Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I’ve been using Google’s gmail and reader apps for some time now. They’re easy to use and very reliable. So, I’m very happy to see that Google has done it again with a Calendar App. I just learned about this on Slashdot a few minutes ago, so I haven’t been able to fully test it, but it appears to have an easy MS Outlook import feature and gmail integration. I’m sure I’ll be putting this thing to good use, because I don’t have Outlook at home (and it’s a pain juggling those appoi

Microsoft has launched the beta for their Windows Live Academic search engine, a Microsoft version of the popular Google Scholar. For those that are just learning about this, check out Jinfo’s quick review.

Just finished experimenting with Rollyo, a web-based service for building a personalized search engine index. As an experiment, I built a searchroll including some of the sites in the Kairosnews weblog list and news aggregator and then added a search block for it in the right hand navigation.

One of the more interesting things Steven Johnson writes in Everything Bad is Good for You is that Google is the way our generation learns about itself. I think it’s a bit of a broad claim, but it’s still a fun thought. I was thinking about this quotation when I stumbled across this little game. It’s a fascinating new media game with a very simple gimmick–you are presented with a collage of images based on a Google search, and your job is to determine the keyword. I wasn’t able to get a single point, but maybe you’ll have better luck.

Many of you may have already heard about Google Blog Search which allows you to search through blogs. However, one of the interesting features beyond the search are the RSS and Atom feeds available at the bottom of the search results page, making it easy to subscribe to any term or combination of terms.

Open Access News notes this story from Google Blog about a father who was able to prevent an unnecessary, extremely dangerous medical procedure on his two week old newborn son. The boy had been brought to an ER with extremely low hemoglobin. When the doctor recommended the emergency procedure, the father quickly searched using Google via his mobile phone and found an OA article which indicated that the low hemoglobin, while rare, would likely reverse itself.

While it is unlikely that OA in the field of Computers and Writing would ever have this life saving result, this story well represents why OA is more than just a publishing practice; it’s an example of the importance of making scholarly knowledge publicly available. OA is just the right thing to do. Why do academics continue to do the wrong thing?

Hi everyone. I’m happy to announce the grand re-opening of CCC Online. I’ve posted a longer, semi-formal announcement and description of the site over at my blog, but thought I’d post a quick announcement here as well.

What we’ve done is to turn CCCO into a site for the management of that journal’s metadata. The content itself (i.e., articles) is still password-protected over at NCTE, but CCCO provides abstracts, keywords, bibliographies, et al. We’re using Movable Type and del.icio.us to make as much of the journal accessible to searches, bookmarking, tagging, and research as possible, and we’re pretty pleased with the results. It’s only one journal, and we’ve still got a ways to go in terms of adding back issues, but there’s enough up there now for you to see some of the potential of the site.

Please feel free to take the site for a spin, and to let us know what you think, either through blog comments or over email. Thanks!

cgb

Recent discussion and analysis of the current fair use dispute over the Google Print Library Project argues that Google’s rights to scan in printed texts is no different than the rights that search engines have to scan and cache the web. See

• Legal Experts Say Google Library Digitization Project Likely OK; Will It Revolve Around Snippets?
• Courts Unlikely To Stop Google Book Copying
• The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis

Today’s Tampa Tribune has a story, “Weaving Through the Tangled Web,” that might be of interest to Kairosnews readers.

The reporter, Gary Haber, briefly references the ETS Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment and the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among others, and intermingles student perspectives with faculty and administrator views.

One thing that always interests me personally is the notion of “authority” and how it’s constructed. I’d like my students to be able to think critically about what the encounter online, but I don’t know that I necessarily want them creating a sort of good/bad binary based only on publisher and currency.