EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
If you haven't seen Curriculum and Instruction Professor Sharon Tettegah lately, it's probably because she hasn't been in this world--she's been in the virtual world of Second Life. Professor Tettegah has been researching how Second Life and other online virtual worlds can be used as an interactive and constructive learning environment. She's not alone. Across the world teachers, administrators, and students have been intrigued by the education potential of Second Life. This phenomena was picked up by CNN and you can read how some universities and educators are using the online environment at: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/13/second.life.university/index.html. Educause has posted a brief article on the educational potential for virtual worlds here: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7015.pdf. Better yet, you can sign up for a free account in Second Life to take a look around for yourself by going to their web site at: http://secondlife.com/.
- Al Weiss
Answers.com is a wonderful online resource that makes it very easy to conveniently access high-quality reference information while using a computer or browsing the web. Answers.com draws from many highly regarded information sources, such as Britannica, Houghton Mifflin, Columbia University Press, Wikipedia, and then combines these resources into a one-mouse-click access model for its users. By pulling together the classic variety of reference sources, and many new web-based resources, Answers.com dub themselves an "encyclodictionalmanacapedia." Anyone can visit Answers.com's web site and search in the traditional manner, but the more convenient and dynamic approach requires downloading an Answers.com 1-click software plugin that can work throughout a Windows or Mac system, or while using the Mozilla Firefox browser.
I use the new Firefox plugin on both my Windows and Mac computers, and also use the widget for the Mac operating system. With the 1-click plugins just select a word or phrase, hold down the Alt key while clicking either mouse button, and then explore the various reference sources assembled in the Answers.com pop-up window. Now these are good pop-up windows in that the user controls them, they hover over the original document or web page, and have been designed to pull together all manner of information in a compact, smartly designed window. As learning or teaching tool, the 1-click search tools would help anyone who was reading through dense or new material with lots of unknown, or vaguely remembered terminology. A quick audio pronunciation accompanies many terms, which can be helpful for Latin and scientific terms, such as that feathered dinosaur archaeopteryx. One can also focus searching to a specific area such as "science," "dinosaurs," "city maps," "legal documents" and so on. Lastly, because Answers.com does not depend on a single source, it becomes an excellent way to introduce students to the variety and quality and breadth of various information sources devoted to a single word, idea, or topic.
- Robert Baird
Flickrfox Sidebar in Flock Browser showing search results
for "odonata"
Speaking of Firefox plugins, Flickrfox allows you to open a sidebar on the browser with previews of Flickr images from any of several sources including all public images, your own images, images belonging to your Flickr contacts, "interesting" images or images from the pools of any of the groups you are a member of. In addition you can do keyword searches as well and bring up images in the sidebar by tags, for example. Elsewhere I've written about Flock, the "Web 2.0" browser that integrates so nicely with Flickr. If you happened to have read that article, you might wonder about how this compares with Flock. Flickrfox actually has some functionalities that I had hoped to find in Flock, but Flock still wins the day for features like its drag and drop uploads and linking of images in online forms. That said, the good news is that because Flock is based on Firefox, the Flickrfox plugin works in Flock too, so you can have the best of both worlds (and yes, both are available for Windows and Macs). There are other Firefox plugins that deal with images, but so far, Flickrfox is my favorite.
- Doug Mills
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