The Commons

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to create The Commons.  This is a new area in Flickr for public collections of photographs.

The LOC has added two sets (1930s-40s in Color & News in the 1910s) with a total of more than 3100 pictures.   The idea behind The Commons is to let the public tag photos and add comments.  Many of the photos do not have location information or the names of the people in the photos.  The Flickr community can make these collections of public photos even better.

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How much should we memorize?

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

When I was a fifth grader, I had to memorize the capitals of all fifty states.  It was something we all had to do and students probably still have to do it today.  I don’t think my life has been better because I memorized all the capitals.  I can recall a handful of times in the last thirty years when one of the capitals would come up in conversation. 

Just last month, during the drive back to Ohio, we passed a car with Minnesota plates.  For some reason I asked my wife the capital of Minnesota.  I couldn’t remember it.  Neither could she.  Our guess was Minneapolis, but it was just a guess. We both scored 100% on that fifth grade test, and to my knowledge I haven’t been asked the capital of Minnesota since the 70’s.

When I got home, I looked it up.  It took about five seconds to find.  Not only did I find that Saint Paul is the capital, but also that it has a population of 287,151 according to the 2000 census.  I found a map showing the city’s location in the state and it happens to be right next to Minneapolis.  I read that the city is also known as “Pig’s Eye” because of a local tavern owned by a man who was blind in one eye.

That is more information than I have ever known about Minnesota’s capital.  I will probably retain some of it because I was authentically interested in knowing about it.  In a pinch I will just look it up again.

There are pieces of information that must be memorized.  Elementary math facts are critical as students learn to do more complex mathematics.  Every subject area has some items that must be memorized, but it seems like our students still focus on memorizing as the main skill.

The process of memorizing does get the brain working.  I still play Brain Age and one of my favorite games is the 30 word memorization.  I have found that I can generally function better when I play these games because my brain just works better. 

Once my brain is working, I want to put it to better use than just memorizing trivia.  I want to use it to solve problems.

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iGoogle Gets Better

Posted on January 15, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

For the last couple of weeks I have been looking for the ultimate start page for my iPod Touch.  I use Google Mobile

http://www.google.com/m

but it leaves a lot to be desired.  Yesterday at MacWorld, Google announced a much improved iPhone interface.  The URL is

http://www.google.com/ig/i

and it works great.  It’s basically a nice RSS interface that is formatted to fit the iPhone format perfectly.  The form factor for the iPhone and Touch interfaces are identical, so this benefits me too.

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Doodle

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

I have been looking for a scheduling tool that I can use to poll my online students to find out a common time we have available.  I needed something web based and free.  Today I found Doodle.

Basic features

  • No registration required (not even an email)
  • A unique URL is created for the poll and another for the administration
  • Any level of time detail can be created – hour, half hour, etc
  • Doodle automatically determines the most popular times after participants have entered information

There is even a tool that lets you export your poll to Excel when you are finished.

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Google and TV

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

I ran across Google Trends yesterday.  I was reading through my news reader while watching the football game.  I clicked over to Google Trends and made a quick realization.

Based on the searches people were doing right now, there were a lot of people watching what I was watching.  The Packers game was on.  The top searches

  • green bay
  • ryan grant
  • brett favre
  • lambeau field
  • matt hasselbeck
  • comanche moon

The names were all of people playing in the game.  Don’t let that last one fool you.  There were a lot of commercials advertising a new show called “Comanche Moon.”  When the first game ended, the searches shifted to names from the second game.

The networks must use this data to determine what people are watching and what they are thinking about.  Better yet, what if a school could get a Google appliance that will show local search trends.  Maybe there is something already out there now.

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