OPLS blog

Yesterday, I found out that blogging will reach its tenth birthday on 17 December 2007. Extraordinary.

What prompted me to write this post, though, was the use of voicethread to power comments and reflections on the article itself.

I encourage you to explore this tool. It provides a great way to share narratives, reflection and rich media commenting. Run the demo to see for yourself and watch for Sord Dragin Man.

I think the success of this lies in the fact that it is so easy to capture what you want to say, ie voice via phone or mic, text and video doodling, webcam, and audio file. Importing media looks straight forward too and I particularly like the link up with flickr.

So, the impact on teaching and learning? Well, clearly, it’s another interesting tool for encouraging peer reflection in our students. There are also possibilities for critically evaluating a piece of artwork or poem, for example. Or even simply collaborating on a work in progress. Once again, we are limited only by our own imaginations.

Except, of course, through the read/write web, we don’t have to be limited to our own imagination, but can share our ideas and experiences with others. Happy birthday, therefore, to blogging

In an interesting postscript to my previous entry, The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

Though Google, Microsoft, the Internet Archive and recently Amazon have all launched major book digitisation projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitised with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are, or eventually will be, available free.

It’s another great initiative and one to continue watching.