Theme+4,+Informational+Technologies


 * Tools C: Informational Technologies/Search Engines**

A: Finer control over the search terms, how used, better results returned B: Finer control over the organisation of the search results – type and format of .. C: Getting away from text based and linear ways of presenting text D: Personal Search
 * Search Engine Developments:**

C: Changes in the way in which search engines are being presented. Questioning why they are text based only. Providing for other means of presenting search results other than texts. //Eg: Quintura, wikimindmap, timetube and tag galaxy.//

Another use of a map or images for connecting concepts – ie. [|www.heathline.com/human-body-maps].

D: Personalisation of the Web
 * Eg: Rollyo – to instruct to search certain parts of the web (certain sources) but not others. Info. Literacy exercise – to come up with your own list of search engines (or sources) best suited to your topic. (in future to be automated)
 * Hunch – where you answer a whole series of multiple choice questions in order to have the server answer questions you may have (part of building personalise service).

Personal Search: Google and Facebook Google Facebook
 * Knowing your search results and search hit preferences so that they can in future market to you.
 * Page Rank (those websites that are linked to by others raise the rank)
 * + 57 personalisation signals (developed in Dec 2009) such as where you are logging in from, what browser you use, what you searched for in the past
 * Edgerank and at least 3 key factors that will determine which status updates you get from others.
 * Use your affinity to others to judge this, political and social position and assumes others of like may be of more interest to you,
 * Relative weight of content – relationship status will come up higher in a newsfeed and more recent items to be posted.

Getting a much more personalised view of the web but the danger is what is being shut. A book that has explored this by Eli Pariser (2011) called the “Filter Bubble” the implications of only giving you the things that you seem to like – prediction engines. Issue of how this is impacted by popularist opinions that proliferate on the web.

Ever narrowing range of information will impact your world view of what you think is important or what you think is going on.

Basic idea that what is of interest to you is also of interest to those you network with. Google fight site – measures how often a search term is used and compares its popularity to other terms.
 * E: Social Search**

Focus now, instead of knowing what everyone is saying out there on the web (page ranking), is to know what your friends and people that you follow are searching – that this will be of most interest to you..

See social relevancy rank table – no longer from the crowd (aggregate) but more important is the friends and followers aggregate.

Will again narrow the range of information you get but should be relevant to you, your interests

Facebook Vs Google – Tussle with big companies about the web (walled garden proprietary ownership of Facebook) or is it better that everything can be searched through search engines.

Quote: E. Pariser – Your Google Self and Facebook self are not the same thing – ‘you are what you click’ vs ‘you are what you share’.

No more searching, no longer searching for information, once your networks have been set up then the information will come to you in your online social feed.
 * The Future of Search:**

Prediction that the future of search is no longer, even google will know what you might be looking for and provide it to you.

__Flipboard Site__: an aggregator service designed for the IPAD and takes your feed and turn them into a magazine format. Gives you pre-selected categories.

“if the news is that important, it will find me.” – based on the feeds you organise for yourself.

How is this impacting the mass media – media sources would have presented information in a specific range of ways, focusing on official sources of information and on the official line. Displace professional human editors.

Network literacy, important that they do have a broad range of networks so that they do not see just one source of information.


 * Pariser: information through editor friends and colleagues.

Idea that the important information will come through to you eventually.
 * Doctorow (2011) – ‘overload’ has a wonderful corollary: redundancy.

Issue of whether trusted sources will go completely or be considered more important.

__Newstrust site:__ present stories from those news sources depending on which have been commented on by others social networks and present them into a news digest. Perhaps like Web3.

Summary: Positives Negative
 * Customisation of content,
 * Customisation of presentation
 * Customisation of context
 * Less need for searching.
 * Lack of expert quality control – curating of content

How you can use these sorts of services to track these services. Delicious and Diego are two examples. Adds index listing and tag cloud tab to your browser (firefox). Create an index using tag clouds. Can embed your tag cloud anywhere you want to. Set up a class account.
 * Folksonomies – the tools that produce tag clouds.**

Libraries use: Waterford Institute of Technology (Library of Congress + user generated tag). Giving two different ways to gain access. (SCIS – Schools Catalogue Information system) – what are the benefits of these classification systems over others.

Wordle: Using this to analyse particular speeches and key points of influence. Used in literature to state what the key themes are in a book that they have read. Other services like this: Word Mosaic (turns a tag cloud into a shape).

Mark Pesce (2010) – Sharing needs to be a bigger foundational component of a modern education system and folksonomies are a good way to do this. About sharing resources.

Postitives: rganic mode of indexing, individual or group indexing, basis of many other web2 services. Negative: Don’t have top down taxonomic control, tagging dependent on language and literacy levels.
 * Folksonomies:**

Specifically about getting updates from services.
 * RSS - Really Simple Syndication.**

1st most traditional: Desk top aggregator – download software to your computer and subscribe to them (ie. Media sites and blogs). Update to your computer everytime there is an update.

Eg: ITune is a desktop based aggregator essentially for audio materials (podcasts, music)

Now most people have shifted away from aggregators on their own computer. 2nd opportunity - subscribing on the cloud to RSS: Eg: Netvibe ( a website creator), Now is Google Reader

3rd opportunity – download a widget Eg. Grazr (a little box that has the latest updates from different media services and embed it into your website), Good way to select which specific feeds you want to bring into your particular web pages. Eg. Rssvoyage – you get to pick your sources and arrange them into a particular way – that is to move backwards or forward through time. Eg: Tabbloid – arrange your updates in your rss feed into a newspaper article type layout.

RSS Feed like search – are moving away from having to search for content to it being there for you.

Symbaloo and Flavours.me is also working with the RSS principles. They will be thinking about it less and less even though RSS is all around them.

RSS Positives :
 * Great for customised content
 * Good for monitoring of content
 * Chosenwell can reflect important topics from a range of view points.

Negative:
 * Exclusion of important information; and overwhelming quantity of information.
 * Have enough feed so that it gives you enough of a picture of what is going on.


 * Social Sharing, publication, e.books, co-authoring, creating content**

Looking at a number of different types of text sharing.

Text Sharing: E.books, a way of sharing printed information on paper. Arrival of books making full use of the digital medium.

Were copies of what you see in print but now you see embedding of all types of media into the text content.

(David Eagleman’s book for application), example of book content utilising web
 * Provides overview of the structure of the argument.
 * Provides drill downs on a particular topic. Still not Web2 direction because not social constructivist in nature. Embedding of audio and video.

Sharing where a number of others can annotate the text and share annotations.

CK=12 Site – Flexible Books, where teacher or students can compose the book – choose a selection of chapters from which to make a book. See video.

Flat world Knowledge – offering a similar service. Open and customizable, freedom to choose.

Scribd – an online service to allow you to share text with other people. Putting material up and then applying a range of typical Web2 technology to it. Tag it, comment on it, discussion, other things written by you.

Flipsnack – flipbook version of the unit outline done in this particular service. Upload PDF to one of these services and turn it into a book online.

Diigo – does allow you to do the same thing as delicious, do with Diigo but is better known for its web annotation function. Whole series of buttons to your web browser, can go to any web page, can highlight the bit that is interesting and you can add notes to them. Can click on those notes and add content, but you can have class students discuss different aspects of the text. As well as a book-marking site.

Lingro – Can look at any webpage through this service and then you can click on any word within the service and get a definition to it. Also can get audio with pronunciation of the word. Particularly good for languages.

Flickr – one of the biggest photo sharing sites, 2/3rd on creative commons licensing. A good educational site. Wikispaces widget – available to do a slideshow for you of images from Flickr or any account. Picasa – another photo sharing account which is on google. Photos of what the kids were doing in class and pulled in to a Google wiki to show parents what was happening in class.
 * Photo-sharing sites**

Thinglink – allows you annotate a photo or any type of image, you can link the annotation that comes up to a further web-page. Lots of educational implications.


 * Slidesharing Site:**

Slide share – same kind of thing with flickr or Picasso but with slides. Educators starting to upload their own materials. Once uploaded it is very easy to embed them into your wiki and people can easily go to it.

You Tube and Teacher Tube – with an education slant. A few other sites that have educational video footage. Again very easy to embed this information in.
 * Video Sharing:**

Sites that fall between the different media categories.
 * Multimedia Sharing:**

Museum Box – create a cube, eg. Choose six images that representAustralia. Used to assemble pieces of evidence on your cube (six pieces of evidence).

Sketchfu – draw and write on a white board, record it and play it back later. Create a little video and then you can embed it. Combination of writing and drawing.

Voicethread – Used to leave commentary on an image, both audio and annotations or drawing on the image. Glogster: allows you to create a multimedia poster, text, images and you can embed audio or video files. Example with a Wallwisher post it to discuss further.

Positives: A lot of creative commons materials out there (use yourself), multimedia interaction, multimedia literacy (development of students voice). Helping to develop multi-modal literacy.

Negative: Copyright, privacy and safety.

Need to decide if it’s to be private or if you can get the