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Website Wednesday

Ivan Tejeda sent in a pair of additional suggestions to supplement the awesome architecture site and post he put up a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s the first one (as a bonus the post is on Women in Architecture; it’s called ArchDaily, and it’s a dedicated architecture blog that is going to eat a lot of my time in the next few weeks, I can tell.

He also passed along a suggestion from Paul Wandless called ArtBabble, that looks really, really great–featuring lots of videos about art and art installations (like this one about the MCA’s current show).

Check ’em out, and h/t to Ivan (and Paul).

Website Wednesday

Welcome to DiRT, people; your one stop shop for Digital Research Tools.

It’s a Wiki with categories for a variety of tools. I found it while reading about the latest and greatest in Digital Humanities Research (HERE & HERE), which is all the rage with the kids I hear, and it’s loaded with great stuff–tools for an alyzing text, collecting data, brainstorming, mashups, dynamic maps, bookmarks, transcription, note taking and more.

Best of all, because it’s a wiki, it’s the kind of place that you can both contribute to and rest assured that it will keep growing with time and be new the next time you return.

Enjoy!

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

After being on hiatus for a couple of weeks, due to my inability to find the time to review my tech sources owing to a grading back up of painful (but not unprecedented) proportion, Website Wednesday returns, now with comedy!

I found THIS ONE about student writing yesterday, while skimming through Leiter Reports, (the new Philosophical Gourmet is going live any day) where I saw the blog post title, “Some Students Ain’t Writing So Good…” and it may me laugh out loud. I think I even snorted.

Just so you aren’t surprised, the site is called Sh*t My Students Write, only the first word doesn’t have an asterisk, so if you’re a little squirrelly about cuss words on your work computer, you might want to wait until you get home. I’m not, though (it’s a WORD!), so I think you should go check it out. RIGHT NOW. It’s hilarious. Seriously. Just what you need. Go here and you won’t be sorry. Great for composition classes, too!

I presume it is modeled after the spectacularly hilarious site called Sh*tMy Kids Ruined, which turned into a book and has been a source of mirth (and coping) for parents for a few years now. So if you didn’t find the first one funny, maybe its inspiration will be…

I swear.

Website Wednesday

Here it is: Spicynodes.

Click on the link and then click on the picture to see what they do–radial mapping, animation, interactivity…my next “powerpoint” opportunity is going in Spicynodes. Check it.

Website Wednesday

Ok, I’m woefully behind on everything all of a sudden–I was sitting pretty and then whamm-o…100% buried in the weeds.

So, I haven’t yet had time to check out any of these for more than 15 seconds since I initially found them. Maybe you can?

Apologies if any of them are bad. Please let us all know what you find out…

Website Wednesday

Today’s featured Web site comes from Michael Heathfield (Applied Sciences/Social Work), and it’s put together by something called “The Equality Trust” and full of fascinating correlations related to Income Disparities and Social Goods.

To see the goods (as it were) you can go to the main site (HERE) and then click on the part that says “See the Evidence or you can skip the main page and just click HERE to go straight to the evidence.

Of course, there is criticism, too, and the authors/researchers behind the trust post their responses. In short, lots and lots of interesting, thought provoking stuff here.

Thanks, Michael!

Website Wednesday

Ok, this is another one that I’m not exactly sure what it does or how it would be used, but it’s called DoodleBuzz, and it appears to be some sort of search engine combined with a doodling application, so you open it up and then enter a search term and then draw a picture and the findings get arrayed along the picture.

It’s odd, and fun. Especially if you like to doodle. Check it out and give it a whirl. It won’t cost you a thing…

Website Wednesday

Who doesn’t need a timer now and again? I know I do, and nearly every day…

Here’s one for both of us!

Website Wednesday

I don’t know what it is, exactly (roughly, it’s a search engine) or how to use it in the classroom. It’s fun, though.

It’s called Spezify.

Maybe you have some ideas for it?

