zip-boom-ba

When I first entered and registered for the class, I was expecting the class to be a direct way of how to teach technology to students and children in general, what the class actually taught was much more.  It was interesting trying to think of the application of many of these new programs into libraries. 

The discussion of video games especially seems helpful for many people are still not seeing the place for video games within a library system.  On the other hand, many of the discussed mediums I can't see of being great use, Twitter, Facebook, etc... but as I think about it more and more I'm coming around to those more and more.  It seems as if it's a fly by night fad and it takes someone or multiple people to work on keeping these up to date, it could be worth it to promote your institution and also as a reference tool.

The readings were incredibly interesting, although I didn't agree much with Postman or McLuhan, its definitely though how many people still feel about many new technologies/mediums, so it's good to know what you're up against so to speak.  

Overall, it was a good class, I do wish that there was more direct conversation towards lesson planning and directly how kids respond to instructional tech teaching.  Anyway thank you all its been very exciting and the discussions in class were always very interesting.

I'll end the course with this video again from the TED series of Brewster Kahle discussing the complete digital library.

youtube v. hulu

I've never been crazy about youtube, I understand why people are, but it seems poorly designed and filled with trashy content.  Similarly to how I ended up feeling about myspace, too many advertisements and the content is poor.  

Youtube has many many videos of poor quality concerts that I've tried to sit through and just get disgusted at the crowd-noise and I'm always disappointed with my search results.  If I search for "David Cross" for example I get everything at the top usually with David Cross, but I also get everything with David and with Cross (many religious results here) the search doesn't seem to react to my use of quotes, to only get results with David and Cross. 

I struggle with determining who uses youtube, because to me its almost a humungous site of America's Funniest Home Videos, without the voiceover to make it mildly tolerable.  I sound like a gloomy-gus, but it is a site that is one of my pet peeves.

I truly appreciate the content that is under their shows tab because that is a rare opportunity to see free television show content that has a producer/writer/director... 

Which brings me to hulu.com which I have been in love with now for about six months and really enjoy the content, because I don't have cable so I can watch the daily show and colbert show in entirity here without being troubled by comedycentral.com breaking the show into clips.  Its very freeing and I could watch old episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati as well, and they have a few movies but they are mostly movies no one would ever want to watch.  

These are great steps for the internet and shows progress to what the possibilities of the internet can hold, I wonder if hulu was in the writer's strike agreement, I'm sure it was.

To teach with youtube can be a bit dicey I can imagine, creating a video is a fantastic way to learn about many things that go into the media, but posting it on youtube could end up in being a disappointment for the class or it could be very exciting... perhaps the school could schedule an assembly to watch the videos as a school, I think that would be much more rewarding overall.

I'll close this post with the ad for hulu.com with Alec Baldwin that aired during the super bowl and somewhat frequently afterwards:

bid ideas.

So I was having a discussion with some of my friends this week about the internet and what the next step could be from here, and began to think of this video:

In the video Luis von Ahn discusses a few of his big ideas to make the Internet more academically useful and how to implement games to make simple problems fixable and quickly.  It seems really simple but this combines so many of the ideas we've been discussing in class I had to put it here as well. 

The words that OCR (Optical Character Recognition) cannot pick up or does pick up wrongly so the digitization movement can move more productively forward.  When you buy tickets from Ticketmaster now you are helping this new wave of digitization, that's pretty incredible to me.

But thinking about that idea even further, the idea of making a game on the internet that allows for the human input that many of these new technological tools are missing could be an enormous industry and would allow for more time to be spent with family and those that perhaps could not find a job elsewhere have a little money come in.  

This perhaps is the next step after Gee's understanding of interactive learning and could be a small part of the future career options for the video game generation... I'm not sure of course its all reading a crystal ball but it's rather exciting to begin to think about the possibilities.

Play some of the Games With a Purpose here: http://www.gwap.com/gwap/

Are we at the World Wide Web?

So I used to work for Careerbuilder.com and one of the things they were quite proud of at the time was establishing a relationship with google which lended them to be at the top of the google search, I am unsure as to what they mean by establishing a relationship with google, but I know that that did happen.

