Daniel Staemmler » Web 2.0

Top Lists in the Field of Learning

Daniel Staemmler — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:48:04 +0000

Often I come across lists of free learning tools and those you have to pay for. However, they always produce a lot of retweets on Twitter. So here is a list of lists that refer to learning tools and in addition blogs that I came across:

Directory of over 3.000 Learning Tools by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT). The center was founded by Jane Hart, a Social Learning Consultant.
Multiple Top 10 Tools Lists of Learning Professionals 2009 by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologie (C4LPT). The center was founded by Jane Hart, a Social Learning Consultant.
Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education by lifehacker
Not a Top list but one that lists Web2.0 Tolls and Applications by category. Here are the ones listed under the tag #e-learning.
Top 100 education Blogs by Online Education Database (OEDb)
Top 47 eLearning & Workplace Learning Blogs by The Upside Learning Solutions Blog
Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0 – has been compiled in 2006 and is not a top list per se but a great starting point when it comes to tools useful in school settings. This is also part 1 and there are 2 more available.
Websites For Students: 10 Online Learning Tools listed by subject. Make sure to check out the comments at the bottom of this page and you find more suggestions (more and less useful).
50 of the Most Dependable Web Resources for University Students splits up into 25 research resources and 25 free Web Apps.
Searching the Internet is a common activity to inquire or learn something about a certain subject. Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need is a list of sites helping you to find what you are looking for.
Tim Stahmer’s top 101 web sites for teachers. To put it in his own words: “Not the whole web… just the best for teaching and learning“.
And last but not least a list of 12 Screencasting Tools For Creating Video Tutorials from Mashable

Feel free to add to this list in the comment box below. Additions are always welcome

Networking for Opportunities

Daniel Staemmler — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:58:22 +0000

Steve Woodruff published a free available eBook that will give you some instructions on how to network in the age of web 2.0. The eBook with the title “Build Your Own Opportunity Network” is for beginners in this area and will guide you through what is available out there and how much time it will cost you to participate and network.

If you struggle to find out what your brand is you will find at the end of his eBook six question and an elaboration upfront that might help you along the way to figure this out.

History of “whatever”

Daniel Staemmler — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:47:32 +0000

I came across this great video capture (via @mattlingard) of a presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 held the keynote talk onthe 2nd day by Dr. Michael Wesch. He is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at the Kansas State University.

This presentation is very well done and in addition to the history of “whatever” there there are a lot of good thoughts in it. How will the next generation develop skills to be able to socially interact with each other when only or most of the time talking to a webcam sitting on the top of their computer screen? The future will let us know…

Top 100 Web 2.0 Apps

Daniel Staemmler — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:45:15 +0000

It has been a while since I posted an entry to my blog. I have been pretty busy in the last couple of month and hope to come back more frequently.

However, here is (another) Top 100 list referring Web 2.0 Apps on the Internet. The list has been compiled by CNET Networks using votes from the community of Webware.com over the months of May and June 2007.

One question easily answered: What are you doing?

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:34:04 +0000

After a lot of things have been written about Twitter and it’s community that answers only one simple question: “What are you doing?” I checked this “… social networking and micro-blogging service“, that even has an entry at Wikipedia already, out. I have to admit that I have checked Twitter out a little while ago and was wondering what makes people interested in continuously post what they are doing right now. For example, are you interested who is having lunch right now. No problem. A visit at Twitterment, a Twitter search service, will reveal who is lunching right now (Source: Binaryplex.com ,Library Clips).Â Okay, now the question remains what are people doing right now and where geographically wise are they doing it? The answer is out there and Twittervision.com is a pretty neat mash-up application developed by David Troy that will show what is going on in real time at the Twitter community.
Alright, and for those of you who want to ban Twitter to their Apple Macintosh computer their is the free software application Twitterrific out there (Source: Twitter Blog). If you know of a similar application for Microsoft please add a comment to this post and let other readers know about it.

What makes Twitter so popular? I think it is very simple, we are always interested in what our friends are doing. A lot of times it is “… the first thing we ask when we call someone” (Source: Read/WriteWeb).Â A little snipped of text provides us with the real time information and a simple social need id fulfilled.

However, I have not decided yet for myself if I am going to use Twitter to keep my friends and readers up to date with my activities. If so you probably will see it on this blog in one of the sidebars.

Social Networking – What's next?

