Yesterday, our friends at Open Culture posted a fascinating and accessible video by Michael Wesch dealing with the intricacies of Web. 2.0. Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology, has become something of an internet phenomenon, having produced two wonderful videos that help demystify the world of Web 2.0.Wesch has a new video getting some play.

Below you can watch a talk he recently gave at The Library of Congress, where he uses video to dissect the new mediascape that we’re living in, and how it’s changing our relationships … for better or for worse.

Be sure to check out Wesch’s other videos, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and “Information R/evolution.”

Today, T.H.E Journal posted a great article describing a recent educational technology initiative in Saugus Union School District in Santa Clarita, CA. The district is launching a new writing program for its fourth-grade students that couples writing and science using ultra-mobile devices and collaborative learning software, among other technologies. According to T.H.E Journal, the initiative is being funded through a $1.4 million EETT competitive grant the district recently won.

The initiative, dubbed “Student Writing Achievement Through Technology Enhanced Collaboration” (SWATTEC), focuses on writing achievement within the science curriculum. T.H.E Journal reports that EETT funding will provide access to Asus wireless ultra-mobile devices (UMDs) for all 1,700 fourth-grade students in the district, Web-based writing tools, and an online collaborative learning environment. It will also provide teachers with laptops, projectors, printers, interactive pads, mobile carts, and wireless hardware. Teachers are also receiving professional development for the initiative.

Although there is a 1:1 component built into the SWATTEC initiative, Jim Klein, director of Information Services & Technology for Saugus USD, told T.H.E Journal that the emphasis is not just on throwing technology at the students, but on using these tools as a means to an end.

Klein asserts, “While the project might look like a vanilla 1:1 project, 1:1 is not our primary goal. The center of the project is writing and collaboration using social media technologies; the devices are just tools that will get us there. Ultimately we want the technology part of it to be completely transparent–to be at once invisible and indispensable.”

For more be sure to read the full article from T.H.E. Journal.

A very informative article recently published in eSchool News presents a great overview of some of the new iPhone App Store programs designed specifically for teaching and learning. The article asserts that 16 of the 500-plus applications available through the App Store are educational in nature, and most of these are flash-card programs. iPhone users can download the applications—which range in price from $39.99 to free of charge—by accessing the App Store through Apple’s iTunes software and clicking on the “education” category.

eSchool news goes on to highlight specific applications such as Modality Inc., a company that transforms content from reference books to mobile applications. Modality has provided iPhone users with Netter’s Neuroscience Flash Cards and Netter’s Anatomy Flash Cards. Both sets of cards are based on Netter’s Atlases and feature a study mode and a quiz mode, where the user can test his or her progress. Each Netter’s application costs $39.99.

The same concept is employed by the company AccelaStudy, which released five language flash-card programs. Applications for French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish are already offered on the site, with Portuguese, Russian, and Polish to come soon, the company says. Each language program features a database of more than 1,200 words in 41 subject areas, with a searchable dictionary and a quiz function.

For more info on educational iPhone apps, be sure to visit eSchool New’s full article.

Google recently announced that it will be embarking on a tour in September in a renovated school bus running bio-diesel to show off Google Apps Education Edition on campuses across the United States. At the Campus Technology Conference in Boston, Google announced that it counts a million users worldwide on campuses–both K-12 and higher education–using its suite of online services.

Google Apps for Education includes:

• Gmail, Google’s e-mail client, which includes 6.5 gigabytes of capacity per account, IMAP and POP mail services, mobile access, and spam and virus protection.
• Google Calendar for personal and group scheduling.
• Google Talk, an instant messenger client that includes free calling over IP, a voice-mail box, and file transfer.
• Google Docs, which includes functionality for word-processing, spreadsheets, and presentations and offers mobile access.
• Google Sites, which provides team Web site development for sites that allow for the embedding of videos, images, and widgets.
• Start Page, a customizable home page with access to school information and widgets, including weather, Gmail, and news.

The company provides add-ons, such as Plus Message Security, which filters e-mail and does policy-based encryption, for $4 per user per year; and Plus Message Discovery, which includes Message Security, hosted e-mail archiving, Web-based administration, and archive search, export, and reporting, for $8.50 per user per year. The pricing reflects an education discount.

For more, check out the full article in Campus Technology.

