Allison Kipta › Comments

"The Associated Press recently covered students’ responses to the president’s school-time proposals. One 5th grader declared her intention to “walk straight out the door” if they were implemented. Her comment and the AP’s willingness to spotlight it say more about America’s scholastic problems than any classroom clock could. A 10-year-old who thinks she can walk out of school when she decides she’s had enough probably also thinks she can decide what she should learn there. I was hardly a classroom shrinking violet, but when I was 10, if my parents and teachers had told me I was staying in school till the moon rose, it never would have occurred to me to threaten a walkout. Experts gush about empowering kids, but we’re really just teaching them to think more highly of themselves than they should. When I made foolish adolescent pronouncements, the wire services never carried them." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Over the pass three years Mobile and Social technologies have featured strongly in the Horizon Report series which examines emerging technologies likely to have an impact on teaching, learning. Mobile devices have progressed from an adoption projection of two to three years in 2006, to a much more imminent adoption prediction trajectory of a year or less in 2008. Whether earlier the educational value of mobile technologies was thought to be delivery of content to people’s devices, the emphasis now has clearing changed to focus on their capabilities that enable users creating and sharing content. The ‘former audience’ combines traditional activities such as searching, reading, watching and listening, with producing, commenting, sharing, and classifying its own content. New genres of filmmaking and photography where the message gains ground over the form are developing. The proliferation of user-created content is fuelled by the wide availability of at-hand mundane technology such as... more... - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"This special issue aims to gather a collection of high quality contributions that reflect the support that can be provided by recommender systems in virtual learning communities (VLC). It focuses on the e-learning domain and the virtual learning communities that grow around it." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"EduTechWiki is about Educational Technology (instructional technology) and related fields. It is hosted by TECFA - an educational technology research and teaching unit at University of Geneva. This wiki is a resource kit for educational technology teaching and research, e.g. a note taking tool for researchers; a literature review tool or a writing-to-learn environment for students. Finally, we started working on tutorials that may be used in classes around the world or for self-learning." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"What is the 21st-century campus? To answer that question, CDW-G surveyed more than 1,000 college students, faculty and IT staff members to understand how technology is shaping American campuses and the educational experience. The annual report examines how student technology needs are changing, and how student needs are changing, and how campuses are – and are not – responding." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"The digital age has changed the ways in which we share our most important opinions and innermost secrets. We chose different communication platforms depending on the level of intimacy we feel towards the recipient of the message and the nature of the message itself. The combination of technology and weight of information has given us new rules for just how we communicate with each other. This chart also ponders the question: Do more options to communicate with each other connect us or alienate us more?" - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Skype is a free and easy way for teachers to open up their classroom and their students to a world way beyond their campus. With Skype, students can learn from other students, connect with other cultures, and expand their knowledge in amazing ways. Teachers and parents can also benefit from Skype in the classroom. Read below to learn how you can take advantage of the power of Skype in your classroom." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"When your computer suddenly fails to boot up or starts randomly deciding it can't find certain files, the first thing you'll do is hope for, or confirm, a recent backup. If it looks like mechanical failure is the cause, and you need just a bit more data off that drive before it's gone for good, try sticking it in the freezer until it's good and cold, then let it reach room temperature again and give it another try. This passed-around tech geek tip works, as a last resort, because when worn-out mechanical parts fail to connect and align properly, contracting them with cold, then allowing them to expand again, can sometimes restore things to barely-working order just long enough to give you a little more time before the funeral." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Skype is a free and easy way for teachers to open up their classroom and their students to a world way beyond their campus. With Skype, students can learn from other students, connect with other cultures, and expand their knowledge in amazing ways. Teachers and parents can also benefit from Skype in the classroom. Read below to learn how you can take advantage of the power of Skype in your classroom." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

DeadCellZones catalogs user-reported dead zones to show you real-world coverage. Plug in a zip code, city, or street address into DeadCellZones and it scours the 100,000+ entry database of user-submitted dead zones. You can filter the results by viewing all carriers, individual major carriers like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, or you can—less helpfully—see a generic "other" category for smaller carriers. Plug in a zip code, city, or street address into DeadCellZones and it scours the 100,000+ entry database of user-submitted dead zones. You can filter the results by viewing all carriers, individual major carriers like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, or you can—less helpfully—see a generic "other" category for smaller carriers." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Students design an interactive story using the Outline view and hyperlinking features in PowerPoint. The goal is to let the reader decide which path to take when reading the story in a slide show. Students can work in small groups (or by themselves if they are older) to create their interactive stories. Students should first design the story using a "storyboard." A storyboard contains sketches of all the scenes in a story, including all the scenes that readers might possibly jump to while viewing the slide show. Students add hyperlinks in the form of action buttons to each slide so that readers can jump to whichever part of the story they choose." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Much has been written about the way in which the N-Gen learner acquires and processes information (Exhibit 1). Coming of age in an environment saturated by technology, where the digital world interacts more and more seamlessly with the "real" world, means that these students represent the first generation of virtual learners—learners accustomed to seeking and building knowledge in a technology-enhanced environment. When these learners seek information, they are more likely to look for it online than anywhere else since this is the environment with which they are most familiar. Are educators rising to the challenge of teaching these students? Some evidence suggests that they are not. The most significant problem may be that since most faculty members do not fit the profile of the Net Generation, they most likely do not share the same learning styles as their students. While many faculty members are technologically literate, routinely using computer resources in research and teaching,... more... - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Many have theorized that the Internet could give education a rude shock. Recently, an opinion piece by Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University in New York who once served as an Internet organizer for presidential candidate Howard Dean, put the possibility in dramatic terms. “Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which ‘going to college’ means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet.” She’s not the first to see newspapers moving from print to online and wonder whether something similar could happen to colleges. Online newspaper readers tend to seek out individual stories, not what papers as a whole have to say. Might finding the right class online become more important than which institution was... more... - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Copy Cat 2.0 actually skip the bytes which are not readable from file and copy all other bytes therefore it extracts max data which is normally not done by windows copy operation. Copy Cat can be helpful at times when you want to copy a CD or DVD which is scratched,when you want to copy data from harddisk area which is partially not readable , when you want to copy data from floppy which is currently not being copied by windows .So download and enjoy." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Recently discovered that a sector of your hard drive is corrupted and not readable? Or maybe you have some CDs and DVDs that are scratched so badly that Windows cannot read data from the discs anymore? Copy Cat is a program that you copy data from your hard drive, a CD, or a DVD byte by byte and will simply skip over the bytes that are not readable. Neat!" - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"A lot of people from US use I-Tunes enabled phone for great music experience. The motorola and apple is providing mp3’s only through i-tunes. But so many times we failed to enjoy when our i-tunes get corrupted. Here I got the way to get rid of this." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"We'll take advantage of a little trick: you can rename an AI file from SampleArtFile.ai to SampleArtFile.pdf and open it in the PDF viewer of your choice - like, say, Foxit Reader." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. - Allison Kipta

