The first “Books in Browsers” conference ended yesterday (congrats to Peter Brantley) at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.
Brewster Kahle’s Keynote (Video and Text) is now available online.
The goal is Universal Access to All Knowledge. We want access to public domain materials, older out-of-print but in-copyright materials, and the newest materials that are being commercially sold.
By mid-2010, you could be transferring files, making phone calls, and printing your pictures from your camera, all without wires. That’s because Wi-Fi connections about to get a big upgrade that will allow millions of devices to talk directly to one another through the popular wireless standard.
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the trade group governing Wi-Fi, has announced a new specification: Wi-Fi Direct, formerly Wi-Fi peer-to-peer. Any device certified as Wi-Fi Direct will be able to communicate with each other directly, without the need for a wireless hub. Watch out, Bluetooth – you’ve got some big competition now.
The new standard will be available in mid-2010, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. It should be available as a software upgrade for older products and included in newer Wi-Fi devices.
This is really big news!
In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in 2011, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has assembled a special historical collection of maps, charts, and documents prepared by the U.S. Coast Survey during the war years. The collection, “Charting a More Perfect Union,” contains over 400 documents, available free from NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey website.
Coast Survey’s collection includes 394 Civil War-era maps, including nautical charts used for naval campaigns, and maps of troop movements and battlefields. Rarely seen publications include Notes on the Coast, prepared by Coast Survey to help Union forces plan naval blockades against the Confederacy, and the annual report summaries by Superintendent Bache as he detailed the trials and tribulations of producing the maps and charts needed to meet growing military demands.
Hat tip to ResearchBUZZ for this link.
Like Facebook, but wish your information wasn’t so public? Time to lock your settings down. Facebook doesn’t make this easy, however; features are constantly added and the default for each new one seems to favor transparency instead of privacy.
The result: there are hundreds of little changes you need to make to truly control where your information goes.
Enter “The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Manual”. This handy guide outlines everything you could ever want to know about locking down your privacy on Facebook, and a few things you probably didn’t even know you wanted to know.
If you use Facebook you should read this guide, if only to understand how public most of your information is.
Download: The (Very) Unofficial Privacy Guide
Upon upgrading to iPhoto 11, I got the revolving gray wheel for a very long time, and the Finder said that iPhoto had "stopped responding" so I force quit and started again. I was finally able to upgrade and rebuild my library, but there was nothing there. Every event was labeled properly, and contained placeholders for my images with my labels and even my ratings, but the images themselves were not there. They were all gone.
Tablet computing and the digital classroom it portends will transform the role of educators. They won't teach. They'll manage the learning process of their students. The Freakonomics podcast once referred to this as a student's "playlist": a customized curriculum where the teacher helps with hands-on work and identifies problems or outliers. Already, initiatives like New York's School of One are trying this out (although the project is limited to a three-hour after-school program at the moment).
Screenshot of a spreadsheet dashboard used at School of One to track student performance.So the irresistible force of digitization -- which has already redefined publishing, music, television and dozens of other industries -- is about to meet the immovable mountain of teachers' unions. The unions can step up, helping their members make the transition to tomorrow's learner-centric, tech-heavy classroom. Or, the unions can dig in their heels, resisting change and fighting the inevitable accountability that comes from analytics and digitization.
Tablet computing and the digital classroom give students access to petabytes of knowledge, tailored to their current situations, abilities, and learning preferences. It's how we can overcome many of the problems endemic in today's schools. It'll mean retooling and retraining teachers, equipping them for the student-centric classroom of tomorrow.
As long as the unions don't get in the way.
Starbucks has launched something called the Starbucks Digital Network. It’s a collaboration with Yahoo, and it will “[serve] up a collection of hand-picked premium news, entertainment and lifestyle content along with local insights and events.
In past blogs we’ve discussed the number of resources for Microsoft Word templates. Whether you are visiting Microsoft’s Website, or the program’s built-in project gallery (available on a Mac), you can find various calendar templates to get you started.
In this particular exercise, I have created my own custom template by inserting a table into each page that is 6 columns and 7 rows. To avoid running into issues with rotating pages, when I export the final calendar, I have designed for the landscape appearance while working in a portrait setting. To do this, I have simply set the text orientation on it’s side.
To complete this calendar you will want to have a minimum of 15 images–preferably in a landscape format.
Sometimes, the best way to show people a location is through a real video tour. This lets people feel as though they, themselves, are walking through the area. Providing an online video of an area is like providing web visitors with a virtual tour.
One of the best solutions I’ve found to offer virtual tours like this is YouVR. There are lots of ways that you can integrate photos into Google Maps, like Mark’s approach of geotagging Flickr photos on Google Maps, or using apps like HistoryPin to pin photos to certain Google Maps locations. But if you want to attach an actual video tour of a location on Google Maps, then YouVR is the place to do it.
CLEARWATER - Social studies teacher Kathy Biddle was giving a lecture recently when she noticed a handful of students fiddling with their Kindles, the hand-held devices Clearwater High School made available to all its students at the beginning of the year.
Biddle stopped her lesson. She scolded her charges, telling them to focus on what she was saying. She thought they were texting their friends or looking at Facebook. They weren't. The students were taking notes on Biddle's lecture, using a feature on the electronic book-reader called 'My Clippings.' They then instructed the rest of the class how to do it.
