Mar
18
McCain Embraces Tech Executives For White House Push - TechCrunch Interviews Carly Fiorina
Posted by admin
Senator McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has twice this month embraced technology leaders in his push to become president. On March 7 Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, joined the Republican National Committee as Victory Chairman. And this last weekend Meg Whitman, the outgoing CEO of Ebay, became McCain’s campaign co-chair.
Frankly, he’ll need [...]
Tags: technology
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Mar
17
Best Green Tech Tips
Posted by admin
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Mar
14
Shell shock
Posted by Technology-blog
An MIT materials scientist's research on sea snails has helped transform battery technology and may end the era when cell phones die if they're dropped and PDAs must be replaced if they get dunked in the tub. Thanks to those sea snails and a eureka moment, Angela Belcher, Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, is developing smart nano-materials--hybrids of organic and inorganic components--beginning with a rechargeable, biologically based battery that looks like plastic food wrap........
Tags: technologyRelated posts
Mar
12
Cheaper Ink Coming
Posted by admin
After putting Hewlett-Packard’s printer line in their cross hairs in 2007, Eastman Kodak and startup The Memjet Cos. are looking to ramp up their assault this year.Kodak went after the lucrative market for inkjet printers in February 2007 when it unveiled printers aimed at users frustrated with high-priced replacement cartridges.
Soon after Kodak’s inkjet rollout, Memjet unveiled what many observers called a technological breakthrough for inkjet printers, with eye-popping speeds and quality prints. Memjet wants to license the technology, rather than make its own printers, but it has yet to announce any licensees.
Kodak has high hopes for the printer market. For years, the multibillion-dollar inkjet printer industry has wooed buyers with money-losing printers and made up for losses with sales of pricey replacement ink cartridges.
Kodak did the opposite. It opted to charge more for its printers but offer replacement cartridges for as little as half industry rates.
Kodak is asking people to change the way they buy their printers. Changing consumer behavior is never simple, but Kodak is making some inroads with users frustrated by high cartridge costs, analysts say.
Some analysts are higher on Memjet than they are on Kodak.
Memjet is the brainchild of Australia’s Silverbrook Research. The company says its printer technology pumps out full-color pages at 60 pages per minute, at least twice as fast as many inkjet printers and about as fast as high-end laser printers. HP says it has similar technology in its existing Edgeline printers.
Memjet says its printers might sell for a few hundred dollars, a bit higher than average, and ink refills for a fraction of the cost of most brand-name printer cartridges. So its tack is similar to Kodak’s.
Memjet had targeted 2008 for the launch of the first product made by a licensee of its technology, a photo printer. Kim Beswick, vice president of marketing for Memjet, says the firm changed course last year to first focus on larger-format printers for the consumer/office market.
She says the larger-format printer market is far larger than the photo printer market. She also says some potential licensees are more interested in the larger-format market. Beswick says Memjet could announce its first licensee by year’s end, with a possible product rollout in 2009.
Copies.com
Tags: LED, technologyRelated posts
Mar
10
Web 2.0 At Two (BAISNet meeting)
Posted by Kassblog
I spent a productive and exciting day at Marin Country Day School, attending one of the occasional meetings of the Bay Area Independent School Technology Network (BAISNet). The day focused on Web 2.0 in schools in two sessions, a morning group meeting and then several breakout groups. You'll find the meeting outline and notes at WikiSpaces.
Edward (Bay School, formerly of KQED) and Michael both focused on student and teacher use of wikis at their schools. Michael referred to wikis as "bulletin boards" within his school, a helpful use of an old metaphor to explain the function of a new technology. I regularly wrestle with the competing values of reducing our intranet to a small number of tools and providing the best tool for each purpose. Both WikiSpaces and MediaWiki do a better job of keeping the discussion forum close to the wiki than do either Moodle or Drupal.
Barbara focused on VoiceThread, which I was happy to see for the first time. MCDS elementary students posted photos and drawings of themselves and various subjects and then commented on them with audio. I like how Voicethread supports multiple source media, so that users may post content in the media they happen to have or best fits the subject matter. The Voicethread team also seem to have paid very close attention to adjacency in their user interface. They cluster the icons for submitted comments closely around the original post and display user tools just underneath.
Hoover, Joanne, and Tracy from Sacred Heart focused on their use of Moodle. SacredSF has over 200 Moodle courses, an impressive rate of participation in taking courses online using this platform. Hoover also demonstrated that they have teachers using Moodle at a high level -- one was making use of at least six different types of Moodle objects. Discussion forums at SacredSF also seem very active.
Barbara encouraged people to join the Independent School Educators Ning (ISENet) as a way to extend our network beyond the friendly confined of BAISNet to an international audience. It's quite possible that the launch of ISENet will answer my longstanding question of where are the independent school bloggers. Though still small in number, it is helpful to forge connections with the leading national figures in one place. I have great hopes for this social network, even while no relishing the need to judge whether to post a blog entry to my blog, the Ning, or both. Perhaps I will use it only when seeking feedback on specific questions.
