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Intelligent Agents power Student Support 'Chat-bots'

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Intelligent Agents power Student Support 'Chat-bots': "The South Orange County Commuity College District has put intelligentagents to work fielding questions from students through instant messaging.  Students are able to ask questions about classes,their college and resources available to students in"

(Via EDUCAUSE Blogs -.)

Cyprien Lomas points to an interesting support approach utilizing an instant messaging format to providing access to resources and sharing information. I subscribe to a similar service called Smarter Child. Smarter Child is a commercial service that allows you to use check sports, weather, news and other such information. It is interesting to think of institutions using this approach to provide access to their knowledge bases.

1001 - A Desktop Flickr Client...

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Kula: 1001 1001 is a desktop client to be used in conjunction with Flickr, the online photo-sharing website. 1001 not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded. 1001 allows you to step into the stream of photos passing through Flickr and to quickly see what's new at the moment. Just run the app in the background and if triggered, 1001 pops up a small unobtrusive window to notify you of new photos. (Via Joi Ito's Web.)

This is pretty nice. Another interesting use of Flickr that demonstrates the hooks they have built into it for use by developers. I've got it running and it is kind of nice to see pictures pop up as they are posted to the Flickr site...

New Flickr Features...

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flickrinline.jpgFlickrBlogTwo new features from Flickr, the photo sharing/community site. First, in-place editing for photo titles and descriptions. You can now edit the title and description information while looking at the photo in context.

Another feature is tag relatedness. Flickr already allows you to assign tags to your images to help keep them organized. They have added a feature where related tags are also posted. For example going to the Flickr site associated with the word VOTE, and you will get all the images that have been tagged with that term. Also listed on the page are links to related tags... election, Kerry, Bush...

Podcasting and Bandwidth Usage...

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Russell Beattie Notebook - 25GB

I know I'm going to learn from experience. The next time I decide to put out a potentially popular media file like that, it'll definitely be on BitTorrent first.

Russell Beattie discusses a possible downfall of becoming a popular Podcaster... bandwidth usage/charges. There has been lots of talk about Podcasting, positioning audio for easy incorporation into devices such as an iPod. While I think the opportunities for time shifting are great and would love to see more existing audio content available via this method of distribution, I'm not that excited about the do it your self variety. It sounds to me a bit like Wayne and Garth without the basement set...

Smaller High Schools

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AssortedStuff: It will be interesting to watch these "small school" experiments as they unfold, although it will probably take years to see the total effect. There is one advantage of a high school with less than 500 students, however. They won't be able to field much of a football team and that will remove a major distraction.

Tim Stahmer discusses recent moves in Chicago and Los Angeles to redesign large high schools into smaller learning communities. Joe Luft of Flushing International High School, and Tom Hoffman of Feinstein High School in Providence have some experience in this area. Also Portland's Marshall High School has recently begun a reorganization as part of a Gates Foundation grant. The Northwest Regional Educational Lab describes their progress in an article entitled Anatomy of Change in the latest issue of Northwest Education.

Google Print

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1. What is Google Print?Google Print enables publishers to promote their books on Google. Google scans the full text of participating publishers' titles so that Google users can see books that match the topics that they are searching on. When a user clicks on a book search result, they're taken to a Google-hosted web page displaying a scanned image of the relevant page from the book. Each page also contains multiple 'Buy this Book' links, allowing users to purchase the book from online retailers.

Here is an example...

Bill Z Finds Himself Blogging...

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Saturday, October 2, 2004 - News: "

On Saturday, I attended the first session of the Ed 436: Technology Across the Curriculum course that I am taking as part of the MAT Flex program at Pacific University. That's why I now find myself blogging.

I am again this fall teacher a technology class for preservice teachers at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. In the past I set up Moveable Type weblogs for the participants, but in light of the recent user interface upgrades at Blogger I decided to just have them set up their own weblog using Blogger. As part of the course I have made it a requirement to post a few times a week to their blog. I'm finding the experience a great way to learn more about each student. For example I had no idea that Bill was a Tri-Met driver. The # 14 route he writes of is near my house...

I have their blog feeds in a special folder set up in my RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire and can easily see when they post something new. Next session I'll turn them on to Bloglines...

IM goes Mobile... And Grows Up...

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Technology > Circuits > Flip Open That Cellphone: It's IM on the Move" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/technology/circuits/07mess.html?oref=login">The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Flip Open That Cellphone: It's IM on the Move It looks more and more as if IM has outgrown its exclamatory roots in teenage chatter. The Washington-based Pew Internet and American Life Project estimated in early September that 53 million adults use the technology.

I'd say so too. It has gotten to the point where I have to remind some of my staff to close their wireless laptops during some parts of our staff meetings.

Flickr DNS Issues...

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FlickrBlog Flickr Unavailable Flickr has been only sporadically available since Sunday morning and was completely off the map for about 5 hours. You may still be experiencing difficulty accessing the site — if you are, try going through www1.flickr.com, www2.flickr.com, www3.flickr.com or www4.flickr.com.

Looks like you can still get to it from the alternative sites...

Dowser: Research Tool For The Web...

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DowserDowser is a research tool for the web. It clusters results from major search engines, associates words that appear in previous searches, and keeps a local cache of all the results you click on in a searchable database. It helps you keep track of what you find on the web.

(Via The Tao of Mac.)

This is another interesting tool that runs locally on your computer. It basically catalogs your web searches on your local computer and creates a searchable local database of your searches. Now I can search my searches. Requires Python...

PSU Community Service Project...

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Portland State | News | PSU Students and Alumni to Participate in Community Service Project at Lewis Elementary Spent yesterday morning at Lewis Elementary with a group of Portland State University students who were helping us with a number of projects. At Lewis we have a very large amount of cyclone fence that surrounds our playground and ball fields. One of our PTA members had the idea of having students paint flowers and other designs on wooden discs, and then hang them on the fence. This was accomplished and the PSU group helped us hang them. They also worked in our outdoor center cleaning up yard debris, and rebuilding our fish pond.

Tim Stahmer's Weblog Noted in Technology and Learning

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> The Back Page > September 15, 2004" href="http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=BAL5OOAXZXEUMQSNDBGCKHQ?articleID=47204073">Techlearning > > The Back Page > September 15, 2004 Online For all you blogophiles out there, instructional technology specialist Tim Stahmer's Assorted Stuff is one of the more compelling Web logs covering K-12 education. In addition to waxing eloquent about the latest education news in the general press, his day-to-day experiences as an educator, and his thoughts on Apple iMovie versus Windows Movie Maker, Stahmer, who works in the staff development department of the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, touches on politics, life in the District of Columbia, The Daily Show, and other, well, assorted stuff. What's appealing about the site is that it captures the essence of what a blog should be-timely, opinionated, and well-written-without being overly self-promotional. And OK, it's also got some pretty good rants.

Tim's weblog, Assorted Stuff, gets a nice mention in Technology and Learning.

Dr. Donald Leu

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I had mentioned that last week at Lewis we held some inservice sessions with staff. One session involved a talk (via iChatAV ) by Dr. Donald Leu of the University of Connecticut. Dr. Leu is well known for his research on New Literacies . His work addresses issues of both theory and practice as the Internet redefines what it means to become literate. I have worked on several presentations with Dr. Leu and asked him if you could speak to my staff as part of our inservice week. He agreed and we connected via iChat and he spoke for about 15 minutes and then took questions from the staff. The presentation then lead to a lab session on iChat. Again using Rendezvous, teachers could easily connect to each other and had a good time experimenting with the text and audio features...

Shrook 2 - RSS and Atom for Mac OS X

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Shrook 2, and OS X RSS/Atom reader, looks very interesting. The Smart Group feature is very nice. Similar to Smart Playlists in iTunes. For example I just set up a Smart Group to track all the Lewis Elementary site feeds. Can set up SmartGroups to track just about anything. Also it will load my feeds on my iPod. Not that I plan to read RSS feeds on my iPod, but just the idea is pretty interesting.

[by way of...D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog]