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My research mentioned on ALA blog |
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Thursday, 06 November 2008 |
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Posted by mmardis in : Check this out! , trackback The findings of this year’s longitudinal study suggest that Web 2.0 tools are gaining popularity in schools across the U.S. These tools are enabling forms of communication, collaboration, and learning never seen in K-12 education. These findings are exciting because they signal the timely, if not prescient, nature of the Standards for the 21st Century Learner. Even a year ago, Web 2.0 tools in schools were less widespread, and so was the need for standards that spoke directly to the role of the school library not only in fostering information literacy and knowledge management. The Standards support a library in which students take responsibility for discovering lifelong curiosity and powerful communication in addition to locating, using, and making sense of information.
Still, the findings also suggest that the use of Web 2.0 tools are in their early stages and that, in some situations, are subject to less-than-ideal integration environments. Research in related fields like school administration and educational technology suggests that the implementation of these tools reveals four levels of influence that take the form of “digital divides” in schools. 
The first level of digital divide is access. Access to adequate amounts and types of hardware is an ongoing issue, but we’re now seeing access play out in schools in terms of bandwidth available for applications like streaming video and audio. The second level of digital divide is skill and Web 2.0 tools present a new professional development and personal mastery imperative for many schools. The third, and emerging, level of digital divide is policy. All too often in schools, we’re seeing technology policies that enforce slow hardware replacement cycles or restrictive use and filtering policies that block Web 2.0 applications. The fourth digital divide, motivation, cannot be overlooked. That is, we’re seeing children, teachers, media specialists, and administrators all having different motivations to either adopt, ignore, or actively thwart learning innovation with Web 2.0 tools. Todd Marshall at Syracuse University is doing some very interesting work in this area. The divide model can be used to describe the implementation in schools if one considers that if problems exist in any quadrant, none of the other quadrants can function properly. But, the quadrant model is just my opinion. What do you think, AASLblog readers? - Which Web 2.0 tools is your school using?
- What do you consider the hindrances or helps to their implementation in your school?
- What’s your role in the using Web 2.0 for learning? What would you like it to be?
- What questions can we ask on future versions of the longitudinal survey to document how the school library is changing?
LINK
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Conversing Cars create a particpatory network |
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Wednesday, 05 November 2008 |
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KARLSRUHE, Germany, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- German engineers say they are developing a software program that will, for the first time, help several cars coordinate their movements to avoid an accident. Scientists said the software allows vehicles to form a network via car-to-car communication. "In dangerous situations, the cars can independently perform coordinated maneuvers without their drivers having to intervene," said Thomas Batz, who developed the software with colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing and Karlsruhe University. The so-called cognitive automobiles are equipped with integrated sensors such as cameras, GPS and radar systems and continuously transmit current position and driving information to a car designated as group coordinator. Sudden dangers, such as a child running onto the road, are recognized not only by the car directly affected, but also by the group coordinator. If the car in question can neither brake nor swerve because there's another car on the lane to the right, the group coordinator orders both vehicles to swerve to the right in a coordinated maneuver to avoid an accident with the child or a collision with one another. Although the system is still under development, the scientists said its group formation function has already been implemented. Link |
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Ten (More) Ways to Change the World Through Social Media |
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 |
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Blogging, social news, peer-to-peer philanthropy, microblogging, social networking, wikis, video sharing, and more. These are the new agents of change. Back in May, we penned the original 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media. Though most of those first 10 are still relevant, the pace of innovation and advancement on the social web means many more have emerged in the past five months that deserve attention. These are the tools and resources that individuals, corporations, and nonprofits alike can use to communicate, create, and connect on the social web…for social change. LINK |
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What's Next After Web 2.0 |
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 |
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As the world financial crisis has gotten gradually worse over the past few weeks, I've been pondering what this means for the Web. ReadWriteWeb as a publication focuses on technology - web products and trends - rather than business and VC happenings. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/What_s_Next_After_Web_2_0_2';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';So with the exception of one of our feature writers Bernard Lunn, who has written a number of great posts on how entrepreneurs can survive this period, we've generally kept out of the Credit Crisis discussion thus far. But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one Web era is usurped by another. But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one Web era is usurped by another. Of course this last happened when Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly Media in about 2004. Luckily not long before that ReadWriteWeb was born (early 2003). So ReadWriteWeb has been documenting Web 2.0 ever since. Over the past couple of years, we've been focusing on other, perhaps more meaningful, trends - Semantic Web, recommendation technologies, web sites becoming web services, Mobile Web and more. We've documented these meta trends in a number of big posts, some of which are in our Best of ReadWriteWeb page and copied here: LINK
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