Nouts Education News

ACE Resources for Lifelong Learning Professionals

22.08.09

The American Council for Education maintains a useful set of pages for academics who work with adult learners. Included at the ACE site is information about Military Evaluation Programs, Government Relations, and Public Policy. (Of course not very many years ago, most students involved in distance education were included in the "adult learner" category, but today distance education is appealing to more and more younger students.)  ___JH

_______

"For more than 60 years, ACE has helped adults gain access to a postsecondary education. We invite you to find out more about our programs and services."

OER Handbook for Educators

12.01.09

The OER Handbook is an excellent resource and will undoubtedly continue to be revised and updated beyond this version one. Coverage includes everything from Finding and Adapting resources to Composing, Sharing, and Licensing resources. ____JH

____

"Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom.

Although no prior knowledge of OER^[1] is required, some experience using a computer and browsing the Internet will be helpful. For example, it is preferable that you have experience using a word processor (e.g. Open Office^[2] or Microsoft Word) and basic media production software, such as an image editor (e.g. Gimp^[3], Inkscape^[4] or Photoshop).

The handbook works best when there is some sort of OER you would like to create or make available to others, but it is also useful for the curious reader."

A Biograpy of America

12.01.09

This video series from Annenberg Media/Learning.org sets a high standard for online resources. The flash media presentations are exceptionally well produced to include clips from historical records and commentary by historians. Maps, a webography, and transcripts are also included with each module. Registration is required to access the free resources. Viewers who visit A Biography of America will also want to examine other programs available from Annenberg. ____JH

_____
"Annenberg Media is a unit of The Annenberg Foundation. Our mission is to advance excellent teaching in all disciplines throughout American K-12 schools. Former names of Annenberg Media are: Annenberg/CPB, The Annenberg/CPB Project, and The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project.

We pursue this mission by funding and broadly distributing multimedia resources for teachers to help them improve their own teaching practice and understanding of their subject. Annenberg Media makes use of telecommunications technologies—the Internet, including broadband video streaming, and satellite television broadcast—as well as hard copy media to disseminate these multimedia resources, ensuring that they reach as many teachers as possible."

The 6 Best and Worst Fake Apple Tablet Ads

29.01.10

Collected by theweek Well before yesterday’s grand unveiling of Apple’s long-awaited tablet computer, rabid fans began filming their own mock ‘commercials.’ Steve Jobs is rehearsing his pitch in the mirror. Bloggers are already at their keyboards. Today, after years of speculation, Apple will unveil its new tablet device, unofficially nicknamed the [...]

The 15 Most Common Ways Girls Try to Look Hotter on Facebook

08.10.10

Written by joePA The success of “The Social Network at the box office this past weekend has many mid-20-somethings nostalgically reminiscing back to the days of “The Facebook (circa 2004), long before the advent of so-called “privacy settings. It was a carefree time when users needed a .edu e-mail address from a select network of [...]

Web Science

12.01.09

This article in the Online Newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology reports on the initiative to establish a new concentration of science and scholarship focused on how the Web functions and how to improve Web operations. ___JH (Thanks to TL Infobits for this reference.)

_____
"To promote Web Science and explore its emerging agenda, a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was set up in 2006, called the Web Science Research Initiative (webscience.org). WSRI’s mission is to foster the fundamental advances required for the Web’s continued growth. In particular, WSRI is focusing on steering the development of the Web Science discipline, running a series of workshops and looking at the lines of an academic curriculum for teaching Web Science. There will be an International Web Science Conference held in Athens, Greece, in 2009 – hopefully the first of many – as well as a new journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science."

"Web Science is not just modelling the current Web. It is about engineering new infrastructure protocols by using scientific and technological tools from many disciplines to understand the human society that uses them, to create beneficial new systems – which may involve extremely radical thinking about both technology and society (Shneiderman 2007). Such new engineering must respect the invariants of the Web experience: decentralisation to avoid bottlenecks and allow increases of scale; serendipitous reuse of information; fairness, openness and trust. In this way, the Web will remain a technology that enhances human society, and supports human aspiration."

Translating the World's Information with Google Translator

22.08.09

This is an informative article from the Google Blog about using the Google Translator Toolkit. Of course translation services are vital components to facilitate the world-wide sharing of educational resources. ____JH
_______
At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit's bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world's Internet population.


Besides Wikipedia, we've also integrated with Knol, and we support common document types including Word and HTML. For translation professionals, we provide advanced features such as terminology and translation memory management.

For more information, check out our introductory video below. And if you're a professional translator or just a linguaphile, try Google Translator Toolkit for easier and faster translations. Be sure and let us know what you think.


Posted by Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali, Google Translator Toolkit team