Room With A View

Stephen Downe’s and Tom Hoffman’s posts about an e-learning project called Kusasa that is being shut down are more than a little disconcerting.

“Lesson? If a project depends on teacher training, it will likely fail.”

An article in the NY Times asks this question and points to the difficulties in having so many web services. There’s only so much time in a day.

As a tech coordinator, I’m very careful when recommending sites or tools to teachers. They’re busy. I see my role as doing some of the leg work–finding worthwhile tools and helping them see ways to apply them to their teaching.

I stumbled upon @Google Talks today. It’s on YouTube. The videos feature presentations made to Google employees. There isn’t a lot of background information given but they appear to be presentations made in various Google offices. (They remind me of the “Brown Bag” lunch talks I attended during university.)

They are organized into three categories–Authors@Google, Women@Google, and Candidates@Google.

A quick look at the speaker list shows: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Tom Brokaw.

For those that attended the What’s Up with Wikis Session yesterday, I’ve posted some useful links on-line. The first is a page on the ISB Tech Pioneers Wiki. It contains some notes on wikis that were put together after a session we had on the subject. On my wikispaces wiki I’ve started a list of ISB classes using wikis. It’s a good place to look for ideas and inspiration.

Yesterday we just scratched the surface of what can be done with wikis. You will have questions. Feel free to corner me in the hall, e-mail your questions, or post your questions here.  Ask away.