I've also heard similar things about wikipedia, how google was fond of their idea and promoted them and pushed them to the top of many of their searches before anyone had even begun to start hearing of wikipedia. Again there are times when wikipedia is not at the top, but something definitely occurred and has been spoke of on both ends as to the "sweetheart" relationship between google and wikipedia. Here's a link to another blurb by Nicholas Carr on the topic: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php

Also recently doing a name search for me brings up some results that I think must have paid to come to the top of name searching: classmates.com (upon seeing this I deleted every piece of me from their site) and linkedIn, which I have a profile on, but I don't understand why it is the top hit for my name... something about these seem fishy to me.  

Thinking about the things that are given priority towards the top it makes me wonder what we are missing on the web, what doesn't fall into the web that google collects...  

I'll end this post with the podcast list that I subscribe to and listen to very regularly (I have quite the commute):

ALSC Blog Podcast

Comedy Central Stand Up (Video)

Delicious TV Veg

KEXP Song of the Day

KEXP Video of the Week

MoMa, The Museum of Modern Art New York

The Moth Podcast

MPR: The Current Song of the Day

The New Yorker Animated Cartoons

NPR: All Songs Considered Podcast

NPR: Car Talk

NPR: Driveway Moments

NPR: Live Concerts from All Songs Considered

NPR: Second Stage Podcast

NPR: Story of the Day

NPR: StoryCorps 

NPR: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Onion News Network

The Sarah Silverman Program

Sesame Street Podcast

Stand Up Comedy

TEDTalks (Video)

This American Life

That's a much longer list than I anticipated when starting this, but I highly recommend almost all of those.

bugle.

I guess a first note on wikis. I knew of the background area of wikis prior to the class and I had a respect for them and I also dismiss them in a sense as well... There's something silly that I've been trying to do on wikipedia for some time. The actor Peter Saarsgard, he's dating or married to Maggie Gyllenhall, he is from my hometown and I've been trying to put his name on the list of famous people from my city, and everytime I have tried this over the past few months it is deleted in an hour or two after I put it up, I put the source of imdb stating he's from the city and I link his name to his page within wikipedia, still no dice. It's seems like a really small thing to do, but yet it doesn't fly, I don't know how you can get something successfully published on wikipedia these days, its seems to have too many watchdogs almost. However, I do when I see a spelling or grammatical error I fix it, and that always stands, so I'm not sure what's going on...

So that's my bit about wikis, moving into google which is exciting, and also podcasting (whoa!) totally excited about that.
Google is a very interesting business model they have developed marketing in a way that is similar to apple and yet dissimilar. And overall google is by far more innovative than any web company that I can think of there is always something new and their stunt with CADIE this week for April Fools has kept me entertained endlessly. I suppose they can keep this up, there's really no one that is trying to be as hip and yet user friendly its a balance they've maintained and they also have a geeky streak which drives even more people that may be skeptical in, there are many fronts that I think are impeccable about their practices. I use many of the tools and there are some that i've played with but can't seem to find a use for yet.

I met someone just before Christmas who was vacationing here from California who worked for Google and had been working the past year on Google Health, and to me Google Health seems really out of the box for them and really trying to shake things up, and this man had made it his life for so long he was really into the possibilities of having people being able to keep track of their medical data online, but to me it just didn't seem like a easily accessible idea. I haven't heard much about it since it has launched, so I'm thinking my hunch is right, but maybe one day Google Health will be all we're talking about. They seem to have more hits than misses.

I keep ending with videos, this is a great one about twittering everyone's newest passion/pet peeve:

honolulu

wikis. oh to wiki. 

To me wikis are probably not used too often by teens other than inside of classroom settings and perhaps to edit a few of their interests on wikipedia. Wikis generally are a little bit dorkier and solitary than the other tools we've been discussing.  It involves understanding and creating code and also delving behind the scenes in the case of wikipedia and feeling a bit like a "know-it-all" or at least that you know more than the people who wrote the page.

It's a very empowering tool, you can see other people's typos and fix them you can research something more completely than another and have instant gratification.  They are great for connect as well as we've seen through class and i still go to this blog by first going to the wiki to click the link i posted. Basically wikis are a great way to have a group of minds come together and combine. 

Teens or young children, I guess I don't see them using a wiki as often as they possibly could be, this may be a bias in my mind, but it seems more like something you would do in college when your bored and beyond that point to be a bit of an intellectual show-off.  Perhaps someone will prove me wrong.  When I think of wikis I subscribe to the TED conference video podcasts and this one was very enlightening about the mindset and world of wikipedia.

Taking a pass on the previous week of SNS blogging, I think I was thrown off on the wiki. Coincidentally wikis are up next! More on that later this week.