Room With A View

The term Web 2.0 gets thrown around a lot. It’s the idea that people can create content and interact with one another. Some people love the term, some people hate the term, some people overuse the term, while others lay claim to the term. Regardless of the hype, The Water Buffalo Movie is what matters.

Robert Thompson read a blog entry by Philip Greenspun where Greenspun wrote about his frustration with a charity that supposedly bought water buffaloes for people. Robert Thompson lives in rural China. He offered to buy Greenspun a water buffalo and give it to a needy family. Greenspun took him up on his offer. The Water Buffalo Movie is Thompson’s account of the story.

Zotero is a free Firefox extension for keeping track of references when conducting research. According to their website:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

I’ve just played with it a little but it looks great. It appears to have the functionality of End Note but with a much better price–free! Users can keep track of citations, notes, and even attach files. When it’s time to create a reference list, there are several styles it can use including MLA and APA.

I’m not sure how well it will configure on school computers which are shared. Will students references–known as Libraries in Zotero–and their files be saved on individual hard drives or can they be saved to a student’s documents folder? I know the files can be exported at the end of a work session but it would be great if it could all be done automatically.

Thanks to at Jeff Utrecht for his recent post entitled Top 5 Firefox2 Extensions For Educators.

I know I’m a little behind the times but I just downloaded Firefox 2.0 for OS X. I love the fact that it’s got a spell checker built into it. I’ve always disliked writing in a browser, preferring to write posts in Word and then copy them to my blog. With a built in spell checker, writing directly in Firefox just got a whole lot better.

Since returning to China after the Christmas Break the internet has been extremely slow. This is because several undersea cables were severed after an earthquake north or Taiwan. Internet traffic is getting through but it’s painfully slow and in many cases not worth the wait. For those of us that rely on the net to teach, it’s a major pain. Students can’t access teachers’ externally hosted wikis or complete many assignments. With all the talk of Web 2.0 I usually feel that my colleagues and I do not do enough to harness the power of the internet. I feel that we have a long way to go. Now that the net is not functional, I realize we do use it more than I realized.

I’ve posted before how I enjoy the TED Talk Podcasts. They have a great diversity of speakers. One of our high school economics teachers is using a speech by economist Bjorn Lomborg with his students. In the podcast Lomborg makes a case for using economics to prioritize global issues. Lomborg’s auguement has given the class lots to talk about.
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Need an overview of the situation in Somalia? Check out Ze Frank’s synopsis.