iSean

T.H.E Journal has a recent article (or the 3 page version here) that notes the top 10 Web 2.0 tools for young learners based on a presentation by Gail Lovely at a recent conference. not surprisingly, i recognized less than 1/2 of the list. color me unimpressed with this list. as a person who spends hours a week in an elementary school, i don’t think some of the stuff on this list is very practical and certainly isn’t worthy of being “top 10″ over stuff like Google Docs, which isn’t even on the list. Lovely lists some apps (and 1 that isn’t even a web 2.0 app), but she also mentions some generic tools (e.g., #2 on her list is blogs, and #1 is wikis). i think i’ll release a better list next week to put this one to shame. stay tuned . . .

i am trying my first post using a new tool called apture. it’s a plugin for WordPress, Drupal, Blogger.com, and many other tools. their about us page notes:

Apture provides the first rich communication platform that allows people to intuitively experience the web.

With just one line of code, publishers and bloggers can quickly and easily turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience. Apture gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages.

Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience.

probably the easiest way to explain it is just to demonstrate it with the 2 links in the next sentence (very easy to do, mind you). the Jayhawk is the mascot for the University of Kansas.

apparently so. i stopped using turnitin a few years ago because i thought submitting my student’s papers seemed a bit unethical. a federal appeals court has ruled that turnitin storing student papers is just fair use. i guess i was wrong.

The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes here (commercial uses can be fair uses), here (a use can be transformative ‘in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work,’ citing Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.), and here (fact that turnitin.com used the entirety of the plaintiff’s work did not preclude finding of fair use). And it turned back a lot of other, small-bore challenges to the district court’s fair use finding.

while it still doesn’t feel right, i suppose i can take some solace in the fact that “fair use” is getting a win.

i love Google Maps. i love Google Earth and all sorts of tools along these lines. that being said, Google is now rolling out a new feature for their maps . . . web cam video from cameras on the spot. right now these web cams are just particular public web cams as tracked by webcams.travel but i bet it’s not long before other web cams find their way into our maps. kind of freeky and neato geeky all at the same time, eh? you can read more over at techcrunch.

i received this link via email and the sender thought this would be worth sharing. at first, i assumed it was spam. then i looked at the lectures included long enough to see a TED video included. i love TED videos so i’ll pass this along . . . view at your own risk, but potentially there are some nice videos here. click for the link.