Purrfection’s Weblog

Ning:

I don’t know where to start about using Ning.  It has so many things you can do with it.  I love how it’s set up when you create your own social network.  The ease of creating your own page is awesome and very eye appealing.  All you have to do is click and drag and you control how your social network and viewed and ultimatley interacted with.  I like all of that freedom and that got me to thinking about what if you could customize your learning environment to better suit your learning style.  What if the first page on a e-learning site let you pick the layout of how you wanted information given to you and if you wanted quizzes at the end or middle of reading content or even not at all?  Having that kind of control over the information seems very appealing to me.  It’s making something that’s your own and you can apprecitate it a little more.  I found a great article about Ning and how it’s a viral expansion loop and that’s what helps it to keep growing.  It’s sort of long, but worth a look at.  If we could figure out and use the same tactics that they used in Ning then we would all have successful sites with the number of viewers growing constantley.  That would be a great thing.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/nings-infinite-ambition.html?page=0%2C0

Mashups:

Mashups offer a good way of compiling a lot of information into one without it coming off completely overwhelming.  That’s a good idea to keep in mind when building an e-learning site.  You want to bring in all this information, but it needs to be done in  a way that does not make the user want to go to another site where it’ll be easier to find what their looking for. One of the sites I liked was pricegrabber.com just because of the nice layout and organization of the site.  I hope I can organize my information successfully on my future site.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-mashups.html

Skype:

I’ve seen Skype a lot recentley on tv being used by Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Court TV Shows, and even Oprah! You know that you’ve made it big when Oprah is using the service. What Skype allows you to do is make phone calls, conference calls, video calls, instant messageing, seeing who’s online, etc.  It’s a new way to stay in touch and relatively cheap to make phone calls for those non-skype users.  I’m not really sure how to incorporate this kind of new technology into an e-learning site.  I guess an obvious kind of use would be to maybe host live lessons over the web.  Promote a certain time and date to give users a chance to come online and get a interactive learning experience over the web.  Maybe you could have life video of someone searching through a telescope for the next big eclipse. Not so sure.  Here’s an article to learn more about the background of Skype and how it works.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/08/04/whatisSkype.html