Sunday, February 28, 2010

How Millennial Are You?

Pew Research Center has put together a "How Millennial Art You? The Quiz" - part of their February 24, 2010 posting The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change. - part of a "series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial Generation." Apparently in order to qualify as a millennial, you'll need a tattoo or two where people can see them and do a lot of texting ;)

Second Life avatar walking around NYC - via Google Street View

Giulio Prisco is working on having his avatar appear in Google Street View - See it on blip.tv at http://giulioprisco.blip.tv/file/3280503/

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Average College Kid's Social Sphere Across Digital Channels

Online Media Daily reports on a study on U. S. college students' use of social networking and communication. "Without factoring in contact overlap, that means every student in the nation has a potential reach of 671 consumers, according to a new "University of Media" study conducted by Mindshare's Business Planning group in partnership with Alloy Media + Marketing and Brainjuicer" Does this mean that if we could teach one college student about use of library resources we could potentially be reading 671 consumers of information? We can dream, can't we? And for all of you "mobile librarians" out there, the study reports that text messaging is the most common method of communication among college students. My friend Drew Smith reminds me that the average number of cell phone contacts reported is about the same as reported for the number of friends that humans tend to have - around 150. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number for a theory about that. (Thanks to YPulse for the info about this article.)

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Educational Origami

Educational Origami - Andrew Churches wiki exploring "the integration of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) into the classroom..." Stephen Downes pointed to one recent entry in particular on managing complex change.

Google Goggles - Translation Tool

Google Goggles translations?? - take a picture of text in German and have your Android phone translate it into English. "You may wonder what’s happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate." Do you mean one of these days it won't matter that I still haven't learned Spanish?? See also "TechCrunch. Search by Sight"

Friday, February 12, 2010

Two Minute Suvery on What's Happening in Virtual Worlds

Alan Levine reports on a quick and dirty survey on what's happening in virtual worlds. Not surprising to some of us, interest in virtual worlds among educators is strong. See more at http://www.nmc.org/2minute-survey/virtual-worlds

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Media in the lives of 8 - 18 year olds

A recent report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm from the Kaiser Family Foundation. January 2010.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Teaching in Second Life

Joe Essid (University of Richmond) posted a chat with Dan Holt about his advice for instructors new to Second Life. See http://iggyo.blogspot.com/2010/02/dan-holt-advice-for-first-time-sl.html and look for the chat transcript at the end of Joe's blog entry.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

EBook reader software comparison from Blio eReader

Blio eReader has an interesting ebook reader feature comparison chart at http://www.blioreader.com/about.html at least as of February 2010.