Category Archives: IT570

Multimedia publishing? Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

I mentioned this multimedia article when we spoke about new formats for traditional technologies, and about ways to soften hard technologies. Scroll down and mouse over all the media elements to see the variety of options:

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek

New Curating Site by Harvard Innovation Lab

AcademicRoom.org is an independent initiative headquartered in the Harvard Innovation Lab. It is promoted as…

“the first multidisciplinary knowledge platform where you can build open communities to curate academic content within well-defined areas—ranging from philosophy, history and economics to engineering, architecture and medicine.”

It is currently in beta – but isn’t everything these days? :o) It just might be worth checking out!

 

Even Credible Sources are Sometimes Not Credible

Will Thalheimer provides yet another valuable resource. His 2006 blog post on the learning styles myth that “People believe 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear…” etc., illustrates that very credible sources have erroneously connected these false statistics to Dale’s Cone of Experience. A warning to us all to track down our sources! See the post at:

http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html

And note that one of the comments cites a 2002 AECTpresentation by Tony Betrus and Al Januszewski that provides more detail on what Edgar Dale did and did not say about his model, available at: http://www2.potsdam.edu/betrusak/AECT2002/dalescone_files/dalescone.html.ppt

Research Tools I Want to Explore

There are several research tools I’ve been meaning to investigate. I hope to delve into them this month. They include:

Zotero at http://www.zotero.org/

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/

and the Intute resources for Educational Technology listed here (must check them out before the now closed database is taken off-line in 2014):

http://www.intute.ac.uk/cgi-bin/browse.pl?id=120544

If you have any thoughts on the above resources, I’d love to hear them! Do you like one or more of them? Do they work well for specific research tasks? Are they intuitive to use? Are they kept up-to-date? Are there other, similar tools you prefer?

A Curating Site that Rivals Pinterest!

Screen shot of the Learnist social network.

Screen shot of the Learnist social network.

Just saw this post about “Learnist,” an educational social network similar to Pinterest that’s been produced by Grockit (see their featured page at http://learni.st/category/featured). It seems more organized and a search for “instructional design” on their site immediately yields great results! It is advertised as a place where you can “curate” content.  Here’s a quote and a review of Learnist that says the site was on TIME’s 2012 list of best websites:

Learnist was launched in May 2012 to encourage people to learn from and teach each other about a wide range of academic and casual learning topics. Users can curate digital and online resources into a media-rich board, called a Learn Board, to share their expert knowledge.

Review:

http://edudemic.com/2012/12/this-is-the-new-learnist/