Educational Technology and New Pedagogies

"Need a quick, fun dose of inspiration? Check out this video, The Infinite Thinking Machine, a new (well, technically, it’s re-launched) Internet TV show for educators. This eight-minute episode focuses on teachers and students as media producers, creating photos, videos, animation, and multi-media projects as storytelling devices. Produced by CUE, the host is Ramsey Musallam, and executive producers are Mike Lawrence and Chris Fitzgerald Walsh. It’s well worth the time."

These Technologies Are Changing Education. Are You Familiar With Them?

Chartle is a free site that allows you to quickly and easily create charts, including interactive charts.

It runs using JAVA in your browser and is very easy to use. You can create pie charts, bar charts, scatter diagrams, Venn diagrams, maps and more. Charts are embedable into other sites also. You can also browse their gallery and use one of the examples as a starting point.

Robin Good: Forget GDrive coming next week. I have just been testing for a few days Bitcasa, which promises unlimited storage for $10/month (free while in Beta) and I must say I have been quite impressed.

Once installed on your Mac or PC, Bitcasa makes itself available to "cloudify" any folder/directory you want with a simple click and then it works in the background to upload and copy all of your files to the your infinite storage drive.

You can sync-up different computers and portable devices and get access to all of your precious files from anyone.

To show how eager Bitcasa really is to receive tons of your files and to backup hundreds of gigabytes of stuff, Bitcasa has installed on my Mac a little utility (with my approval) that automatically offers me, everytime I plug in an external hard disk, to cloudify its contents. 

I have already cloudified over 20GB without a hitch and now I can see them from all my computers. 

If you need to work or collaborate with othe people, are on the move, and can't carry around a suitcase of hard drives, Bitcasa may provide an ideal solution at a very accessible cost.

Very promising. 9/10

Sign up to get in: http://www.bitcasa.com/ ;

Robin Good: Zeeik is a new web-based video curation site with a unique slant and some very innovative ideas.

Its key features provide some very stimulating ideas on how in the future you may go about curating, navigating and collecting video to create a guide or make sense of a specific topic.

1) Collaborative Curation

First of all, Zeeik is designed in a way that puts the topic of curation at the center, while allowing multiple users to contribute, search, find and select which video clips would be most appropriate for it.

"Users collaboratively make zeeiks in request-and-replay manner." Zeeiks are also similar to what a video wiki would probably be like, as they allow multiple editors to contribute and shape the final content.

2) Topic and Level Navigation

Second, Zeeik introduces (thank you guys for showing curation startups where is the next gear) a rudimental but still highly effective navigational gizmo, allowing any topic to be easily segmented into many sub-topics and levels. This new visual navigation addition is of the essence in providing a feature that expands the potential of curated content of orders of magnitude. A navigational tool that allows you to intuitively navigate from topic to topic and from high-level view to a very detailed one is exactly what I would like to see show-up across the board of content curation tools in the near future.  

3) Search, Collect and Excerpt Video Content

Third, Zeeik makes easy and effective to search video content on any topic, to tap into your video assets rapidly and to trim and excerpt specific sections from any video you decide to include. 

These ingredients by themselves make Zeeik a truly innovative content curation tool, and while its interface and usability may leave a lot to be desired, I think it deserves high praise for finally breaking new ground. 

Zeeiks can be easily linked or embedded into any web site or blog and can be used to create catalogues, guides, tutorials, textbooks, music album, or just about anything that is video-based.

Sample Zeeik: http://www.zeeik.com/app2/vmap/view/showVMap?vMapId=1764512127 

More info and sign-up: http://www.zeeik.com 

"This is a collaborative mindmap originally started during the LearnTrends live online event on November 16th 2008."