Ken Ronkowitz :: Blog :: Archives
from http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/275-Ple DON'T Google my web page? Who would want that? If you have a website or a blog you WANT all the search engines to find your pages and index them. You want to be found, so that others can find you. Right? There are companies that specialize in helping you get to the top of search results.
But there are situations when you don't want your web page to be found. Maybe it's a login page, or it contains somewhat sensitive material (though it can't be very sensitive since you're posting it on the Net!) or it might contain images that you don't want people finding in a search. Maybe it's a page that can only be viewed by a registered user or after logging in at another page, so you don't want it indexed (even if someone who clicks the Google link wouldn't be able to see it without logging in - surely this has happened to you at least once when you clicked some NY Times or Chronicle of Higher Education story link). Realize that if your page isn't indexed by the search engines, it's highly unlikely that someone will just stumble upon it. A good example is this blog. This entry will get a few dozen hits in the next week from our subscribers or regular visitors. But if I check the stats for this piece in six months, they will be much higher. (In fact, I just looked back 6 months in this blog and the entry from 9/26/06 has 1,258 hits now.) How does that happen? Well, that entry was indexed by Google and all the rest of the sites that send out their (ro)bots. So when someone searched on "podcast" or any of the other words in that piece (or in my tags), they found it. So how do you stop those auto-searching, hungry little bots that Google and others send out to find new Net stuff? Google (I'm just going to say that to mean all search engines, OK?) has a set of computers that continually crawl the web. They know which sites have already been found and they read all the pages on each of those sites and they search for new ones and changes that have been made to the old ones. This collective of computers is known in Googleland as "Googlebot." But webmasters can put a file called robots.txt on the server too which is a standard document that can tell the bots not to download some (or all) information from your web server. I don't want to get too technical here. (That's Tim's job.) but I'll give you the basics and add a few links to sites where you can get a lot more information. This robots.txt file provides restrictions to search engine robots. Those automated bots are at least courteous enough to check for a robots.txt file before they access pages of a site. Even simpler is using a robots META tag on a page. That lets the HTML author indicate to a bot that the page shouldn't be indexed, or used to harvest more links. This method doesn't work with all bots, but it will stop most of the main ones. (Are you starting to envision all these bots as some kind of invading organism like in the 1960's movie Fantastic Voyage or that stuff that attacked the ship in The Matrix? So that META tag would look like this: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> Then the robot should neither index this document, nor analyse it for links. There is actually a format standard called the Robot Exclusion Standard. If your page/site has been online a while, it probably has already been found and adding or changing your robots.txt file won't be immediately reflected in search results, but it will be discovered and used when the next bot crawls your site. Google actually uses several user-agents, so you can block access to any or all of them. If you block "Googlebot" you stop the bot that looks for things for their web & news index, but if block "Googlebot-Mobile" you stop the one who crawls pages for their mobile index (maybe your pages aren't mobile-ready, so you want them ignored) or block "Googlebot-Image" to stop your images from being found. There are fine tunings too. Look at this one - what do you think it does? User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /documents/ Allow: /documents/disclaimer.html That would block all pages inside the folder/directory called "documents" except for that one disclaimer.html page. My point is this - sometimes you just don't want to be found. Know how to hide. The bots are always out there... Links to find out more tech info on all this:http://www.robotstxt.org/ google.com/webmasters/ - lots of stuff for web folks about how to interact with Google. And here is a good & simple 2 part blog entry from the Google folks about this topic: googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/controlling-how-search-engines-access.html googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-protocol.html
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/276-Whe
I would title this piece something about Net Neutrality but I think that is a phrase that gets confused looks or
makes people turn away. You're thinking about not reading the rest of this post already. Network neutrality (AKA
net or Internet neutrality or NN) is a principle that in a personal way addresses your home connection to the Net. If
you are on a broadband network for Internet access, and perhaps also for your telephone service, and television
programming, then you should be concerned. A neutral network would have no restrictions. It's safe to say that
NO network is completely neutral now and that the principle is just that - a principle.
The big telecommunications companies want to provide you with all your services (Net, phone, TV, movies and the
next thing) and also charging you for content from some providers. I don't mean paying your monthly fee for HBO.
