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Opinion
Is Web 2.0 'Designed for Education?'
3/5/2008
Spamming to increase the ranking of a hyperlink at social sites led to the "nofollow" HTML tag, meaning that search engines can still follow the link but should not rank it or score it. Flickr now adds nofollow tags to links that people add to Flickr. http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13530_1-9876028-28.html?tag=blg.orig
- Learning Value of Mashups. Like Microsoft, Yahoo, and many other companies, Intel offers a mashup tool. Why is this notable? A basic thinking skill developed during college is synthesis, finding similarities in diverse ideas and describing the over-arching concept linking those ideas (an "idea-mashup"?). Therefore, assigning a mashup exercise for students may be more engaging than assigning readings in a textbook.
Blog: http://softwareblogs.intel.com/author/robert-ennals/
News: http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1461.htm
- Online Mashup Symposium. In recognition of the important learning potential of mashups, the New Media Consortium will hold a 3-day online symposium about Mashups, April 1-3. Go to the URL itself to learn about mashups and why they are so potentially important for higher education. http://wp.nmc.org/mashups/section/symposium/
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently a Communication Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT. batsontr@mit.edu
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