Google Talk Beta Publicly Launches

BetaNews captured this news 2 days ago:

It’s official. Google late Tuesday released a beta of its highly anticipated Google Talk instant messaging client. Much like the search giant’s Web site, the software sports a straightforward no-frills user interface free of the clutter and advertising that bog down other IM clients.
Weighing in at only 900kb, Google Talk is a much smaller download than other popular IM services, including AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. However, for the time being its feature list is quite sparse.

Student blogs offer new recruiting tool

This story in eSN shares about US colleges/universities engaging students to blog to advertise student life to potential/future students.
Saw this interesting bit in pg 2:
“I know that there are people who contributed to newsgroups in the early nineties, who never imagining that someone would Google them in 2005, …”
Looking ahead, our students’ blogs today may soon become part of their CV/resume when they look for a job tomorrow. yah, y not? highly likely to be so *hmm*

20 Reflective Questions for Portfolio Buidling

Guat Kheng found this list of question while clearing some files and shared it with me. It’s a list of questions that can guide our students to think while buidling their learning portfolio. The questions pertain to the choice of artefacts, in that why/how a student decide to choose a piece of artefact to showcase in his/her portfolio.
Here goes:
1. What were the most difficult parts of your artefact, and what gave you the most satisfaction?
2. What are you most proud of, and what would you do differently in the future?
3. How did you use previously learned skills in producing your artefact?
4. How does this artefact demonstrate your skills or knowledge of the competency?
5. How does this artefact demonstrate your growth in this area of learning?
6. Explain why you selected this medium (poem, poster, film, essay, etc.) and how the artefact demonstrates your mastery of the competency.
7. What have you learned from your successes and disappointments?
8. How would you improve this artefact?
9. What advice would you give next year’s students about this competency and demonstration of mastery of it?
10. How will mastery of this competency benefit your life?
11. Explain how your artefact reflects an in creased awareness and knowledge of what is involved in the mastery of the competency.
12. In what ways have you gained greater appreciation and awareness of the connections and relationships between countries and cultures?
13. What personal insights have you gained from this project? Include in your response intellectual, emotional, and/or physical challenges.
14. Describe the artefact you have selected and the process you used to create it.
15. If you were to act as a mentor, what advice would you give future students completing an artefact similar to the one you have selected.
16. How is communication and working with others demonstrated in the completion of this artifact?
17. Why are you proud of this artefact?
18. Describe the artefact you have selected and the process you used to complete it.
19. In the future, how will you be able to use the skills, knowledge, or experience you gained by completing this activity?
20. Describe the purpose of the artifact and explain how it met expectations of the instructor or client.

Papers of WWW2005 workshop on the weblogging ecosystem

Saw this posting in Mathmangeic, thought some other teachers might also be interested. Here’s the extraction of the papers from the WWW-2005 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics:
Extracting Latent Weblog Communities: A Partitioning Algorithm for Bipartite Graphs by Kazunari Ishida
Discovering Important Bloggers Based on a Blog Thread Analysis by Shinsuke Nakajima
The EigenRumor Algorithm for Ranking Blogs by Ko Fujimura
Tomographic Clustering To Visualize Blog Communities as Mountain Views by Belle Tseng
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog by Natalie Glance
GIS and the Blogosphere by Matt Hurst
Analyzing concerns of people using Weblog articles and real world temporal data by Tomohiro Fukuhara
Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics by Paolo Avesani
Blogging, RSS and the Information Landscape: A Look at Online News by Kathy Gill
Differences between Blogs and Web Diaries by Toshiaki Fujiki
Thank you Lilia.