MERLOT in Second Life

The university of Oregon has decided to create an environment in Second LIfe that mimics the real-life campus (they even state that the main building is an exact replica). Personally, I’m not convinced that re-creating something that exists in real life, with all its restrictions, is the best way to explroe the creativitiy and freedom that could be possible in a computer-generated virtual world, but that’s just my opinion …

Here’s a link to news about the MERLOT campus:

http://grapevine.merlot.org/index.html#news03

and here’s the video:

ELT and blogging

An interesting video/slide presentation about using blogs:

Create a newspaper from a blog

This great little online site will take your blog feeds and convert them into a newspaper – a two-column pdf file. You can then save it.

http://fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/

education from the kid’s view

I came across this video – thought it was worth re-posting. The original blog post where I found it suggested ironically that this poor kid needed to have some time to collect stamps. I can imagine that some people would also suggest this poor kid needs to learn to sit still for a few hours each day …

Cybersurfing With Young Learners

Lots of links to ideas for using the WWW with young learners:

http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com/Cybersurfing-with-Young-Learners

View more presentations from carlaarena.

SL

Why build a virtual world? Philip Rosedale talks about the virtual society he founded, Second Life, and its underpinnings in human creativity. It’s a place so different that anything could happen.Philip Rosedale (avatar “Philip Linden”) is founder of Second Life, an online 3D virtual world inhabited by millions. He’s chair of Linden Labs, the company behind the digital society.

Tim talks on Ted

If you’ve not yet discovered Ted Talks you really ought to have a look at some of the great speakers who have videos there. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with being the person who invented the World Wide Web. He was working at CERN in Switzerland and wanted to develop a way to make it easier to send information from one computer to another.

In this video he discusses the “semantic web”:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/484

Keeping references with Mendeley

I was recently pointed to some software that is now in beta – called Mendeley – which gives you a way to store research citations and then access it from any computer. I’m still working on seeing the ways it could help with research, but so far it looks really promising!

What I like about it:

• I can upload/store a pdf file and it will automatically extract the relevant citation information (journal name, date etc)
• it will also extract the references in the article and store them
• I can use the online version as a back-up
• it is possible to create folders for references that are related
• there is a plug-in for Word which means I can add the citation as I am working on a document, and it will then create a bibliography (as does Endnote, but this is free)
• I can create a shared group so that with colleagues we can share references about a topic
• it is possible to publish my own work

I can work online or offline, and then synchronise my references with the online version; then I can go to my office computer andsynchronise also, which means I don’t have to keep sending myself emails to rememebr to update!

History of CALL

A publication that is available online, outlining the trends in computer assisted language learning. It is unfortunatley a bit out of date now, though.

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/History_of_CALL.pdf

And here’s a video with the history of the internet (which is not, of course, the same thing as the world wide web)

Thanks to Kareene’s blog for the link, and also for some suggestions about how to use the video for business English.

Understanding YouTube

An interesting study on the growth of YouTube:

Thanks to Mark for this link!