Don’t get me wrong, I believe news anchors are vital to our coverage of current events, but I am watching the Vice Presidential debate at home and came across HACK THE DEBATE.

Now, I don’t know what will be visible once you click on the link, but here’s a run down of what it was when it was live. You’ll need to understand two major components that went into creating this:

1. CurrentTV - a television station that broadcasts programs created by the audience…in essence it what web 2.0 is, but for television. It came about in 2005 and has been on the air 24/7 since then. Current.com came about a few years later as a way for the audience to be involved even further.

2. Twitter – a microblogging site that supports instant blog posts, limited to 140 characters (about the length of a standard text message). Twitter is part social network, part blog site. Twitter’s power lies in the built in features that allow tweets to mesh with other programs.

So what was on current.com during the VP debate? Think: VH1′s pop-up video meets CNN. As people posted their tweets marked with a tag #current, they would pop-up, in real time, on the Current TV airing of the debate. Most of the comments were relevant and appropriate with only a few making comments that were less than appropriate.

This is powerful! This is amazing! I can’t get enough of web 2.0 mash-ups.

Well I hope I Will Richardson doesn’t mind, but I’m going to plug his book in my blog by using a tool that will change the face of blogs as they can be used in education. Upon checking my Feeds for the day, I saw that Will discovered a great tool. The article, bookmarked at Will’s Delicious site can be read here: SchoolLibraryJournal.com. I just had to try and embed a Google Book Search text in my blog. I chose Will’s text because I just included it as part of a research assignment for a group of classroom teachers and technology trainers across the state (of North Carolina).

So here’s the text…check out the level of interaction that you have..zoom, pan, scroll, just as if it were yours for the taking.

So what would you do with a tool like this? (other than buying a copy of this great text)

How many of you have children (in class or at home) that have or want to have a social network identity? Some of you reading might be asking what a social network is, so here’s a basic explanation. By the way, I love that series! Why can’t students and teachers create content that effective?

Back to the topic at hand, social networking has power in numbers. It’s one thing to get to know your friends, but the idea of meeting friend’s friends opens up a door to an exponentially large number of people to include in your audience. MySpace and Facebook have been known to be home to countless internet predators, but not all social networks are created equal. For example, Ning – a build it yourself and control it yourself social network.  Check out the social network we created as a group of technology trainers. I admit, traffic has stalled, but we’ll be coming back to it down the road.

A second example of effectice social networking can be seen at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social network for the white collars of today’s workforce. Need a job or just want to find other people in similar fields of work, create an account and begin by posting a description of your job.

Now here’s the problem with social networking: TechDirt just posted an article about universities denying student applications simply based of Facebook profiles. Is this right? I don’t know. My first thought is that we need to educate students not only about the proper etiquette and behavior in a face to face social environment, but also etiquette in online networking as well.

Is this part of our curriculum?

Yes. Ethical responsibility and behavior is part of the North Carolina Computer Skills curriculum. It’s just not something that is emphasized. Maybe it’s because no one includes this on tests……..

My parents suffered from my relentless attempts to take something apart and see how it works. For many years, it stopped there, because I didn’t focus on the individuals tasks I was performing. I was more interested in the final product of ‘the pile of pieces.’ This lead to many broken or disassembled items that would never be put back together without an engineering degree and/or the original manufacturing plant the item came from.

Today I took apart a couple of DLP projectors and was able to recover the working pieces to make one working projector from two broken ones. What’s my point in all this? The thought process, critical thinking, and the ability to reconstruct pieces into the whole. These skills can not be taught through traditional classroom approaches of the teacher as the Sage on the Stage. We must remember that in order to promote critical thinking and problem solving, meaningful tasks must becom a part of instruction and classroom participation. Although my journey of a million pieces has brought me to a point that I can (usually) dismantle electronic devices and pit them back together – often gaining a better understanding of how things work.

A few netbooks by Acer & Asus

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/five-things-tha.html

In response to a blog post by Karl Fisch, I agree 110% with what he has to say. Any one that labels themself an educator and refuses to learn ways to implement technology into daily instruction (providing the technology is available), should lose their license. Yes, I know that’s extreme, but if we want to provide students an education to make them ‘globally competitive’ and ‘future-ready’ we just have to get down to it and ensure that teachers receive the highest quality professional development. Don’t just offer technology instruction in isolation. After all, we don’t work in technology isolation. Hey life, hold on a minute while I go check my e-mail and pay the bills online. NOT!!!!

Each day, I set my mind on the task that when someone needs my help, I give to them. I do this with one thing in mind – educate others so that they might be able to help themselves. Give them the knowledge and confidence to tackle problems when they encounter them. Today’s education system no longer needs to cram information into student’s brain, but we need to show them how to dissect information and use it in meaningful ways. Critical thinking is vital to learning today.

So as we as continue down the paths of technology and education, we have to make sure that teachers focus on becoming technologically literate. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Try something new and celebrate your successes. From that, you will only move forward.

If you haven’t read Karl’s article, then please do so – and share it with others – after all it’s been around for more than a year.

By the way, here’s a shot of Karl I took at NECC this summer:

Yes, I dare to go there! While Google has proven, time and time again, to be the most effective search engine at giving you what you are looking for, it has also paralize our brains into thinking beyond the first page of search results. So I asked the question, what other search engines are out there? If there are others, what can they offer that Google doesn’t?

I came across Viewzi and was pleasantly surprised to see a creative new approach. Instead of searching indexed sites as Google does, Viewzi is a meta-search. It provides a visual approach to search engine results.

Here’s the sales pitch. It’s slick design has been a popular hit. The question is – how are the results compared to Google?

Other questions to consider:

1. How long will Google stay on top?
2. What search engines have you found that are equally as valuable to you (either in your line of work or otherwise)?
3. What is the risk of using only one search engine to cull data and research?

In the past few days, I’ve had some experiences that truly illustrate why an open source community really is better for communities of learning and working. Our online learning community requires a support contract. Just recently, the module that allows us to send e-mail to our students has decided to evaporate. It is completely gone! One would think that you could find an online community of people willing to help out. Not so. The only solutions that are listed are behind closed doors for ‘clients.’

I decided to look at some open source alternatives out there. I searched for similar errors and found wikis, e-groups, discussion boards, and personal websites all with open arms hoping to help you…..and at no charge. This seems to be a driving force for many people to leave the ‘big box’ software companies and take a leap of faith when setting an alternative like Moodle or Sakai.

After getting my hands on this new HP netbook, I am already trying to find a way to migrate to the ‘cloud.’ With a desktop computer, a 15″ Dell Latitude, an HP netbook, and a home computer include 500 GB NAS drive, I have plenty of copies of my data. I have so many copies that I don’t know which one to use. I turn to the cloud, a virtual environment, using the web to store documents and work.

There is a big problem with this. Any know what that might be? Connectivity. Without internet access, I would be totally parallized. So I have now run into other areas for me to explore – VNCs, Remote Access, and the use of web based storage. I’m currently using Google Docs for presentations, spreadsheets, documents, (and now Forms too). Picasa stores my photos, my iPod stores my music (not cloud computing). So where do I go from here?