Gerardo Lazaro is hyperthinking...

It has been a great ride since I started using technology in teaching in 2008. After a few months, I introduced myself to the universe of technology and its potentisal uses for education, communications and life in general.
However, something that I didn't realize until a few months ago, is that while I speak to friends and people in general, one of those moments that usually happen in your living room, and we're discussing about any topic, I constantly have hyperthoughts. What is hyperthinking? I'm not sure that's a valid word, but it's the best I can use to explain that everytime I'm thinking I'm having a series of hyperlink activity in my brain. I hear something about Peru, and I imagine the latest YouTube video about it. If I hear about psychology, then I share that there's a great course in iTunes that is free and available to anybody, and so on, and so on.
Is that a consequence? Or, is it part of the phenomenon that prompted me to use media and internet resources in general?
Is our brain getting used to think in terms of hyperlinks?
help me answer these questions and let me know if you go thorugh the same process, or is it about time to call the nearest psychiatrist?

Reengineering the search engines...a must in the era of overwhelming information

It is completely overwhelming to be immersed in the technological world and deal with the astoundingly growing amount of information that is available nowadays. As a heavy information user, I find myself swimming in this sea of data (text, images, videos, blog posts, podcasts,etc), and most of the time I spend while searching the resources I want to incliude in my classses is filtering among the search results from the different seach engines I use according to the nature of queries.
I have come up to summariza search engines depending on their specialty. Even though using multiple and specialized search engines is a great help, it has always been an incomplete experience.
I just enjoyed what is the new experience of search engines mixed up with a spreadsheet feeling of information classification.

Google Squared is one of the new services Google is offering for those of us who enjoy browsing through the vast oceans of information.
It gives you a new dynamic process when searching ands classifying your information. It certainly reduces your searching time and extends your options. You can add criteria by adding columns to enrich your search results.
I encourage you to incorporate it into your searching experience. Take a look at the following video:




Here are some of the search engines I use and recommend:

METASEARCH Engines:
www.mamma.com
www.dogpile.com
www.ixquick.com
www.webcrawler.com
www.izito.com
www.faganfinder.com

IMAGE Search Engines:
www.compfight.com
www.taggalaxy.com (Great to be used with an interactive whiteboard)
www.tineye.com
http://elzr.com/imagery
www.pixsy.com

OTHER Search Engines:
www.soople.com (Easy expert search)
http://4me.sweetsearch.com/ (Sweet search 4 me)
www.ipl.org (Libraries' search engine)
www.rollyo.com (Customizable search engine)
www.blackle.com (Energy-saver search engine powered by Google)
www.2lingual.com (Bilingual Search engine)

I hope these search engines are of good use for you as a teacher or internet user.
If you have additional search engines, please contribute and post a comment.

This is an addition to the organization search engines can give you. I want to include Google Wonderwheel. It is a very graphic way to organize the information you're searching. I recommend you the post from Alan Simpson's blog, One year in the life of an English teacher. Here one of the images he used:

Global revolution...ing

How many times in your life can you say that you've been part of a global revolution? Not many, I would assume, or perhaps a lot, depending on which revolution you think i'm writing about. There are indeed many revolutions happening right now. Some can be summed up in Technology (Information, Communication), others in Science (Biology, Medicine), but all of them should have a commanding force: Education.

I read news, reports, journals and so on about Biology, Education, Technology and Culture in general, and every single day I get enough adrenaline to continue form one more year.

I regularly watch TED lectures, and there are two speakers that are my favorites: Sir Ken Robinson and Juan Enriquez, not only because they tell us the stories and things we must listen to and work on, but also because they speak from their hearts and minds with passion and humor.

This morning I watched 2007's Juan Enriquez wants to grow Energy, and agriculture was the centralized topic.

I have just finished watching 2010 Sir Ken Robinson's Bring on the learning revolution!, and again there was a central reference to agriculture, and this reference was metaphorically essential. We need to grow education, water students with appropriate learning environments, and harvest life-long learners eager to act on their and our world's problems to arise.

I dream about doing things better in my life, family and work, the beauty of being an educator is that even though we can make mistakes, we can offer knowledge and opportunities to students, and have a larger impact in other people's lives.

