Google – altruism or what?

I had to follow up my last post, prompted by a friend, to comment on the constant rollout of stuff from Google. I’m a fan on the one hand, and then I worry on the other. Google’s technology playground, GoogleLabs, is seemingly always cooking up cool new things. The graduates of GoogleLabs soon find a place in the digital mainstream. I liked Google Desktop, for a while, then gave up a few months ago as in reality I do not work on only one computer and not enought stuff transfered – so Desktop had too many limitations. Even the indexing fails at times! I have of course dabbled with other Google goodies, and make good use of Picassa. And I am curious to see how Google Suggest shapes up. It’s fascinating to watch the hits – worth showing teachers and students.

At the back of my mind, however, is the Googlification of all things online as posed by that great flash video EPIC2015. Was 2004 really the year everything began? Can’t you just see all these Google things leading to the Evolving Personalised Information Construct?

Regardless, a Google product that has been getting some ‘press’ in the blogosphere is The Literacy Project.

Ira at SpecEdChange says ” Google has pulled together a vast collection of literacy resources into an on-line Literacy Project that can help educators assemble books, information, videos, book groups, blogs, and much more.

Take a look around, you’ll find fascinating things that may spark all sorts of classroom ideas. There are easy to follow directions for creating tech-enhanced on-line book groups, developing school-wide blogs, or for adding your own school literacy videos to this project”.

Ho Hum. I’m going to wait to see what teachers in schools can do with this.

Tom Hoffman in Emerging Technologies quoted Andy Carvin who comes down a bit on Google:

My guess is that other educational bloggers will have similar reactions. Not unlike the Google Literacy project launched the previous week, Google for Educators seems more like a promotional stunt, lacking in any new resources tailored for educators. Given Google’s superpower strength in the Web 2.0 universe, one might expect them to focus their resources a bit more on developing tools and services that teachers and students could really use.

Tom also complains about advertising – fair enough – but how else will we get lots of apps for free in schools?

In the meantime I do feel that the Google Literacy Project pulls together into one space various tools that we can use in our Web 2.0 learning environment – and from my point of view, having them together in one Project (or portal) makes it much easier to promote to reluctant teachers.

It’s just the quality that’s the issue isn’t it? But I do like fun!! So go try this out now….

From Dean Shareski:

This is just plain good fun. Spell with Flickr was fun but this is really cool. Type any name or phrase and geogreeting finds buildings that will spell your phrase.

The page itself actually finds and shows the building locations as it builds your name.