This tutorial shows how to use a spreadsheet in Google Docs as an RSS Feed reader. You can fetch RSS news feeds from different sources into one spreadsheet – much like a simpler version of Feedly – and then publish your feeds as a public web page. No coding required.
learn, teach, repeat: Rough thinking about annotation and online activism...kind of like climatefeedback.org
Talking with educators in the last year about the importance of, and potential for, online annotation, I refer often to the work of the folks at climatefeedback.org. When I get puzzled looks from teachers or the predictable, "so what?" from school leaders after I show someone how to mark an online text using hypothes.is, or how to see public annotations in the hypothes.is stream, I step back from the logistical demonstrations to describe an emerging example that there is a group of scientists who are concerned about the popular media's presentation of climate change and climate science. They have organized an online annotation effort to effectively fact check the media. In that way, I try to justify my interest and excitement about online annotation. Digital notes in online margins are not just a tool for bookworms, they are a tool for bookworm activists.
An update on Marginal Syllabus activities is long overdue. Here are a few thoughts about what this emergent experiment in informal educator learning has done, where it may be going, and what some of us are thinking – particularly in a post-election context that demands critical thinking, resistance, solidarity, and activism.
IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library: Free Public Domain Sheet Music
IMSLP stands for the International Music Score Library Project and was started in 2006. The logo on the main page is a capital letter A. It was taken from the beginning of the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. It was published in Venice in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci, the library's namesake.
Launched in 2010, Colossal is a Webby-nominated blog that explores art and other aspects of visual culture. Colossal won the Utne Media Award for Arts Coverage in 2013. Each week you’ll find 15-25 posts on photography, design, animation, painting, installation art, architecture, drawing, and street art. Colossal is also a great place to learn about the intersection of art and science as well as the beauty of the natural world. There are frequently posts about things far out in left field, but generally Colossal is a reminder that in the digital age there are still countless people making incredible work with their bare hands.
Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes. Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think. If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, these books are the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, these books can help you too.
ISTE | 3 lessons that drive home digital citizenship
When educators talk to students about digital citizenship, they often come from the standpoint of protection. The discussion centers on how to stay safe and protect their online identities. But it's time to move digital citizenship to the activism stage. "This is the idea that we can use digital tools to improve the world around us to support causes, empower others or create better environments," explains Alec Couros, professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada.
This is a video of the mapping process which we first piloted at Educause last year. It’s designed to help you explore and reflect upon how you engage with the digital environment and then investigate how your students/users/staff engage with what you provide. Feel free to use the video to help plan your own mapping session and let me know how you get on. The video is CC licensed so it’s ok to embed it into your work/courses directly with an attribution if that’s helpful.
An exercise in simple data visualization – Messy Thinking
Let’s work through an example in which we use a simple form of data visualization – concept mapping – to reflect on and discuss our behaviors in digital spaces as a potential form of professional development.
You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and thus, before you take the conversation forward, you would like to do some research on the Internet to know more about that person. How do you do this without directly asking the other person? Google is the most obvious place for performing reverse email lookups (just Google for the email address) but if that person doesn’t have a website or if they have never used their email address on public forums, Google will be of little help. No worries. If you only know the email address of a person and nothing more, here are some ways that may help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.
(Digital) Identity in a World that No Longer Forgets | Katia Hildebrandt
In recent weeks, the topic of digital identity has been at the forefront of our minds. With election campaigns running in both Canada and the United States, we see candidate after candidate’s social media presence being picked apart, with past transgressions dragged into the spotlight for the purposes of public judgement and shaming. The rise of cybervigilantism has led to a rebirth of mob justice: what began with individual situations like the shaming of Justine Sacco has snowballed into entire sites intended to publicize bad online behaviour with the aim of getting people fired. Meanwhile, as the school year kicks into high gear, we are seeing evidence of the growing focus on digital identity among young people, including requests for our interning pre-service teachers to teach lessons about digital citizenship.
This is a collection of resources that can be used by educators or students regarding the issue of digital citizenship. Note: the questions used here are targeted primarily at high school students, but many of these questions apply to anyone new to the topic.
The Desert View Watchtower, one of the most prominent architectural features on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, underwent major renovations during 2010. View recent photos here: here The Watchtower is located at Desert View, the eastern-most developed area on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. Recognized as a National Historic Landmark, the tower was constructed in 1932. Architect Mary Colter’s design takes its influences from the architecture of the ancestral Puebloan people of the Colorado Plateau. She collaborated on the design with Hope artisans of the day, including well-known Hopi artist Fred Kabotie whose murals adorn much of the second level of the tower.
Some of our finest products at GIPHY have come out of hours of internal testing, tweaking, and joking around. If a GIF that we serve up makes you laugh, it’s almost certainly made us laugh, too. Our Slack /GIPHY commands are a perfect example of that. So, we wanted to share just a few of the secret commands we get a kick out of. Think of them as our version of the In-n-Out secret menu. And there’s more to come!
Everything is connected is a knowledge game — a game relying on knowledge about the world in order to be solved. Like a quiz, and yet different. Everything is connected is also a puzzle. You get some pieces and have to figure out how they fit together. How they are connected. But unlike with a normal puzzle, whether or not two pieces fit together does not depend on the shape of the piece - afterall, all pieces are squares but it depends whether or not there is a known connection between them. What is a known connection? Each piece of the puzzle represents an entity in the world. It can be a country, a famous person, a song, a religion, or something else entirely. There are hundreds of different types of relations: for example, a person could be a citizen of a country, or the author of a song. A city can be the place of a birth of a person, or the capital of a country. Just like in every other puzzle, in order to place a piece somewhere on the board, it has to fit to all of its neighbours. Once all pieces are placed, the puzzle is solved.
GifCities is a special project of the Internet Archive to celebrate 20 years of preserving the web. Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Peeling back the curtain on behind-the-scenes videos on Vimeo
We love watching videos. Tons of them. And on Vimeo, quality videos to binge on are in no short supply. But it’s important to remember that what we see here is only the tip of the production iceberg, and oh-so-much goes into making videos that we often don’t get a chance to see. That’s where behind-the-scenes videos come in! As a kid, nothing sparked more joy in my tiny soul than watching bonus features and director’s commentary of my favorite movies. When you watch a seemingly flawless final film, it’s hard to imagine the blood, sweat, and creativity (“There’s no crying in baseball!”) that went into creating it. From development to the editing room and everything in between, behind-the-scenes videos allow your audience to peep a glimpse at the beautiful chaos that is filmmaking.
All effects - PhotoFunia: Free pic editor online with library of picture effects & photo filters
Performing image editing and applying picture effects to any image is a time consuming exercise that is fit only for an avid photoshop user. If you’re looking for a quick and professional picture effects online service, then PhotoFunia is the solution you’ve been looking for. With PhotoFunia you can edit photos online for free in a matter of seconds resulting in high quality photo collages. Not only you can edit pics online for free you can also have much fun doing so, by sharing them with your family and friends. So what are you waiting for? Start editing pictures online with PhotoFunia for free today.
Flickr is a leading image and video hosting website owned by Yahoo. They offer a public API which can be used to return a list of photos matching a certain criteria. To return an API response in JSON format, you would send a parameter format in the request with a value of json. For example, the following will return a list of photos tagged “kitten”.
We can exploit Javascript's help and use it to do some magical things using only the characters: [,],(,),! and +. If you're not on mobile, you can pop open your browser's JS console to follow along. You can just paste any of the code examples into the console and they should evaluate to true.
The commercial Internet is an amazing achievement. But its values are the opposite of a library. Where libraries exist to inform, those of us who run online businesses do our best to extract information from you. Where libraries try to be impartial, we practice constant manipulation. Every link has an ulterior motive. Click this, read that, view this ad, punch this monkey, and above all, share everything with us, no matter how private, forever. However, these un-librarians have made genuine technical breakthroughs in dealing with large data collections. For people just bringing their collections online, this raises the question of how to engage with a world whose values are repugnant, but whose expertise is alluring.
So you have an idea for an audio project — a radio feature, a series, a podcast or something else. Now what? Where do you start? How can you move from idea to execution? This post is designed to help. It will walk you through critical questions about your project, audience and stories. Once you’ve completed the document, use it as your guide and make changes when needed.
It’s not easy to translate audio stories to digital ones. The standard “webify” method of turning radio scripts into web text is a bad approach that results in boring, confusing stories that often have major reporting holes. Thankfully, there are a couple of effective, low-lift ways to tell your stories online. I’ll walk through a few examples below, along with some ideas for how you might use social to engage your audience.
