Monday, October 26, 2009
Farewell to GeoCities
Back in the mid 90s GeoCities provided a truly welcome free website hosting service for people like ourselves who wanted a basic web presence without having to get involved in complicated a, and often costly, web hosting arrangements. For almost 15 years we maintained our website (at www.coatepec.net) courtesy of GeoCities' beneficence-- which, to be sure, was heavily underwritten by outfits like Yahoo.com. In our own case we have purchased, and continue to purchase, services from Yahoo as a form of consumer loyalty to a web pioneer we wish well for. And GeoCities sites can continue to live on via Yahoo services which, in many cases will remain free for some time.
Like millions of other people around the world we feel today's "passing" of GeoCities as exactly that. It's been a great friend over a lengthy and decisive period of internet evolution. We have always been glad to have had the chance to be part of it.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Books available for reviewing
We have a brand new batch of books in from publishers. If you'd like to review one--or more--of these books for the journal, e-Learning, email Michele (knobelm@mail.montclair.edu) and specify which book(s) and your mailing address, and she'll get back to you with review guidelines and a copy of the book(s).
Bermejo, F. (2007). The internet audience: Constitution and MeasurementNew York: Peter Lang.
Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Gordon, D. (Ed.). (2003). Better teaching and learning in the digital classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (Eds.). (2009). Teaching the new writing: Technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Jankowski, N. (ed) (2009). E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice. New York: Routledge.
Lehmann, K., and Chamberlin, L. (2009). Making the move to eLearning: Putting your course online. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.
O’Dowd, R. (Ed.). (2007). Online intercultural exchange: An introduction for foreign language teachers. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Slotta, J. D., and Linn, M. C. (2009). WISE
science: Web-based inquiry in the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Taffe, S. W., & Gwinn, C. B. (2007). Integrating literacy and technology: Effective practices for grades K-6. New York: Guilford Press.
Turow, J., and Tsui, L. (Eds.). (2008). The hyperlinked society: Questioning connections in the digital age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Talk of next-generation messaging
Recent buzz on the internet is Google's Wave project, which promises to change the way we communicate with others using text as the primary (but not the sole) medium. As Ryan Paul of ars technica explains:
It brings together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, collaborative rich document editing, and generic support for third-party Web services in a single seamless communication medium that is more flexible than any of those things individually.
This sounds all well and good, but it was this video that helped it all make sense for me.
If Google delivers on even half of this, email as we currently know it (a 30-year old technology, by the way), will look obsolete overnight.