Today, Campus Technology reports the release of Microsoft’s free software tools for helping researchers publish, preserve, and share data. The new utilities include an authoring add-in for Word 2007 for capturing document metadata; a Creative Commons add-in for Office 2007; an e-journal service for self-publishing of online-only journals; a research output repository platform; and a collaborative workspace for researchers.

Corporate vice president of Microsoft’s External Research Division, Tony Hey, asserts that “collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers–with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We’re supporting that scholarly communication lifecycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs.”

In partnership with the British Library, a workspace will be hosted on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, providing researchers a way to collaborate throughout a project’s lifecycle, from seeking funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers, and other research objects throughout the research process.

Be sure to visit Campus Technology for the full article, which discusses the key features of software in detail.

Last week The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported that Stanford University will be offering what appears to be a course in “iPhone Application Programming” this coming Fall semester.

TUAW also suggest that the active Non-Disclosure Agreement developers enter into when working on Apple’s SDK might have an interesting impact on the class. Apple’s NDA, for instance, disallows people from discussing specifics regarding the iPhone’s platform, making a class revolving around that exact premise challenging to say the least.

The course will likely be taught by one (or more) of the same Apple employees that teach a Cocoa Programming course on campus. Apple and Stanford have shared a close relationship; however, it is still uncertain whether or not that enables them to circumvent the NDA restriction.

For more, check out TUAW’s full article.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Young of The Wired Campus posted an article that discusses a recent patent application filed by an Apple employee, which details software that would capture video and slides from college lectures and automatically edit them into video podcasts.

The application, titled “Automatic Content Creation and Processing,” was originally discovered by AppleInsider. The name on the patent application is Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Young asserts that an Apple spokesman could not be reached for comment Monday, but the company is notoriously tight-lipped about products that are still in development.

Perhaps the most interesting feature described in the new patent application is the ability to determine automatically when to run video footage of the professor speaking and when to splice in images of lecture slides. As the patent application puts it, the software would determine “a time to switch the first and second streams from the event data.”

As Young suggests, many college officials are looking for easy ways to record large numbers of lectures and offer video or audio recordings to students. The obvious objective of this prospective application is to capture and distribute lecture podcasts without requiring professors or other staff members to perform time-consuming editing or file management.

Be sure to check out Young’s full article in Wired Campus.

Last week, the MASIE Learning Consortium released a new mobile learning paper that explores the impetus for the mLearning explosion, traces out the scope of its current impact and projects the future ubiquity of handheld learning devices.

Elliot Maise introduces the paper by suggesting that “we are at an inflection point for the use of mobile communication devices. The release of new devices and applications, including the new Apple iPhone 3G, highlights the rapidly expanding interest in handheld devices that are both phones and computing capable. Our mobile telephones are evolving into platforms for collaboration, knowledge access and performance support. The MASIE Center is convinced that one the next frontiers will be designing learning and performance applications that fit naturally into our hands, pockets, purses and lives. We invite the learning field to think “out of the box” and take an evidence-based approach to exploring these capabilities.”

Download a pdf of the paper at mlearningopedia.

Today, Open Culture reports that Google has launched the beta version of its new content initiative, Knol. For you staunch decriers of Wikipedia out there, this news could be potentially good and bad. Educators might think of Knol as a more credible resource than Wikipedia because it caters to the individual author/expert, not to the wisdom of crowds. Each encyclopedia entry is generally written, edited, and revised by one individual. However, Wikipedia’s collaborative approach is not being entirely abandoned; thus, modernist pedagogues might think of it as a slippery slope.

According to Open Culture, Google’s model leaves ample room for collaborative writing. It keeps open the possibility that multiple authors will write an encyclopedia entry. The initiative also allows for “moderated collaboration” — meaning that “any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public.” Collaboration is built into Google’s model. It’s just not taken to an extreme conclusion.

This week, Desire2Learn—a web-based platform for the delivery of online teaching and learning—announced a new mobile application of its Desire2Learn Learning Environment. Desire2Learn 2GO uses Learning Environment 8.3 to provide access via Blackberry.

Campus Technology reports that Desire2Learn’s recent Fusion 2008 user conference in Memphis, TN, showcased mobile access to what Desire2Learn describes as “core Desire2Learn Learning Environment data and functionality.” The application includes features for collaboration, interaction, communication, access to course details and class lists, the ability to view and edit user data, support for connecting to multiple organizations, and viewing and editing grades.

The company has schedule several Webinars on mobile e-learning in the coming months.