Spent some time rationalising all of the workshop documents and assorted presentations. I have a habit of modifying presentations and workshop guides each time they occur. Then I simply upload them up to the server with a different version number of name. It was time to clean out the directories and reduce some of the clutter.

I linked all of the resources to a single page for the sake of convenience as well. Feel free to download and  trawl through any of the resources. There are resources relating to blogging, wikis, photoshop, flickr, video processing, podcasting, vodcasting, web domains, the Blackboard LMS and lots more.

I have been catching up on my reading and procastinating a little at the same time. But, to get to the point. Sue Waters and Michelle Martin have written simply excellent posts about Twitter and blogging respectively. They actually compose excellent posts all of the time and I wonder if I will ever manage to do the same. I can only hope.

Sue Waters posted some excellent advice on how to manage your twitter community and how to keep relatively on top of it all. Sue’s advice is practical and straightforward. Her advice is always useful. I haven’t been watching Twitter that much in the last week or so but I shall see if I can manage a Twitter moment each day and see what crops up.

Michelle’s post last week was on why people do not comment on your blog. I read her advice closely of course as I do not attract many comments. I am not that paranoid about it but it would be nice to obtain more comments. I will follow her advice and make some changes to my blog and writing style. Michelle has written a great follow up post as well.

Maybe my writing is too scientific. Perhaps it is too academic? Is it boring? Is my writing clear? Is it too verbose? Enough.

Frankly, I would like to let go and post about life at work and what I see happening at school and in the local area vis-à-vis educational technology however I felt that would simply become a rant. So, my present goal is to converge my two separate career backgrounds, history and technology, and focus my blogging in that area. I shall try and merge with other other history~ humanities educators and build up a community that way. I will of course write about the tools but at least attempt to add a curriculum example as part of the tool review.

Do yourself a favour and read Sue’s definitive post on Twitter and Michelle’s invaluable post on blogging. Don’t forget to tag their posts in del.icio.us and share them via Google Reader and the like!

Somewhat off task for a teacher of history yet this article written by Dean Giustini in BMJ describes the evolution of the semantic web in a clear manner. Dean references Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his work on the semantic web. The article includes a brief yet useful glossary and a comparative table that lines Web 2.0 up against Web 3.0.

As you read the article replace the word ‘doctors’ with ‘educators’. Terms such as ‘medicine’ and ‘health-care’ can be replaced with terms such as ‘teaching’ and ‘classrooms’. 

Back in 2001 I became aware of the web site, Becoming Human, while I was working as an instructional designer at ICUS in Singapore. I quickly shared this site with the other designers on the team as I felt it was simply an excellent example of graphic design and interactive treatment. I was constantly on the look out for web sites that I felt could inspire and challenge the graphic designers and Flash programmers that were an integral part of the team at ICUS.

The site was created by the brilliant team at Terra Incognita Productions in Austin, Texas for the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Terra Incognita Productions have created a superlative suite of web sites since 1998.

The Becoming Human web site features an interactive array of video, flash and audio based content. It includes interactive activities focused upon the evolution of the human species. The photography is rich and the illustrations are highly detailed. It is easily navigated and incorporates a glossary and links to relevant web sites.

This web site is not interactive in the Web 2.0 sense of the term yet it could certainly be enriched if a teacher of history or science links it to a blogging or wiki based activity that allows students to document and share their own observations of the embedded materials. The students could be inspired to create their own explorations of the human race by creating and publishing their own podcasts, vodcasts or Voicethread productions.

Flickr has just released version 3.0 of its uploader for both the Mac and Win platforms.

An excellent tool that allows batch uploading, tagging and commentary. You can also direct images to specific sets. You can alter the order of images via drag and drop. You can also work on another batch while one is in process. Via TUAW.