Emerging Technologies Consulting

I’ll admit it.  I’m an Internet junkie.  I get almost all my news from the Internet.  I read newspapers online, but mostly I rely on my RSS feeds to bring me information from lots of different sources.  In my Google reader every morning, there are things from newspapers, journals, personal blogs, and more.  I have them grouped into folders by topic so that I can focus on one topic at a time.  So, I have a folder for college/higher education, one for K-12, one for general technology news, etc.  Here’s what my reader has to say about the way I use those feeds:

From your 217 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,086 items, starred 10 items, shared 9 items, and emailed 4 items.

217 subscriptions.  You’d think that’d be enough for me.  But there’s a lot of information out there.  You never know what you might be missing.  This morning, I saw this interesting note in my reader:

New! Google Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting stuff on the web. Give it a try!

And so I did.  It gives me interesting bits from the web, based on my existing feeds.  They are thumbnail versions, so they’re easy to scroll through.  It was a great way to start the morning off, when I haven’t yet made it through my first cup of coffee.  The things I found weren’t just fun and interesting.  They were also quite useful.  Here are a few of the things I found this morning:

• Software for programming board games (I swear I’m going to try this out this week).
• Lightworks goes open source (it’s great for education when tools like this get less expensive and more accessible)

I like the idea of “play” as finding good information.   So go have some fun, learn something new.

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• Google Reader Play spices up RSS feeds (ubergizmo.com)

I know I’m sounding like a Google cheerleader lately, but these are just the things that are coming through my feed reader (which is, yes, Google Reader).  Smart Mobs reports that Google Earth was instrumental in the recent discovery of a collection of hominid bones in South Africa.  Professor Berger used the tool to expand the number of explorable caves from 130 to 500.  One of those new caves yielded the discovery.  The best uses of technology in education facilitate teaching, learning, or research, allowing for new ways of doing things and new discoveries.  This is a great example of that.

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• Google Earth Helps Discover Our Hominid Ancestor in South Africa (searchenginewatch.com)
• Google Earth helps discover rare hominid ancestor in South Africa (google-latlong.blogspot.com)

One of the things I’m constantly hearing from teachers and faculty and witnessing in students is that students are bad at searching, even on Google.  The New York Times offers these tips for searching, all of which are quite useful.  I’ll add to the list that searching for a phrase in quotes, especially when searching for error messages or technical issues, can yield all kinds of great results for fixing a problem.  The new “show options” feature allows you to narrow a search by type or time period.  For example, one could search news within the last 24 hours to see the most recent information about a topic.  With Google, narrowing results is often necessary to filter out all the crazy stuff.

For education, Google Scholar offers the ability to search journal articles.  A warning, though.  Only a small portion of available articles are indexed by Google Scholar.  But, a quick search there can yield information about creating a better search in the library database.

Searching takes some practice and experience to figure out what works best.  It also takes patience.  Scroll past the first page of results.  Add a word or two to your search terms.  Keep on digging!