"Every now and then, someone develops a new way of thinking about an old problem. Email has become so bogged down with spam and other problems that for many people it's all but useless. Attempts to make email more secure have struggled to make headway because the email system was never designed with such things in mind. The boffins at Google — well, actually Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who brought us Google Maps — asked "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?" Their answer is Google Wave, a free service that has the potential to change the face of the internet." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Social software, software that supports group communications, includes everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities -- though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"The United States should invest in early education to help bolster the number of young people eventually eligible to serve in the military and protect national-security interests, a report released this week argues. A majority of the nation’s young adults are ineligible for military service because they have not graduated from high school, have criminal records, or are physically unfit, says the reportRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader, produced by Mission: Readiness—Military Leaders For Kids. The nonprofit national-security group, based in Washington, is made up of more than seven dozen retired senior military officers." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Google Wave actually has its own lingo – yes, you have to learn a few definitions if you’re going to really understand this new communication platform. Having knowledge of these terms will help you understand more about Google’s newest project." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"From November 5 to 11, Canadians will join together to celebrate Veterans' Week. During this week, Canadians across the country will honour the Veterans and those who made the ultimate sacrifice." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Remembrance Day Poppy: to commemorate the sacrifices of members of the armed forces and of civilians in times of war, specifically since the First World War. It is observed on 11 November to recall the end of World War I on that date in 1918." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Google Maps Navigation is an internet-connected GPS navigation system with voice guidance. It is part of Google Maps for mobile and is available for phones with Android 2.0. Google Maps Navigation uses your phone's internet connection to give you the latest maps and business data. But that's not all that's different about Google's approach to GPS navigation. Watch the below video to learn more." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

This web site is part of an academic, open, community-based project. It is dedicated in collecting and presenting data which are exploited in research areas, such as: - Study of marine telecommunications in respect of efficiency and propagation parameters - Simulation of vessel movements in order to contribute to the safety of navigation and to cope with critical incidents - Interactive information systems design - Design of databases providing real-time information - Statistical processing of ports traffic with applications in operational research - Design of models for the spotting of the origin of a pollution - Design of efficient algorithms for sea path evaluation and for determining the estimated time of ship arrivals - Correlation of the collected information with weather data - Cooperation with Institutes dedicated in the protection of the environment It provides free real-time information to the public, about ship movements and ports, mainly across the coast-lines of Europe... more... - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Law enforcement agencies around the world face a common challenge in their fight against cybercrime, child pornography, online fraud, and other computer-facilitated crimes: They must capture important evidence on a computer at the scene of an investigation before it is powered down and removed for later analysis. "Live" evidence, such as active system processes and network data, is volatile and may be lost in the process of turning off a computer. How does an officer on the scene effectively do this if he or she is not a trained computer forensics expert? To help solve this problem, Microsoft has created Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), designed exclusively for use by law enforcement agencies. COFEE brings together a number of common digital forensics capabilities into a fast, easy-to-use, automated tool for first responders. And COFEE is being provided—at no charge—to law enforcement around the world." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"The edWeb is a social networking website that makes is easy for anyone in the education community to connect with peers, share information and best practices, spread innovative ideas, and provide professional development. The edWeb provides an easy and intuitive Web 2.0 platform that includes blogs, discussions, file-sharing, shared calendars, wikis, live chat, messaging, polling, and shared links. Communities (groups) can be created and linked for closer collaboration." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"Recently I completed an evaluation of a one-to-one laptop program involving over 12,000 students in over 100 schools. The results? Standardized test scores show mixed results, but student engagement is through the roof. In addition, student behavior issues are down, student interest in their communities is up, parental involvement increased and students extended their school day by continuing their work at home on their laptops. And because I used focused conversations with teachers and administrators involved in the project, rather than strict quantitative analysis of standardized test scores, I saw many things I would not have seen otherwise, like the following: * teachers could truly differentiate instruction for the first time * mainstreaming special needs students became more effective * students could actually show many more of the multiple intelligences we have heard so much about * students developed a more professional attitude toward using digital technology * teachers and... more... - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet

"SCHOOL pupils are expected to turn to online learning this winter if the swine flu pandemic intensifies as predicted. Heriot-Watt University's online programme Scholar, which helps Scottish pupils studying for Highers and Advanced Highers, is already gearing up to accept a much greater volume of hits." - Allison Kipta from Bookmarklet