I'm talking about charging for access to things like certain websites or services. You're using up a lot of bandwidth
to watch those online videos or download a movie from NetFlix or the iTunes store. And the telecoms want a cut. (Universities are concerned with bandwidth too. They are not
neutral. They throttle down your uploads or downloads, block ports or sites etc.) One of my neighbors just added
Optimum Online Boost to his broadband service (and $9.95 a month to his bill). Their site tells you, "Downloading music, uploading
photos, emailing large attachments and online gaming will be better than ever with speeds up to 30 Mbps downstream and
now 5 Mbps upstream." He was very excited - showed me a bunch of pages and how fast they loaded. He was
disappointed when I said that I didn't look at it that he got more speed, but that he was getting the speed that all of
us should be getting. In other words, they are throttling down MY service, not speeding up his access.
Neutrality proponents say that if these companies can impose their tiered service model to a greater degree, it will
restrict users, "unflatten" the playing field, fragment the Internet, and stifle the growth of the
Net. The video embedded here is a very good look at all of this. It is the second draft (that immediately appeals
to me - that someone is updating their video as if it was an essay) of a piece about where the World Wide Web came from
and where it is going. Is that the same as where the Internet is going? Good question, Ken. Watch the video and tell
me the answer. I recommend that you look at the video. * The video comes from foureyedmonsters.com. I'm
a bit unclear about that site. It appears to be a site for the indie film Four Eyed Monsters, but this little
film is part of their podcast series. (Someone correct me if I'm off on this - no "About Us" link on their
home page.)
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/278-Soc
My sons are off at college, so I'm out of touch with the preschool and primary grades these days. My sons cut their
tech teeth on my Apple IIe, Mac SE & Windows 3.1 and went online with my 1200 baud modem and 40 hours a month of
AOL.  So I'm reading about kids and the Net and I find that they have social networking sites for the very young.
And I felt quilty about not teaching my course in Second Life this semester. Man, I am out of touch with technology.
The
article led me to two sites in particular.
You really should take a look at Nicktropolis from the cable TV Nickelodeon folks (watched a lot of that
channel
with the boys) and Disney Extreme Digital.
Nicktropolis is a new 3-D virtual world full of games, videos, chat and customized rooms and the new Disney
Extreme Digital (DXD) extends their very sophisticated web site with chat and channels devoted to their movies, TV,
music and games. Obviously, they need to be super squeaky clean when it comes to privacy & security. At
Nicktropolis you choose a NickName (of course) without persoanl information attached and the default is for the liitle
guys to "chat" using povided phrases from pull-down menus (parents can activate realtime chat though). Your
NickSelf avatar can journey through the virtual community. Interaction? You can vote on new features and if you feel
uncomfortable with someone or something, click on "Report a Concern." DXD (beta when I tried it out)
has similar chats - "speed chat" (hmmm... you can choose to say "Check out the Pirates of the Caribbean
channel") and a parent-enabled one called "True Friends" chat. ("Sorry, honey, but Melissa can't be
your true friend. Why don't you tell her to buy a nice DVD instaed.")  http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/uploads/pacifiers.serendipi" style="border:0px none ; float: left;
padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" />OK, Ken - easy on the sarcasm. It's for kids. And, it's free. Yes, it is. But
for kids to do or learn what? Computer skills? Netiquette? Keyboarding? Product placement?
