Lately, there has been a lot flying around about search engines. To really understand the quality of information, particularly when we,  or our students search for it, we need to understand how those results are being generated. They are not random. They are the results of algorithms that determine what results appear in what order…
 
In the past two weeks, there have been some major stories about search that have been appearing among the Tech press. I’d encourage you to check these out and consider what they mean for how we gather information and for how we teach our students to gather information. We certainly do not live in a world in which we can simply allow publishers to curate information for us any longer—it changes too fast, so now, we need to learn to take on that role for ourselves and each other.
 
Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying our search reults
 
The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
 
Study: Bing searches more accurate than Google's
 
Bing continues to grab more searches
 
Today, Google’s major competitor in Search is Bing (www.bing.com), owned and operated by Microsoft. Additionally, startups continue to emerge, like Blekko (www.blekko.com), which searches based on slashtags. (Let Blekko explain itself to you here!) Finally, major technological innovation is actually being diverted away from “traditional” Search and to location-based Search (using GPS and mobile devices) and to Social Search (in which people rely on their social networks to help them conduct searches).  This shift probably represents the most important gleaning from all of this—15 years ago, Yahoo! thought it could manage users’ experiences on the Internet by cataloging websites in to categories. The explosion of the web made that effort futile, and search was born. Over the past decade, Google grew in to one of the most important corporations ever, and now, it would appear that we are already moving beyond search, so, as educators, we must understand that, not only is information constantly flowing and changing, but how we access it and evaluate it must also be constantly flowing and changing.

Tags: Search, Google, Bing

In School District 21, approximately 70% of our families have Internet access at home and 30% do not. When breaking this number down further, even more interesting and important information is revealed. On the one end of the spectrum, a couple of schools have populations in which 95% of families do have Internet access. On the flip side, in another District 21 school, only 20% of families have Internet access. Approximately half of our English language learners have Internet access at home. We even know that Internet access is only related in a minor way to income--meaning that there are many low income families that have Internet access as well as families not classified as low income that do not have Internet access. Unfortunately, we do not know more about the nature of the Internet access in the homes of District 21 families. For example, we do not know who has dial-up connections to the Internet versus who has high-speed connections over cable or DSL. Nevertheless, the Internet is not yet completely commonplace in our community.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the mobile telephone is establishing itself as the basic tool for connecting people around the world. It is now predicted that by 2012 nearly every adult in the world (and many adolescents) will have his or her own mobile phone, which, of course, will also include some form of Internet access.

For more information on this, read the article from The Guardian. Also, consider what this new technology means for the idea of knowledge? What does it mean for classroom instruction?

Tags: SmartPhones

Yesterday, an alpha version (a very early test version) of Wikia Search launched. It has initially been created by the founder of Wikipedia, and like Wikipedia, the idea is that it will be managed by everyone who uses it (and has the know-how to manage it and has the desire to do something to it). Like with Wikipedia, the belief is that transparency will make it a valuable tool versus the other search engines, like Google and Yahoo. They are based on a model of generating advertising revenue, and they keep very secret the formulas that are used to determine the order that web pages appear in the search listings. (It’s much better to be near the top of the rankings after a search! Corporations and organizations will use all kinds of technical tricks to try to get their websites placed there!)

This is really a revolution in the goal of searching the Internet. Here the goal is to simply help you find what you need and to allow everyone who knows anything about computer programming to contribute to that process.

Read the BBC article.

As of yet, District 21 makes no recommendation about the use of Wikia for yourselves, personally or professionally. Additionally, we have policies that clearly guide us in our use of search engines with students. Our students live in a very different world... as do we...

While the process of supporting everyone through the successful implementation and distribution of report cards can be extraordinarily time consuming, upon doing a little bit of "web-surfing," it did seem necessary to share one important link that can take you out to all kinds of other really interesting and useful education links, The 2007 Edublog Awards website, a site which gives awards to education-related websites in number of different categories. With second trimester underway, take a few moments from some professional learning of your own, and see how it can inspire you to create units and lessons that challenge even more students in even more effective ways!

Uruguay has made the first official purchase of laptops from the $100 laptop project. Though, the laptops currently cost nearly $200, Uruguay has made a commitment to purchase one for every child in the country in the next three years. This ambitious plan comes from a country that is not nearly as economically impoverished as some of the international states that this project hopes to benefit in the future. When one considers an initiative such as this, it does raise questions about how soon alternative machines, which are just beginning to be released even in suburban Chicagoland, how long it will be until inexpensive laptops have become as common as the textbook. When they do, what does that mean for student learning in a world in which 24 out of every 25 students that have Internet access have some type of web presence like a MySpace or Facebook page?

As you may know, on Friday, October 26, 2007, Apple released its newest operating system. Some of our more tech-savvy staff members have wondered when they'll get their hands on it in the classroom. Well, in short, for a variety of reasons, School District 21 will not be rushing to be the first ones to load the new operating system on to our computers. Read more (below) to learn about why we are not making the switch now!

Tech_Tidbits_102607

Over the last few years, a combination of do-gooders, computer science professors, and major corporations have combined to develop and begin producing an expensive laptop computer that would actually function in the real life conditions of rural life in the world’s “least developed countries.” Dubbed the $100 laptop, this machine would could not rely on constant electricity, and it had to be extremely rugged, all while costing a fraction of what the least expensive portable computers cost at big box retailers. Successful these engineers have been in the development of their machine, but now they continue to struggle in raising funds to pay for the machines and the government-based orders to supply them to schools and children.

Yesterday, a shrewd marketing strategy was announced to sell these computers in the United States, 1 for 2. That’s right! You pay for two computers, but you only take one home. The other goes off to Haiti!

Read about it on the BBC website!

More info on this amazing computer from the BBC!