Web 3.0 for Learning

The Web offers a lot of resources for teachers and learners. I usually find very nice clips in YouTube and in similar video-sharing portals. For example, last April I tried to teach my students how to go to “Job Interviews”: plenty of short (about 3 minutes) offered tips, ideas, subtitles, and so on. Everyone enjoyed to imitate the clips and role-play the people interviewed with practical examples.

Catch YouTube is a free tool for converting and downloading YouTube videos. Catch YouTube offers eight formats for video conversion. The video conversions are fairly quick depending on the length of the video.

Here I try to edit something coming from Online Education Database about resources to search the Deep Web, beyond Google. The page was originally dated 2006, but some of the links have been checked and are still useful.

Sometimes Google is not enough to find appropriate results, specific pages, and the like. It is also impossible to analyze and search the so called “Deep Web” that Google itself has not indexed yet. In a sense, with the Deep Web is as icebergs: what we can see and search is just the top, not the whole size of the mass of pages and information (that lies under the surface). Yet, there are plenty of solutions to deal with the situation:

1. Clusty — A metasearch engine that combines the results of several top search engines.
2. Intute — A searchable database of trusted sites, reviewed and monitored by subject specialists.
3. INFOMINE — A virtual library of Internet resources relevant to university students and faculty. Built by librarians from the University of California, California State University, the University of Detroit-Mercy, and Wake Forest University.
4. Librarians’ Internet Index — A search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians, not just a Googlebot.
5. Internet Archive — A database of tens of thousands of movies, live music, audio, texts, and home of the Wayback Machine that allows you to find old versions of web pages, over 55 billion.
6. direct search — A list of hundreds of specialty databases and search engines. No longer maintained, but still perhaps the most complete list of the deep web.

Social bookmarking tools enable users to store, manage, search, share and organise bookmarks of web pages.  There are a number of social software tools in existence. Most allow you to import and export bookmarks from the web, some do not. Others enable users to add comments or ratings to the bookmarks according to how useful they believe they are or to email bookmarks directly to other people. Most are free, some you have to pay for. Some sites cater for particular sectors or interests such as the business and commercial sector. 
One of the most popular, general sites is del.icio.us. It is free, easy to use and this is the one we recommend you start with. Just Google it and download it onto your computer. Others include Simpy and Ma.gnolia. One that is popular with pupils is Fave (used to be Blue Dot) as it combines bookmarking with social networking and encourages social interaction.
Using bookmarking tools can be an invaluable e-learning resource in a classroom at two levels. Firstly, you and your pupils can share useful book marks around the topics you are teaching and secondly it is an invaluable way of helping students understand tagging, how knowledge is classified and used and the ‘authenticity’ and abuse of data sources.
You can set up a group for your class around a particular subject or theme which you can use to recommend sites to students or which they can use to add sites they have found useful. It provides good ‘evidence’ of their research, especially if they are asked to add a rating and a description. A useful homework assignment may be to contribute say two or three bookmarks to the group and comment on other people’s contribution.  Looking at bookmarks that are publicly available is also a way of fast tracking research into a topic.

Resources

• Del.icio.us: http://delicious.com/
• Diigo : www.diigo.com
• Faves : www.faves.com
• Using Del.icio.us in educations (article): GROSSECK, G. (2008) ‘Using Del.icio.us in education’ (WWW). Scribd’s CMS: http://www.scribd.com/doc/212002/Using-delicious-In-Education (25.05.09)
• Ma.Gnolia : http://ma.gnolia.com
• Simpy : www.simpy.com
• Social Bookmarking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
• Stumbleupon : www.stumbleupon.com

While there are plenty of web polling services around where can you create online polls and surveys for free, there are couple of reasons why the form builder in Google Docs rules them all.

Reason 1. You can create any number of polls and surveys using Google Docs for free and virtually unlimited number of people can participate in such surveys via the web browser.

Reason 2. The forms created with Google Docs are mobile friendly and people can therefore send in their responses from mobile phone browsers as well (perfect for conducting polls in a conference).

Reason 3. All the votes and responses are automatically collected in an Excel spreadsheet and that makes it easier for you to analyze large sets of data using charts and other complex spreadsheet functions.