I'm sure that zipping
through Bikini Bottom (with SpongeBob SquarePants), trying out new games and watching videos is entertaining, but it
feels empty. I guess the upcoming massively multiplayer Pirates of the Caribbean role-playing game (free
with ads or $9.95 a month for premium) is preparing you for Second Life (and selecting your cable package) when you're
an adult. Make sure you have a fast connection, ("Finish your homework & Daddy
will get you Optimum Online Boost.") because this is video streaming land. If I know your NickName I can
visit your private room - or you can block my access. (Watch for a "Let's Go Phishing" game soon... no, I
made that up.) If Nicktropolis is very much The Sims, and college students are writing papers about virtual
learning environments, maybe this IS educational. Universities take note: Want a course on branding? Get a couple of
accounts in these.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/282-Sha
This seemingly "sudden" plan to
spring ahead earlier than expected into Daylight Savings Time at 2 A.M. reminds me of all the hoopla over Y2K back in
2000. That started 3 years before the event, so in the end it was a whimper instead of a bang. Still,plenty of media
coverage, books and fix it programs and companies spending big bucks to get ready. The obvious fears this time
are still financial systems, cell phone systems, airline schedules and such and the odds are excellent that these big
companies have done what they need to do. Windows Vista will do a self-fix and if you have XP or a Mac and you have
auto update turned on, they will do the update automatically. The NJIT tech staff recommended downloading its
"Outlook TimeZone Update Tool" if you use your computer's Outlook calendar.. I went to the MS site and
couldn't find it, so if I'm late to any meetings Monday morning, that's my excuse. I got an email from Palm
telling me to update a fix for my PDA. I'm sure its the same with a Blackberry & the rest of our techtoys. But the
last time I did a Palm update, the whole unit got messed up, so I will probably just go in & fix the clock - like I
will do to my microwave, clock radio, car clocks, watch and the multitude of "clocks" hiding in my
life. With my Verizon cell phone (an antique because I am not a fan of cell phone technology), if I dial *228,
the phone gets its firmware updated and that will fix it if it wasn't automatically reset as soon as I logged on to
contact a cell tower. So this little glitch forced us to to temporarily redirect tech support and that costs time
and money. A Forrester analysis estimated that a medium to large corporate tech department has probably commissioned
two to four people to fix the glitch, and that with 2 weeks of work it would mean about $50,000 in labor costs.
(Obviously they get paid better than our university tech crew.)
What if we don't find any substantial energy
savings from the time change? Then Congress can switch back and we can do the tech changes all over again. I
know
that Hawaii & Alaska get to ignore all this, but what happens when they interact with the rest of us? Why does my
friend Steve get to ignore DST in Arizona? Where are the instructions that came with my digital watch that has all
those buttons? The time to change your clocks is also a good reminder time to
change the batteries in your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms. I would worry more about those not working than
the DVD player. |
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/281-Dra
More and more online MS
Office-styled applications are showing up online for word processing & spreadsheets etc. Another app that
I'm coming across are online ways of drawing flow charts, layouts, org charts, diagrams and even far more sophisticated
3D artwork. So, I suppose some of these are alternatives to Microsoft’s Visio. NJIT offers Visio to all
its students as part of our larger Microsoft licensing, so here it's not an issue of having the software
available. Perhaps, you do not have access to Visio or similar software - OR - perhaps you find Visio too
difficult to learn. You might want to try using an online app.
OmniGraffle (from the
OmniGroup) is an interesting one (but it's for
Mac OS X). It's great that software like this gathers a community around it, so if you go to Graffletopia, you'll find many free downloadable
stencil sets for it from maps to science
or architecture - even Lego People and blocks. http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/uploads/visio1.serendipityT" style="border:0px none ; float: right;
padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" />Take this drawing up a few notches and you have Google Sketchup which is a powerful but fairly easy drawing system
that streamlines and simplifies 3D design. If you use Google Earth, Google SketchUp allows you to place your
models using real-world coordinates and share them with the world using the Google 3D Warehouse. Check out the
review of the commercial version of
Sketchup 5 that goes for $640 to get a good idea of what it can do, and what a deal it is to get the free
version. Anyone out there have drawing programs they would
recommend in either the Visio or Sketchup categories? Free & open source preferred, of
course...
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/283-Pro
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/uploads/scrabble.serendipit" />I heard author Jonathan Lethem
interviewed yesterday on Fresh Air, one of my
favorite radio interview programs. Besides talking about his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet and his
semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortress
of Solitude, he discussed his Promiscuous Materials Project. The details are on his website jonathanlethem.com but it's a kind of
literary rip/mix/burn project. There are stories and songs for filmmakers or dramatists or songwriters to
adapt, remix, reuse - choose your verb.
They're not totally free (you pay a buck) or totally without
restrictions (you sign a written agreement) but then "you're free to adapt or mutate the story as you
please." Lethem says: I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing
my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of
adaptations, appropriations, collage, and sampling. I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay
for Harper's Magazine. As I researched that essay I came more and more to believe that artists should ideally
find ways to make material free and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my own art practice
reflect that belief.
