Terence Armentano - eResume & ePortfolio

This Video is hilarious! Take a break and have a laugh at our techno crazy world.

I think it is appropriate that Brian Childs, our BGSU IDEAL liaison in Kenya, Africa, actually IM’d me this story just a few minutes ago. I have written about the $100 Laptop program several times on this blog regarding the affect it could have on the progress of worldwide education. We are currently assessing the technological capabilities in Kenya and TZ for future delivery of online courses in Africa and the $100 laptop program might be a huge part of the puzzle. Contrary to the name of the laptop, it is not cheap in the sense of quality. The $100 laptops actually use state of the art technology for durability, wi-fi, energy efficiency, and more.

“Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines. Previously, the organisation behind the scheme said that it required orders for 3m laptops to make production viable. The first machines should be ready to put into the hands of children in developing countries in October 2007.”
Watch the video clip.

I thought this video was cool. Google is on to something here and I’m looking forward to see where they go with this model of work. I think they realize that people actually work best when it feels like play. Think about your favorite hobbies, sports, etc. It reminds me of what it’s like to work at BGSU

“What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.”

These folks plan to do just that with the help of everyone in the world using a customized wiki to build The Open Library. Talk about dreaming big. I’ll have to keep tabs on this project and see where it goes. They have already hooked up to the Internet Archive’s book scanning project so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books. They also located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good.

The site is an early technology preview, and many things are still in flux or not operational. In the meantime, you may want to take a guided tour. Thanks to Mike Kudela for sending me the link!

WikiMindMap is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages in large public wiki’s, such as wikipedia, have become rich and complex documents. Thus, it is not always straight forward to find the information you are really looking for. This tool aims to support users to get a good structured and easy understandable overview of the topic you are looking for. View a wiki mind map on the topic of e-Learning

This post is two fold. One, if you know me, then you know I think Google is an innovative powerhouse and posting a time line of their History and Milestones is appropriate. Second, you can check out the teaching tool xtimeline to create one of your own time lines and incorporate it into a course you are teaching.

http://www.xtimeline.com/business/Google-s-Timeline

When Grady Burnett, Head of Online Sales and Operation for Google, spoke at BGSU, I asked a couple questions and had a suggestion. Since then I have seen them address 1 of my questions and apply my suggestion to their process. Coincidence? My suggestion was that they should integrate blogger with their gmail account to which Grady replied that he thought it was a good idea. Several months later Google incorporated a drop down menu into gmail with blogger as one of the options - nice.

One of my questions was if he knew whether JotSpot would be incorporated into the Google Apps Suite to which he did not have a reply at the time, but it now appears like it will be coming soon according to this ZDNet article. Incorporating a wiki into their current suite only makes sense for what they are doing. I wonder if it will be as good as PB Wiki. PB Wiki is crazy simple, innovative, and useful. I wonder if Google will buy them out?

My final question to Grady was whether or not they have thought about building a Google Learning Management System. He first asked what I meant by a Learning Management System and after I explained the concept, he said he thought it was a good idea but that they had not thought about that yet. I wonder if this too will be addressed in the near future. Google, that will be 1 million dollars please. jk.

For those of you that do not yet own an incredibly expensive iphone, but still want to view websites on a mobile device fairly easily, you can try using a free web-based solution at www.baresite.com. BareSite converts any website to a layout suitable to be viewed on a mobile device. “The goal of BareSite.com is to make mobile browsing easy and cheap. While an increasing amount of publishers make their content available for mobile devices, over 98% of websites still are not ready for mobile browsing. With BareSite.com, we intend to change that. We strip all unneeded content from normal websites, and make them mobile-friendly. Browsing is easier, and costs are lower due to lower bandwith usage.”

Here is what Bowling Green State University’s homepage looks like using baresite -
If you use baresite let us know what you think.