Learn By Doing

A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education

  • A number of posts crossed my desk over the last few days as Google released updates to its Google Bookmark service.  What I found surprised me and I think this tool is going to be amazingly useful in a classroom to make it easy to create lists around specific topics.

    Recently I do keep a few Bookmarks in Firefox and use Xmarks to synchronize them.  I love this service and have used it since it was Foxmarks quite some time ago.  In addition to syncing my bookmarks, it keeps my QuickFox text files and my UpdateScanner setup synchronized across machines.  Xmarks is not foolproof though and I have frequently ended up with multiple copies of my bookmarks despite my best intentions.  I now keep Xmarks in check by only automatically updating on one machine and manually on the others.

    I also store bookmarks in Delicious for reference and enjoy easily publishing them automatically on my WordPress sites using del.icio.us for WordPress.

    I last tried Google Bookmarks a few months ago and found the disconnect between my GMail page, where I live, and the Google Toolbar, where I could find bookmarks easily, a bit hard to navigate. The first thing I noticed was how easily it imported my Firefox bookmarks and that sharing a List was easy.

    That seems to be the least of what Bookmarks are useful for.  I was impressed with what a list actually is and what they are useful for.  Check out my Google Bookmarks public list and you will see this video (below) or this presentation.

  • TED is owned by The Sapling Foundation, a private nonprofit foundation, a 501(c)3 organization under the U.S. tax code. It was established in 1996 by Chris Anderson, who was then a magazine publishing entrepreneur. The goal of the foundation is to foster the spread of great ideas. It aims to provide a platform for the world’s smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries and most-inspiring teachers, so that millions of people can gain a better understanding of the biggest issues faced by the world, and a desire to help create a better future. Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea. Consider: SohbetOyunlar1

    • An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired imagination.
    • An idea weighs nothing.
    • It can be transferred across the world at the speed of light for virtually zero cost.
    • And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.
    • It can reshape that mind’s view of the world.
    • It can dramatically alter the behavior of the mind’s owner.
    • It can cause the mind to pass on the idea to others.

  • PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing.

    PaperRater.com combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM). We offer the most powerful writing tool available on the internet today.

    Before we could offer PaperRater.com we had to overcome large challenges related to computational linguistic design and development, handling transliteration variation; ethnolinguistic identification; document classification and entity extraction; name parsing and regularization; duplicate document recognition, plagiarism detection, clustering, and prioritization; automatic entity extraction and entity resolution.

    As part of the development process, we put together a team of computational linguists and subject matter experts to develop a core Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine using statistical and rules-based NLP to extract language evidence from essays and term papers and robustly translate that evidence into accurate codes. We hope to showcase some of our technology at a later date.

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  • Download and use the legal free copy from the author on Lulu.

    The embedded preview below takes you to Lulu for a quick preview and where you can purchase a hard copy to be shipped to you.

  • From Microsoft

    The ancient tradition of storytelling meets the digital age.
    When students create a movie or interactive slideshow to tell their story, learning becomes personal.
    With digital storytelling, students can:
    • Improve their writing.
    • Show creativity.
    • Have a voice.

    Digital storytelling projects lend themselves well to portfolio assessment.

    And

    Download the Digital Storytelling e-book

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