Terence Armentano - eResume & ePortfolio

“Here’s where we are now” on what makes communities tick online,
on mobile, in face-to-face settings, and why understanding this is so
important for learning”

edublogs: Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities

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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.

As any reader of my blog knows, I have written about the important role I believe web 2.0 will play in academia. (See Web 2.0 and Higher Ed, Blogging in academia, Blogging Academia, and the Stanford Blog Directory,and University 2.0)

Not being one to just sit idly by and talk about the important role web 2.0 will play in academia, I decided to put words into actions and design a weblog and podcast system for Bowling Green State University. I built the system on the technological framework of WordressMU with many personal customizations. The system is in perpetual Beta so we can test new features, collect feedback, and continue to refine it. There are so many creative ways to use this system (See our About page for some examples). Below are several real life examples of ways the BGSU community is already stretching the creative boundaries of the system:

One English instructor at BGSU, Amanda McGuire Rzicznek, is using the system to podcast her lectures and blog her writing tips, news, and announcements (see her English 111 blog & English 112 blog). She is also having each of her students create their own weblogs on the system, which they use for reflective writing, collaboration, and feedback (see one of her students blogs here).

My office, IDEAL, is using our IDEAL @BGSU weblog as a web 2.0 portal to communicate our services to the university and to display our distance learning Resources, Announcements, Newsletters, Podcast, and Photo Gallery. The nice thing about our weblog page is that it is very dynamic and enables email subscription, RSS feeds, Podcast Feeds, and lots of other things the tech junkies of the world love). Plus anyone with admin rights can update the site without having to know any HTML. One of our instructional designers, Michael Kudela, is a huge flickr fan so we can even manage our photo gallery from his personal Flickr account. Now that is cool!

Did I mention that I built this system using all open source tools? Yeah. That’s pretty cool too.

Sports and Recreation is a huge part of the BGSU culture. If you ever go to an intramural flag football game at BGSU, you would think you were at the superbowl. Well, the sports and rec people at the university saw the potential of a community blog for their users and contacted me to help them get it set up. It required a little more programming and customizing, but in the end they will have a community of sports rec bloggers. I can see the bragging rights go up even more with this outlet. Their community weblog will be launching soon so I look forward to seeing how that community uses the web 2.0 environment. Check out the Rec Sports Wire to see what they are doing.

The MBA department is using their weblog to give current students the opportunity to share the ins and outs of their daily life so if you’ve ever wanted to know what’s it like to be a graduate student, you’ll want to check it out at - BGSU MBA

The benefits of blogs and podcasts are far reaching and are transforming the way people interact and learn from each other. BGSU faculty, staff, and students can all reap benefits from blogging and podcasting.

Thanks to Connie Molnar and Dr. Bruce Edwards, my bosses at IDEAL, for allowing me to dream, innovate, and design this system for BGSU. They are both great leaders and visionaries at BGSU.

It appears that PB Wiki is fiercely competing with the Goliath that is Google and their new product, Google Sites. I really enjoy both products and have implemented them both in different ways at BGSU. We have been using the PB Wiki in our training programs and Google Sites for our own project management organization. I think wiki’s are awesome collaboration tools. I wrote a post a few days ago about ways I thought Google Sites could improve their system and it appears that PB Wiki already has pretty much all of the feature I said should be integrated into Google Sites, so I hope the competition drives excellence for both companies. Sometimes I wonder if Google is wishing they would have bought PB Wiki instead of JotSpot, but I guess they still could if they wanted to. I mean it is Google! The reason I like what Google Sites is doing is because it has the the patented ease of use guarantee and it integrates well with other Google apps we use. I am typically a fan of their web apps and they usually integrate search technology like no one else. However, PB Wiki is looking a bit more sophisticated at this point and I hope the Google Sites development team is working hard to match their features very soon. For example, the new PB Wiki provides page level access, page folders and folder access controls, as well as a new sleek interface. Check out this video of the new PB Wiki 2.0 and let us know what you think.

It appears Guy Kawasakai left me a comment letting me know that I made the Alltop list for Education sites on the Internet! Yes! Click the image above to see a screen capture of my location on Alltop. You will notice the US News Education site right above me and the BBC Education news site a few rows over. If this were a digital magazine stand, I would be right there with the big boys. Yet another reason to digg Alltop. Check me out here http://education.alltop.com/

Yes, images in a textbook of the beautiful heavens are a nice way to teach about our universe, but give me a comprehensive view of the universe with real satellite images any day. Science teachers of the world; you gotta see Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope - a technology that combines feeds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and weaves them together holistically to build a comprehensive view of our universe. The TED video treats the WorldWide Telescope like something completely new, however, it appears to be very similar to the already available Google Sky, which enables you to view images of distant galaxies and nebulae from the Hubble Space Telescope, learn about the movement of the planets and the lifecycle of the stars. The advantage of Google Sky is that it works on any operating system whereas I am not sure that will be the case with Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope. Either way, I look forward to finding out which one I like better and teachers around the world should do the same.

These innovative technologies will really give students a unique, never before seen perspective, which may inspire some excited discussion in the classroom and even ignite some new motivation in students to look at studying science and technology. Again, we see the online world continue to contribute innovation to education. Just another aspect of University 2.0.

The World Wide Telescope Video

Google Sky Video