The BitTorrent Effect

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Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent EffectWired has a great article about BitTorrent and its creator, Bram Cohen.

Last night I read this and began to think in terms of how this technology could be used in education. For example, last spring our 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students put on a production of The Wizard of Oz. One of our parents did a nice job of taping the production and then created a DVD. Copies were made and sold and such. Am thinking now of going over to school this afternoon and putting the whole thing up as a torrent. Not so much because I think many folks want to see the production, (though it was really pretty good as elementary school productions go...) but rather just to mess around with this stuff. Everyone points to illegal uses, but read the article and I believe you will see the idea behind it is brilliant. We have more and more big files that we want to share, this technology provides a very good method of doing so.

Note: I see that Alan Levine just posted about it at Cogdogblog and has some ideas of how it can be used in an education setting.

Flickr Images from South Asia

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image from sarvoday flickr site 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...

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Week in Review > Postings From the Edge: A Catastrophe Strikes, and the Cyberworld Responds" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/weekinreview/02blog.html?ex=1262322000&en=6d233db45276c28e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland">The New York Times > Week in Review > Postings From the Edge: A Catastrophe Strikes, and the Cyberworld Responds

AFTER an earthquake in the Indian Ocean sent tsunamis smashing into coastal Asia and East Africa, much of the initial information about what had happened came from the World Wide Web, especially from the personal journals called weblogs, or blogs. Here are excerpts from Web postings about the catastrophe.

New York Times piece by Peter Edidin. A listing of partial posts from weblogs about the tragedy...

Mappr! and Flickr

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mappr imageMappr! is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take and tag on Flickr. Right now the data used by Mappr is based on the tags that people add to the images they post on Flickr. For example, if I take a picture of my son playing in a local park and add information such as park location and city and state, the folks at Mappr can use that information to place that image appropriately on a map. Flickr already takes advantage of the EXIF meta data associated with each picture. It isn’t to hard to imagine a time in the near future where the digital camera you use will also capture GPS data and stores that along with the other meta data. I'm hoping that Mappr becomes a bit more transparent and allows individual users to map their own images. It could be a great tool for a neighborhood history project that some of my teachers are planning.

Cocoal.icio.us: A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X

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Cocoal.icio.us: A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X I can't remember where I found this, but this is a great little client for folks who use del.icio.us for bookmark management. Basically it is a client interface for your del.icio.us account. The paned window interface allows for the viewing of sites right in the application. Also it has a great search feature. I can see this being used by students to easily review sites they have gathered for research.

WorldChanging

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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.

Where You Can Contribute to International Response Fund

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redCross 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

The Web and Disaster...

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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.

Vera Katz

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A Woman of Our Times (washingtonpost.com) Katz was a refugee, born in Germany, fleeing the Nazis as a child, then walking with her family away from Nazi-occupied France through the Pyrenees to Spain, then going on to Portugal and, finally, New York.

David Broder has a nice article on our mayor and her career as her term of office ends. Vera Katz has had a very interesting life and career and Broder hits the highpoints...

The Graphing Calculator Story

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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 and University Libraries...

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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...

Googling Libraries

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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...

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

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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.

Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr

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Engadget Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr:
"Flickr is quickly becoming one of the most popular“moblog” and photo sharing site, is it the interface? The APIs? Caterina talks about this and more!

Do you plan to support video in the future?
We would like to support short-form video — like the kind of video you can take with your digital camera.

This is something I have been wondering about. Am glad to see they plan to offer this. With many of the digital cameras, short form video can be used very effectively to create short pieces for posting. I have used this when traveling to put together short little pieces that give the folks back home a bit of the flavor of my trip. Example: Chicago, July 2004

Necessity: A computer, a data projector and a file cabinet...

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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...