EdTech @ ADW

“For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” - (Famous 6-word short story winner)

Here’s a guide to writing in 140 characters or less. With the advent of Twitter and SMS, the ability to express yourself succinctly and with brevity is becoming all the more important Click here to read this article

For those who want the article in summary form:

• Use strong verbs and a minimum of adverbs
• Avoid “university words”
• Forget about breaking your thoughts into two posts
• Write first, then trim
• Cut out the words “that” and “which”. “The toy train that my sister got for Christmas” can be “The toy train my sister got for Christmas.”
• Eliminate personal pronouns. “I am going to the Apple store” can be “Going to the Apple Store”.
• Write short sentences
• Use punctuation!
• Be personal
• Get to the point.

After posting earlier about our QuizBuilder project we felt it was a good idea to try to explain a bit better how it all is intended to work. Here is an overview:

The process starts with a teacher creating a quiz with a web interface. That quiz is stored on the server in a MySQL database and the application runs in PHP. Once that quiz is on the server, students browsing in with the QuizBuilder Flash Lite interface, running on a mobile phone or in a web browser on a computer, can see the quiz and go through it. Once the student has finished the quiz, their student id, date, score, and the number of the quiz is sent back to the server and stored. Later, the teacher can go in to the web interface and see what students have taken their quiz and what were the results.

Search Engine is a collaborative radio show produced by the CBC, which includes a novel combination of radio show, podcast and blog.The show describes itself as ”your open source to all the surprising and significant ways the Internet is transforming our world…a look at politics and culture through the lens of the Net.”   The collaborative element comes about through the fact that the show invites (and pays for) citizen journalists, and uses the blog entries of its community to create part of the content of its weekly podcasts.The podcast is smart and funny.  The blog is even better, combining transcripts and audio files of extended version of the interviews heard in the show, as well as videos, images and links to relevant sites, in addition to providing a space for the Search Engine community to respond to stories, provide additional information, and submit their responses to the “mobdocs” (the invitations for the show’s collaborative citizen journalism projects).The show isn’t so much about technology and gadgets as it is about how technology and gadgets and the Internet affect and change our lives.Recent topics include:

• P2P file sharing and copyright protection.
• Net neutrality - laws that restrict traffic-shaping by public ISPs to limit use of technologies like BitTorrent.
• The cyberattack on Estonia - how suspected Russian cyberterrorists attacked Estonia’s infrastructure.
• Chinese “gold farmers” - sweatshop workers in China that play Warcraft online for a living - collecting and selling Warcraft gold.

It’s worth a listen!

Brian and I are making good progress on our mobile quiz application. We’ve hosted it on www.quizbuilder.mobi. The Flash Lite client for the mobile phones is almost done. There is some tweaking left but not that much. It basically looks something like this:

On the server side, the quiz creation is also almost working. But here there is more work to do than on the Flash side. Creating a quiz looks something like this: