My favorite web hosting solution

Site5 is the best web hosting solution I have found on the internet, and I have been through many. They give you tons of space and speed. I even built and host BGSU's blog and podcast system on their servers and only pay about $5 a month, if that tells you anything. Click Here and sign up today if you are even remotely interested. It's great for educators and industry.

Why Twitter Matters

Here is an interesting article from Business Week on Why Twitter Matters. Twitter is a microblogging website where users have 140 words or less to make a blog post. It is a way for people to easily stay in touch with their community at all times asynchronously. Many of the things people write in less than 140 words are quite silly and one might wonder how or why something like Twitter is becoming so popular. The following quote from the article reveals part of that answer.

"How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It's not the core technology, which is simple, but instead the community. Twitterers find and follow the people they care about on the service. Late in April, following one of Twitter's outages, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote: "I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occurred: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me." Arrington, who has nearly 17,000 people following his Twitterstream, continued: "It is now an important part of my work and social life, as I carry on bite-sized conversations with thousands of people around the world throughout the day." It's a huge marketing tool, and information tool. But it is also a social habit that's hard to kick."

On a side note, one of our English Instructors, Amanda McGuire Rzicznek, at BGSU had her entire class use twitter to cite and share their sources for their papers.

Another thing I found very fascinating is something called Twittervision. Basically, you can see live posts that people are making from various countries on a Google Map. For example, here are new Twitter posts from people living in Ireland

What do others think of Twitter? Is it a useful technology for educators?

All my Faves - Find and explore some of the most popular sites on the internet

I'd like to thank TerenceOnline's mom for sharing this one with me. She should start her own educational technology blog. lol. All My Faves provides a nice visual design for users to easily find the most popular sites on the internet. I'm not exactly sure how they came up with their list of sites, however, it's a nice and simple way to explore what is out there. It's an easy way to stay on top of internet technology too. With two new kids in my family, I will definitely be checking out the kids category soon.

OLN Expo, resource of the day, and ipods

It has been about a month since my last posting so I plan on getting back into the swing of things. It has been a busy month! I was recently honored that the Ohio Learning Network chose to highlight the BGSU Weblog and Podcast Solution as their resource of the day on April 22nd. They started doing the resource of the day back in march 2007 and they actually highlighted a web 2.0 wiki I put together back then as well. I'm glad to be able to contribute to their mission as they do a great job aggregating "services and resources so Ohioans can meet their learning potential, Ohio’s economy can grow, and Ohio colleges and universities can continue to be knowledge leaders. "

They also invited me to do a break out session about the development, implementation, and administration of the system at the OLN Teaching and Learning Expo 2008 on May 19th in Columbus, OH. Every educator in Ohio should check it out if they can go that day.

In keeping with the theme of weblogs and podcasts, I thought this article was pretty cool. It lists 10 ways you can turn your ipod into your own portable personal learning environment.

Bowling Green State University goes Web 2.0

As any reader of my blog knows, I have written about the important role I believe web 2.0 will play in academia. (See Web 2.0 and Higher Ed, Blogging in academia, Blogging Academia, and the Stanford Blog Directory,and University 2.0)

Not being one to just sit idly by and talk about the important role web 2.0 will play in academia, I decided to put words into actions and design a weblog and podcast system for Bowling Green State University. I built the system on the technological framework of WordressMU with many personal customizations. The system is in perpetual Beta so we can test new features, collect feedback, and continue to refine it. There are so many creative ways to use this system (See our About page for some examples). Below are several real life examples of ways the BGSU community is already stretching the creative boundaries of the system:

One English instructor at BGSU, Amanda McGuire Rzicznek, is using the system to podcast her lectures and blog her writing tips, news, and announcements (see her English 111 blog & English 112 blog). She is also having each of her students create their own weblogs on the system, which they use for reflective writing, collaboration, and feedback (see one of her students blogs here).

My office, IDEAL, is using our IDEAL @BGSU weblog as a web 2.0 portal to communicate our services to the university and to display our distance learning Resources, Announcements, Newsletters, Podcast, and Photo Gallery. The nice thing about our weblog page is that it is very dynamic and enables email subscription, RSS feeds, Podcast Feeds, and lots of other things the tech junkies of the world love). Plus anyone with admin rights can update the site without having to know any HTML. One of our instructional designers, Michael Kudela, is a huge flickr fan so we can even manage our photo gallery from his personal Flickr account. Now that is cool!

Did I mention that I built this system using all open source tools? Yeah. That's pretty cool too.

Sports and Recreation is a huge part of the BGSU culture. If you ever go to an intramural flag football game at BGSU, you would think you were at the superbowl. Well, the sports and rec people at the university saw the potential of a community blog for their users and contacted me to help them get it set up. It required a little more programming and customizing, but in the end they will have a community of sports rec bloggers. I can see the bragging rights go up even more with this outlet. Their community weblog will be launching soon so I look forward to seeing how that community uses the web 2.0 environment. Check out the Rec Sports Wire to see what they are doing.

The MBA department is using their weblog to give current students the opportunity to share the ins and outs of their daily life so if you’ve ever wanted to know what’s it like to be a graduate student, you’ll want to check it out at - BGSU MBA

The benefits of blogs and podcasts are far reaching and are transforming the way people interact and learn from each other. BGSU faculty, staff, and students can all reap benefits from blogging and podcasting.

