Yahoo, in a statement released today, says it won’t be shutting down Delicious immediately and will be looking for a buyer. “We believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive,” the company said.
I’m still trying to “get my head around” how to use Google’s new “Books Ngram Viewer,” the amazing application announced yesterday that allows you to easily analyze “the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.” I’m sure there are ways to use it effectively with students — English Language Learners and mainstream — but I just haven’t had a chance to think about how.
Please feel free to share ideas in the comments section.
In the meantime, though, I thought I’d start collecting posts and article that provide information about the service itself.
Here are my choices for The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New Books Ngram Viewer:
What Google Knows About Men vs. Women is a fascinating visualization using data from Google’s Ngram Viewer. It’s an analysis of how the words “he” and “she” have been used over the past two hundred years. There’s a good explanation that goes with the visualization.
Here’s a video about the Ngram Viewer (Thanks to Richard Byrne for the tip):
Coincidentally, the same day I posted a very intriguing Google Ngram about teaching in my Education Week Teacher column, TED Talks released a video about the Google Ngram:
Each year, I post a “The Best…” list of good and accessible “year in review” features, and I thought I’d get started now…I’ll be adding more as they come online.
Looking Back at 2010: Teaching Ideas is a very nice piece from The New York Times Learning Network. It suggests a number of ways to use “year in review” features.
“This map shows 2010 Mothers’ Index around the world. The Mothers’ Index helps document conditions for mothers and children in 160 countries (43 developed nations and 117 in the developing world) and shows where mothers fare best and where they face the greatest hardships. All countries for which sufficient data are available are included in the Index.”
And, if you haven’t already received an email from Delicious telling you what you have to do in order to transfer your bookmarks to the new Delicious, you can find the instructions here.
(A day after the news broke, Yahoo says it won’t be shutting down Delicious immediately and will be looking for a buyer. “We believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive,” the company said. You can learn more about it here at The Atlantic.)
The Web is abuzz today with what appear to be fairly solid rumors that Yahoo has made a decision to shut-down the popular Delicious social bookmarking site.
At the time I’m writing this post, though, Yahoo still has not confirmed nor denied the report (and not a peep about it on the Delicious blog). Ironically, they’re making this response (or non-response) when the report from TechCrunch about their shutting it down has been the most-linked site by users of Delicious for most of the day. Other posts about its demise have been in the top ten most bookmarked links.
I’m sure I’ll be adding to this “The Best…” list, but I thought it would be useful to get it started. I doubt that — if indeed this report is true — Yahoo is going to shut it down immediately, so they’ll be time to figure out plenty of alternatives.
So, here are my choices for The Best Sites For Figuring Out What To Do If Delicious Shuts Down:
Google has finally created a process that makes it a lot easier to move Delicious bookmarks over to Google Bookmarks. You can read all about it at this TechCrunch post.
This is a Computer is a post from Read Write Web that provides several multimedia examples of technology from the past that preceded what we now consider computers.
Posterous, the blogging platform, has just launched a “Groups” feature that might be the easiest way to create a public or private social network on the web.
Instead of explaining it in detail here, I’m just going to recommend you visit a TechCrunch post that provides a better explanation than I could probably write.
Husband-and-wife team Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, from California, spent three years and $1 million visiting 80 individuals around the world to document what they eat on a single day. The result is a contrasting picture of what people around the globe consume. With each image Menzel and D’Aluisio add context to the profiles with essays on food politics and cultural obsessions with diet. Here is a selection of images from the book.
Researchers Give Advice for Teaching Social Studies to ELLs is a post by Mary Ann Zehr at the Learning The Language blog. Her post gives an overview of some new research on the topic, along with useful links.
It particularly caught my eye because it’s possible that after taking a two-year break from teaching Social Studies classes to intermediate ELL’s, I might go back to teaching a class next year.
Today, I’d like to share “Part Two,” which includes videos that didn’t quite “make the cut,” but which I think readers will find useful, anyway. In addition, this list includes some clips that weren’t actually produced in 2010, but which I learned about this year.
Here are my choices for Part Two Of The Best Videos For Educators — 2010:
There are two things that make this video stand-out (it’s a nice compliment to the one I’ve used in the past). One, it shows Dr. Walter Mischel, the originator of the experiment, actually saying what the long-term implications of the test might be. Since students read about him in the lesson, it will have a double impact. Secondly, the video shows a fun “reverse Simon Sez” activity designed to help children develop self-control skills. It’s obviously designed for small children, but I’m sure even high school students would enjoy doing it for a few minutes after they see the video.
The only existing moving images of Anne Frank were discovered this year. It’s only a few seconds but, if you’re studying her in class, just showing that she was truly a living and breathing person can have an impact on students.
Here’s how Mashable describes it: At the 9 second mark in the clip, you can see Anne Frank leaning out of a second-story window as she watches a bride and groom exit a neighboring address. The Guardian reports that the scene dates back to July 22, 1941 and was provided to the museum by the couple in the 1990s.
Nature By The Numbers is an incredible video “inspired on numbers, geometry and nature”:
This year, I watched the movie “Dangerous Minds” (I might have been one of the few teachers out there who hadn’t seen it earlier). It’s an engaging movie, but it’s one in a long line of nauseatingly paternalistic hero teacher films out there. However, it does have a great two minute clip of a teacher home visit that shows the importance of telling parents positive news about their children:
Volkswagen sponsors a site that shows videos designed to encourage people to do activities that promote social good by making them fun — an idea that all of us teachers might want to keep in mind. You can see all of them at The Fun Theory, and here’s the one that started it off:
Will Richardson highlighted this short clip from the movie “Apollo 13.” You couldn’t find a better one that would show what problem-based learning was all about:
I suspect many people saw “Famous Failures” before I did this year, and it’s a good one:
And everybody has got to see Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes:
As a bonus, two years ago Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach wrote an excellent post including this extraordinary video on John Dewey and progressive education:
The awards ceremony was just completed for the 2010 Edublog Awards Winners.
You can see the winners here, and it’s quite an impressive group. It’s a gold mine for learning about top-notch blogs, twitterers, and other social media resources.
I was honored to be named Second Runner-Up for Best Individual Blog. Thanks for your support!