Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

Many of our “traditional” aged students already have the tools to compose multimodal compositions, multimodal pieces of art, right in their cell phones. They do not eschew the humanities, they just need someone to help make the explicit connection between what they are currently doing, and humanistic traditions of the past. Shows like Battlestar Galactica [...]

[Read more]

I had to watch the entire demo video; however, I think I figured out that Dapper allows someone to make their own widgets. I’ll be honest, I can’t imagine asking my students (remember folks, I teaching writing and film studies) to use this tool. However, I think it might be a tool that is [...]

[Read more]

One of the things that first wowed me about Flickr was the ability to annotated picture. For example, I annotated this picture (below). Now, linking to it from the blog does not carry the annotations. You have to go to the actual flickr page to see and read the annotations.

2view is another tool that allows [...]

[Read more]

If you are like I am, having students demo all different technologies each semester, it means both you and your students have accounts all over the web. Tabber looks like a tool that can help an instructor bringing it all together. So, if you have students with multiple accounts (for example a social bookmarking [...]

[Read more]

You know how much I love social bookmarking; however, I’m beginning to think I might start having my writing students use various social annotating sites instead. The difference?

Social Bookmarking: bookmarks page, allows annotation, allows tagging, allows various social forms of sharing
Social Annotating: everything above plus clipping text, images, videos, etc. from the pages being bookmarked

Over [...]

[Read more]

I went to this wonderful presentation at CCCCs about how a faculty member assigned podcasts in her writing class. Now, I am a stickler for saying that podcasts are periodically published texts; however, she had her students follow the general conventions that are emerging in the world of podcasting. (So…they made audio files structured whose [...]

[Read more]

Spock
(from: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9708718-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware)
If Spock works…it could be an interesting way for individuals to clean up their identities on the web. Think about your students with “2sexxxy4u<at>yahoo.com” email address, or, other stuff graduate students have done and don’t want found when they go on the job market? Although I don’t see this tool being anything that I [...]

[Read more]

Ever wonder why/how we lose our students in web based coursework? Maybe various screen capture tools will help us figure it out? Last week I read about Robot Reply, a tool that will track what web site visitors do while on the website and thought “cool, maybe this tool will work!”
I’ve wanted to have students [...]

[Read more]

http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/geek-to-live–organize-your-pdf-library-with-itunes-240447.php
Wow…and I’ve spent lots of time finding stuff to organize web research, but this is cool! I’ve been sold on social bookmarking sites for a couple of years now. And now I’m starting to like these various “clipping” or “notetaking” type bookmarking tools as well. However, the problem with most of them is that they [...]

[Read more]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040601544.html
That’s it…I’m tired of these types of posts/articles/etc. about how faculty members are banning laptops from their classrooms because they are too distracting to the students. And all this particular faculty member is reported to do in class is lecture and ask questions. Haven’t these people heard of the research that says people fade out [...]

[Read more]