Lethem knows that what he is doing is not totally new and that
he's not the first on this path. He lists a number of influences including David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life In The Bush of Ghosts
site, the Free Culture movement, and a book by Lewis Hyde
called The
Gift. He also has a page on his site with links and embedded videos of more Cultural Re-use and Appropriation. Lethem says
he was influenced by Open Source theory
but he doesn't consider this open source or quite the same as Copyright Commons projects either. It's a project to keep an eye on and I
hope it motivates other authors and artists to put more of their materials online for creative reuse.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/284-Thi
A colleague sent me a link to an article from the Washington Post called "Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs?" (by Lori Aratani, 2/26/07). I know it was sent
partly because he thought I'd be interested in the topic, but also partly because he wants me to see proof in black
& white at how bad all this technology is for students. He's down on edtech, so I am seen as the enemy in some
ways. Most of the piece focuses on a 17-year-old girl who multitasks her way through an evening of homework
while watching MTV, sending instant messages, talking on her cellphone, text messaging, checking weather.com, adding
some comments and checking new photos on Facebook. I will delight admissions counselors to know that she confessed to
the writer that she was filling in a college application while she was being interviewed. The author points out that
her homework was to "define 'descent with modification' and explain how 'the tree analogy represents the
evolutionary relationship of creatures' on a worksheet for her AP biology class." (If the assignment had been to
write a poem, would we have been less impressed/distressed by her multitasking?) I had a problem with my own
sons ten years ago (they're in college now) when the Net hit our house hard and they were doing the same thing(albeit
without Facebook & a lot of the other sites and with only a sad land line phone and modem). My fear was the same as
it is for parents and educators today - this must have a detrimental effect on their ability to focus and
develop
analytical skills. Bring in a lab coat. There is special concern for teenagers because
parts of their brain are still developing, said Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "Introducing multitasking in younger kids in my opinion can
be detrimental," he said. "One of the biggest problems about multitasking is that it's almost impossible to
gain a depth of knowledge of any of the tasks you do while you're multitasking. And if it becomes normal to do, you'll
likely be satisfied with very surface-level investigation and knowledge."
But the girl in the
story has a GPA of 3.85. My sons did very well too. So I start to think, "Maybe it's just me who can't
multitask like that." After all, I had no talent for videogames and still hate my cellphone and can't text
message with just my thumb while doing something else. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that when
students are sitting in front of their computers "studying," they're also doing something else 65 percent of
the time. In 1999, 16 percent of teenagers said they were "media multitaskers" -- defined as using several
type of media, such as television or computers, at once. By 2005, that percentage had increased to 26 percent. The
foundation also found that girls were more likely to media multitask than boys.
26% actually sounds
low to me. I mean even my own primitive brain is working the laptop to write this while I'm "watching"
(OK, maybe listening to) the news on TV and checking the paper copy of the article from the Post and a survey I
printed from the Net. I don't think most of our students have a choice about multitasking. Just as many of our
undergrads have no choice but to work part-time while being a full time student. "Kids who grow
up under conditions where they have to multitask a lot may be developing styles of coping that would allow them to
perform better in future environments where required to do a lot, but that doesn't mean their performance in the
workplace would be better than if they were doing one thing at a time."