Thanks to Connie Molnar and Dr. Bruce Edwards, my bosses at IDEAL, for allowing me to dream, innovate, and design this system for BGSU. They are both great leaders and visionaries at BGSU.

PB Wiki steps up their game. Will Google Sites respond?

It appears that PB Wiki is fiercely competing with the Goliath that is Google and their new product, Google Sites. I really enjoy both products and have implemented them both in different ways at BGSU. We have been using the PB Wiki in our training programs and Google Sites for our own project management organization. I think wiki's are awesome collaboration tools. I wrote a post a few days ago about ways I thought Google Sites could improve their system and it appears that PB Wiki already has pretty much all of the feature I said should be integrated into Google Sites, so I hope the competition drives excellence for both companies. Sometimes I wonder if Google is wishing they would have bought PB Wiki instead of JotSpot, but I guess they still could if they wanted to. I mean it is Google! The reason I like what Google Sites is doing is because it has the the patented ease of use guarantee and it integrates well with other Google apps we use. I am typically a fan of their web apps and they usually integrate search technology like no one else. However, PB Wiki is looking a bit more sophisticated at this point and I hope the Google Sites development team is working hard to match their features very soon. For example, the new PB Wiki provides page level access, page folders and folder access controls, as well as a new sleek interface. Check out this video of the new PB Wiki 2.0 and let us know what you think.

I made the Alltop list for Education sites on the Internet

It appears Guy Kawasakai left me a comment letting me know that I made the Alltop list for Education sites on the Internet! Yes! Click the image above to see a screen capture of my location on Alltop. You will notice the US News Education site right above me and the BBC Education news site a few rows over. If this were a digital magazine stand, I would be right there with the big boys. Yet another reason to digg Alltop. Check me out here http://education.alltop.com/

Alltop - A table of contents for the Internet

Alltop is a very simple and cool site that can help people find what is currently popular, by topic, on the Internet. Their slogan is "we've got all the top stories covered all the time." The page updates every 10 minutes as well. This is a good site for people that won't build their own custom homepage on Netvibes, MyYahoo, or iGoogle and those that do have custom homepages may find some good new sites to add to their homepage. I personally think it is neat to see what all of the top global news articles are. Gone are the days of having to just rely on 1 newspaper or newsprogram to stay informed. This opens the doors up to deeper acountability in reporting the news. For example, one could quickly compare Al Jazeera Headlines to CNN Headlines side by side and see how each venue spins various stories. This would be a great way for students to hone their critical thinking skills by comparing and contrasting the various outlets of information. What makes one source more credible than the other? Plus, it would be cool to see TerenceOnline added to their topic page on Education. I would like to see Alltop add a search engine to their site. Categories + Search Engine = More access to information.

Here is what the site says about itself:

"We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”

Google Sites - Some quick thoughts to improve the system

I am liking Google Sites as a team intranet wiki collaboration tool. However, there are a couple of things that need improvement and I'm hoping people from google read this.

1. First and most importantly, they need to make the page management system better!
   
   • For example, they need to allow people to create folders to organize the pages we create, instead of just a huge list of created pages. I know google is anti creating folders and I am fine with that since I too prefer the search engine for organizing and retrieving, but they need to provide a search engine to find the page I am looking for to link to.
     
2. They need to enable each user the ability to add a list widget to a page so that people can add co-workers' lists to their page and have an updated list of everyone's projects on their page. In addition, it would be nice to have the ability for individual lists to export their lists to 1 Master Team list. Therefore, everyone could keep their individual project lists on their pages and it exports to a team list. It would also be neat if it could take list information and generate a graphical diagram.
   
3. The Google Sites Start Page is pretty weak. It would be cool to have all of my RSS Feeds there and i'd like to be able to upload them in one fell swoop with an OPML file. It should be something more like Netvibes or at least iGoogle.
4. Why not incorporate email with Google Sites?
5. More page privacy options.

Though I have these requests, it is a very cool product and I look forward to see how they improve it over time. More thoughts coming soon as I discover more about the inner workings of the system...

Google Sites - Putting it to the test

I was eagerly awaiting to see what Google would do with the wiki software company, Jot Spot, that they acquired quite some time ago. From the acquisition, Google has created Google sites, which is this hybrid wiki/project management application that is really quite interesting and easy to use. I must admit that I am a huge fan of using technology effectively to make things better. However, the only way to truly know it's deep value is to put it to the test in a real life team and project management situation. So lets do it. I just designed and am now beginning to implement a google site for my team to use. My logic in developing my team's Google site was to give each team member their own wiki page to help them manage their own projects, invite collaboration, and track their own status, while simultaneously sharing with the group what they are doing. In addition, everyone has a file upload page, which is linked to their wiki page. I've also created a dashboard (this is a custom template provided by Google sites), an ongoing projects page (custom template to easily add and track projects), an Announcements page to communicate with the team (also a custom template), and a Team Wiki page. The beauty of the system is that it is incredibly easy to use and enables the team to be productive on their projects while giving managers a snapshot of our workloads. Most project management software systems are clunky and not this easy to use, so I give it props for ease of use. The question is how effective this method will be for team collaboration and project management. It seems that it is off to a good start, and I'll report back in about a month on my thoughts of the system.