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Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.

Lately I've been fascinated by the concept of personal learning environments. As an instructional designer and trainer, I've spent a lot of time trying to develop learning experiences for other people. But through my own personal experiences with Web 2.0 tools, as well as my ongoing belief in constructivist theories of learning, I've come to believe that the future of staff development lies in our ability to go beyond structured training to facilitating informal processes and learning experiences that occur on a daily basis. While there may always be a place for very structured "event-based" learning, I think that we can get more "bang for our buck" if we think about how to help staff use a variety of tools to construct their own learning experiences.

In its simplest terms an e-portfolio is a collection of evidence. Students use their personal Web space account to plan, reflect upon, and then publish evidence of what they've learned at Penn State. Students use either the Penn State Blog or common web publishing tools to share important aspects of their collegiate experience! Can my blog be my e-portfolio? Could my e-portfolio have a blog? Isn't a blog or an e-portfolio just a website? The answer to all of these questions is YES!

So, leading up to this workshop I took 45 minutes out of my day and did something that I think may very well be the culmination of what I have been working towards over the last two years. After asking Liz to go out and purchase a domain for $8.95 a year, I was able to use the Multi-Site Manager plugin to clone the settings of UMW Blogs within our install (think of it as a WPMu within a WPMu) and voilà, Longwood Blogs was created—it took all of two minutes! The other 43 minutes I spent playing with the theme and reproducing all of UMW’s customized support documentation for Longwood with the wonderful Wiki INC plugin—which allows us to not only reproduce our installation and host it for them, but also reproduce all of our documentation using a Mediawiki –>WordPress plugin! Not bad for a two hour training session, eh? Two years worth of iteration and development given to Longwood in less than an hour.

So, leading up to this workshop I took 45 minutes out of my day and did something that I think may very well be the culmination of what I have been working towards over the last two years. After asking Liz to go out and purchase a domain for $8.95 a year,

Brings all your web content together into a blog format. Swurl supports your existing blog, pictures, links, videos, and more.

I seem to have left pieces of myself scattered around the internet. This is my attempt to pull some of those pieces together.

This site is an experiment in personal publishing. All of the content is managed by Denna herself without a local content management system. She controls everything from her existing accounts on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Ma.gnolia, Twitter and Upcoming. Before we started planning, we knew that Denna was already actively using the functionality of other web sites to share her work and thoughts. It made no sense to reproduce the functionality here when we knew we could import her content from other sites and use it on this one. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to create a site that would distill all of a person’s activity from around the Web on one site, painting a rich picture of who they are and what they do.

The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs.

Our first personal learning network conferences are beginning tomorrow, Thursday. I've given the kids the questions that we will be sitting down in small groups to discuss. The idea is that is small groups (2 - 3 students and me) we will sit and have a 10 minute (or so) conference to discuss the idea of their network establishment and their beginnings of working this wa

This video demonstrates the power of social networking. Several days ago, I announced via Twitter and later on my blog (2¢ Worth) a wiki page I was constructing about Social Networking for Teachers. I asked volunteers to come in a help me populate the page. I did the first two edits and then sat back and watched. The page was edited 40 times in the first three hours.

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center. Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons! As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources: news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases. We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center. Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons! As Joyce points out, we can certainl

Frustrated I turned to my PLN on Twitter and asked-- * What about kids talking to each other and learning socially is so hard to "get"? * Why is control such a huge part of school culture? Control of kids--control of teachers? * Why do we not trust students and think if we are talking - they are learning? * Why is restructuring the way we deliver curriculum so hard for teachers to accept?

We’ve spent a lot of time at my school thinking about the concept of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). We live in an age of information abundance. Our students need to learn how to find, evaluate, organize, synthesize, remix and re-purpose information in order to understand and solve complex problems. A PLN isn’t a particularly new idea; learning networks have existed for a long time. What’s new is the reach and extent that’s now possible for a PLN, with technology and global interconnectedness providing the opportunity for a much wider, richer and more diverse PLN than ever before. This is a complex topic that can’t be fully addressed in a short article, but let me provide an example of my own learning that resulted from my PLN.

Top HP software executives said on Tuesday that they believe in the ideas behind cloud computing, but don't like the name of the approach or the "hype" surrounding it. Talking at the HP Software Universe show and conference in Vienna, Tom Hogan, senior vice president for software at HP, said the company had taken time to weigh up the promise of cloud computing, which provides web-based access to remote enterprise applications and storage.

