Conversing at ELI
Laura Blankenship February 28th, 2008
Shameless self-promotion. Here’s a podcast I did at ELI with Veronica Diaz. We talk Web 2.0, faculty support and education. Enjoy.
Archive for February, 2008
Using Blogs in Teaching
Laura Blankenship February 25th, 2008
Here is the presentation from our session on using blogs. It’s also available as a video from iTunes U.
Blackboard wins suit against Desire2Learn
Laura Blankenship February 25th, 2008
Over the weekend (and snow day), I saw the educational blog world aflutter with the news about Blackboard’s win over rival D2L. Inside Higher Ed covers the story quite well. (Also at The Chronicle.) Blackboard’s patent has long been disputed and many in the educational technology community have been critical over Blackboard’s recent business practices. In fact, according to Michael Feldstein, who has been following the case since it began, Blackboard is losing customers and some blame these practices in part. Blackboard’s many patents are still being reviewed after several entities, including the Software Freedom Foundation asked the patent office for the review (which I discussed here). Educause, the leading organization for higher education technology, also criticized Blackboard’s patents. I think it will be a while before we fully know what the fallout (if any) is. D2L is likely to appeal and we’ll be waiting for the patent review as well.
Image editing without Photoshop
Laura Blankenship February 18th, 2008
Most of us are not doing complex image editing projects. We need to do some cropping or resizing, maybe some simple auto color correction. We don’t need or have access to Photoshop. Luckily, there are plenty of applications our there on the web. I had been asked about these recently and knew about a couple of them, but after an inquiry to my friends on Twitter, I was bombarded with ideas (thanks everyone!). Here are a few of them.
- Picnik–allows you to rotate, crop, autocorrect, sharpen, adjust colors and more. You can add text, shapes, or create fun effects.
- Splashup–this is a more full-blown image editing program with tools similar to those in Photoshop.
- Snipshot–very similar to picnik, but basic editing is available without signing up for an account.
- Pixenate–not as slick–looking as the ones above, but still offers similar features. I didn’t find it as fun or easy to use
These tools are all online, but there are other tools that can be downloaded for free.
- Irfanview–works on windows PCs
- GIMP–works for windows, linux, and mac
- iPhoto, of course, works well on the mac (comes with the operating system, but upgrades cost a small fee usually)
- Picassa, a Google product, works on all platforms as well
So take some pictures and then go have some fun!
New Schedule Posted
Laura Blankenship February 14th, 2008
The New Media Lab schedule for the spring semester has been posted.
WordPress company gets $29.5 million
Laura Blankenship February 7th, 2008
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has received a few million dollars in funding, according to CNET. They’re holding to their open, small pieces loosely joined policy, and hope to tackle some of the sticky issues related to blogging, such as comment spam. I’m personally looking forward to seeing more from them, especially in the blog platform area.
Google Forms? Whoa!
Laura Blankenship February 6th, 2008
Google has announced the ability to use spreadsheets combined with a form to collect data. Let’s try it out. Here’s a link to my form.
ELI 2008: Recommended Videos
Laura Blankenship February 6th, 2008
I’ve been back from the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Conference for a few days now, finally catching up on everything. There were lots of great sessions from ELI that I want to recommend to those who did not attend. All the recorded sessions are available here.
First, I’d recommend George Siemens’ talk on Connectivism, which provides a new way to think about learning. I’ve been following his work for quite a while and find it quite compelling. This talk was a good introduction.
Second, I’d recommend Michael Wesch’s talk on Human Futures for Technology and Education: A Crisis of Significance. I didn’t get to see this talk myself as it conflicted with my own panel, the video for which you can find here and the audio here. You may know Wesch’s work from YouTube. He’s had a few videos go viral.
Third, Intellagirl’s talk on using Second Life to teach rhetoric was quite inspiring and had me looking at Second Life in a new way.
Each talk is about an hour, includes video and slides and is well worth the time spent viewing them. It’s a great way to see some of the ideas from a conference without having to go. But it’s also well worth going for the discussions in between. Hopefully, in watching these videos, you’ll have things to discuss as well.