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Terence Armentano - M.Ed.

Terence Armentano United States: onlinelearning; Share

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Topics I am interested in writing about

Replied Nov. 30, 2007

Topics I am interested in writing about
2 Replies

Started this discussion. Last reply by Terence Armentano Nov. 30, 2007.

How will you use social networking tools to teach?

Replied Aug. 29, 2007

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My e-Learning blog

Google Chrome - Day 2

I'll keep this post short and sweet. This is my take on the Google Chrome web browser after one full day. It's very fast! Google chrome menevers the web at high speeds. Web pages render incredibly quick and media looks good on the browser. It is lightweight, opens pretty quick, and the tabs are well designed. I can seeminly have 30 tabs open and not slow down my system. Of course Google apps

Google launches Chrome - A new open source web browser

This is going to be interesting! One of the most innovative and wealthiest technology companies in the world has developed a new open source web browser called Google Chrome that they will be releasing to the public for Beta use on Sept 2nd (UPDATE!! Download it here). This is some pretty big news as far as I am concerned as I believe a web-browser environment will replace the desktop

20 Tech Habits to Improve Your Life

I found this article to be helpful and thought you would too. I especially thought that the hulu tv service was pretty neat. You can watch movies such as Jumanji, Liar Liar, and other big time movies and tv shows for free online. Maybe another good reason to chuck the expensive cable plan in favor of online media. I think hulu is a foreshadow of where tv is heading into the future. Again, hulu

Medieval Technology -

I know this vid has been around for a while, but it is pretty funny and worth sharing. Enjoy!

Live Broadcasting on the Web

A colleague of mine at BGSU, Anthony Fontana, has a great post on his blog about the exciting world of live broadcasting on the web. There is a lot of good information in his post about using this technology for teaching and learning online. He asks, "How can these tools be used in education? How is this different than simple video conferencing?" Faculty, students, and other individuals (visiting

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Terence Armentano left a comment for donald Jun 2

Terence Armentano added the blog post 'Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform' May 27

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Hello and thanks for checking out My Page in this community. I thought this community would be more dynamic and interactive than just a blog. I look forward to meeting all those that join this community. The ability for us to learn from each other is immeasurable.

Terence Armentano's Videos

The Encyclopedia of Life Added by Terence Armentano
Everything is Miscellaneous Added by Terence Armentano
A vision for free, global (online) education Added by Terence Armentano

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Terence Armentano's Blog

Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

TechCrunch, a reputable technology blog, reports that "Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too. This poses some interesting scenarios for Colleges and Universities that would… Continue

Posted on May 27th, 2008 at 12:29pm — No Comments (Add)

IDEAL Presents at The 2007 Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning

[This will be going in BGSU's eLearning newsletter in Sept. and wanted to post it here first to get your comments/feedback]

IDEAL Presents at The 2007 Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning
Institutional Partnering for Success in Distance Education Degree Program Development
By: T… Continue

Posted on August 29th, 2007 at 10:46am — No Comments (Add)

My Presentation in Madison, WI for the Annual 2007 Distance Learning Conference

Anyone going to the Annual 2007 Distance Learning Conference in Madison, WI. If so, you can check out my presentation...

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Posted on July 30th, 2007 at 11:02am — No Comments (Add)

Use your blog to communicate with the community

One way to enhance this community is to use your blog space to let us know what you are reading, thinking, researching, etc. in the field of online teaching and learning. Also, If you already keep a blog outside of this community like I do, you can post a link to your blog and also use your RSS feed reader on the left hand side of the page to aggregate your blog onto your page.

Posted on June 4th, 2007 at 9:58am — No Comments (Add)

TerenceOnline

I currently have a blog at http://terenceonline.blogspot.com and you can see the RSS feed for it on this page.

The developers of Ning are working on a way to link external blogs into this blogging system so I will be looking forward to that.

Enjoy the site
Terence

Posted on May 24th, 2007 at 5:10pm — 1 Comment (Add)

Comment Wall (21 comments)

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At 7:09pm on March 31st, 2008, Mark Cruthers said…: Hi Terence,

I started live and started smallo to develop a reputation. Then I had a little foloowing among home schooers and I took it online. You can start small online though.

Wiziq can help facilitate that.

At 12:21pm on March 31st, 2008, Will Taylor said…: re using Pligg/Drigg in the online learning environment (distance or blended) -

I've set up an installation - initially using Drigg, and now using the custom platform used on my sandbox.similibus.org site - that automatically imports rss feeds from relevant news sources (I'm teaching at a medical school, so am using the Health news feeds from BBC news and National Public Radio; Terri Gross's Fresh Air interviews; and some feeds from the CDC). This imports all items in these news feeds as individual drupal "nodes".

