Terence Armentano - eResume & ePortfolio

TechCrunch, a reputable technology blog, reports that “Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

This poses some interesting scenarios for Colleges and Universities that would like to leverage the facebook platform in the educational environment. It will be interesting to see how this differs from other social network scenarios such as google’s OpenSocial, the clone-able Ning system (which I also use to run my online teaching community), and the fully open source Elgg system. Which of these will be most useful in the education environment. They each function differently and are offered in different ways to the consumer. What do others think?

Terence

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Here is an interesting article from Business Week on Why Twitter Matters. Twitter is a microblogging website where users have 140 words or less to make a blog post. It is a way for people to easily stay in touch with their community at all times asynchronously. Many of the things people write in less than 140 words are quite silly and one might wonder how or why something like Twitter is becoming so popular. The following quote from the article reveals part of that answer.

“How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It’s not the core technology, which is simple, but instead the community. Twitterers find and follow the people they care about on the service. Late in April, following one of Twitter’s outages, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote: “I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occurred: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” Arrington, who has nearly 17,000 people following his Twitterstream, continued: “It is now an important part of my work and social life, as I carry on bite-sized conversations with thousands of people around the world throughout the day.” It’s a huge marketing tool, and information tool. But it is also a social habit that’s hard to kick.”

On a side note, one of our English Instructors, Amanda McGuire Rzicznek, at BGSU had her entire class use twitter to cite and share their sources for their papers.

Another thing I found very fascinating is something called Twittervision. Basically, you can see live posts that people are making from various countries on a Google Map. For example, here are new Twitter posts from people living in Ireland

What do others think of Twitter? Is it a useful technology for educators?

I’d like to thank TerenceOnline’s mom for sharing this one with me. She should start her own educational technology blog. lol. All My Faves provides a nice visual design for users to easily find the most popular sites on the internet. I’m not exactly sure how they came up with their list of sites, however, it’s a nice and simple way to explore what is out there. It’s an easy way to stay on top of internet technology too. With two new kids in my family, I will definitely be checking out the kids category soon.

It has been about a month since my last posting so I plan on getting back into the swing of things. It has been a busy month! I was recently honored that the Ohio Learning Network chose to highlight the BGSU Weblog and Podcast Solution as their resource of the day on April 22nd. They started doing the resource of the day back in march 2007 and they actually highlighted a web 2.0 wiki I put together back then as well. I’m glad to be able to contribute to their mission as they do a great job aggregating “services and resources so Ohioans can meet their learning potential, Ohio’s economy can grow, and Ohio colleges and universities can continue to be knowledge leaders. ”

They also invited me to do a break out session about the development, implementation, and administration of the system at the OLN Teaching and Learning Expo 2008 on May 19th in Columbus, OH. Every educator in Ohio should check it out if they can go that day.

In keeping with the theme of weblogs and podcasts, I thought this article was pretty cool. It lists 10 ways you can turn your ipod into your own portable personal learning environment.