30+ Cool Content Curation Tools for Personal & Professional Use As the web becomes more and more inundated with blogs, videos, tweets, status updates, news, articles, and countless other forms of content, “information overload” is something we all seem to suffer. It is becoming more difficult to weed through all the “stuff” out there and pluck out the best, most share-worthy tidbits of information, especially if your topic is niche. Let’s face it, Google definitely has its shortcomings when it comes to content curation and the more it tries to cater to all audiences, the less useful it becomes. The demand for timely, relevant content that is specific to our unique interests and perspectives has given rise to a new generation of tools that aim to help individuals and companies curate content from the web and deliver it in a meaningful way. These new tools range from simple, application-specific types such as social media aggregators and discovery engines, to more complex, full-blown publishing solutions for organizations. Comments(65)
You can bet your aaS that data is the key to new business models for physical goods Companies are already building big businesses selling digital assets such as computing (Amazon) and music (Spotify) as a service but the purveyers of physical goods are getting in on this business model too. Maybe it’s a car service such as ZipCar or Lyft or even sharing access to homes via Airbnb or HomeAway; when it comes to physical goods, we’re taking the same on-demand models from the digital world to the real world. Even Google may be getting in on this trend with Google Mine. And as this model matures, data will be both the enabler and a high-value byproduct of the “as-a-service” economy. Given that the real world has much higher levels of friction — from trying to easily get shared goods to the people who want them, to the regulatory hurdles that might protect consumers but can be used to stifle startups — data about where products are being consumed will be invaluable. That’s why a blog post by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group on the sharing economy got my attention.
Top 10 Bookmarking Websites for Teachers Below is a list of some of the best social bookmarking websites online. Check them out and let us know if we have missed any : This is one of my favorite bookmarking tool that I use almost daily. Diigo is very easy to use and has a bookmarklet that you can install on your browser and with one click you can save any web page you want. It also has a set of web annotation tools available for free. Besides its being a directory of web tools and mobile apps, Edshelf is also a platform where you can sign up and start storing and organizing your web content. This is another great web curation tool. This is a content sharing service that allows members to "pin" images, videos and other objects to their pinboard. Probably all of you know about it.Evernote is a great tool to bookmark and capture anything you want from the web and save it to your account. As its name indicates, Livebinder allows you to organize your resources into binders.
The sharing economy will become a necessity As the sharing economy takes the world by storm, companies need to start adopting new business models to make their businesses future-proof. Hands up who hasn't heard of the shared economy? Not many. Triggered by these figures, companies have started building their business models around the notion of sharing. In a recession, sharing represents a smarter way of living. As Benita Matofska, founder of Compare and Share, explained: “Most studies around the subject often ask 'do you want to share?' There has been a cultural shift over the past 30 years. But what we do know is that we're going to have to share to survive if our constant consumption depletes resources.
9 Ways Students Can Host Peer Tutoring Sessions Online During my last year as an undergraduate studying history and political science I got my first taste of teaching by running short tutoring sessions for freshmen who were in U.S. History 101 courses. In those days tutoring had to happen in the university library or in a vacant classroom. Today, thanks to web conferencing tools, students don't even need to be in the same country in order to tutor each other. Here are some good tools that students can use to host peer tutoring sessions online. The Obvious Options Skype is probably the most obvious option for hosting an online tutoring session. Last week Google announced that Google+ can now be activated inside Google Apps for Education domains. The Lesser-Known Options Live Minutes is a service offering free hosting for webinars. Any Meeting is a nice service for hosting and recording live webinars without installing any special software. Meetings.io is a registration-free tool for hosting online video conferences.
Collaborate Consumption Notes: Examples Digital Writing Tools I have assembled a collection of tools which break the mold of traditional writing and use the power of the digital medium to create multimodal, interactive texts. Please add more examples in the comments, I want to keep collecting tools which can help to recreate what writing looks like in the digital medium. These tools move beyond just digitizing words and pictures, pushing digital writing to more creative levels. Add Movement and Scale: Prezi – – if you are stuck in the serial, linear model that writing in a word processor or presentation tool can create, try using the presentation tool Prezi to write a story. The Blank Canvas: The New Hive – – Use words, pictures, video, audio, and hyperlinks on a blank canvas to create a story. Create a Multiple Pathway Game Based Text: Playfic – a site to create and play interactive fiction, text based games. Focus on a Skill: Analyze to Give Direction to Drafting: Finish the Episode: Write Together:
Top 15+ disruptive business models based on collaborative consumption Would you trust a stranger to drive your car, or sleep in your house? Thousands of people say “yes” they would. They’re part of the collaborative consumption movement. It’s all about using social technologies to do some very old fashioned things like swap, barter, and trade. From social lending, peer-to-peer hotels, peer-to-peer task, bike sharing and car sharing, people are swapping their cars, homes, even clothes with each other. Collaborative consumption gives people the benefits of ownership with reduced personal burden and cost and also lower environmental impact and it’s proving to be a compelling alternative to traditional forms of buying and ownership. Have you ever purchased an expensive tool or piece of equipment that you never use? The problem: Many households own power drills, but most of them are used for only very little during their lifetime. The solution: Zilok offers peer-to-peer daily rental of tools, camcorders and other goods. Collaborative consumption #2 – Bicycles
10 Ways To Use Technology To Teach Writing Both high-tech innovations for learning and the inability of many American schoolchildren to write well have been major talking points in educational circles for quite some time, but oddly enough, one may offer a solution to helping remedy the other. There are a variety of tech tools and methods out there for teaching writing that can make the process easier and more fun for both teachers and students. While not every high-tech way of teaching writing will work for every class or every student, there’s enough variety that there’s bound to be something for everyone. Here, we offer just a few tech-focused ways to help students learn grammar, essay-writing, and, most importantly, why good writing is so important to their futures. AUTOMATED PROGRAMS CAN GIVE MORE FEEDBACK ON STUDENT WRITING .
