Terence Armentano - eResume & ePortfolio

Alltop is a very simple and cool site that can help people find what is currently popular, by topic, on the Internet. Their slogan is “we’ve got all the top stories covered all the time.” The page updates every 10 minutes as well. This is a good site for people that won’t build their own custom homepage on Netvibes, MyYahoo, or iGoogle and those that do have custom homepages may find some good new sites to add to their homepage. I personally think it is neat to see what all of the top global news articles are. Gone are the days of having to just rely on 1 newspaper or newsprogram to stay informed. This opens the doors up to deeper acountability in reporting the news. For example, one could quickly compare Al Jazeera Headlines to CNN Headlines side by side and see how each venue spins various stories. This would be a great way for students to hone their critical thinking skills by comparing and contrasting the various outlets of information. What makes one source more credible than the other? Plus, it would be cool to see TerenceOnline added to their topic page on Education. I would like to see Alltop add a search engine to their site. Categories + Search Engine = More access to information.

Here is what the site says about itself:

“We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”

“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!

I believe blogging is going to play a much greater role in the future of academics and educational institutions. The Information Age in which we live is moving us in the direction of a knowledge based economy. In this knew economy where information is created, shared, and re-mixed at the speed of light, consumers demand quality, up-to-date, relevant information, and they want it now! Professors that blog are moving in this direction and their students will recognize and appreciate it.

It’s similar to the way computer companies have evolved their business model for developing new software. They realized 2 major things: (1) that people would rather have something to use in a Beta version than years of waiting for a product that ends up being buggy anyhow (2) the feedback they get while in Beta version enables them to make a better product more quickly. It is a move from the Microsoft model (wait 5 years for a substantial upgrade) to the Google model (perpetual upgrades).

A teacher that blogs is like a company moving from the Microsoft model to the Google model. The following is a great example of a college professor using a blog effectively in the field of higher education. Notice the rich media, large network of related blogs, and tons of resources, which makes this blog a jackpot for anyone interested in journalism. I’m sure her students appreciate it. Check it out here - http://tojou.blogspot.com/

Today’s NY Times article titled, “For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate” brings to light some extremely interesting discussion. Namely, what are the essentials for educational and economic development in third world countries? Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT computer researcher, began the $100 laptop program which aims at creating laptops for the third world for under $100. Currently there at $150 but projected to be under $100 by 2008. This might sound easy to some since Dell doesn’t seem to be to far off the mark with their own $500 laptop, however, there are different conditions to overcome for use of a laptop in the third world. For example:

• “Each machine will come with a simple mechanism for recharging itself when a standard power outlet is not available.”
• A foot pedal and hand pulled device can be used to generate electricity.
• The computers lack a hard drive but use solid state memory instead, and the processors turn off automatically when not in use.
• The software is based on the free Linux Operating system, a rival of Windows. It will also used a stripped down web browser, some simple learning programs, and Google’s gmail for email.
• A video camera lens is included on the machine for video conferencing and digital pictures.
• To include wireless network capability, they use a range of methods depending on local conditions. “In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

I am particularly excited about the fact that these computers will be able to access the internet. It says in the NY Times article, “When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.” In my opinion, therein lies the keys to educational and economic development. If these computers could not tap into the Internet, I would have said this was a wasted project and that the money could have been better spent elsewhere. But the fact that they can connect to the ultimate worldwide collaborative resource center that is the Internet, brings forth infinite potential for learning, transformation, and economic change. In addition to the current set up of the computer, I would recommend that, if possible, the computers given to teachers come equipped with Moodle, an open source learning management system as well as Open Office, an open source Office suite (similar to MS Office, but free). In addition the web-browsers should come equipped with pre-installed bookmarks to some of the greatest educational websites available. I’d be willing to contribute a list of sites I’ve found over the years to the project. Maybe a wiki could be established to collect these sites. In fact, this gives me an idea for a project. I’ll blog about that later.

I’ve posted in a previous blog article that Africa is becoming the largest consumer of cell phones in the world. This is awesome to hear because it represents the wireless network that is being built and that computers can tap into. I don’t know what the connection speed will be like for these computers and networks, however, making them wireless accessible is a step in the right direction. My university, Bowling Green State University, is passionate about bringing education to the third world via distance technologies and hopefully it won’t be long before students at BGSU share a classroom with not only visiting international students, but with people actually living in all parts of the world. What a rich learning environment that would be for everyone.

MIT Research Scientist, Dr. Nathan Eagle, goes to Kenya to research and study the future of mobile technology (i.e. cell phones). Why Africa you might ask? According the the MIT website, “Africa is well-suited as a testbed for the development of a mobile phone programming curriculum. Given their massive adoption and widespread use, as well as the recent technological advances in their computational power, mobile phones are ideal substitutes for the personal computer throughout the continent.” Here are some more statistics about Africa and mobile technology from the MIT site:

• Worldwide, there are more than 2.4 billion cellphone users, with more than 1,000 new customers added every minute.
• 59 percent of these 2.4 billion people live in developing countries, making cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world.
• Mobile phone shipments grew 19 percent to 810 million units in 2005 and are expected to rise by 15 percent to 930 million units in 2006
• Cellphone usage in Africa is growing almost twice as fast as any other region and jumped from 63 million users two years ago to 152 million today.

This is very interesting research for those of us that are interested in working to enable Africa with greater access to university education via online technologies. Dr. Bruce Edwards, Associate Dean of Distance Learning at BGSU, has traveled extensively to East Africa and is dedicated to bringing more education to the developing regions. I may also be traveling to Tanzania in the next year or so to explore the logistics of setting up a distance learning center on behalf of BGSU.