A number of people have asked if the video that was shown at the Intel keynote is available online, so here are some links: Flash 6, Windows Media, and a smaller version of Quick Time.

Here’s the link to the original .mov file in case those others get taken down. Be advised it’s a .mov file that requires the latest version of QuickTime (free) and is a whopping 27 meg (though in these days of fast connections that may not be as whopping…) To me at least, it’s an amazing couple of minutes, and I really can’t articulate how lucky I feel to have been the subject of all of this. But it gives an absolutely great overview of what Weblogs have meant at our school. If you take the time, please let me know what you think.

(via Alec Couros) Amy Gahran goes as far into Furling as I’ve seen anyone yet and comes up with a great primer for the uninitiated. She also creates a new job title:

Discussion group support: Some online dicussions mention a lot of links – articles to check out, recommended sites or services, etc. Hunting through archives of postings can be exceptionally tedious, and often fruitless. If you designate a “furler” for your discussion group (someone who creates a Furl item for every link referenced in the discussion), finding those valuable nuggets can be much easier later on.

On first blush, one addition I would make to her list is to use Furl to push content to various pages similar to what I did with the “What’s Mr. R. Reading?” section of my journalism portal. But this is a great list of creative ways to use the tool, one definitely worth Furling.

Tom posts some interesting thoughts on some of the things we need to think about as implementation of Weblogs and wikis and such continue to evolve.

And the classroom is a demanding environment for wiki software, too. Most wikis are only edited by a couple people, at a fairly slow pace, so the fact that two people can’t edit the same page at the same time is generally not a problem. Wikis can’t handle having twenty five students trying to edit the same pages concurrently, or 90 kids all trying to add links to the homework page at 9:30 pm. Which is not to say that wikis won’t work, but the teacher will have to make sure they don’t end up with too many students trying to edit the same page at the same time.

While I was in Bernie Dodge’s great workshop about wikis and Weblogs as WebQuests I was thinking a lot about our idea to create a media literacy wiki for students to create the text. I really want to pursue the idea, but I also need to do lots more preparatory thinking on how to make it work.
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I’m in Atlanta for a few days before heading back home on Monday night to get back to my routine. I’ve got over 300 posts accumulating in my Bloglines account under the edblogger section, and more and more of it seems to be worthy of thinking and saving and writing about. It’s no doubt going to get harder and harder to stay abreast of all of it.

And I mean what does it say when Bloglines makes Time’s 50 Coolest Websites list? Cool indeed. Now we need them to recognize Furl, which, by the way, Greg Ritter has done a great overview of:

But now I’m hooked on Furl, a free service. You stick a “Furl It!” bookmark in your browser toolbar, and click that when you want to archive a page. It pops up a window that lets you add the link, an excerpt you’ve highlighted, comments, and keywords to your Furl account. Links can be categorized (in multiple categories). Plus, Furl caches a copy of the page and indexes it, so the page and metadata are searchable. You can import/export your links in various browser bookmark formats or raw XML.

If that’s not enough, you can rate the pages you save & they’ve just built in a recommendation engine to suggest new pages, based on your ratings — found a gazillion neat pages and tools through that today. Also, Furl links are share-able. See mine. And you can subscribe via RSS to someone’s public Furl bookmarks.

All these great tools in our arsenal to play with and learn from, getting more and more recognition. It’s part of what made NECC so heady and motivating. People are starting to get it. They’re starting to see what we’ve been seeing for a couple of years now, and that no doubt means that all of these technologies are going to be pushed even more by teachers and students which in turn means a lot more great ideas and discoveries and tools ahead. I still find it amazing that I have just as much enthusiasm today (if not more) as I did when I first started playing over three years ago. What a very fun ride…
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