Post Tagged with: "Web 2.0"

The problem with blind spots is that you don’t know you’ve got them. I mean, it’s obvious to us today that students weren’t going to need a slate or homemade ink in order to be successful. But imagine living in that time. There was no way those people could have foreseen the changes that make us snicker at those statements today.

Might we also be clinging to faulty beliefs about what will make our students successful? But how do we identify them? What beliefs do we throw out? Which ones do we keep? What skills and content are we teaching that will be irrelevant in five years? What tools are we still using that are already outdated?

Clay Shirky, a leading authority on the Internet’s effects, argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works. In this video, he notes that we are living through “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” If this is true, how do we prepare our students for this new, emerging and ever-changing media landscape?

In recent months, the Library of Congress has piloted a new photo series on the photo-intensive website, Flickr. If you’ve never been to Flickr, it’s essentially a website where photographers from around the world are uploading and sharing their photos, and commenting on the photographs other people post.

In this case, Flickr has teamed up with an unlikely photographer (or should I say archive of American historical photography), and the results are literally breathtaking. One example alone is Jack Delano’s “In the waiting room of Union Station”, taken in Chicago, Illinois. The photo features two officers who create shadows in spotlight-like beams of sunshine coming in from the gothic windows above.

Heard of Wordle? Check the newest “Technology in the Classroom” minute to implement Wordle with a few clicks. The blog post is itself “Wordled,” so not only will you better understand what the site can do, but you will see application and ways in which the site can be used in the classroom. Click now!

Ever wanted an easier way to share your PowerPoint presentations? Now there’s an easy way to share without the need to have the software on the viewer’s computer. Read on to discover what Slideshare can do for you.

Former students of mine recently informed me that Google Scholar is being widely used as a research tool at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and since finding this out, I’ve made ample use of it myself.