The web sharing economy is booming in the crowded streets of Paris Walk down one of the narrow streets of Paris and there’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon one of the world’s most sophisticated car-sharing networks. The Autolib electric car system — marked by the tiny, boxy electric Bluecars and the neon-hued electric car chargers — is run by a public-private partnership and currently has some 65,000 users and a goal to have 3,000 cars available this year. But Autolib isn’t even the biggest car-sharing network in Paris. Autolib, the Paris electric car-sharing network Drivy is one of an estimated nine car-sharing companies operating in Paris. Cars are just one of the types of things that Parisians are sharing using a new-style economic model that is called everything from collaborative consumption to web sharing to the mesh. Airbnb has a large user base in the city (I’m writing this from a Parisian flat rented on Airbnb). Why Paris? The CEO and founder of Drivy, Paulin Dementhon It’s also expensive to own and operate a car in Paris. “We’re less square.
15 Free Learning Sites It can be hard to keep up with the ever-growing list of free educational sites out there, much less distinguish which ones will best meet your needs and help you learn skills you really need without shelling out big bucks. New sites are always being launched and even those that have been on the scene for a while sometimes don’t garner enough attention to make it onto your radar, often getting overshadowed by more high-profile sites. As a result, even those who are in the ed tech loop can miss out on some seriously helpful free learning sites. Here our content partners at Online College highlight just a few of these under-the-radar free learning sites, that run the gamut from providing full degree programs to simple job-skill training tools, offering a little something for every kind of learner. Scitable : Scitable, created by NatureEducation, is an online collaborative space for science learning.
What’s Google Mine is Yours? - Borrowed Planet According to a widely reported post on an unofficial Google news blog the search giant is at an advanced internal test stage with a new service called Google Mine. While Google hasn’t acknowledged the project exists the details reported across several reasonably reputable tech blogs do seem analogous. Google Mine is described as a tool for creating a personal inventory of the ‘stuff’ we own and is to be closely integrated into Google+. This integration will enable various social interactions around the items we list such as sharing, gifting, reviewing and general nosying at our friends possessions. The tech media have, rather predictably, described Google Mine as: ‘Ebay/Craigslist, etc for sharing’. Assuming that the story is true, and putting to one side Google’s history of projects in perpetual beta that never see the light of day, it is a potentially fascinating move by Google into the realm of the Sharing Economy. But is there more to Google Mine than first meets the eye?
Best Websites It's seriously hard to keep track of which sites have the greatest content and resources. So to help make things easier, we've compiled this comprehensive list of over 100 of the best websites on the internet. The sites on this list are those that we consider to be genuinely useful, top-of-the-line websites (not apps) where you'll find what you need. Books Project Gutenberg Own an e-reader but hate paying for e-books? GoodReads What could be better than large social network for book enthusiasts? Audible The internet's home of audio books, Audible has an insanely-sized catalog featuring most classics, many new releases, and a host of quality audio courses to keep you learning for years. If you're anything like me, your list of books to read is literally never ending. Book Riot You can be a book lover without being pretentious. Pixel of Ink Invaluable for Kindle owners, Pixel of Ink tracks down great Kindle ebooks available cheaply or for free. WhichBook Browsing Instapaper Pocket Google Translate
Risky Business: Cloud Computing in the Sharing Economy The sharing movement is in full swing. Innovative “collaborative consumption” companies are helping pool under-utilized assets such homes, boats, cars and then renting them out as services. With the rise of peer-to-peer sharing, it also makes sense that cloud computing—which is compute and storage “resource pooling” and renting—would also gain traction. But just as there are risks in sharing property and other assets, there are also risks in sharing cloud computing infrastructures. Jessica Scorpio of Fast Company has it right when she says; “A few years ago, no one would have thought peer-to-peer asset sharing would become such a big thing.” Indeed, since the launch of Airbnb, more than 4 million people have rented rooms—in their own houses—to complete strangers. Intrinsically, the rise of the sharing economy makes sense. But to make a sharing economy work, a key issue of “trust” is necessary. In a similar vein, the big target on the back of cloud computing is trust. Connect: Authored by: