John Palfrey

At St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s today, I’m talking with an extraordinary group of teachers at a NYSAIS workshop. The topic is using technology in teaching. We’re going to build a list of resources we’ve talked about today for posterity. Who’s first?

- Eduforge.org

A meta resource for technology and education, including sharing of information and tools and the like

- Digg.com

An RSS aggregator with a social component

- Rojo.com

Another RSS aggregator

- Delicious

A tagging service and search engine

- Moodle

A course management system or content management system, which is open source

- Second Life

A virtual world in which some classes are taught

- Wikia

A wiki service, related to Wikipedia

- JotSpot

Another wiki service

- Creative Commons search

A means of finding works online that you can re-use in the classroom, or that your students could use

- TechnologyBites

A new blog on tech and teaching

- H20
A best-of-breed, free/open source rotisserie discussion system

- H20 Playlists

A place to share reading lists, course syllabuses, and the like, with support for cool things like OPML

Congrats to Susan Crawford, David Weinberger, and their co-horts for a wonderfully successful first One Web Day.  Susan says, “We had to start somewhere, and it was a more than respectable start.”  To be sure.  Netizens hosted events both in  real-space and virtual worlds (SL!) to celebrate the day. “Seriously underappreciated,” indeed.

Charlie Nesson and his daughter Rebecca Nesson are hosting the Tuesday lunchtime session at the Berkman Center today.

- One first is that this is the first video webcast lunch event. We’ve regularly webcast these lunches audio-only. This week, with the help of Indigo Tabor, we are offering a live feed with video as well as audio. (The real-time webcast is 12:00 - 1:30 p.m. EDT today, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006.) So, too, is it being offered in Second Life, where 24 people are tuning in at the moment from Berkman Island, we’re told.

- The other first (actually, I’m certain there are more than two, since Becca and Charlie are involved) is that the class that they are talking about, Cyberone: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, is being taught IN Second Life, a first for Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School, anyway. If you haven’t seen the promo video for it yet, it’s a must.

It remains to be seen if these firsts will stick. It remains to be seen if these firsts will lead to other good things, as the establishment of Creative Commons by Prof. Lessig or the first podcast series hosted here by a combination of Dave Winer, Chris Lydon, and Bob Doyle. But it’s fun to be sure. Charlie and Becca keep the Berkman Center young and just a bit hip, and the likes of Rodica, Dean, Gene, and John Lester from Linden Labs keep giving things like these experiments life.

(John Bracken called this first first, way before me, and added more about a Berkeley example.)

Rodica Buzescu is doing amazing things with the conversations taking place on Berkman Island in Second Life. The most recent event is a continuation of a great HBR article on marketings in MMOGs by Paul Hemp.