Here are my notes from Keith Kruger’s excellent and thought provoking workshop.
Keith is the CEO of CoSN, the US’s premier voice in education tech leadership. click for CoSN site
Outline of the workshop:
Three major conclusions:
Interesting to see what Canberra Primary School teachers are doing with audio recordings with their learners. Some good stuff.
They’re using an application called profcast
They make two kinds of audio recording:
Why podcasts? Read More…
CET chair Prof Phillip Wong kicked off the conference with a nice analogy, comparing technology with antibiotics. Cavemen are given antibiotics and told the little pills will save their lives. Some of these cavemen will put the pills on a pedestal and worship them, others will try one pill and leave the rest, others will mix the pills with water and rub the mixture all over their bodies, and others will take the whole lot in one go. If the pills don’t work they’ll dismiss the claim that they’ll save their lives. If the pills make them sick they’ll say they’re dangerous. The challenge is to help them understand how and when to use the pills. The same is true for technology. Prof Wong said he’d borrowed that analogy from Chris Dede (see below).
RAdm Ronnie Tay the new CEO of IDA gave us some interesting figures about IT use in Singapore, focusing on IT use among the digitally literate and those in education. Up-to-date stuff with a clear vision. Read More…
Worth a look:
The new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are no good according to A List Apart:
“WCAG 2 is not enough of an improvement and was not worth the wait.”
A List Apart: Articles: To Hell with WCAG 2
Got this via the boagworld podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/boagworldpodcast
Useful lists of what’s hot in Web 2.0:
We’re becoming increasingly reliant on technology to remember things. The UK’s Telegraph reports:
“As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes.
When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of close family relatives, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.” click for Mobile phones ‘dumbing down brain power’
I read something interesting somewhere about memory a while ago, but I forget what it was 
Webware has just revealed the results of their Webware 100 public poll on the best Web2.0 sites/online applications.
There were more than 5,000 nominations for sites to be included in this awards program, which Webware’s editors pruned to a list of 250 finalists. Users then voted on those finalists – there were 489,467 votes cast. click for Webware 100 voting results
The top 10 vote winners, which accounted for 45 percent of all votes, were, in alphabetical order (links open in Webware page with links to the winning sites):
I’m going to check out Bebo & Gaia ‘cos I know very little about them.
As for the others, no big surprises. Firefox is, without doubt, the best browser. Anything Google is good. Wikipedia, well naturally. YouTube and MySpace too. Stardoll I mentioned in an earlier post. And Wordpress, well, this blog is a Wordpress blog. Nuf sed.
A new one for the dictionary, I hope.
Email bankruptcy = “when you are so inundated with email (both genuine and spam) that you have to delete everything and start over again”. from Urban Dictionary
Thanks to Philip Tan who introduced me to this new term. He sent me a copy of the following excellent article, in an envelope:
Click for Washington Post article on email bankruptcy
Here’s a list of people who’ve filed for email bankruptcy:
No big surprise. Inevitable, I guess. Commercial spam aside, there are just too many emails where the writer has not thought to make the email relevant to the reader. Then the huge quantity of irrelevant emails reaches to the limit where the signal becomes noise and we cease to pay attention.
Tom Merritt, in a quick aside on a recent edition of CNet’s BuzzOutLoud podcast, also revealed that he was getting slower at handling his email replies. Not bankrupt yet though. I’m about the same. I’m notorious for not replying promptly: I now write my replies once a week, unless it’s urgent.
In case you need some advice… Lawrence Lessig explains how to declare email bankruptcy in Wired 14.08: How To: Be More Productive.
Just unveiled by Microsoft. It’s called ‘Surface’. I can’t wait to get my hands on one
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP5y7yp06n0]
Follow the link below and watch the video demos to be totally amazed. Available soon for business use (retail outlets, restaurants, casinos).
Twitter: Markhamster
