Ravi Purushotma is a graduate student in the MIT Comparative Media Studies program where he specializes in new media and gaming.

Communicative 2.0 is a draft of his thesis that explores uses of a wide range of new media for foreign language gaming including gaming, game modding, and mashups of Web 2.0 software.

Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool released under a creative commons license that holds a great deal of promise for digital storytelling in education.  A free download is required to create and read Sophie projects.  The idea of the book is the central concept.  The creator can simply drag and drop components (text fields, comment fields, etc.) or resources (images, audio, video, etc.) onto a page.  Objects and pages can all be resized.  There is also a timeline feature that lets you start and stop audio or video as well as make any resource appear or disappear from the page.  The comments component also merits special mention.  While the book is downloaded to the readers machine, their comments can be read by anyone else who "opens" the book.  It's a powerful concept combining an easy to use multimedia interface with the communicative properties of a blog.

Many people will be familiar with Muzzy Lane's game Making History. This World War II strategy game is designed with certain extra capabilities, such as decision tracking, to make it easier to integrate into the classroom than other commercial games such as Hearts of Iron II. It seems their game's success along with successful titles from other small publishers such as Peacemaker  and A Force More Powerful have encouraged Muzzy Lane to focus on current events as their next subject area. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson will be working with Muzzy Lane to create a new series of video games focusing on modern global conflicts. You can read more about it on Wired.

Joost has allowed its beta testers an unlimited number of invites. If you'd like one, send me an email mentioning this post to bryanttATdickinson.edu.

For those unfamiliar with Joost, it's basically an online TV service with some fairly big name channels, including Comedy Central, MTV, and the NHL. They are clearly trying to add a social element to TV viewing with Channel chatting and other features on the way. There are also some foreign language channels including ShortsTV, SiVoo and JumpTV in Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic. You'll find them under Entertainment in the channel directory. This could be another way for us to connect our students with native speakers while giving them a context for discussion.

Wetpaint released a new technology called "Injected" earlier this summer.  For those unfamiliar with Wetpaint, they're a free hosting service for wikis.  We use them for several class websites because they remove ads for educational sites and the version comparison is very good for collaborative writing.

YouTube is releasing localized versions of its site. You can read more about it here on ZDNet.

Like Flickr, YouTube can be used by foreign language teachers as a great source for examples of authentic language around the world. However, like most massive international sites, the language tends to default to English. There is currently a search function by language if you know where to find it, but it's only about 50% accurate. The new localized versions should be much better about providing video and discussion in the target language. 

Red vs Blue is getting ready to release their final episode.  You can read more about it at Wired.

For those not familiar with Red vs Blue, it's a comical video series created with the video game Halo and released via the internet. The series was the first popular example of what is now known as machinima, the use of video games to create films. 

If you're interested in the possibility of using games to have students create content, you can find an infinite number of examples at www.machinima.com. They also have tips and tutorials for the most popular games. Sims may be the easiest. If you're focused on foreign languages, Felix Kronenberg at Pomona has some good examples.

Valleywag has a very nice map of social networking sites and their popularity by country.

I notice they don't have Mixi in Japan, which is odd, but they have the international examples I already knew about, along with a few others. If you're looking to extend your classroom and bring students in contact with people from a certain country, this is a great place to start. 

One of the reasons Web 2.0 has had such an effect on education is that it allows our students to write in a truly public voice. No subject is better suited to take advantage of this capability than journalism. Newsvine is a combination of a social networking a news site that offers them this opportunity. Articles are shown on the site from traditional sources such as the AP, but users can also submit their own articles to the site to be ranked and rated by other readers. Students may even earn a little money in the process.

Microsoft has released LiveStation in for private testing. It's similar to Joost in that they use p2p technology to deliver a full screen TV experience; however, they claim they're not competitors. As the name implies, Microsoft is looking to focus on live TV whereas Joost is an on-demand service. However, it is certainly not hard to imagine each being extended to do the opposite.

How much longer until we see campuses getting rid of satellite TV services, either for the campus or just the language centers? I don't have a test account for LiveStation yet, so I couldn't measure the bandwidth. Joost was a rather heavy user at 600kbs, but as compression technology continues to improve (and with bandwidth becoming cheaper), it may not be long.

 

There have been several recent attempts to use more advanced statistical analysis to judge the reliability of articles within Wikipedia.

The first is a color-coding scheme that gives the reader an idea of the reliability of parts of the article based on the number of times it has been revised. The basic idea is that if a certain section is constantly being revised, it's less reliable than a piece that has been virtually unchanged for a long period of time.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/wikipedia-color-coding/

It's rare as an educational technologist that you find a cutting edge technology whose use is immediately obvious to faculty.  Google Sky is the exception. Astronomers will need little convincing after seeing the latest version of Google Earth in action.

 http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html
 

DNA Stream offers a player that delivers a "TV experience" via the Internet. It's similar to Joost, which I mentioned here earlier along with others. What makes it unique is that it is flash-based and doesn't require the downloading of a client. It also uses much less bandwidth than Joost.

The site offers English and Spanish videos. Click on a flag icon at the top right to toggle between offerings in the two languages, or select one of the two links below.

http://www.adnstream.tv/ (Spanish)
http://www.dnastream.tv/ (English)

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

Transcosmos is releasing a virtual world called "Meet Me" specifically designed for the Japanese market.  They hope to create a more conservative environment as an alternative to SecondLife.  Clearly the hope is that Meet Me will find a large niche market as a virtual environment, similar to the success Mixi has had in the social networking space.  I'm always happy to see these environments that are somehow language specific so that we can use them in our language courses.  I found this link via Bryan Alexander's Infocult blog:

Meet Me

Croquet has also developed significantly from when I last saw it, as seen in their demo on YouTube.  The ability to create windows that can contain content or link to other parts of the world is fascinating.

Two releases on the same day for competing products in the virtual space arena has brought the topic to the forefront again.  Both Lively and Vivaty allow the user to insert a 3D room into a webpage.  Both are much simpler than SecondLife with limited creation capabilities.  Mostly users decorate their rooms, import media from the web, and text chat with other visitors.  Vivaty is tied to either AIM or Facebook with each account tied to your own "scene". 

The Japanese virtual world Meet Me has been released.  It's the same basic idea as Second Life with some key differences that should be very beneficial for teachers of Japanese

• There are rules governing behavior.  It's not the wild west you'll find in Second Life.
• It's intended only for a Japanese audience, so you can be reasonably sure people you meet in the environment are Japanese.
  
• It's a virtual representation of Tokyo and could easily be used as an example of Japanese modern culture.

The download is free, though you do have to register with your email address.  Also, for XP you have to make a change in the Control Panel to read the Japanese characters in the environment. Go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Advanced Tab >  then for the drop down list set "Select a language for non-unicode languages” to Japanese.  Thanks to Takeshi Sengiku at Gettysburg for find this.