A TAG CLOUD TO PUT THE UNIVERSE OF BLOGS IN ORDER

With the growth of blogs and the so-called Web 2.0, the traditional categories used to put the available information in order have become more limited. Instead, new ways to organize such "digital disorder" have emerged, such as the "tag cloud", which we have incorporated to ORT Virtual Campus’ Web of Weblogs.

Unlike the categories that integrate the catalogue of a library, for instance, which are generally elaborated by experts in classification, these "tag clouds" are created by users communities. This new way to organize the information has other special features such as:

• The categories are not in hierarchical order, but they are presented in a more horizontal, ‘chaotic’ way. The former are general, whereas the latter tend to be more specific (in our case, some of them are: Services, Design, Final Project, Campus, Technology, 1st year Almagro campus, 3rd year Belgrano campus, etc.).

• A "tag cloud" is associated to a new type of navigation on the Internet, which is known as "faceted navigation", where depending on the users’ choices, searching options narrow down. In this way, when selecting a label, we will be able to see all the information that is associated to that theme and can specify other future searches.

These new ways to organize the information follow the increasingly evident tendency towards mobility and permanent reordering of the information. In this context, in which we have to handle large amounts of information, textual galaxies or content nebulas, organizers like "tag clouds" will be fundamental tools.

Here's an independent documentary on the relatives and victims of the Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires.

PART I

PART II

PART III

ORT Virtual Campus at LA NACION Newspaper

From the School to the Internet and from the Internet to the School

ORT Argentina has included in its Virtual Campus a web of weblogs through which the school community is interconnected. Each course, workshop, extracurricular activity, special event, class, track, etc., has its own blog. At each of them -and in special subjects- students produce, organize and edit what they did with their classmates from their ‘subblog’ and then share it with the rest of the school. In this way, the classroom is no longer a closed room, where the teacher dictates and students copy. "Now, teachers and students work all together", explains Guillermo Lutzky, Director of the Virtual Campus. Prof. Lutzky now wants to carry out a digital literacy training: "Not only does everybody have to learn to handle the tools, but also to find and process the information in the best possible way; they have to network. It is important that students understand that everything they ‘upload’ on the Internet is their responsibility".

To read the whole article in Spanish, click here.

ORT Virtual Campus at LA RAZON

The Blog at School: A Tool that Grows and Motivates Children

The web offers tools for projects, links, and communication, and also to send practical works. The students, happy.

Students open a blog, choose a template, post texts, upload photos, leave comments, add a visits counter, change background colours, etc... They start classes and after the first breaks, they handle those terms. With the beginning of the school year, teachers have a new challenge: how to exploit that energy, which is applied to the use of the Internet, for the benefit of the school curriculum. In order to achieve so, blogs are a valid alternative in classroom projects.

Among the schools that include technological tools in the syllabus of some subjects, we can mention ORT, with more than 140 blogs running from the two campuses. The Director of the Virtual Campus, Guillermo Lutzky, makes emphasis on the idea that blogs are useful for ‘communication and production’: "Some children upload their poems, instead of handing in a sheet of paper; or in the case of the Mass Media track, students upload videos. But there are also blogs to monitor students, and even a medical department blog for prevention. Some teachers use them as weblogs: two students take turns to register the class, the activities, the tasks and then post them for the rest".

In turn, the Geography teacher Eugenia Alonso from the Liceo N° 1 José Figueroa Alcorta María, says that the school has a blog where the information on the different activities (such as ceremonies, excursions, championships, celebrations of last year’s hundredth anniversary, etc.) is constantly updated. "Besides, I give students guides, links to search for information, and work proposals. At another blog, I include information on courses of study for 5th and 6th-year students, enrolment dates, scholarships, syllabuses, and different university sites", adds Alonso, who has been working with weblogs since 2005.

Teachers agree on the fact that students get hooked on blogs, which are useful to hand in practical works or as a means of communication in the classroom. "It is like a blackboard that accompanies us. It is a network tool, which is part of the future. Therefore, the idea is that children can produce works they can keep for them and which they can show", emphasizes Lutzky. “Above all - he explains- it is interesting to go and look for children in that virtual environment: students spend more time on line than with the TV”.

“Many times, teachers are afraid of using a new tool, which the student knows better, but that can be from the instrumental point of view because the one who knows about the subject is the teacher. And it is ok that the student can share what he/she knows with the teacher.", indicates Laura Rodriguez, from Programa Red, Department of Education of the City of Buenos Aires.