Website Wednesday

Oh, boy, are you all in for a treat. Call me a nerd, call me an egg head, call me whatever you want (just don’t call me late to dinner, ba-dum-shaaa), but I haven’t been this excited to get the next episode in a series since I became viciously, crushingly (and so, so satisfyingly) addicted to The Wire.

What series is that you ask? The Ten Minute Puzzle.

Presenting, a series of ten-minute (who doesn’t have ten minutes?), introductory podcasts to some of the greatest, coolest, most thought provoking philosophical conundrums ever, with quick, clear explanations of the problem, its history, and the attempts to resolve the puzzle, right up to the contemporary moment.

Great, great stuff.

Website Wednesday

So I was surfing the cyberwaves in search of a good site for today’s post, Googling things like “cool websites for community college teachers.” Eventually I stumbled upon freerice.com. I nosed around for a bit and thought that it might be a good site to post, so I emailed the link to myself and planned to get to it later. Next I zipped over to CNN.com to get a quick dose of headline news. There I see a link to Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2011. I click it. I then scroll down to the education category. What site do I see first? Freerice.com. Mmmmhmmm.

So what is it? It’s a site run by United Nations World Food Programme that has two main goals: “Provide education to everyone for free, and help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.” They do this by having advertising sponsors who donate 10 grains of rice for every multiple-choice question answered correctly. Questions come from six different subjects (math, English, geography, chemistry, language learning, and humanities), with each category having multiple levels of difficulty. According to their totals page, they have currently donated 91864527800 grains of rice. I’m not sure how to pronounce that number, but I do know that it’s pretty darn impressive!

Website Wednesday

On Monday, I was sitting in the Student Pathways Task Force presentation, when conversation rolled around to the topic of how to inform students about the connections between majors and careers (and how students are often unsure, confused, or misinformed), and Maria Jaskot-Inclan (Wright College) mentioned a Web site to which Wright links, hosted by the University of Tennessee. So I checked it out, and it’s pretty great stuff, as promised.

The site is called “What Can I Do With This Major?” and for the majors I checked out, it looks like a really helpful and more comprehensive site than most of the others I checked out while looking for this one. It’s also pretty informative about the majors themselves.

Each major is broken up into three columns: one that lists the areas of study within the major (to a decent level of detail), one that lists the categories of employers who might be interested in this major, and one that lists information and strategy suggestions for pursuing that major with an eye on a future career.

For me, the test of these things is always what they say about Philosophy majors. I know, I know–it begs for a joke, right? But not a joke in sight. In fact they hit on most of the things that I highlight for students when I get asked that question and add a few more to boot.

Not only that, but if you go back a level, the site is presented along with a whole suite of tools for career seeking students including a guide to majors that, again, I found to be unusually clear and thorough. There is also an explanation of the S.T.E.P. strategy for choosing a major (complete with a nice Prezi!), which I would have found to be helpful back in the day, I think.

In any case, my point is that there are a lot of resources to explore and learn about unfamiliar majors, careers and possibilities for students and advisors alike. Enjoy!

Website Wednesday

This one is a recommendation for accessing some great summer reading on the Web. One of my former students, and current HW tutor, David Work recommended it to me, knowing of my affection for long, thinky pieces of journalism, opinion and analysis.

The site is called Longform and they spend their time trawling the cyberworld for free, accessible, time worth, “full length” non-fiction. It’s a true delight, and it is updated frequently.

If you are the sort of person who gets regularly overwhelmed by that bi-weekly New Yorker in your mailbox or monthly Vanity Fair, you can limit your exposure by signing up to have them send you one story a week (their editor’s choice). But if you’d rather do your own selecting, you can rest assured that you’ll find a variety of interesting options here. They also have organizing options by topic, by magazine, by decade, and more. Poke around; you’re sure to find something great.

Maybe even something you’ll want to teach…

PS: There’s also a companion site for sports only writing called Sportsfeat. I’m not sure if/how it is different from the Sports section of Longform, but I figure it’s worth noting, in case you’re in the mood for something to investigate. All I know at this point is that they are somehow related, but they have different stories.