help but think this is like Wimba, or Centra, or many other live-capture-record sessions often used for synchronous distance education programs. Only, this appears easy-to-use and doesn't require any kind of special software or hardware. A smaller-scale joe-blow version of interactive virtual environments.



I'm going to try it out and when I do I'll let you know what I think of it.