David Meyer, director
of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan
See - it's great
training for those law firms and engineering jobs that will require you to do 80 hours a week in order to
succeed. The research is not definitive about whether multitasking helps, hurts or has no effect on teens'
development. Still, when they do imaging
on these multitaskers and the hippocampus (responsible for storing and recalling information) gets lit up to do a task
but quiets down when they multitask, what are we to think? Well, at least the striatum gets active and that's
the part that we use to master repetitive skills. That must be why my son can text message with one hand like a
pro. But he also knows that sometimes he needs a quiet place to read without distractions. (Thomas Hardy will do
that to you.) Maybe what we as educators need to really do is make sure that our students are exposed to as many
learning situations as possible, and if they are getting plenty of multi-inputs outside of our classrooms, we might
need to provide a balance of single channel environments to develop the entire brain.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/286-Ope
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) launched a site that gives educators and learners access to classroom materials at no
cost. It's called OER (for Open Educational Resources) Commons at oercommons.org. There are a range of educational resources:
primary documents, complete course guides and syllabi, lectures, lesson plans, lab activities, and homework assignments
on a variety of topics. The site has a good number of 2.0 features like user ability to add tags, ratings,
reviews, and comments to help others find their way through the 8000+ resources now listed. So it is content with some
social net mixed in too. The site is really an aggregating site for materials. You'll see a lot of MIT's
OpenCourseware materials indexed here as well as material developed by faculty at Rice, Harvard, and the University of
California-Berkeley. But you should not see this material as limited to higher ed, but as source for the K-20
community in areas like art, mathematics, science and technology. There are links for Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary. Don't expect to
find a primary "course" though - most links from that area led to animations & video clips from sources
like PBS' NOVA program. It was annoying that, even though I had registered at OER, I needed to register at
another site to view a sample animation that was supplied by teachersdomain.org. I clicked on "humanities" and got 1495 hits with all
kinds of things from Visual
Histories: German Cinema 1945 To Present, Fall 2003, to Education For The New
Millennium and Out Of Ground
Zero: Catastrophe And Memory, Fall 2005.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/288-Goo
Gizmodo called it GooTube last October when
Google agreed to purchase the hot but without profit web site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. A lot of
people
thought it was crazy. Google had a video service that worked, but it hadn't caught the viral fervor of
YouTubers. YouTube also was having problems with infringing content on their site and Google was supposed to
bring audio fingerprinting and other technologies to the table to help work that out. But those problems still are
present and are probably even larger issues now. Personally, I see the
differences between the two services as much simpler, and their future reminds me of an older technology's history.
Google allows longer video to be posted. The video quality on YouTube is lower. Google started charging for some
video. Since Google Video attracted less of the YouTube audience with its goofy video uploads, there appeared to be
less junk clogging up the service. Oh, there is still plenty of stupid video, and lots of overlap - a Google video
search on a genre like comedy turns up video from both services - but they are
not equal. Examples of this include the BBC programs (one of which I will write about tomorrow) that Google
offers which is just not what you expect to find on YouTube. And I wouldn't have a problem with them keeping the
two services apart - one for pay to play and higher quality, another for user-content (original) to get posted, voted
on and commented about. Apple, Inc. has its Music Store full of music and video that users pay for, and it has
iTunes U - an entity that looks on the surface like the Store but is actually separate. You can't search the NJIT on
iTunes U site by searching in the Music Store (you need to enter through our website, as you do for other iTunes U colleges). Perhaps
Google (and Apple) plan to merge these services into one megasite of free and pay content. I'm OK with that approach
too. It certainly simplifies search and gives wider exposure to the free content, but it always irks me when I find a
video in Google that I want to check out but I'm not sure I want to spend any money on. Whenever I hear Web 2.0
entrepreneurs interviewed about their new whizbang project, the inevitable question is "What's your business
model?" Usually, the answer is that they don't have one, but the quick answer is sell ads. It worked for
television for half a century and has been invading the Net in general for the past decade or so. It's likely that the
YouTube video one day will have a introductory commercial before the one you clicked actually starts. And following the
patch of TV commercials we will complain, ignore them, laugh at them, try to create technology to zap them, but we'll
generally look at the service as free. BTW, there actually is a gootube.net - it's real estate videos.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/287-Ste
I have always been a sucker for a good
time-travel story. I'm not a huge sci-fi fan but the time travel niche has always appealed to me in books and
films. So I read (as best I could) Stephen Hawking's unlikely 1988 bestseller A Brief History of
Time. Sure, I questioned Stephen comparing notes with Jim Carrey. But now I'm hearing that physicists are
questioning his theories, especially that when black holes disappear, everything goes with them. It's a neat
paradox because it also makes it hard for a scientist to really know everything about black holes and therefore hard to
prove a theorist wrong.
Actually, according to the video, even Stephen is saying he was wrong.
There's a BBC website
with information about the video "The Hawking Paradox" that I have embedded below. It's an example
of the kind of better quality video (that is, the content quality and the technical video quality) that is posted at
Google that you might not find on sites like YouTube. That's odd, considering Google owns YouTube - see my previous
post.
