Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
If you're a true Wikipedian or merely a fan of the world's largest encyclopedia, you'll want to have a listen to this week's episode of FLOSS Weekly with Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte. They interview Jimmy Wales, and he provides some interesting insights into the workings of Wikipedia. Good stuff ...
Posted in Wikis | 2 Comments »
Monday, May 15th, 2006
There's a battle royale brewing in the telecom world. Skype just announced that SkypeOut calls to U.S. and Canadian numbers will be free through the end of 2006. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, SkypeOut allows you to call a standard landline number from your computer using the Skype VoIP ...
Posted in Emerging Technologies | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 8th, 2006
Mark McCahill is from the University of Minnesota and is one of the architects of the Croquet Project, an open source peer-to-peer system for building virtual worlds like those found in World of Warcraft and Second Life. Those of you who've been around the Internet block a few times might ...
Posted in Conferences, Savvy Technologist Podcast | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
My old mobile phone was acting up so I picked up a new one a few days ago. The Samsung T809 is pretty cool on its own, but I've had the most fun playing with Google SMS. If you haven't ever tried text messaging, find a teenager somewhere and ask ...
Posted in Emerging Technologies | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
We had a whole-district staff development day today and I had the chance to introduce about 35 teachers to Web 2.0 and some applications like Del.icio.us, Flickr (with an accompanying lesson on Creative Commons), Technorati, Bloglines, and Wikipedia. I was pleased with the results, and the experience reminded me of ...
Posted in Personal productivity, Professional Development | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 19th, 2006
Paul Nelson is Technology Director at Riverdale High School in Portland, OR and co-creator of the K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project. K-12 LTSP is a really cool way to take older machines and breathe new life into them by connecting them to a powerful server that takes over the bulk ...
Posted in IT Infrastructure, Savvy Technologist Podcast | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
I meet with a bunch of other ed tech folks from the Twin Cities area once a month to share ideas and see demonstrations of various learning technologies. As I type this I'm sitting in a meeting with a representative from the Minnesota Dept. of Education who is giving all ...
Posted in General | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
I popped over to the U. of Minnesota today for a teleconference about podcasting in the classroom. Long-time readers may recall that I posted last year about the U.'s UThink blogging system that provides a free blog for every student and staff member. They've upgraded the system to support podcasting ...
Posted in Conferences, Podcasting and iPod | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 28th, 2005
I had the pleasure of hosting a second roundtable discussion this morning. The room was full and we had some good discussion of many of the issues that come up whenver there's a discussion of blogs, wikis, and other interactive, Web-based tools.
I pointed everyone to James Farmer's edublogs site where ...
Posted in Blogging, Conferences, Wikis | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
It seems like "the long tail" is popping up everywhere these days so I guess this is a good time for a jargon watch post about it. The long tail literally refers to the general shape of a sloping probability function. Not surprisingly, the interesting part goes beyond the mathematical ...
Posted in Emerging Technologies | Comments Off
Wednesday, August 10th, 2005
I feel like reprising my first podcasting post from last October. Just when you thought you had podcasting figured out, along comes DTV from the Participatory Culture Foundation. DTV, an acronym I have yet to find defined anywhere but I suspect stands for "Distributed TV," is a system that mirrors ...
Posted in Podcasting and iPod, Web technology | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 8th, 2005
Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) is doing a guest stint at lessig blog while Lawrence Lessig is away. He's making a top ten list of things that will be free someday and puts a free curriculum on the list at #2.
I'm not sure why there would be just one free ...
Posted in Curriculum Resources, Wikis | Comments Off
