Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Here’s an insight into how Santa covers the earth and delivers all those gifts in such a short period of time.

You’ll need Google Earth. If you don’t already have it you need it. Even Alec has it now…I think.

Merry Christmas!

This might be interesting.

I haven’t used wikis alot but mostly because it requires collaboration and some training. I did a workshop on wikis a while back and showed folks wikispaces. It seemed to offer the standard tools and was fairly intuitive. Now they’ve added blogger and typepad integration. So I’m following the instructions to export this entry.

1. First, make sure you have integrated your blog on Wikispaces as described above.
2. When creating a blog entry, put the following text at the bottom of your post: [ [wiki:spacename:pagename] ] e.g. [ [wiki:adam:politics] ]
3. Post the blog entry
4. Within half an hour you’ll see one or two things happen
   1. The blog post will be appended to the wiki page you specified
   2. If you’re on blogger, the text you entered will be converted into a nice looking Wikispaces reference with the Wikispaces logo and the text “This entry is linked to a Wikispaces page” and some other detail

Okay so instead of a comment, go to the wiki and play around.

This entry linked to <a>Wikispaces page (Blogger Export)</a>

The latest issue of Leading and Learning with Technology features an article by yours truly.

In it, I go toe to toe with a teacher librarian on the merits of using wikipedia as a research tool. You can take a wild guess on which side I take. There’s also a poll you can take after you read both sides.

Just so you know, I’m married to a teacher librarian so it’s nothing personal.

Although the eggs are probably cold by now, the conversation still is warm. Join us for our discussion.

The highlight for me was our talk about potholes and education. Sounds weird but it works.

As usual, Rob has done a great job with shownotes.

After our posse talk last evening, a number of very random thoughts are running through my head. Allow me to ramble…

Alec wonders about all the “stuff” that’s out there such as blogs, podcasts, et al and is concerned that the good stuff we talk about and create may not last as technology changes.

I don’t have a great response but in the spirit of rambling and randomness, I check my feedburner stats today and was taken back a bit with this graph.

So sometime from September to now, my readership has tripled. As I listened to the EdTech Talk Podcast about the edublog awards, they were talking about the best individual awards and mentioned that those bloggers (Will, Stephen, Barbara and Ulises) have been doing this for a while and have found not only an audience but a voice that is distinct. I’m finding this to be very true for me, not that I’m anywhere close to their league but this space has allowed me to experiment and play and thankfully, folks have been kind enough to comment or better yet, link to me from their space.

So where does it lead? I hope Alec’s fear (you’ll have to listen to the podcast when it comes out to get his exact thoughts) that all may be lost is unsubstantiated, but I don’t know. Yet, even if all of this stuff is lost, there has been great learning and fun in creating. It reminds me of my lego days. Most of the fun was building stuff. Even if someone kicked it over that was fine because I’d just build it again and even better.

PS. Although initially I had mentioned to vote for us, I think the Dave and Jeff really deserve this one. The work way harder than us and offer some outstanding discussions.

This article would indicate that wikipedia is on par with Britannica and others. Although I’ve thought this, I’ve never known for sure. I like the concept of wikipedia and would certainly use it as ONE resource. Perhaps as an equal resource.

…the resource is almost as accurate as the online encyclopedia Britannica, at least when it comes to science.

The article goes on to say that of 42 randomly selected topics, there were no distinguishable differences in either encyclopedia.

Terry Freedman may not agree, but I’m sticking to my guns. Perfect knowledge is tough to find. Weinberger suggests at times all we need is “good enough”. Wikipedia is better than good enough and if you don’t think so, change it yourself!

UPDATE: Here’s a interview with the Nature study and also Jimbo Wales.

I love RSS. But I’m not sure this is for me.

Then again as my late grandfather once said, “Everyone’s got to go sometime.”

via Jack McLeod

Here’s the second part of the our talk with Stephen Downes. Rob’s done a great job with the show notes. I especially liked the wikipedia link to the “more cowbell” reference.

Collectively I believe we drank 56 cups of coffee but there’s no documentation on that.