Articles Read:Technologies/Trend:- Personal Web or Personal Learning Environments (PLE)
- internet appliances
- improved internet searching
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Summary:The last couple nights I have been getting caught up in what I have been looking at I haven't had a chance to summarize what I have been looking at. Personal Web or Personal Learning environments have been around for awhile (in technology this could mean a year or so) with examples like google's personalized home page
igoogle or
pageflakes or what Michael Wesch uses
netvibes to organize his research classes in digital ethnography. What these "websites" do is give the owner a place to pull in data from outside sources and organize it in a way that suits their needs (insert learning or personal needs here).
So let's look at what this means - a user wants to learn Spanish because her or she is going on a month long vacation and would like to be able to speak the local language. This learner would have the ability to pull in a widget/nugget/flake/gadget that maybe has Spanish lessons - one i am thinking about gives like 10 words in the language you are learning and then after a certain time period switches back to English (or your primary language). Other feeds can be brought in so the learner could search for all of the videos that teach Spanish and then save that search as an RSS feed so that anytime a new video is added it shows up on the PLE. So these two items capture the content gathering one can also add social networks, blogs, wikis and so on to connect to other learners, and since the learner can then reflect on what is being learned via a blog then this student has most of the components needed to build knowledge. So as in the article that colleges are looking to blogs to replace Blackboard - is this how colleges will deliver its distance education? Maybe a page is created by the instructor or subject matter expert and then students access it - something keep looking into.
Tonight I ran across a
quote that goes along with what I was looking at concerning mobile technology. The quote said that (paraphrasing) any gadget eventually becomes a pc - any gadget that doesn't will be replaced by one that will. And you see this all the time - the blog that referenced this quote had an image of a digital picture that ran windows ce and could connect to the internet via wifi and had other computing power - but again it is supposed to display pictures. But look at cell phones - they are now mini computers - although my wife is always telling me to stop using your phone and get a real computer - probably because I look like a doof reading articles on a two inch screen. How about the ipod it use to play just music then video was added, games, you could read text documents that could be hyperlinked but all of this had to be synced from a computer - well now look at the ipod touch or the iphone now you can just surf the web or download a million apps that do almost everything. What are some other examples?
So the quote I found several days ago saying that laptops and mobile phones will eventually find a happy medium is probably not that far off. Look at the
CrunchPad that I found the concept drawings for today - it boots straight into the browser and is meant to be used to surf - what they called couch computing - only thing missing is a way to talk to other people - but I guess you could use skype as long as you can connect some sort of microphone - blue tooth headset?
Today I also ran my very first OTS all-staff meetings and what I did was have the different service groups get together and talk about the technologies or trends they think they will have to start looking into in their area. Got some good conversations going with folks even emailing me afterwards with ideas to improve their area! I must say I am really enjoying this internship!
