The IT Crowd - Hello IT Machine

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

IT Crowd: truest moment ever!

Heeding the advice of those who go before us.

This text has some excellent research into EFFECTIVE use of ICT's in the classroom. Interestingly it suggests my current T&D into using electronic whiteboards is useless. Why, you ask? They only provide one focal point and the most effective classroom has multiple focal points to address multiple levels.

The power of the internet to change (record) history

AOTUS: Collector in Chief

The Archivist’s Take on Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation at the National Archives.

UK Writer about the internet - Paul Carr

Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore is the painfully true story of how Paul Carr attempted to become a dot com billionaire and in doing so lost his reputation, the love of his life and very nearly his freedom.

I've just finished this 'novel' and really enjoyed the 'insight' into this world I teach about. Scary actually - how volitile it is. It was relieving to see Carr has given up 'drinking rum' as his alcoholism was tedious. I will be following his blog. I had some good laughs. I'll also be using the 'story' of facebook and the million dollar webpage in my classes for a long time. Thanks Paul.

Hole in the wall

Very cool project that brings access to kids without computers.
Hole in the Wall

Tag clouds

Verrry cool tag clouds.
A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus, both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity are possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

In principle, the font size of a tag in a tag cloud is determined by its incidence. For a word cloud of categories like weblogs, the frequency of use for example, corresponds to the number of weblog entries that are assigned to a category. For small frequencies it's sufficient to indicate directly for any number from one to a maximum font size. For larger values, a scaling should be made. In a linear normalization, the weight t_i of a descriptor is mapped to a size scale of 1 through f, where t_min and t_max are specifying the range of available weights.

for t_i > t_min; else s_i = 1

• s_i: display fontsize
• f_max: max. fontsize
• t_i: count
• t_min: min. count
• t_max: max. count

Cyberbullying in its place

Some info sheets for teens experiencing bullying via facebook.

Coming soon..