« Networked objects at ITP as art… Etech2005   |   Main   |   New use-case for IE: Yahoo! Launch videos? »

Surprisingly neat stuff going on in education… ETech2005

I’m in the session on From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool, and it’s been far more relevant that I expected. I learned about a new tool that is totally pertinent for both my own projects and the wiki-hunt we’re doing for the bloghercon: Instiki is a personal, client-based wiki written in Ruby. *Have* to try this one (this is more for my projects that the bloghercon thing). Personal note: Ruby is cute.

For the bloghercon wiki, I thought of rolling our own via my Dreamhost account, but then (der, just after talking to Abe of JotSpot) thought that Socialtext or JotSpot would work perfectly for this. Our list of organizing and advising chicks (and it is all chicks, dudes - and I’ll declare that I’m not at all sure how I feel about that) is growing big fast and email got unweildy for me yesterday (the day it encompassed me). I’ve got a request in to Socialtext and will try to find Abe again to see we can get a trial there. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this space, so I’m not sure which of the tools will work best for us. Best to explore both.

Wow, and this school stuff keeps getting interesting. That’s a lesson to all of us to dismiss agenda topics outside of our normal high tech poweruser base.

There’s a new tool called SchoolBell 1.0 with a calendaring application (calendar servers/syndication is also something that I’ve been thinking and writing about).

Very good to see education is such a hotbed of useful development. The needs and resouces and tech-skills/familiarity index of most educators is an excellent model to generate applications that real users can pick up and use.