I-O Data has just revealed a tiny, new keyboard for handsets, which connects to your device via Bluetooth. We suspect this is just an sdk hack away from the first iPhone keyboard, which would be quite handy in the classroom. It might also function as a confidence booster for those embarrassed by their abnormally small hands.

Dipity is a social timeline application that enables users to construct visual timelines with events, photos, audio and video. Dipity timelines can be created to represent any historic information and are formulated either by entering items manually or by adding a feed. The service currently supports the ability to import from Picasa, Twitter, Pandora, Wordpress.com, Last.fm, Flickr, Yelp, Blogger, YouTube, and any other supplied RSS Feed.

After you’ve entered the data for your timeline, Dipity quickly generates a visual timeline. The timeline allows multiple zoom levels by length of time displayed. You can then scroll horizontally across your timeline and click on individual items within it. Once an item is selected, it will display details and images if available as well as links for the source data if pulled in from a feed.

Dipity also offers three methods to view the timeline data. List view is a more traditional chronological view; Flipbook view is a coverflow method; and Map View offers a world map view if the items are geo tagged.

In terms of teaching and learning, the site might be used by students and teachers to create and share interactive timelines about any subject or topic. With Dipity, students might be given the opportunity to bring history to life by embedding relevant YouTube videos or images into their timelines. Teachers might create a timeline of the day by combining Dipity with classroom tweets from Twitter. Timelines can be created by students individually or as a class and posted on a class website as a study resource.

Here are a couple of great examples: The History of Russia and Eurasian Republics, The Major Events of World War Two, and a History of ACU on YouTube from our own Kyle Dickson.

Thanks to EduResources for drawing attention to CLARe (Contextualised Learning Activity Repository), a repository for online learning and teaching materials. CLARe currently contains resources related to language learning and study skills; however, according to EduResources, plans are underway to expand the contents.

The repository contains complete interactive, multimedia activities (learning objects) and individual resources, such as texts, video or audio recordings (assets). These materials were created as part of the JISC L2O project and comprise materials initially supplied by developers at the universities of Portsmouth, Reading, Surrey and Southampton. CLARe asserts that they have designed their materials to be flexible—they can be used in a blended learning/teaching situation or independently by students.

CLARe is running on GNU EPrints, repository software that generates eprints repositories compliant with the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting OAI 1.1 and 2.0. The GNU EPrints repository-creating software is available for free at http://software.eprints.org/.

Yesterday, our friends at Mobile Learning posted an article highlighting a new, free mobile web site hosting and authoring service called Wirenode. Wirenode uses a Web 2.0/AJAX interface to create mobile websites and to integrate Web 2.0 services including Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS, image galleries, or other “widgets.” The integration also works back into Web 2.0 with a widget available for Facebook and Mobile Facebook. The site incorporates media and interactivity, which may be uploaded by the user, and also offers an analytics tool for users who wish to track the amount of visitors/students checking out their mobile site.

As Mobile Learning suggests, Wirenode might be a terrific tool to help teachers and students create and present information in a mobile format, and is certainly a must-see for educators interested in utilizing mobile devices for enhancing and supporting teaching and learning.

The open access movement continues to grow as the Harvard Law School seeks a broader audience for faculty research and scholarship. Earlier this month HLS faculty voted to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

“The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world,” said Dean Elena Kagan. “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

Click here to read HLS’s full news release.

T.H.E. Journal is featuring another very interesting article by Dr. Ruth Reynard this week, which discusses the ongoing debate concerning the benefits/drawbacks of social networking tools and software in education. In the article, Reynard seeks to explore whether or not social networking as an instructional concept and user skill can be integrated into more conventional approaches to teaching and learning? And whether or not the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in these conventional learning environments?

To help answer these questions, Reynard mines a recent data-rich survey conducted by The National School Boards Association (USA) in partnership with research firm Grunwald Associates and with the support of Microsoft, Newscorp, and Verizon, which dissects social and education related activity patterns by American students. The focus of the study was K-12 instruction; however, much can be learned from the results of this study that apply to the uses of social networking technology in general.