Daniel Staemmler — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:22:01 +0000

Social networking has taken over and everybody is talking about it. The big players are MySpace, Facebook and on the professional networking end LinkedIn and Xing (former OpenBC), to only mention a few. Are you part of one, two or even more of these social networking? I am! Signing up is easy and mostly done in a few steps but creating your profile takes most of the time a little longer than only a mouse click here and there. However, help is on the way: OpenID. “OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.” Further information is also available at Wikipedia. However, a recent article in the New York Times discusses the idea of a standardized OpenID which is pushed by several companies. But why? Well, the question is pretty simple, there will be more and more social networks out there. My guess is, that not only classes, universities, schools, and professional networks will be the center of interest. More so private social networks like extended circle of friends, communities, neighborhoods, and families. So who wants to enter all the personal information over and over again? I do not and therefor pledge for an OpenID that will help me to sign up for those social networks I would like to be part of and those I have been invited to.

Interested in creating your own social network that you are in control off? Here is one of my earlier entries that describes one option on how to do so.

As a side note, this somehow reminds me a little bit of the idea and discussion about global ID and how Google is or can be a part of it. John Lanchester wrote a pretty comprehensive and interesting article about it that I enjoyed reading.

TEDTalks – Hans Rosling

Daniel Staemmler — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:56:39 +0000

Did you ever wonder how to visualize your data that people understand and grasp the information easily? One man who really understands how to do that in the field of international health is professor Hans Rosling from the Swedish Karolinska Institute, who also is the “… founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life“. He gave a presentation in February 2006 at Monterey, California at TEDTalks and gave a quiet stunning example of his outstanding work and how to visualize data . To see a recording of his presentation click here. I highly recommend visit the Gapminder tool at the Google website since it “… makes it possible to search deep into Gapminder’s moving graphs visualizing world development“.

The question remains is there any tool or WebApp out there that helps you to visualize, display, share and discuss your data. Actually there is and it is called Many Eyes. I only briefly explored this tool which seems to be pretty comprehensive but easy to use. Any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated.

Last but not least there are a couple of books out there on how to visualize data. A name to mentioned in this regard is the one of Edward Tufte. Here is a list of his books at Amazon. I once went to a seminar here in San Francisco he gave and wasn’t impressed and left after lunch. However, is books are definitely worth to have a look at.

Your own Social Network

Daniel Staemmler — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:31:15 +0000

Marc Canter is the CEO of PeopleAggregator a website where you can create and run your own social network. You either can decide to run a social network on their webserver or you download the source code and run it on your own. Marc Canter strongly believes that the future does not lie in big gigantic social networks like MySpace. No, more so that there will be millions of networks that connect 25 to 150 people with each other, e.g. families and communities. A big plus about creating your own social network is that you determine what kind of content is displayed and what the rules are.

What I like about PeopleAggregator is that you own the data that you feed into it. Whenever you feel like you have to move on you can take it with you. Even though I have no MySpace account I think it will be difficult to take all my friends and content with me once I decided I want to move on.

Zweitgeist – Web 2.0 is alive

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:51:07 +0000

Did you ever wonder who is looking at the same website you do right now? There might be a solution for you out there which is called Zweitgeist (German for second spirit). You install a piece of software on your PC (Apple Macintosh is not yet supported), choose an avatar that represents you in your second, virtual life and voailÃ it shows up on every website you are looking at right now. This gives you the opportunity to meet other fellow surfers on the same website and communicate with them.

The concept is sort of like the one of Second Life. The difference is the existing World Wide Web is used as the virtual world instead of some “second” world developed by a company. What I like about this Web 2.0 Application is that it allows you to get in touch with people that have similar interests as you do.

I have to admit I have not fully explored Zweitgeist since I am working on a Mac and unfortunately it is not supported for now. If you had any experience with Zweitgeist already or try it out let me know how it worked for you? It could be a cool feature for people who run a blog and can directly and live interact with their site visitors.

More Trends and Predictions

Daniel Staemmler — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:50:15 +0000

I know, I know, there are a lot of trends and predictions being published and released right now. After all it is this time of the year to reflect on what happened and to predict what might be.

However, I just received the wwwtools for education newsletter with a nice assembly of “Trends from 2006, Projections for 2007… and Beyond“. Graeme Daniel put a nice list of notes and trends in education together. He split these different areas up into the following categories:

Highlights: Technology in education, 2006,
Technology 2006,
Forecast for Technology, 2007,
At the hardware trade shows,
The iPhone – Rising Star of Macworld?
More mobile and wireless trends,
Converging technologies: Computers, TV, Video and Net,
A mixed bag (e.g. Web 2.0, Nanotechnology),
Just for fun, and
Books.

Enjoy once again the trends of 2006 and predictions for 2007. If you want to sign up for the wwwtools for education newsletter you can do so by clicking here.