News items show up then as node items, each with a voting form permitting each user the option of one "up" vote; with a form allowing community tagging of the content; and with treaded commenting enabled. Raw news items can be viewed as a "river of news" (all items, most recent on top), or as a table.

A variety of views are available - including cloud views of item titles - with promotion of items based on user ratings, comment density, and/or user-created tags. The interface using Pligg or Drigg would be simpler, but quite workable (I do love those cloud view pages - being a dominantly visual learner).

This permits our user community to "float" selected stories judged relevant to our community discussion, into the forefront for continued discussion.

This is one "corner" of my social learning platform (the remainder being based on user-generated content). My sense is that a Pligg/Drigg-like platform will handle this 3rd-party content well, but other approaches might be best for user-generated content.

So far, I only have experiments with a small number of selected users (some cybersavvy folks who could weather the early glitches in the system). Will go live in one week, I'll post my success and failure stories here.

At 11:59am on March 31st, 2008, Will Taylor said…: Thanks, Terence. I'm having a hoot testing out these installations - as an introvert in an extrovert's profession, site development gives me some good respite at the end of a long day ;^)

As things look now -

If you need a good social ratings site directly out of the box, which accepts distributed content submitted as individual items (and can accept feeds submitted by those with admins privileges), Pligg is a great platform. Very simple user interface. The provided "pligg this" link makes it easy to directly submit items while browsing. Sets up out of the box easily. Haven't played around with themes yet, there are a few simple ones available & the default one is simple & elegant.

Drigg provides almost equivalent features, within a Drupal installation. Requires a bit more attention in setup (tho not daunting by any means). This would be my recommendation if one needed to integrate Digg-like features into an existing Drupal installation, or needed to build other features into a site (such as direct blogging in addition to displaying imported distributed content, &c.). This module suite is developing rapidly, so I'd keep an eye on it, it is only likely to get much better over time.

I'm very fond of the custom platform I've developed in Drupal (at http://sandbox.similibus.org). Drupal's Views plugin permits all sorts of creative page views, and in conjunction with the NodeCloud module permits awesome content cloud pages. If folks wish to clone this, the site is documented on my blog at http://wt.similibus.org.

One advantage of a custom platform, is that it permits one to play with alternate algorithms for social promotion of submitted items, not being locked into a ratings formula. I remain a bit perplexed about the most pedagogically sound approach to promoting peer-submitted content in a community blog or in an aggregation of peer-created distributed content. Clearly user rating (voting up) works nicely for user-submitted 3rd party content (as in Digg), or for items from an imported 3rd-party feed (such as a relevant news feed). I'm concerned tho, with the pedagogical implications of user rating of peer-submitted content. I've currently configured my installation to promote items based on comment density - how much discussion did an item provoke. I'd really like to see some discussion on this point, and perhaps some other proposals re alternative algorithms for promotion of content-items on a community site.

I've put the sandbox site (link above) up for others to play around in, add content &c., hoping that this might attract some discussion that could serve the further evolution of such installations. Please mess around in it & give me some ideas.

At 12:33pm on January 31st, 2008, Jen said…: Hello Terence,

Becky and I team teach a pilot project(f2f) for OHVA, once a week to students in grades 2-6. Along with my master's in professional development from UW-Stout, I am working toward a certificate of elearning from the same school. I am interested in what you have to share.
I would have taken your course, but we just started back up and I feel a bit swamped right now.

At 3:10pm on August 30th, 2007, Thomas Siebenaler said…: Best place I've lived? Denver, CO....wosrt? a trailer behind Wal-Mart. But most times, I find find the good in life.

At 4:09pm on August 3rd, 2007, Mary Hricko said…: Well, I have a learning community now called WEBTAS which has a ning site. I should just invite you as well into my group. I'll do that today. However, we can create a different LC...maybe you can start recruiting when you do the webinar.

At 3:44pm on August 3rd, 2007, Mary Hricko said…: Hi Terence,
I am mary.hricko (how boring) on Skype. I don't know where they we put me in Moulton, but I will get back with you so we can do a test with Skype. What learning communities are you in for OLN? Should we start a social networking LC?

At 12:40pm on July 30th, 2007, Mary Hricko said…: Hey Terence!
I might be going to Madison as well. I'll write more about the Kent presentation to you later.

At 11:10am on July 30th, 2007, Sheryl Hansen said…: Terence, Hi! Nice welcome message. Thanks. You've created a very useful space and I hope to consistently make time to participate. Heather, you and Garrick have been plotting and planning for your webinar and we're looking forward to you sharing your progressive ideas and resources. Let us know how else OLN can be supportive - and be a greater catalyst for connections and collaboration! Sheryl

At 6:03pm on July 3rd, 2007, Terence Armentano said…: Hey sorry about that. I've been on vacation and will be getting back to work and this community next week. Hope all is going well.
Terence