As Reynard fleshes out the debate, she ultimately comes to the conclusion that an appropriate response to social networking tools is not to reject them as irrelevant to learning but to realize that current students are likely to already be familiar with the passive uses of social networking and need to be challenged towards innovation. She argues that we are already challenged in that regard with all learners: engaging students at a higher level to develop active learning skills and facilitate full engagement in the learning process. She writes: “The issue then is to build on what is already being done and accepted by students as a familiar activity to develop more innovative uses of the same activity and encourage students to become engaged participants in their online connections.”

Reynard’s full article is certainly worth checking out.

Open Culture recently posted an interesting article about BlogTalkRadio, which provides anyone with a computer and telephone the opportunity to create a live radio show, and then later turn the broadcast into a podcast.

OC reports that, so far, about 82,000 shows have aired on this free service, and about 2.4 million listeners tune in each month. Among the broadcasts, you’ll find interviews with Brian DePalma, Yoko Ono, Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail), Jodi Picoult (author of 14 novels), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Frank Rich (New York Times columnist), Phil Donahue (director of the new film Body of War), and David Mamet (famous screenwriter and playwright). Some noteworthy shows hosted by BlogTalkRadio include: the Smithsonian Channel, Mr. Media, Movie Geeks United, ZNE’s Circa Arte, BC Radio Live, The Poor Chef, and 3 Chicks on Lit.

As OC suggests, this service seems particularly useful for anyone who wants to create a broadcast/podcast but doesn’t want to grapple with the technical side of things. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this description fits many of the educators I know. Consequently, BlogTalkRadio might be a great option for teachers looking to create podcasts to supplement their course content without exerting too much time and effort.

Get more info on BlogTalkRadio here, and check out their “Best of” section here.

Our friends at Mobile Learning recently called attention to an excellent mLearning blog by Digital Learning Consultant, Dean Shareski. Shareski’s experience with students and teachers using mobile phones as learning tools demonstrates the tremendous educational potential of these devices in learning contexts.  In his latest installment, Shareski discusses a presentation by his colleague Carla Dolman at the recent TLT conference. For the presentation, Dolman brought along some of her students to help her field many of the tough questions so often asked by educators at any session on mobile learning:

“Did it change your learning? Were you tempted to use it to text or call in off task ways? Was it just a novelty? How did students who didn’t have a cellphone feel? Are you still using it for learning?”

Dean relates that the students not only handled these tough questions, but were also able to facilitate a hands-on learning experience, demonstrating to the audience how they shared files via Bluetooth. Shareski plans to create an online version of the students’ presentation to share their insights with a wider, online audience.  In the meantime, you can view this video of Dolman and some of her students talking about their experiences with mobile learning:

Our friends at TUAW recently endorsed a new iPhone-compatible Wikipedia interface. Developer, Comoki, has released a nice alternative to a number of other applications like iPodia. TUAW asserts that it has a more reliable “Save” feature and makes some wise formatting decisions on the page, including making bulleted lists collapsible. Comoki also makes use of a little Ajax for zooming images without reloading the page.

Of course, you may prefer to go offline with something like wikipedia-iphone (Google Code). Or perhaps make use of an older iPod for such pursuits. As you know in the classroom, it’s always handy to have unlimited access to questionable information from an suspicious source.

The New Media Consortium recently announced a competitive award program for educational communities in Second Life and Project Wonderland. Twenty grants totaling $100,000 in cash and development assistance will be awarded this year to fund these educational efforts.

According to the consortium, NMC is “looking for projects that use immersive 3D environments to teach cross-disciplinary concepts that are difficult to teach by traditional means.” The criteria for selection include novel approaches to learning, immersiveness, and broad applicability (across disciplines).

Individual prizes include $500 in cash and $4,500 in development assistance from NMC Virtual Worlds, a program within NMC that provides pro bono services for education. The assistance includes “professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services,” according to NMC.

Proposals are now being accepted, and the submission period will remain open until all 20 grants have been awarded. The competitive awards are open to all but are geared specifically toward educators at K-12 and post-secondary institutions. Winners agree to make all finished materials developed as a part of the funded program available for license under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Click here for more information.