What’s on the Horizon?

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) jointly produced The Horizon Report. It describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within the next one to five years. The 2008 Horizon Report was released at the ELI Annual Conference in San Antonio in January. The 2008 report focuses on the following topics;
· Grassroots Video
· Collaboration Webs
· Mobile Broadband
· Data Mashups
· Collective Intelligence
· Social Operating Systems

The Horizon Project Wiki links to the workspace used to develop the report.

Scratch

Are the students in your school using Scratch yet? Watch the 30-second video below to find out why they will want to be.

Scratch was designed to “help young people (age 8 and up) develop 21st century skills that will be critical to success in the future: thinking creatively, communicating clearly, analyzing systematically, using technologies fluently, collaborating effectively, designing iteratively, learning continuously.” With it students can create and share their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.

Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab Research Consortia. It is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the Scratch website.

If you want to learn more, watch the video below where Mitchel Resnick and other members of the Development Team explain the project. An amazing 60,000 student projects have been shared on the Scratch website since its inception last year.
And don’t miss the Educator’s Page where you will find instructional videos and resources.

Tag Clouds

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags. The tags are typically listed alphabetically, and tag frequency is shown with font size or color. The more popular the tag, the larger the font. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag. A tag cloud is an image that communicates information in a single glance.

It’s a new approach to text.

Here’s a link to the Librarything tag cloud.
http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php
OCLC Project Tag Cloud Builder
http://tagcloud.oclc.org/tagcloud/TagCloudDemo
Build a tag cloud to insert on a webpage
http://tagcrowd.com/

Desktop Navigation--Diminish and Restore Windows

Did you ever have numerous windows open and suddenly need see something on your desktop? Rather than diminishing each window, one-by-one, you can use a simple keystroke to diminish them all at once.

“WINDOWS KEY”—”D” will diminish all open windows. Even better, it is a toggle key combination so when you are through with the task on your desktop, hit the same key combination again and all your windows are restored.