Richard’s Educational Technology Blog

Today I got an e-mail with a picture from a 1954 Popular Science magazine that supposedly showed what scientists thought a home computer would look like in 2004. While the picture is funny and very believable, the whole thing was a hoax. The picture actually came from a recent photo re-touching competition. The entire story can be found on Snopes.com, a site dedicated to disproving urban legends. Tools such as Snopes become more and more useful as we spend less time finding information, and more time judging whether it is useful and reputable or not.

Want to read the story behind the computer photo? Go to… http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

The latest tool from Google is aimed specifically at the educational community. It’s called Google Scholar and is focuses search results on scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. The term “instructional design”, for example, brought up 46,500 results from scholarly publications.

Anurag Acharya, Principal Engineer for the project, said, “We at Google have benefited much from academic research. This is one of the ways in which we are giving back to the research community. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of giants.”

For more info, visit Google’s official Blog

Last week Infobase Ventures founder, Paul B. Allen, spoke at BYU. His presentation focused online tools to help educators and students.

Overview of Paul’s Lecture:

“In just 10 years, the World Wide Web has given more than a billion users access to billions of pages of information on virtually every subject. However, real learning requires much more than just having access to data or information. In his presentation. Paul Allen discusses ways in which educators and students can use Web-based data and tools to gain and share knowledge. Topics include open source and open content projects, social networking and community tools, blogging, multimedia, mobile computing, and location-based learning.”

View a QuickTime video stream of Paul’s presentation
Download a copy of Paul’s presentation in PDF format

One of the best nerdy things I’ve done this year is switched from using Internet Explorer to using Firefox. It’s a much better browser. Even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommends it. For those of you who were hesitant to switch because Firefox was still a “preview” application, you’ll be happy to know that Firefox 1.0 (official version) was released this week.
Download Firefox.

I might me exposing a weird trait of mine with this posting, but here goes… I like looking at the bookmarks that my friends have set on the browsers on their computers. No, I’m not trying to spy on them or anything like that. I just like to see what tools and resources on the internet they find useful. It’s sort of like having a friend recommend a book for you to read. I’ve found some great tools just by observing the sites that my friends use. In case there is anyone out there as weird as I am, I’m going to share with you my bookmarks for design resources on the web. The are all sites that I find very useful for designing online and offline products.
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When working on a project, there is nothing more frustrating then having progress held up because you can’t get a hold of a key person (SME, designer, etc). Because of that, I’ve found several tools that I use with my teams whenever we start on a project. The first one is a cell phone, but that’s obvious so I won’t go into detail – except to mention that that I keep my work phone forwarded to my cell phone so I can work wherever and whenever I want to (and people who haven’t perfected the idea of a “virtual office” can still contact me). Now, let me mention some other tools.
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I’ve decided to start a new category called “useful tools” blog about tools that I’ve found to be helpful for… whatever. Anyway, one such tool is LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com).
By connecting to other people that you know, LinkedIn’s free service allows you to build a huge network of “links”. Then, when you need advice, or a reference, or a job (to give a couple of examples), you can contact key people through your friends. It eliminates the need to “cold call” anyone. Networks build quickly (I have over 200,000 people in mine). So if you haven’t signed up for LinkedIn yet, do it - then link to me!