EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/

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Have you twitted? Twitter can be used to track friends and send short messages either to a select group of people or the world, online and by mobile phone. My colleagues use it as an in/out board. Can it be used to facilitate learning? Apparently, yes. AcademHack: tech tools for Academics describes a Twitter assignment in which students virtually followed classmates over a weekend to explore new media. The success of this assignment inspired 13 (thirteen!) ideas for using Twitter in the classroom.

For more, see the Educause Learning Initiative 2 page document “7 things you should know about Twitter“.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) reports on a new study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that documents Web surfing habits. Not surprisingly, video sharing sites like YouTube are seeing a strong increase in viewership, and a Pew survey found last spring that more of these folks are looking at educational content when they visit these sites. Many institutions are taking advantage of this to make content available that’s been created by and about their faculty, staff and students. Duke has done this as well - visit the Duke University News channel on YouTube to see a variety of videos about faculty research, library activities, and other information about our campus.

See also:
Thanks to YouTube, Professors are Finding New Audiences (CHE)

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Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium has posted a list of more than 50 different Web 2.0 tools that can be used to tell stories in digital form. He provides variations on a single story for each tool, along with some additional examples for many cases. This is a great list to explore to get ideas of how different tools might be useful, accompanied by some tips for generating story topics, using media and preparing your project.

List of 50 ways (plus a few extras) to tell a story using Web 2.0 tools
Slide show of Levine’s conference presentation that is the source of this list

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Videos within Google Privacy Channel on YouTube cover different topics,
like how users can manage their search histories and adjust cookie preferences, enhancing users’ control over how their personal information is displayed.The series, appearing on YouTube’s Google Privacy Channel, is part of the corporation’s effort to raise awareness about how users can control their personal information when using Google’s products, according to the Official Google Blog.

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Google recently started an invitation-only beta test of a new service called “Knol”.

Pages at Knol are similar to Wikipedia entries, with expert authors writing articles on a variety of topics.  A columnist at ArsTechnica notes that despite being one of the top sites on the web, Wikipedia is the one space where Google can’t make money through ad placement - he speculates that Google’s motivation is to create a “Wikipedia-killer”.

Regardless of the motivation, Google’s approach is to highlight the authors of the articles.  They want to encourage individuals that are experts on a topic to write articles and let users examine information about the author to determine how trustworthy the information might be.  (Wikipedia, of course, works on a “crowdsourcing” model where multiple authors - sometimes anonymously - create and edit entries.)

Currently, Google doesn’t have Knol open to the public, but has posted a blog entry and sample screenshot.

blog entry at Google

sample screenshot at Google

A range of thoughts about Knols and the future of Wikipedia can be found on various blogs:

listing of posts at Buzzfeed

An article about Google’s Knol effort has also appeared at Wikipedia.

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Two recent articles have highlighted popular teaching content (and the professor- stars who have created it)

The New York Times proudly proclaims: At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star. Professor Lewin’s course materials, including videotaped lectures are available on OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at iTunesU.

Fans e-mail him from all over the world, discussing both his inspirational style as well as the concepts he has taught them from watching his videos. Even people who are not students have a new appreciation for physics after watching his presentations.

Two mathematics professors, Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, at University of Minnesota have created a YouTube hit about Möbius transformations; in the 6 months since this was posted, it has received over one million hits. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the animation.

We may be able to all have our 15 minutes of fame on the internet. Or, use someone else’s popular content in our teaching.

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Would you like to have your students work together to build an annotated map? Google Maps has just added a collaboration feature. When you are creating a personalized, annotated map using the “My Maps” feature of Google Maps, there is a new button entitled “collaborate“. This feature allows you to email an invitation to others to allow them to help annotate the map. For example, a group of students could create a map based on a course reading, annotating placemarks with insightful interpretations. Alternatively, students could map geological features, watersheds or species distributions. Students involved in community projects could place their own pictures together on a map.

Next to the collaborate button on Google Maps is another feature for sharing information. If you’ve found or created a wonderful KML/ KMZ file using Google Earth, and want to share it with someone who does not have access, click the “import” button to upload the file from the web or your computer. You can then send Aunt Mary the link to see your vacation trip, or share the link with your students via Blackboard. Your students or Aunt Mary do not need to have or use Google Earth to see your map.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) reports on a new search engine from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that makes it possible to look for particular terms or phrases within a recorded lecture.

According to the brief news item, users can search for terms like “white dwarf” in a lecture on astronomy, rather than browsing the recording the old-fashioned way. Want to learn more? Go to the Lecture Browser home page and search for the desired term in one of more than twenty different disciplinary categories. The search engine will return a list of MIT lectures in that field which contain the term, with links to cue up the recording at the point(s) in each lecture where the term is found.

At present, this tool is available only at MIT, but the CHE report indicates it may be made available to other universities at some point in the future.

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Amazon.com will be soon releasing their highly anticipated e-book reader device, code-named Kindle.

The CIT tested the Sony Reader earlier this year and the Amazon device has many similar features - a screen that uses E Ink technology that resembles a printed page and the ability to hold up to 200 titles. However, Amazon’s entry into the market will include wireless capability that allows for purchase of titles directly on the device without a computer and can even be used to update purchased titles with new information. It can also search through books for particular words and phrases. Amazon has several partners in the publishing industry, providing what promises to be a wide range of content.

feature article at Newsweek

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