I am in the middle of revolutionary times, and so are you, I'll try my best, but if you are a student you have to at least match that effort. And yes, you can do it.

Hear me on this...or you won't later - September 27th

I'm a great fan of technology and the products derived from it. It amazes me that we are able to handle information (audio, video, documents, etc) in the way we do nowadays, whatever the information is we can carry it, send it, remix it, upload it, download it or anything that a computer allows us to do.
But as any other human activity, if we don't control its use responsibly, we can lose important things such as your ability to hear.
NIHL (Noise Induced Hearing Loss) is a condition that is on the rise because most earphone users are not paying attention to the big picture, keep it low.
The use, or abuse, of loud sounds directed to your ear canal will have a damaging effect if you don't control its use.
I recommend you to follow simple guidelines published in this document from the Minnesota Department of Health.
And please, don't let this message fall in deaf ears!

Daring Education - September 21st

Every single time I open my bloglines account, or visit my favorite sites from my delicious account, I get constant reminders that information and communication technology (ICT) is the current technology. it's difficult to adapt to changes, but that's what human beings excel at, no wonder we have advanced more in the last 200 years than in the previous 18 centuries. Before people use to create friends communities by postal mail, waiting for replies every month. Nowadays your replies can take a minute or two, literally. Communication has experienced a revolutionary growth speed. Videoconferencing by Skype, or other tools such as Ekko, help you realize that the world isn't that big, and that we are closer to each other than we suspect.
Denying that ICT is a major tool to spread the knowledge is like going back to light up cities with candles and oil torches. Could we make it to our final destination? Sure, at some point. Is taking too long being necessarily conservative? No, it is just denying a reality.
Try it. Give your students the power to speak, podcast, webcast, reply 24/7.
Check out the following video, a daring video with a reality that is closer to you than you realize. If not, ask your son or daughter how many people can they meet through the WWW.

World Wide Web 2.0 - June 24th, 2008

There has been an explosion followed by a snowball coming to us at all times, it is called flow of information. The resources derived from and to handle all sorts of information generated from the ever-expanding knowledge, but most of all by the practically unlimited availability of it, is astounding. Proof of that is the exponential amount of blogs and wikis that have been in the last few years. This is certainly a new generation of interaction between user, interface and the powerful feedback.

There are several websites that promote the use of the new types of tools available: cool, fresh, dynamic and friendly web 2.0 tools. Pages such as Go2Web2.0, and Mosaic are good examples of that.

the best of all is that a new way to interact and present information is available in Education. Generating contents with new approaches, visions and levelsof interactivity. Let's celebrate the web 2.0 and the possibilities it brings us for our social, academic, business and personal life.

Quality in Education - June 16th, 2008

Education is a very clear concept, obtaining knowledge and experiences to enlighten one's background. The education has been around us for thousands of years, in one way or another.
Education, as well as any other part of the human expression, has suffered "revolutions" along time.
It wasn't until a few decades ago that the use of a green board with dusty chalks (white at the beginning, coloured later) was the gold standard. Time after, year after year, the evolution of technology and the implementation of it around the sociocultural environment has marked distinct changes in education.
State-sponsored education, still very popular in many countries around the world, is no longer the prime source of knowledge production. Private institutions, with a significant presence in forming renowned scientists and thinkers are probably the leading machinery of knowledge production nowadays.
However, Education has entered into a new era. Knowledge is no longer reserved for the elite families or people with lots of financial resources. Money is not the primary obstacle for a person to be educated. Willingness and progress desire is the main ingredient, but technology and its open and immensely vast of available resources, not only of educational material but also in the current ways to creating, communicating, disseminating, and sharing information.
Perhaps the "obstacle" nowadays is to decide what to study, where to study and when. Age is not a problem, many universities in different countries have older adult programs.
It is the amount of information that is unstoppable what sets people in jeopardy if good education is not part of its resume.
Finally, developing countries like Peru are used to form and educate people with lots and lots of skills to compensate for the lack of resources (books, equipment, technology, etc) that are perfect for facing the first world working markets as well as postgraduate studies.
Even though my country has been placed in one of the last positions in educational achievements of our region, there is a lot valuable people trying to revert this uncomfortable truth. Unfortunately, usually the ones in charge of taking the decisions are the first blockers of progress, here and anywhere.