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July 16, 2007

Search Goes Back to Being Human

For years I taught about the differences between directories (Yahoo, DMOZ) and keyword search engines (Google, Altavista). Then last week I did a presentation about searching and declared that the world of directories was pretty much dead. Everyone goes right to Google or Wikipedia these days. I've already blogged about how much more productive (or distracted) I feel since I added the googlepedia plugin to Firefox.

So today I heard about something new...Mahalo This is only in alpha now and is planning a full release about a year from now. All of the search pages are hand-crafted by humans. So, how can it possibly start doing collecting now and still be viable a year from now? The answer is by including a variety of technologies. The site is built in a wiki (although it doesn't look like that on the outside) and the pages are populated with RSS feeds.

This one will be fun to watch!

Posted by Pat on 8:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Magic Pictures

I've been preparing for a session on organizing digital media for use in classes.  One of the things I've been struggling with is how to convince teachers that it's worthwhile to tag any of their content.  It's really taken me almost a year to figure out the best way for me to use my del.icio.us account.  The power of that service is all in tagging. I've also used Flickr extensively for a by searching on various tags and organizing slideshows or collections with that tool.

This week I came across PhotoSynth by Microsoft, which aggregates photos to create a seamless whole picture.  This is still in beta, but it gives a good picture of how this is going to get continue to become more useful. Right now the demos are using photos taken by one individual or a small team (gotta make the demo look good). But the longer vision of this is to enable users to stitch together their photos based on tags. Or better yet, use the Flickr tags of numerous people to build these 3D views.

From where I sit, this looks like more of the world getting flat.  Last summer, when AOL released data on all their searches, it was disturbing to see how quickly the little one or two word phrases that we typed in can be aggregated to give a snapshot of our whole identity.  That's the dark side.  Finding a way to aggregate those little bits of data and create a larger common consciousness is much more powerful and exciting. We do that intentionally at Wikipedia and now we might begin to see it happen more automatically.

Posted by Pat on 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 10, 2007

Where was Pat?

At the beginning of June, I took a trip to Europe for the first time. Now, I'm finally getting my photos organized because I'm doing a session on digital images and education. Here are my slides as organized in Picassa, uploaded to my Picassa Web Album, and turned into a slide show with code from Picassa Web albums.

Posted by Pat on 5:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2007

IPod or No IPod?

The month of June brought two stories that are hard to hold in your head at the same time.

Schools banning iPods to beat cheaters

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

June 1, 2007—

Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious--students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text-message the answers to each other. Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device.

Devices such as iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say. ...

Prepare for the SAT Test, or Play With Your iPod? Have It Both Ways

By MARIA ASPAN

Published: June 25, 2007

High school students cramming for the SAT test have traditionally relied on thick books full of practice exams, sharpened No. 2 pencils and intensive tutoring sessions. But now a traditional test preparation company is offering some options for the iPod generation. ...

To me, all of this underlines the fact that we, as educators, really need to be doing things differently within our schools, while the rest of the world changes so much around us.

Posted by Pat on 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack