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Photo Tagging: A New Art Form?: "Between emails and instant messengers, the Internet has done much for productivity. Business moves faster. And people are connecting around the world. And now, a Canadian company is leading the way for a new kind of art form of sorts — it's called tagging."
Tod Maffin of CBC Radio looks at the use of tags in the photo sharing tool, Flickr. His audio report also discusses the use of tags in del.icio.us
On The Media -January 7, 2005: "In the wake of the tsunami, a tidal wave of information. Also, the legal storm over age discrimination allegations at the Weather Channel and more harsh accusations about the New York Times. All that plus a nice chat with Mr. Magazine on the first-ever podcast edition of NPR’s On the Media." (Via On The Media from NPR/WNYC.)
This week's On The Media has several interesting conversations regarding the South Asia Tsunami and how the Internet was used to share information and to reach out for donations. Also discussions about the democratization of media... The show includes discussions with Ester Dyson, Jeff Jarvis and Tod Maffin of CBC Radio. Maffin does a nice job explaining the recent phenomena of Podcasting and how it is being used by people to time shift content. He also tries to explain why he likes to listen to The Dawn and Drew Show...
BBC NEWS | Education | 'School in a box' for Sri Lanka
The BBC has a report on a UNICEF effort to provide school supplies to teachers in Sri Lanka in an effort to help get schools reopened next week in tsunami damaged areas. The report has images and a listing of supplies in the box. This type of tool was first used to help children of refugees in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami BlogNews and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts. Kind of a grass roots effort to disseminate information about the disaster, relief efforts, missing persons reports and on the ground reports...
Flickr: Sarvodaya's Photos I was looking on Flickr this evening for images posted from the tsunami areas in South Asia. I did a couple of searches of Flickr tags and under the tag tsunami I found some images posted from a user called Sarvodaya. Turns out that Sarvodaya is a development group in Sri Lanka. Since Wednesday the organization has posted over 215 images on their Flickr site and have created a weblog with updates and pleas for donations.
In addition I found a Flickr group called Hands to S. E. Asia and there found a listing of more images from the area. One member named Heterotopias has posted 59 images in a group call E.S. Asia Quake & Tsunami. With all the talk of citizen journalism and such, these kind of images and tools bring home the stark reality of the situation. The images are harsh in their depiction of the situation there. These are not just pictures of upended boats or damaged houses, but rather they show in very stark terms the human suffering that is taking place. Sometimes you wish you had a filter... This is something that I really have a hard time comprehending...
Update: Flickr TsunamiMissing tag and Flickr Tsunami Missing Group Images of those reported missing... Also yesterday the Flickr Blog pointed to some of these and to a few others too...
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here Worldchanging is a multi-author web site that focuses on technology, the developing world, and solutions to problems. With the recent tragedy in South Asia the articles and posts here have been very informative and timely. The most recent post points to W. David Stephenson's list of 10 key security model elements and discusses them in terms of a warning and response system for any kind of emergency or disaster.
A quick look around this morning finds that some very popular sites such as Amazon, Apple, Google, A9, Yahoo and others have rewritten their home pages to point folks to South Asia Response Fund locations. Amazon makes it very easy with one-click giving...
Update: More places to make donations...American Red Cross: donate to the International Response Fund, United States Agency for International Development, Donate to the International Response Fund, UNICEF: Support South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts, Center for International Disaster Information
Today Will Richardson wrote about how information from the tsunami effected areas of the Indian Ocean is being published by not only traditional news sources, but also bloggers and how a tool such as RSS can be used to help one keep up to date with the latest information. He points to a New York Times piece which highlights some specific sites that illustrate this point. Will's post also contains a link to a Google News Feed he created using a form off of Justin Phlister's site. This form creates an RSS feed based on Google News search criteria.
While reading some of the weblogs pointed to in the Times article, I came across AlertNet. Reuters AlertNet is a humanitarian news network. It aims to keep relief professionals and the wider public up-to-date on humanitarian crises around the globe.As you can imagine, the Alertnet site is publishing quite a bit of information on the Indian Ocean earthquake.
It was originally set up as a response to the Rwanda crisis of 1994, the Reuters Foundation became interested in media reports of poor coordination between emergency relief charities on the ground. It surveyed charities on what could be done to remedy this. The conclusion was that there was a need for a service that would deliver operation-critical information to relief charities worldwide, incentivise relief charities to swap information with one another, and raise awareness of humanitarian emergencies among the general public.
AlertNet attracts upwards of three million users a year, has a network of more than three hundred contributing humanitarian organizations and its weekly email digest is received by more than 10,000 readers.
After a bit of hunting around, I also found an Alternet RSS feed from Newsisfree.
The Graphing Calculator Story I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.
Facinating story behind the classic Macintosh application, Graphing Calculator, and the guys who kept working on it and got it included on the machine even after being laid off from Apple...
Google Library (Google Weblog) Much of the discussion around this endeavor has focused on its effect for the largely-affluent and privileged children who go to the major universities from which the books are taken. Will they stop going to the library? Will they miss the smell of dead trees? Will they be able to do research more efficiently? With all due respect, this is the wrong group to think about. The real beneficiaries of this scanning should be the less fortunate people around the world who barely have access to a library, let alone a world-class one. Let us scan these books for them.
This post from Aaron Swartz at the Google Weblog explains some of the particulars of the agreement between Google and 5 major university libraries to digitize their entire library collections. He points out the projected timelines and at the end makes a very good point about why this matters. We have a lot of issues with copyright to deal with, but in the end what Google and the universities in the agreement are doing is making their collections available to the world. This is really pretty amazing... Combine this with initiatives such as Google Print and if you weren’t' already doing so, you really have to start to think differently about how we teach kids to access information...
Technology > Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?hp&ex=1103086800&en=9d5c79b92752adff&ei=5094&partner=homepage">The New York Times > Technology > Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web...
The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections...
This is pretty interesting...
Remixing Wikis for Elementary School Classrooms: Instiki, Wifi, and RendezvousTom Hoffman, Manager, SchoolTool Tim Lauer, Principal, Lewis Elementary School
Tom Hoffman and I will have the opportunity to present at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 in March in San Diego. I have had the opportunity to attend this conference twice in the past and have found it to be one of the best conference experiences I have ever had. You learn as much in the hallways as you do in the sessions.
Our session will highlight how some of the teachers at my school, Lewis Elementary, are using the Instiki wiki as a student writing environment, and how we utilize Rendezvous on OS X to make it very easy for students to find their work. In addition, since Instiki is installed on the teacher's laptop, we will also talk about how this has facilitated their adoption of the technology.
THE list
Originally uploaded by lydiamaria.
My oldest daughter's list of what still needs to get done before she can come home from college for winter break...
Necessity: A computer, a data projector and a file cabinet...
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
My good friend Andy is one of the best teachers I have ever met. That being said, he does have a tendency to drop his laptop from time to time. This morning he came to work and discovered after another drop that his Powerbook screen would not come to life. I find his approach to solving this problem both novel and frightening. Thanks to Melissa for the image...
Ed-Tech Insider: A New Way To Picture The News Over at eSchoolNews.com I point to 10 x 10, (Via AssortedStuff.) a web site that searches the RSS feeds of three major news organizations and returns the top 100 words associated with the stories found in those news feeds and associates them with photographs from those organizations. An interesting display of information in a graphical format...
oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: Wireless Hacking Just a few of the things you'll learn from this book...
* Use existing Ethernet cables to provide low-voltage power to Access Points with no additional source of electricity. * Install Linux and FreeBSD on low-cost (under $150) Soekris single-board computers. * Modify the firmware of your Linksys WRT54g. * Construct Solar Powered Access Points and Repeaters for your Wi-Fi network. * WarDrive for wireless access points with tools like Kismet and NetStumbler. * Install an antenna without killing yourself or changing the earth's orbit. * Expand your Wi-Fi network beyond one box and 50 users with MESH network topology.
I'm really interested in learning how to do the first one...
OS X Home/Classroom Library Catalog Tool: "Delicious Library (note: the name has nothing to do with del.icio.us the social bookmarks manager.) is an Macintosh OS X application that allows for the cataloging of a home or classroom library collection, a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. You can import your information by hand by title or author, or if you have an..."
Over at the eSchoolNews weblog I have posted about Delicious Library. A very interesting home/classroom library cataloging tool with a confusing name. It allows you to cataglog books, music CD's, video's, and video games. The information can be entered manually, or you can use an iSight video camera as a scanner and scan in the bar codes of your items. It then searches Amazon for the information and returns it for cataloging. I am planning to help a few teachers at Lewis Elementary set this up for check out of their classroom library books.
Experiencing War (Voices of War): Stories from the Veterans History Project (Library of Congress)A very good example of how the web can bring alive the stories of peoples lives and allow it to be shared. This is what good educational software should be...
Election result maps Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results... Or why Rhode Island matters more than Wyoming...
(Via low culture.)