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century. Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision.

CloudAve seeks to be the pre-eminent location for commentary and analysis on all things relating to Cloud computing and SaaS. Rather than yet another consumer Web 2.0 love-fest, CloudAve wishes to differentiate itself by its insightful analysis, it's business-centric focus and its neutrality and independence. On CloudAve you can expect to read about; * General commentary on work related trends * Tips and Tricks for users * Reviews of different work related applications * Detailed analysis of releases * Strategies to increase the uptake of SaaS

‘The Cloud’ is increasingly prevalent in tech conversation these days. Stalwarts of the space such as Amazon and Salesforce go from strength to strength, whilst titans of an earlier model such as Larry Ellison and even Steve Ballmer now seek to appropriate the meme. New blogs like CloudAve play a role in aggregating commentary from near and far.

Not merely some game of buzzword bingo on an unprecedented scale, cloud computing is coming into its own, and it is becoming increasingly easy to see the opportunities for a significant shift in the way we access computational resources and to recognize that the walls separating organizations from their peers, partners, competitors, and customers will become ever-more permeable to the flow of data through which those distant machines will compute.

The Manhattan Street Corners is my working title for a project to produce a comprehensive photographic portrait of everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan. Between March and November, 2006, I systematically photographed each and every one of the island’s roughly 11,000 street corners (the exact number is a matter of definition and, in some ambiguous instances, even a matter of judgment).

Mobile Dot is dedicated to developing mobile technology for learning.

Make a remote shutter release for your canon digital camera (and some other brands such as Pentax, sony, and some nikons) for about 3 bucks in under 5 minutes, even a 1st grader can do this. This is great for getting the perfect exposure, and enables you to go past the 30 second exposure offered with canon cameras. I use this on my Canon Digital Rebel SLR and it works every time...

Make a remote shutter release for your canon digital camera (and some other brands such as Pentax, sony, and some nikons) for about 3 bucks in under 5 minutes, even a 1st grader can do this. This is great for getting the perfect exposure, and enables you

Being able to access your files from anywhere and from any computer is one of the great conveniences of the always-on Internet. Online file storage has been around for quite a while, but the latest generation of services are so cheap and easy to use that there is almost no reason not to back some of your files up into the cloud. Most online storage providers also give you the ability to then share these files with your friends and colleagues. We selected the services on this list because they have a good track record of keeping your data safe while providing you easy access to your files from wherever you are

According to a 2008 IDC white paper, 2007 marked the "crossover" year, when there was more digital data created than data storage to host it. The IDC report also projected that by 2011 the amount of digital data created will be more than twice the amount of available storage. Bottom line? We don't produce storage capacity at the same rate we produce digital information.

a web based application which renders boards.ie SIOC & FOAF data within a 3D space. It does so in real–time and allows a user to navigate and explore forums and conversations in a unique interactive manner. As semantic data aims to make a more smarter web, enabling bits of data to 'talk' to each other and in turn providing a richer and more intelligent source of information, our ways of viewing and managing this data will have to evolve in tandem, a smarter interface to engage with the smarter web. A new generation of user interfaces will have to become more flexible and malleable, allowing for live real–time 'mash-ups' of data in a more engaging intuitive manner. As technologies such as touchscreens and web-enabled portable devices are embraced into the mainstream market access of data will not always be browser based going forward, interfaces may not always be manipulated by clicking a mouse and indeed data may not necessarily exist in one dimensional systems.

WordPress 2.7 is here! As usual the WordPress community has been very active even when WordPress 2.7 was in beta and were publishing a lot of good resources. I have been reading them and collecting them.

WordPress 2.7 is here! As usual the WordPress community has been very active even when WordPress 2.7 was in beta and were publishing a lot of good resources. I have been reading them and collecting them.

Sony's Walkman series of media players has done its best to keep stride, stuffing in new features and design refinements over the years, but touchscreen-dominated players are clearly in vogue, and it looks like the company is finally ready to break down and get touchable. According to the Sony stalkers over at Sony Insider, there will be 16 and 32GB touchscreen Walkman players at CES 2009 this coming January. The literal and figurative centerpiece is to be a 3-inch OLED display (possibly that 3.3-inch panel making the rounds, or something more Sony specific), running a touch interface with many similarities to the current Walkman players.