I also hope that the new BAISNet Wikispace that Barbara started will really take off. It is well past time to build documentation and hold certain discussions in a wiki rather than all via email. It's time to end the practice of starting the annual email-based discussion on "topic x."
I was pleased to receive positive feedback to my use of connectivism to demystify the appeal of Web 2.0 tools to a small number of wildly enthusiastic educational technologists. Hoover questioned whether connectivism is just a different word for social constructivism, and I pointed him toward the idea that constructivism, even within a social context, finds the source of learning within the individual. Connectivism posits that learning takes place beyond the individual, within the network itself. The network learns, primarily by taking over the functions of information storage and retrieval from the individual.
I was also pleased that a dozen attended a roundtable discussion entitled "Take your web site to 2.0 with Drupal." In a complete shift from three years ago, we now have a critical mass of school technologists frustrated with the limitations of commercial school web site providers and seriously considering open-source alternatives.
BAISNet meetings happen serendipitously, usually when email discussion on a particular topic reaches a new high, or when someone realizes that the group has not held a meeting in many months. Flying down from Portland for the meeting was totally worth it, both for the specific knowledge I gained today, the feedback I received on my new ideas, and the reminder that the Bay Area has a truly valuable concentration of independent school technologists who understand how to share information for the good of the group. Kudos to Barbara for organizing this meeting and Hoover for shepherding this group for many years (and driving me from the city to the meeting and back!).
tags: edtech, techintegration, drupal, moodle, connectivism Tags: LED, PIC, technology
Edward (Bay School, formerly of KQED) and Michael both focused on student and teacher use of wikis at their schools. Michael referred to wikis as "bulletin boards" within his school, a helpful use of an old metaphor to explain the function of a new technology. I regularly wrestle with the competing values of reducing our intranet to a small number of tools and providing the best tool for each purpose. Both WikiSpaces and MediaWiki do a better job of keeping the discussion forum close to the wiki than do either Moodle or Drupal.
Barbara focused on VoiceThread, which I was happy to see for the first time. MCDS elementary students posted photos and drawings of themselves and various subjects and then commented on them with audio. I like how Voicethread supports multiple source media, so that users may post content in the media they happen to have or best fits the subject matter. The Voicethread team also seem to have paid very close attention to adjacency in their user interface. They cluster the icons for submitted comments closely around the original post and display user tools just underneath.
Hoover, Joanne, and Tracy from Sacred Heart focused on their use of Moodle. SacredSF has over 200 Moodle courses, an impressive rate of participation in taking courses online using this platform. Hoover also demonstrated that they have teachers using Moodle at a high level -- one was making use of at least six different types of Moodle objects. Discussion forums at SacredSF also seem very active.
Barbara encouraged people to join the Independent School Educators Ning (ISENet) as a way to extend our network beyond the friendly confined of BAISNet to an international audience. It's quite possible that the launch of ISENet will answer my longstanding question of where are the independent school bloggers. Though still small in number, it is helpful to forge connections with the leading national figures in one place. I have great hopes for this social network, even while no relishing the need to judge whether to post a blog entry to my blog, the Ning, or both. Perhaps I will use it only when seeking feedback on specific questions.
I also hope that the new BAISNet Wikispace that Barbara started will really take off. It is well past time to build documentation and hold certain discussions in a wiki rather than all via email. It's time to end the practice of starting the annual email-based discussion on "topic x."
I was pleased to receive positive feedback to my use of connectivism to demystify the appeal of Web 2.0 tools to a small number of wildly enthusiastic educational technologists. Hoover questioned whether connectivism is just a different word for social constructivism, and I pointed him toward the idea that constructivism, even within a social context, finds the source of learning within the individual. Connectivism posits that learning takes place beyond the individual, within the network itself. The network learns, primarily by taking over the functions of information storage and retrieval from the individual.
I was also pleased that a dozen attended a roundtable discussion entitled "Take your web site to 2.0 with Drupal." In a complete shift from three years ago, we now have a critical mass of school technologists frustrated with the limitations of commercial school web site providers and seriously considering open-source alternatives.
BAISNet meetings happen serendipitously, usually when email discussion on a particular topic reaches a new high, or when someone realizes that the group has not held a meeting in many months. Flying down from Portland for the meeting was totally worth it, both for the specific knowledge I gained today, the feedback I received on my new ideas, and the reminder that the Bay Area has a truly valuable concentration of independent school technologists who understand how to share information for the good of the group. Kudos to Barbara for organizing this meeting and Hoover for shepherding this group for many years (and driving me from the city to the meeting and back!).
tags: edtech, techintegration, drupal, moodle, connectivism Tags: LED, PIC, technology