From Marylaine Block, the "librarian without walls" - Neat New Stuff - http://marylaine.com/neatnew.htm - a link to a new Wikipedia Search Engine -

http://www.wikiseek.com/   

Good news passed along by Stephen Downes - http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=41221 - Blackboard is not doing so well in the patent wars. Desire2Learn, a Canadian LMS has apparently won the first battle with Blackboard. However, I'm not sure how long LMSs will continue to be important in education - http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/126293.html  I see the future in open source, and web 2.0, with applications loosely joined, as appropriate for individual classes.

The Desire2Learn's patent-info blog - http://www.desire2learn.com/patentinfo/   

VoiceThreads is a beta applicatioon, currently free, - a wonderful educational tool that  looks like a lot of fun; plus it's very easy and free. You use photos or other images, upload them, and use your computer's microphone to add narration or other audio, or, if you don't have, or don't want to use a sound recording, you can simply type copy. Then people can comment, by voice or text, on your VoiceThreads, or you can limit who comments and who sees/hears the comment and determine when. VoiceThreads will be especially useful if a computer is being used to -

• show visuals
• play audio
• narrate
  
• annotate directly on visuals
  
• interact asynchronously with people (students) by voice or text
  
• interact in real time with people (students) by voice or text
• moderate the interaction
• run an online class, with sight and sound
• share sight and sound with family and friends without using YouTube
  

VoiceThreads will be especially useful for storytelling, art, language learning, and many other aspects of learning and teaching.

 Michelle Pancansky-Brock has created an education example - http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=3352 - that is also a tutorial and I recommend you watch the whole show. (The last visual is of the earth.) I learned a lot from it. 

VoiceThreads is actively inviting educator to use it - http://voicethread.com/classroom.php

There is also a whole section of tutorials, including this one for making a VoiceThread - http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=466 

Check out the Browse for more educational VoiceThreads.

I love web 2.0! 

I really like gMail, but I hate this kind of ad!

Soliciting plagiarism - shouldn't that be illegal?! 

commoncraft does it again! If you want to explain social bookmarking to anyone, you could send them to Wikipedia, but a faster better way to communicate the concept is to point them to this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

Being behind in reading through the posts I've collected on Bloglines, I have just read Harold Jarche's blog post from July 18  - http://www.jarche.com/?p=1243#comment-136841 In it I discovered, and downloaded, a paper by Mark Federman where he describes the communications events I have been aware of, but still struggling to articulate. I love it when that happens!

Federman's paper is called Why Johnny and Janey Can't Read, And Why Mr. And Mrs. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time and explains so much about what's happening today. I strongly, strongly recommend it for all teachers, thinking literates,  and digital immigrants. (The pdf is attached near the bottom of the post.) http://whatisthemessage.blogspot.com/2005/11/why-johnny-and-janey-cant-read.html

To continue on, in both ideas and format, from the historical point Federman left off at, take a look/listen to Teemu Arina's audio-visual presentation that I've linked to - http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/184422.html  

And some of my thoughts from a year and a half ago, highly influenced by Walter Ong's writings, as I developed the communication theory behind a course I was composing called "Oral Rhetoric" - http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/5201.html

And also a description of my experience researching recently, a match, I believe, to Federman's comments on research now - http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/2404.html

What I callour  "shifting semiosis" is what Federman described, and I thank him! 

More later, after I reflect more! 

I remember vividly the first time I saw Jon Udell's screencast on Wikipedia. From watching it, I 'got', I grokked,  what Wikipedia was, how it worked, and what it could do.  I saw Wikipedia as a  world mind that human knowledge could reside in. I also realized, from Udell's screencast, that nasty jerks could pollute it. That's why I like Virgil Griffith's  Wikiscanner as described in this article from the CBC. I  think Wikiscanner walks the narrow line between privacy and secrecy. The locations of the computer IPs where edits are made are revealed, but no one is named. A little less anonymity but not full disclosure, more responsibility without a great increase in fear.

Has anyone used it and found out anything interesting? 

The Canadian professor and journalist, Michael Geist, has laid out a logical and forward-thinking blueprint for where Canada, and others, should be goiing to support and enhance the digital economy.

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/247864  

I find his ideas compelling, not just because of his knowledge of all things digital, but because he's a very good writer, which I admire. He shows his rhetorical chops here with this piece clearly aimed at Canada's new  industry minister, Jim Prentice. I admire Geist's use of this time, when Prentice, we hope, will be looking for advice, and before he does anything negative or short-sighted that would make writing warmly to and/or about him sycophantic. 

Here's hoping Prentice listens, and supports the Canadian digital economy, seeing that our potential is huge right now, as we have one of the most digitally active populations in the world. The Canadian traditional interest in communication continues.

I'm looking forward to teaching Oral Rhetoric again, and preparing for it. (I've written about this favorite course of mine before - http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/13225.html & http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/14100.html ) In those previous posts I was doing the extremely complex task of figuring out a curriculum web, contemplating what students probably already knew and how to link material to that previous knowledge and extend it in the direction required by the course description, in the light of what would be the most helpful learning for them, and in a manner that would encourage community of practice and other learning habits. I am ambitious in my teaching practice.

Since the last time I taught Oral Rhetoric, there have been two important influences on me. One is that my computer crashed, and, among the material never recovered, were all my files for Oral Rhetoric. All the work I'd done over the three iterations of the course was gone. The other important influence has been my online reading of blogs in EduSpaces, and of educationally-oriented blogs I've collected on Bloglines, and a few, experimentally, on Google Reader. Plus what I've collected from these sources, tagged and stored on del.icio.us

The crash and my loss of files was not nearly as disastrous as I first thought because of web 2.0 and my conserving nature. I used a wiki for the last two times I taught Oral Rhetoric, Wikispaces.

The first time I used it, I was building those files which I have since lost, and then copying and pasting them into the wiki over the term. (I was doing the same in other individual wikis for a course I was not as attached to.) The wiki structure and my conserving nature ended up saved me all kinds of reconstructive work.

For the course I was less attached to, and was pretty sure I wouldn't be teaching again, I simply deleted the whole wiki. For Oral Rhetoric, however, I decided not to delete, but to simply edit out most of the material. I planned on starting a new wiki when I taught the course again, but, as I had made some changes from my original files, I decided I would keep this wiki so I could mine material from it in the future, and that turned out to be a very lucky decision.

As I don't like to leave completed materials exposed on the web I deleted most of the work and some of the pages and left fairly empty pages on a wiki that the public could now see (as I was no longer paying the $5.00 US a month for privacy as I had while the course was running.) After the course, I set it up so only the administrator - me - could make changes to the pages, and only the nearly black pages were public.

With a wiki, you can always go back to previous pages. What this meant was that while I had lost the course files on my computer, I had most of my materials still on my Oral Rhetoric wiki, buried one page back. All I had to do was revert to the final version of each page, the version before before I'd edited out the material after the course was over. So I still have most of my course materials! And, as I always do some revision to any course, learning from each set of students and their different responses to the course, I would have had to do about the same amount of preparation even if I still had my files!

This term I'm using a wiki from PBwiki for Oral Rhetoric because I find it more attractive

and because it can be private, just for those I invite, my class members, even in the free version. I will explain more about this choice if anyone asks.

So the wiki history of pages saved me, but my other influence is that of easily available constant on-going research, that is, what I read through my Bloglines list and my Google Reader list (as I compare Bloglines and Google Reader). When I am fascinated by aspects of a course, I am constantly, almost subliminally, thinking about it and how to teach it. That is how I came to introduce creating recordings of personal stories as part of Oral Rhetoric, and putting them online. I discovered PBwiki that way, and Audacity, and EduSpaces, and Federman's article. Through this kind of research, I build my WRI330 tag on del.icio.us, and through that tag, I review my course and what might be helpful sites for the students to use and/or learn from.

So web 2.0 is central to my teaching, especially to teaching Oral Rhetoric. I require my students to come to class, and to work online, and thus to learn in this new communication environment.