(To view this Google Video requires the free Flash player
)
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/289-For
I've been working with some faculty who want to get into blogging, so I have been getting together some links and
articles for the newbie blogger. One to look at is Time to check: Are you using the right blogging
tool? from the USC Annenberg Online
Journalism Review. It includes a brief glossary of blogging jargon like Skins = the pre-designed
templates that give the blog a certain look (CSS for those who don't want to know about CSS) and post scheduling
= in some blog software, a feature that allows you to write posts and schedule them to be published at some point in
the
future - the equivalent of the release feature in a CMS. I'm typing this on 3/16 but setting it to publish itself five
minutes into 3/19. It also looks at some of the blogging tools (services) available like the free Blogger and
WordPress, and commercial services like TypePad and Movable Type. Technorati is the place most bloggers (and non-bloggers) go to search blogs, but
Google's Beta Blog Search is also a good
place to look.
I have done some meta-blogging here on Serendipity35 on
topics like college blogs, blogs
in
education and academia. And
Cranky Geek, John C. Dvorak, has a post on how to read a blog that's a useful guide.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/290-Pub
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/uploads/radio-old.serendipi" />I am a big fan of public radio (and
that means more than just NPR, as great as
NPR is). If you are also a fan, you should know about this public radio podcast directory. It lists hundreds
of public radio programs that are available as recorded podcasts. Each program has a  feed link and you can follow the links
to listen to one online, or more properly SUBSCRIBE by using that link (copy-and-paste the feed link) in a podcasting
program such as iTunes or Juice (formerly called iPodder).
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/277-Moo
My presentation today at the NJEDge.Net
Faculty Best Practices Showcase is titled "Moodle: A Free Learning Management System (Free - like free
kittens)" The title is playing off the idea that free software isn't really free - unless you don't
have the accountants put anything on the books for the support and implementation of an open source project. Open
source is all about support and community. Like other universities, NJIT feels that it is in our best interest
to explore some of the available open source course management systems that are alternatives to commercial products
such as WebCT. The instructional technology team at NJIT first began to look at Moodle (and initially Sakai) during the fall
2005 semester and looked at pilot programs at other schools. Seventeen NJIT faculty ran test courses during the spring
and summer of 2006. A formal pilot program using Moodle was instituted this past fall with 24 courses. Participants
included current users of WebCT and faculty who were new to using any type of learning management system and for online
courses and face-to-face or hybrid courses. This semester we have 12 courses running, and 20 courses and organization
sites in development. My PowerPoint from today is viewable online at my Slideshare site.
What interested me about Moodle back in 2005?
- that it was an open source LMS/CMS software
- how it might be used in eLearning
- whether it
might be a viable alternative to a commercial product and if it actually is such alternative - how hard would it
be to move courses & faculty over to it from WebCT. - the constructivist philosophy behind it and in the creation of the software.
From the Moodle.org site: [Constructivism] maintains that people actively construct
new knowledge as they interact with their environment.
Everything you read, see, hear, feel, and touch is
tested against your prior knowledge and if it is viable within your mental world, may form new knowledge you carry with
you. Knowledge is strengthened if you can use it successfully in your wider environment. You are not just a memory bank
passively absorbing information, nor can knowledge be "transmitted" to you just by reading something or
listening to someone.
This is not to say you can't learn anything from reading a web page or watching a
lecture, obviously you can, it's just pointing out that there is more interpretation going on than a transfer of
information from one brain to another.
