Tonight was the Christmas program at church. You can always count on a slip of the tongue here or there. This year Mary was “inspecting” a child.
Kids in the Christmas performance are always so genuine. This year was no exception.
If you have watched the growth of photos tagged with remarkableohio on the Flickr map, you should have noticed a fundamental change in the way it works.
My original plan was to have one page that showed every marker tagged with “remarkableohio”. Now you get a listing at the bottom that says there are 277 pictures, but only about thirty red dots show up on the map. It takes a lot of work to see the rest of those dots.
I thought zooming in on an area would show all the markers in that area. This is not the case. From the full Ohio map, I zoomed into the Findlay area. I stopped when Hancock County filled the screen. I waited for the red dots to show up. I waited a long time. Nothing happened.
In other words, no markers showed up in Hancock County. This is about as bad as it can get. I have specified a tag with at least fifty hits around the county where I live and none of the markers are on the map. To get those markers at this new zoom level, I have to do a completely new search by clicking “Search the map” and then TYPING my tag. Flickr doesn’t even remember that I have already typed the tag on the previous page.
After a new search, Flickr says there are 54 matches but still only shows about half of those markers. If you want to see all the markers, you must zoom into a specific area and TYPE another search. I zoomed into downtown Findlay, TYPED a new search and still don’t see almost half of the markers in the downtown area.
Way to take a killer application and cripple it, Flickr. Why isn’t there a button that says “Show all markers”???
Also, why did the scroll mouse zoom go away? I used it all the time. Now it’s gone.
Please give me my old Flickr map back!
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia says that teachers who don’t let students use Wikipedia are “bad educators”. He says that new editing and checking procedures have made Wikipedia more trustworthy.
Try to edit the article for Hillary Clinton. The edit tab has been removed. Notice the lock in the top-right corner of the article. To modify this particular resource, you must first login. This is one of the measures that has been incorporated to protect articles from vandalism.
I think there are two valuable components to Wikipedia. One is the shear volume of information. The second is the external references to supporting information. The combination almost guarantees something about almost any topic with a link to an authoritative site.
One of the 21st century skills that our students need is to be able to determine what is authoritative and what is not. Wikipedia is the perfect place to develop this skill.
Just about all the blogs I read have mentioned Linda O’Connor, the New Jersey middle school librarian that has created a campaign against using Wikipedia in schools. She sites at least two cases of incorrect information in Wikipedia. In other words, out of the more than 2 million articles, she has found two errors. That is unbelievable.
I hope she has banned the New York Times from the school library. A google search indicated they have had about 47,000 retractions. Would those count as errors?
I have been looking for a good “bubble” dialog program to use with elementary students during writing exercises. I found Bubblesnaps today.
The picture above is directly from the Flickr account of my good friend John. Bubblesnaps connects to any Flickr account and grabs the photo you select. Then the bubble and text are added. The final creation is saved as a Flash file that can be sent to someone via email or embedded in a blog (as above).
