Everything is Miscellaneous

If you have not yet read David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, we recommend you spend an entertaining hour listening to the author summarize his book during a May 2007 Google Tech Talk called Everything is Miscellaneous.

The mass digitizing of information has upset traditional means of categorization and classification. Unlike physical objects, digital information can be cut up into smaller and smaller pieces and then put into multiple categories simultaneously to be searched in many different ways. David Weinberger explains this phenomenon and the power of this new complexity.

Google Tech Talks “are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics ranging from Current Affairs, Science, Engineering, Humanities, Business, Law, Entertainment, Medicine, and the Arts.”

Holiday Fun

Holiday Traditions Around the World
http://www.msichicago.org/scrapbook/scrapbook_exhibits/catw2004/traditions/index.html
51 countries from Armenia to Wales from the Museum of Science and Industry

Holiday Games for Interactive White Boards: http://christmas.iboard.co.uk/




Build a Snowman: http://www.kented.org.uk/ngfl/games/snowman_v4.html

Use Blueprints to put Toys Together: http://www.history.com/genericContent.do?id=57580
Drag + drop Flash® game from the History Channel

All Santa, all the time from Canada’s Post Office: http://www.postescanada.ca/dec/santa/fun/games/default-e.asp

Education World’s December Lesson Ideas
http://www.educationworld.com/holidays/archives/december.shtml




Thanks to Donna Farren, our Distance Learning Specialist for sharing these resources!

Language Translation in Word

Both Word 2003 and Word 2007 have a built in language translation tool. You can choose to translate an entire document or just selected text. To use it in Word 2003, highlight the text you wish to translate, go to the Tools menu and select Language, and then Translate. From the drop down boxes choose which languages you wish to translate from and to, In Word 2007 you can find the translate button on the Review ribbon.
Hello
Bonjour
こんにちは
Hallo
Γειά σου
Здравствуйте!

While this feature can be useful when you are trying to figure out text in a foreign language, the translations are not usually done well enough to translate a document to send overseas. Try it out by translating a paragraph from English to another language and then back again!