Computer Interaction of the Future!

So today I was reading around and came across this video, which really isn’t that new, but it really blew my mind. 

This is just plain awesome! Think of the possibilities in education across the board. Here are some of the ideas I had just off the top of my head.

• Art – Photo Editing, Photo Managment, Drawing
• Computer Science – Gaming – imagine how much easier it could be to create and manipulate computerized environments
• On a sidenote… think of the possibilities with Second Life and other multi-player games.

Come to think of it, this is just plain applicable to make navigation easier and more effective!  Wow!  What do you think?

Google Scholar/Book Search to find Ancestors!

Today I was listening to a lecture on Google Books and Google Scholar given by Ben Bunnell from Google. I highly recommend the lecture if you want a good introduction to Google Scholar and Google Book Search. As I was listening I decided I would try a search for “vandrimmelen” and see what came up. I knew that some of my ancestors were educators, but they died years before I was born, or I was too young to remember them to know what they really did.

I started out with Google Books and was delighted to find a couple of interesting things that my Dad and Mom probably know a little bit more about than me:

Addresses and Proceedings – National Education Association of the United States

This book has several references to Thomas VanDrimmelen Jr (from Utah). If you scroll down on the page you see the beginning of a dialog that he is having. It looks interesting. I think that Thomas was a brother of my Grandfather.

Nursing in Hospice and Terminal Care: Research and Practice

Reference to an article that my Grandma Van co-wrote: “Evaluation of a commonly used oral hygiene agent” (Published in Nursing Research, 1969). I knew she was a nurse and taught nursing classes at BYU.

Prediction of successful nursing performance v. 1

This one doesn’t have visuals of the book itself, but I imagine if I were to find this book (which is very easy with Google Books just enter search by zip code) I would find something about or by my Grandma in there.

I then went to Google Scholar and found a reference to my Grandpa Van:

Evaluation of Health Standards used in Determining Qualifications of Prospective Teachers.

Co-authored by my Grandpa Van in 1964. He died when my Dad was still a little kid, so it was almost surreal as I

On a sidenote, I personally have not found Google Book Search/Scholar that useful for academic purposes thus far, but I believe that is more because I have been primarily searching for Arts and Humanity subjects. I do however, have a good friend in a PhD Chemistry program on campus that swears by Google Scholar. He says he, and his colleagues use it almost exclusively at this point.

What have your experiences been? Do you have any long lost academic relatives that you found through Google Scholar/Book Search?

e-Portfolio’s of the Future! (Foreign Language Focus)

I received an e-mail from a professor (Dick Langston) on campus today informing me that their department (Germanic Languages) will be totally revamping the current curriculum. Their plan right now is to have all incoming students create a blog that they will update during their time in the department. When they leave they will then have an e-portfolio all ready to go with their thoughts as well as a nice representation of their work.

This blog entry has three purposes: 1) to write about what will definitely be included and how it will be useful; 2) to examine some possible emerging technology inclusions; and 3) to solicit thoughts from others about their experiences, both with platforms and student blogs as a whole.

Background

Using blogs to solicit student involvement has been gradually coming on over the past couple of years. Today I listened to a great conference discussion about student blogs on David Warlick’s Connect Learning that really summed up the efforts nicely. I highly recommend that anyone thinking about using blogs in student curriculum listen to this. It is a little more than an hour long, but very worth the effort.

Definite Uses

Turning the discussion to our uses, here are some of the definite ideas right now. The list of application is by no means complete, so please feel free to add your own ideas in the comment section!

• Text – Bread and butter of all good information. Essays, Research Projects, Opinions on Articles and so forth
• Images – Activities they are working on in class, Diagrams of grammar explanations (remember, this is foreign language based), Images to augment text contributions, Images from literary texts they are discussing
• Audio – Lectures they have given, Authentic foreign language examples, Student Feedback, Music, Audio blogs
• Video – All the Audio examples with video, Video blogs

Emerging Possibilities

What are some of the emerging technolgies that might be important to look into? Where are we going in the next 5-10 years?

• Skypecasts – I wrote an article several weeks ago about the possibilities here in regard to language acquisition. They could record a skypecast they put on.
• Virtual Gaming Classes – Integrating online multi-player games like Eve-Online, Second Life and World of Warcraft into classroom learning environments (Article).
• Web 2.0 in Classrooms – Examples of web pages/blogs students created for classes you taught.
• RSS Reader Lists – Most students spend hours and hours reading and aggregate it using a RSS feed reader (Article). Put current, or favorite reads on there!
• Del.icio.us – Bookmark lists of favorite sites will provide not only a great bookmarking resource, but a personal touch to what that student is really interested in interdisciplinary.

This is by no means a complete list. These are just a couple of ideas I had off the top of my head. What other ideas have you seen, or do you think would be important to include in a E-Portfolio? What platforms have you used in the past that have been useful to you? Any other thoughts and comments? Please add them below!

Zoho – Online Wordprocessor Goes Offline? WOW!

Many of you read my article several weeks about about Google Docs… well this is an update to that. Yesterday Zoho, another online office suite, announced three new features:

1. Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office
2. Zoho API’s
3. Desktopize for Zoho

Microsoft Office Pluging – This is a great feature! Any online word processing challenger to Microsoft Office is going to have to integrate with the giant if it is ever to be competitive.

API – This basically turns the application into open source, making it available to users, groups, and most importantly organizations like the schools we are work in to further develop the product to meet our needs. Coincidentally this announcment comes on the same day that Google releases the API for their online spreadsheet. (Google Docs have yet to catch up to this one).

Desktop Application – This is an awesome feature that bloggers have been writing about ever since the online office suite began getting developed, both by Zoho, Google and others. This is the first release of what will probably be many releases!

I tried out Zoho about 6 months ago but found it way to slow for my taste… perhaps now it deserves a second chance. Does the Zoho Desktop application actually store all your online Zoho documents locally and sync them up when you connect to the network again. If it does… WOW! That just solved a huge issue!! Post your findings in the comments for all of us to see!!