http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000773.html

I'm feeling kind of silly today, so... via a chock-a-block wiki page from the always fabulous Jenny Levine came a link to the great community building exercise, the Librarian Trading Cards flickr pool (collect them all!), which in turn led to the amazing set of flickr toys and specifically the trading card maker that's been used to create all these nifty cards (you know, my english profs used to just slam me for run on sentences, but I don't care, it's more fun this way!) And I just couldn't help myself,, so here's El Guapo's card (the photo for which was taken by my 6 year old son, it's amazing how few photos of myself I actually have on my computer, oh yeah, those run on sentences again...) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000774.html

http://www.reload.ac.uk/plex/index.html

Exciting stuff, the first beta of the Plex tool is available for download now. The Plex tool is being developed at the University of Bolton by Phillip Beauvoir, Mark Johnson, Oleg Liber, Colin Milligan, Paul Sharples and Scott Wilson and is the output of the JISC-funded Personal Learning Environments project. Scott Wilson has also posted a powerpoint presentation on the new tool as well. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000775.html

http://solstice.eplt.washington.edu/Say_Hello_to_Solstice

Oren Sreeby wrote me today to let me know about the recent open sourcing of Solstice, a Web application development framework for Perl which the University of Washington has developed to power their suite of Catalyst tools. Solstice itself is just the framework used in the development, but the team is also apparently at work to open source the actual web tools themselves. This is exciting news as people who have seen the Catalyst tools will know that they represented an early and quite innovative approach to providing teaching and learning tools (including a much lauded eportfolio tool) that wasn't simply replicating the same CMS over and over again. Ed Tech Perl developers, are you listening? - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000776.html

http://www.ldu.leeds.ac.uk/dragndrop/bloguse/

Back in 2003 I created what's become one of the more popular things on the EdTechPost site, the 'matrix of blog uses in education.' For whatever reason it's gotten lots of links and traffic over the last 3 years, but what has been especially gratifying is when people have picked it up and actually done something new with it (like, you know, re-used/re-mixed it!)

The first example I found a year or so ago was the Dutch site Frankwatching, which took the original sketchy document and translated it into Dutch, along the way making it much more fetching to the eye.

But I was really blown away by a recent example emailed to me by its creator, Tony Lowe. Tony, through a company called Webducate, has developed a number of flash-based tools for creating learning content. Using one of those tools, Dragster, he created an interactive version of the 'matrix of blog uses in education' with a cool innovation - in addition to a pre-existing list of "uses," which the user can drag and drop into their chosen quadrant of the matrix, it allows you to create new ones on the fly to then be placed there.

In an email Tony writes that in future versions people will be able to save completed exercises and look at a gallery of others' work, but even as it is now I can see this being a useful tool to use with faculty or others in workshops to brainstorm different uses they can make of blogs and blogging and help them see it as an activity and process, not an end product (which was a main goal of the 'matrix'). - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000777.html

http://eyespot.com/ and http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/public_home

Via Mark Oehlert's post I came across these two new tools with the promise of "online video editing tools" and I just had to check them out. With more and more services popping up allowing people to share and find media, this is another logical step, online remix tools, and one that I am interested in as well because I don't have any video tools of my own (or ANY skills with video for that matter, making myself a perfect test candidate) (read more...)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000778.html

http://electroplankton.nintendods.com/flash.html

Brian and I have been trading links on wigged out music makers and visualizers recently. It started when he pointed to opening in his furl feed, which I replied back to with the whitney music box.

These are cool, but I dig even more things like Nintendo's ElectroPlankton, really the only reason I would consider buying one of these Nintendo Dual Screen handhelds, though with a 7 year old son I am sure that will change ;-) And from a slightly different angle, I admit to coveting toys like Alesis Air FX Sound and Effects Controller or the Korg KPE-1 KAOSS Pad Entrancer. One of the reasons I love things like these - you can put them in the hands of non-musicians and see their eyes light up as they start to mangle and manipulate sounds to make new ones, something they never thought they could do. In my life, turning myself and other people onto the joy and power of making music is as powerful as any other teaching/learning I have done. Hallelujah! - SWL