Allison Kipta › Comments

"Beyond Distance Research Alliance is a research and development centre with an international reputation based at the University of Leicester, headed by Professor Gilly Salmon. Beyond Distance will hold its 5th annual Learning Futures Festival Online 7th-14th January 2010. The festival title “Positively Disruptive”, reflects the promise and challenge of innovative and future learning, moving from sharing good to outstanding practice and presenting risks and difficulties as well as new horizons. The Festival will include synchronous and asynchronous e-tivities led by top practitioners in e-learning research – a great opportunity for us to work together to create, explore, and present for discussion a variety of plausible alternative futures for learning and teaching approaches in Higher Education. For further details please visit: http://www.le.ac.uk/beyondd... " - Allison Kipta

"The spiral spectacle — which lasted for two minutes — was seen by vast swathes of the Scandinavian country's almost five million population, with sightings as far north as Finnmark to Trondelag in the south." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"A MYSTERIOUS giant spiral of light that dominated the sky over Norway this morning has stunned experts — who believe the space spectacle is an entirely new astral phenomenon." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Just like a tattoo, your digital reputation is an expression of yourself. It's highly visible, and hard to remove. Explore how your online identity affects you, your friends, your school and your job - for better and for worse - and how to make informed choices." - Allison Kipta

"The CU Online Handbook " - Allison Kipta

"The first reaction of many readers when they see this picture is Photoshop! Surely this must be a fake. But no, many independent observers witnessed and phtotographed the apparition. It is real. Banbury continues: "It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end. This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth. According to press reports, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart."" - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

For most people, the written thank-you is your best bet for an expression of warm, heartfelt thanks. The last thing you want is for someone to be disappointed when her hand-knit scarf is acknowledged with a loud, animated e-card." So says the Emily Post Institute, founded in 1946 and still an authority on principles of politeness in today's digital age. And while, in the era of Gawker and YouTube, its earnest advice may seem old-fashioned and out of touch, it does raise the question: does handwriting have a practical use today, or is it just a relic of a bygone era when children listened to their elders? Certainly, notes written by hand have the retro appeal of, say, a gift of homemade apple butter, but apart from the odd scribble of gratitude or condolence, do we really need it? Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

Welcome to Cloudworks, a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

"The tech world has been abuzz in the last week or so, ever since it was announced on TechCrunch that the CrunchPad was dead in the water. The JooJoo takes its place. But what the heck is it?" - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

These days, we have electronic textbooks to read and tablet computers to document our thoughts in class — and now, portable whiteboard viewers. Luidia, a company that designs and sells interactive electronic whiteboard solutions, is leveraging the display, portability and connectivity of Amazon’s Kindle to offer a new “Send to Kindle” feature that shoots whiteboard contents to an Amazon’s e-book reader. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

"Heavy data users may soon find themselves paying more for service if they're AT&T customers. AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega reiterated the company's idea charge heavy network users more for their activities at the UBS conference on Wednesday, noting that a mere three percent of smartphone users suck up some 40 percent of the company's traffic. For those of us who are constantly tortured subjected to AT&T's slow service, this may seem like a great idea, but de la Vega's threat falls into the same trap that other ISPs have used in order to merely profit more from heavy users. That tiny percentage of customers, which de la Vega pointed out were mostly iPhone users, are using a disproportionate amount of the company's bandwidth thanks to their heavy use of video, audio, and images. The company claims that perhaps these users aren't aware of what kind of effect they're having on the network and could use some "education" on the matter." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Smart alec idea for a business card that could easily be adapted for nearly any profession or endevour." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule,[1] the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.[2][3] Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.[3] It is a common rule of thumb in business - Allison Kipta

"Signal-to-noise ratio (often abbreviated SNR or S/N) is an electrical engineering measurement, also used in other fields (such as scientific measurement or biological cell signaling), defined as the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise. In less technical terms, signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is." - Allison Kipta

"Search faster with Heapr.com I'm serious. Just try it. It's faster. It's like 38% faster than the standard Google.com search. No, I did not just pull that statistic out of my ass." - Allison Kipta

"Japan-based Mobile Art Lab has taken iPhone innovation in a new, more kid-friendly direction with the introduction of the PhoneBook. The software and book-like construct combination offers a child and parent the opportunity to read interactive stories or learn simple math lessons together. " - Allison Kipta

"The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

"Sugar Labs have released v.2 “Blueberry” of their Sugar on a Stick virtualized OS, intended for deployment in education settings. Originally released in public beta back in April, the platform was originally developed for the OLPC XO-1 notebook but subsequently spun out for any Windows, Mac or Linux computer." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

Sugar Labs have released v.2 “Blueberry” of their Sugar on a Stick virtualized OS, intended for deployment in education settings. Originally released in public beta back in April, the platform was originally developed for the OLPC XO-1 notebook but subsequently spun out for any Windows, Mac or Linux computer. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

"Complete “Webibliography” for ‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirky" Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Allison Kipta

"Before we even discuss broadband, let us first get one piece of statistic out in the open: 74% of the world population doesn’t have Internet access. At all. In other words, 5 billion of the world’s 6.8 billion people will have little use for Google’s Chrome OS because they don’t have Internet access. Google’s Chrome OS is a great idea. Put as much as possible into the cloud, and keep the physical device as a “thin client” to access this functionality. However, this great depence on Internet connectivity has left the OS virtually useless for the vast majority of the world population, especially those who would have benefited the most from a low-cost, lightweight computer." - Allison Kipta

"Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio - Allison Kipta

"National helpline for adult literacy skills and general adult education courses: 0800 100 900 or visit www.learndirect.co.uk. " - Allison Kipta

"The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity that changes lives through literacy." - Allison Kipta

"Knowledge Essentials is dedicated to teaching parents the art and science of teaching their children so that they can apply these skills at home" - Allison Kipta

"It is our dream to make Symbaloo the easiest starting point on the Internet. It's that simple - Allison Kipta

"Launched in November 2003, SchoolRack provides a free service for K-12 teachers and faculty to create a classroom website and share information online with students and parents. By encouraging collaboration among our users, we provide a safe environment for students to learn, parents to participate, and teachers to educate. Simply put: our work begins when class ends. Our mission from the onset has been to seamlessly connect teachers, students, and parents through the Internet. Since our launch, we’ve been in a process of continuous improvement and have relied on feedback from our users to refine our website. Managing students, parents, and your classroom takes up much of your time as is – but we’ve created a product to save you just that in the long run." - Allison Kipta

"In 2009, Agilix released BrainHoney – a new and better way for teaching and learning. Based on an open technology architecture and concepts of mastery, efficiency, individualized learning, and equitable access, the BrainHoney hosted suite of solutions is the only learning solution that works seamlessly across classroom, hybrid, and online environments." - Allison Kipta