Reason 4. You can chose to get email notifications as soon as people fill in a Google Docs form with their responses.

Reason 5. Forms in Google Docs support a wide range of question types including scale and grid that are generally not available in other web polling services (at least the free ones).

Reason 6. With Google Docs, you can pre-populate form fields via URL parameters. This is pretty handy in case you want to pre-fill some fields of the form with default choices or if you are planning to integrated a Google Docs form with another system like the comment section of your site – if someone has filled their name and email in the comment section, they need not fill that data again in Google Docs form.

Reason 7. Google Docs is probably the only free polling software that supports logic branching. This is like serving a different set of questions to a user based on their previous responses.

Let me explain that with an example. Say you have created a survey for your site visitors that asks whether they have upgraded to the latest OS or not.

Since there’s little point in asking Mac related questions to a Windows User (and vice-versa), you can create different sets of questions for Mac and Windows related questions and redirect visitors to the right set based on what OS they use. Here’s how you do that inside Google Docs forms.

Reason 8. Google Docs forms are great for conducting internal surveys as well if you are using Google Apps in the organization. That’s because Google Docs can automatically record* the email addresses of people (your employees) who fill out the form.

Organize, share, and discover research papers! Mendeley is a research management tool for desktop & web. You can also explore research trends and connect to other academics in your discipline.

How does it work?
The first thing to do is to import your research papers into Mendeley Desktop. You can do this manually by using the “Add Document” button on the interface or you can import existing EndNote XML, RIS, or BibTex files.
You can also drag and drop your PDFs into Mendeley Desktop, where it will then extract the document details, keywords and cited references. It also looks up Cross-Ref DOIs, arXiv IDs and PubMed document details automatically.
Your library of research papers will all be neatly and intuitively organized. You can search through your bibliography manager and filter by author, journal, keywords and even by assigning your own tags. This gives you immediate and quick access to your documents. Mendeley will even suggest papers not in your library which are similar in content or context.
To make life even easier, Mendeley can also take care of renaming your papers to more user-friendly file names. The bibliography manager can automatically rename all of your files to the same name format such as “Author – Title.pdf”, making it even easier to manage your research papers. There is also the folder monitoring tool, which allows Mendeley Desktop to automatically import any new files that you place into your selected folders.
You can access your Mendeley bibliography from any computer by having an online account. This means that whatever operating system you are using and wherever you are in the world, you can manipulate your bibliography and access it with ease.

How many times did we hope to impress our friends and/or students with nice pictures? With Photo Flash Maker, you can create gorgeous photo flash slideshows in SWF format for watching on computer, burn the auto-run flash photo album to gift CD/DVD, build a web gallery with amazing flash slideshows with dynamic SWF + HTML + XML files, or upload the slideshows to our free web album Go2Album, and then embed the slideshows to MySpace, Blogger, Friendster and many other social websites.

It is possible to add music and through the supported formats (Mp33, WMA, WAV songs or CD sound track) music can be added to the slideshow. You can enable audio streaming if the flash is designed for website. In addition, each photo in the slideshow can link to a target page or pop-out window.

Finally, you can choose from Random, Wipe from Left, Fade to White, Cross Expansion and other 60-plus transition effects. Zooming and panning effect is optional for advanced flash templates.
The teaching potentials are great and after some technical job, I think students will enjoy what comes out, jumping to try it on themselves as well.

Welcome!

Thanks to an American colleague that I follow on Twitter, prof. Ira Socol (http://twitter.com/irasocol), today I found an interesting service (free) called “Cast Universal Design for Learning” (UDL Book Builder) that allows you to create, share and publish books and content in various formats digital.

As with all the tools of Web 2.0, BookBuilder also allows the creation of cultural products, engaging, lively and – above all – appealing to students, which do not require mastery of technical detail. You can insert audio and video clips in the digital book, decide the orientation (vertical or horizontal), catalog (fixed in the preview issue), indicate the age of use, the layout (the layout graphics and the sequence of pages), and many other things. Finally, the site also allows you to listen to everything and this can help the deaf, along with a kind of sub-titling (Karaoke-style). Worth to try!