The next front[ier] in the disruption of traditional media An article aimed at traditional media folks that explains RSS and syndication.... In a nutshell, RSS allows news sites, and bloggers, to syndicate their content. Each time a news site updates its headlines in an RSS format, or a blogger posts another comment to her online journal, that headline automatically appears on a number of sites.
[Chicago Uncommon Photography] A great photography site...
This photo was taken in San Francisco at The Golden Gate Park Visitor's Center.
Mrs. Stewart's Classroom News Today I had the great honor to work with Priscilla Stewart. Priscilla is a teacher at Buckman Elementary in Portland, Oregon. She is new to using weblogs, but after just a few minutes you could tell she understood the power of being able to easily publish information about her classroom for her students and their families.
We are using Movable Type to publish her classroom blog. After playing around with the features we began to discuss the use of the blogging tool by her students. This lead us to create another blog for her students to post daily classroom updates. Using the RSS feed from this blog, we employed a JavaScript to capture the RSS feed from the student blog and have it feed into her main classroom page, so those visiting the site can see her classroom information, and also see the most recent postings from her students.
Jon Udell: Politics and audioblogging Let's think about how this might have played in 2003. There's a really good chance those students would have blogged the incident, with accompanying audio if not video. Having done so, there's a really good chance the blog community would have noticed and amplified the students' blog.
Jon Udell, one of my favorite bloggers, writes about how technology may have a transformative effect on politics. The example he quotes is about an Al Gore quote from 1999 taken out of context by the media, to the dismay of those who actually heard his talk. He makes the point that blogging and searchable audio could be used to fact check media stories.
AppSwitching Diary: Web Based Applications With Wi-Fi WiFi's combination of broadband and wireless fundamentally changes the equation. Once you can take your broadband connection with you, then the balance tilts decisively in favor of web-based applications that you can access wherever you are, irrespective of their or your location.
In this post, he mentions his experience using a T-Mobile Hotspot at a Starbucks. I have had an account for a few months and find it quite useful. When traveling between schools, or between meetings, I find myself with some time to kill. I can now easily stop at a Starbucks, have a cup of coffee, and catch up on email, or other such work.
Just recently discovered that a coffee shop near my school has free Wi-Fi. That is where this post is coming from.
Brad Fitzpatrick: The accidental entrepreneur "A stupid idea," his mother said at the time. "People will never write down their personal thoughts online."
The Oregonian highlights Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal.
Am playing with Kung-Log as a posting tool for Movable Type. Has a little feature that grabs the name of the song that is currently playing on iTunes... This Old Porch from the album "Anthology Volume One Cowboy Man" by Lyle Lovett
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003 Join the leaders from the many worlds of pervasive computing to explore and invent the new Internet infrastructure and culture. Speakers include: Howard Rheingold, Alan Kay, Clay Shirky, Eric Bonabeau, Tim O'Reilly, David S. Isenberg and many others.
I attended last year and found it to be one of the better conferences I have ever attended. This year's lineup of speakers and topics looks even better. While the registration fee is a bit steep compared to regular education conferences, they do offer a 50% discount for academic instructors. From talking to conference chair Rael Dornfest, teachers qualifiy for that. Now I need to find some funding.... :-)
Movable Type as Journal Tool Students in this beginning German class at the University of North Carolina use Movable Type to publish their journal entries. Another exciting use of weblogs in education. I have wanted to do this with our Linux Terminal Server Project schools, but rather than make them public, they would be used as learning logs for only the student and teacher to read and comment on. RSS could be used to alert the instructor of new entries. Lots of possibilities... Now if we can only convince our IT folks to install Movable Type on the LTSP boxes...