Some colleges using Moodle to check
out: K-12 Moodle seems like a great fit for K-12 districts with limited budgets
and IT staffs, but a desire to use an online learning environment (probably NOT for fully online courses as much as
"web enhanced" or blended courses). I'm impressed that the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia (a new high school developed in partnership
with The Franklin Institute) uses an inquiry-based science, technology, mathematics and (you don't see this in too many
high schools) entrepreneurship curriculum. So they are using a lot of project-based learning, inquiry, research, and
collaboration - and this is their Moodle
site. And right around my own area here in north NJ, we have Montclair Kimberley Academy who puts our Moodle pilot to shame. They have every class K through 12 in
Moodle courses. I'd be interested to read your comments on Moodle and share links to other schools (K-20)
using Moodle.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/291-The
Heather Huey from NJIT's
Van Houten Library sent me a reminder (via Facebook!) that while I can access The New York Times for free
through the NJIT library, I might want to take advantage of a new service. The New York Times is opening
TimesSelect for free to students and faculty who register from a .edu address. TimesSelect is
NYTimes.com's paid offering that provides exclusive access to 22 columnists of The Times and the International Herald
Tribune as well as an array of other services, including access to the Times' archives, advance previews of various
sections and tools for tracking and storing news and information. Current student subscribers will receive
pro-rated refunds for their previously paid subscriptions. College students & faculty interested in registering
for free TimesSelect subscriptions should go to
http://www.nytimes.com/university for more information.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/131-Try
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/uploads/second_life_logo222" style="border:0px none
; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; width: 132px; height: 151px;" /> In Second Life you create a
digital self (an avatar) so that you can walk, run, fly, dance your way through an ever-changing 3D landscape. You can
chat and socialize with others from all over the "real" world as well as the world of SL. You can
build homes, skyscrapers, vehicles, a chair - practically anything. It looks like a videogame, but it's not
one. By the time you read this entry, there will probably be 5 millions residents there. And they are spending real
money. It was developed by Linden Lab,
a company founded in 1999 out of San Francisco. They provide the technology, but residents build the world. In the beginning, it required a credit card account to join in, but not anymore. You pick your SL name. The first
name is whatever you like & the last name can be selected from a drop-down menu. You once you enter, you have
"relatives." You'll need a date of birth and an email address. Join here. You will have to download the application and
install it on your computer (works with Windows and a Mac, but I've heard it's smoother on Windows). Then it's
time to explore. Like some old computer game, you can use the arrows on your keyboard to start walking. You start out
on "Welcome Island". There's some info there about how to change your appearance, how to move around,
interact with objects and IM people. My favorite part is flying. I've wanted to fly over houses since childhood and now
I can. Click and you can take a screenshot for your memory book. I'm really behind on this whole SL world.
I've been collecting bookmarks and articles but I only recently actually created an account and started actually flying
around. The learning curve for using SL was steep for me. Especially since I am not a gamer, it was not
intuitive.
In a few hours I could do basic moves: click rather blindly on places on the SL map, navigate buildings without
crashing
into walls, sit at a bar. Still, without adding my credit card to the mix, I'm still walking around in clothing
that reeks "newbie" and without possessions. Stranger in a strange land. Linden Labs recently decided to
open the source code for the Second Life
client. It will be interesting to see what comes of that. Users may build an improved graphical engine themselves. To find out the news from SL, many people turn to New World Notes at http://nwn.blogs.com What about educational uses? “Top
20 Educational Locations in Second Life”: is a wiki article from SimTeach, “a place for university instructional designers,
faculty and administrators to find information and to share their own experiences designing, teaching and administering
classes in immersive environments.” SLurls
(SL URLs or direct links to locations) are provided. A good place to start your exploration. There's
information at the Second Life Education Wiki. The New Media Consortium is deeply involved - check out their
own
SL Campus Observer and watch a short video.
Teen Second Life is an international place for residents 13-17. There are some
Linden Lab staff (Linden Liaisons) there to try to keep it a safe place. I've read that an occasional teacher is
brought in for "special educational projects" but I have no further information on that. Karine Joly
wrote about “Should your institution hold virtual open houses in Second Life?” last summer.  And I recently saw a presentation by Danielle Mirliss & Heidi
Trotta from Seton Hall
University about teaching teamwork in SL for a course in Industrial
& Organizational Psychology.
SL is
being used in classes and colleges, marketers, businesses are getting in there too. There are virtual
conferences in SL. How about a SL open house for your campus? If you're catching up on Second Life,
you might try these 3 overviews:
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/292-Mor
2 more sources of video online: The University Channel makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to
the public. It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format.
The focus is on public and international affairs. This project is an initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, but includes other university members and partners. Did you miss CBS' 60 Minutes this past
week? You can watch video from past shows online at 60minutes.yahoo.com. The segments are annoyingly chopped up, so to watch an entire piece you may have to
click several links or let the video run and watch a lead-in commercial over & over. This is the price you pay for
free.
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