January 2008 Archives

I just wanted to point to that the Blogs at Penn State toolset is now working with visitor comments.  If you want to turn on commenting, you can follow the directions here:

http://blogger.psu.edu/help/basics/comments

There are some "gotchas" but we are still working some of them out.

• Web 2.0 is the Rock and Roll for this generation.
• It may mean that a "newbie" may be 60 and an expert may be 13.
• Digital literacy means that participation must be at the core.  Sitting and watching isn't enough to be considered digitally literate.
• Use wikipedia to teach critical thinking ... come up with two completely unrelated topics and challenge the class to get from one wikipedia entry to the next in fewest number of clicks.  I love this!
• Wikipedia is like a person making a sand castle on a busy beach -- soon other kids come over and start helping.  Everyone wins.  Interesting as this just happened while we were on the beach in FL ... Madeline saw a kid building a sandcastle, went over, and contributed.

Something I'll have to see, MacHeads the Movie.  View the trailer.

I am not much of a gambling man myself, but I am interested in the predictions markets that I've learned about.  Anyone following ETS for the last couple of years will remember a TLT Innovator's Series talk by David Passmore and Rose Baker related to using prediction markets for organizational decision making. We followed it up with an ETS Talk and had thought about creating our own ETS/PSU Innovation Market.  It would essentially be a place where we could watch trends emerge as our peers bought shares in ideas.