Episode 107 - A Fast and Furious April

Tech Talk 4 Teachers

In this episode the month of April has witnessed some huge announcements that will directly impact Internet users. Apple releases the iPad, Facebook hosts the F8 Conference and Microsoft enters the cloud with docs.com

The ITC serves over 12,000 visitors for the month of April!



Right Click Here to Download MP3
(5 minutes 25 seconds)


Facebook Privacy Changes
http://www.macworld.com/article/150822/2010/04/facebook_privacy.html?lsrc=nl_mwweek_h_crawl

Facebooks Ambition
http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/

Docs.com
http://docs.com


Technology Pick of the Week
My technology pick of the week this week is a blog posting from Kapp Notes blog on interesting Random Web 2.0 Statistics

Kapp Notes
More Random Web 2.0 Statistics
http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-random-web-20-statistics.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Who owns the most servers?
http://geekpedia.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/googles-1-million-servers/

Episode 107 – TechTalk4Teachers Transcript:

It’s Friday April 30th, 2010 and welcome to episode 107 of Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m Tom Grissom. It’s been a very busy month in the technology world and I’d like to take a few minutes to cover three of the big stories that I think are going to have an impact on education in the coming months.

The first story involves the ipad. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past month, the Ipad device has been released to the public. The reviews are mixed coming in. Some are finding educational uses while others are still trying to find exactly where does the ipad fit in the education world.

One of the big stories this month for college students is the Facebook conference that was held this month. The FA conference made several announcements that will directly impact Facebook users.

First, Facebook is coming out with something they are calling instant personalization, in which they may be sharing user profile data with other services. For example, Pandora and Yelp may be exchanging data with Facebook, so that user profile data may be used by those services to provide a better experience for those users. While that creates instant personalization, it also comes at a cost for privacy. So Facebook users need to be aware to keep their privacy settings where they want so that information is not shared that they do not want to have shared with the world.

The other big announcement involves Microsoft and Facebook, in which they are doing a beta test with something called docs.com. This essentially is Microsoft Office coming to the web for Facebook users. The Office 2010 product will be released later next month for some users and the docs.com website is a web 2.0 cloud service that will allow Facebook users to create very simple documents like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It will not have the full functionality of the Office 2010. However it does give 400 million Facebook users access to Microsoft Office products. As this rolls out of beta, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this in the future.

Facebook Privacy Changes
http://www.macworld.com/article/150822/2010/04/facebook_privacy.html?lsrc=nl_mwweek_h_crawl

Facebooks Ambition
http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/

Docs.com
http://docs.com


At the ITC this month, we have also been extremely busy as this is the last month before our final exams. I just looked at some of the student traffic we had coming into the ITC and just yesterday we had just short of 1,000 students in and out of the ITC. That will put us over the 12,000 visitor mark to the ITC this month. With the retirement of Terry Hyder, we are down full-time position here at the ITC and I want to recognize the student workers here at the ITC for doing a great job and handling a lot of the workload. We continue to be extremely busy with students coming in and working on their project-based learning activities and this week we have been having a lot of LiveText questions as students complete their electronic portfolios and lesson plans online.

The other news at the ITC this month is that I started a new blog called Netbook Secrets. Now I only have two entries to date, but I plan on adding more over the summer that will share some of the experiences that we’ve had here at the in successfully implementing a netbook program. So be sure to keep your eye out for Netbook Secrets in the coming months. Be sure to check out the show notes, as I will have links for the articles regarding Facebook, privacy settings, and the docs.com website, if you’re interested in learning more about these services.

Technology Pick of the Week

My technology pick of the week this week is a blog posting from Kapp Notes. This is from a posting on April 12th regarding more random web 2.0 statistics. I thought I might share just a few of the entries that this blog is offering.

Kapp Notes
More Random Web 2.0 Statistics
http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-random-web-20-statistics.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Here are some interesting stats. Facebook has more than 400 million active users. By 2050 the population of the United States is estimated to reach 400 million. It reached 300 million in 2006. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and spends 55 minutes a day on Facebook. The average Twitter user has 27 followers. And one of the more interesting ones is according to YouTube’s fact sheet, for every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. That’s up from 20 hours of video in May of 2009. So just imagine the content that is being added to the YouTube website. Also along with this, I will post a link to another graphic that shows how many servers different companies are using on the Internet and along with the Google YouTube service, Google now has over 1 million servers on the Internet, just to handle the huge traffic that Google must deal with every month.

That wraps it up for episode 107 of Tech Talk for Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.