Tags: wordlecv resume vita tagcloud wordcloud visualization

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Chris Johnston has announced the availability of a public WordPress 2.5 demo site. This site will house the most up to date version of WordPress 2.5 prior to its release in March. This is particularly useful to those who do not wish to setup an SVN install of WordPress on their local machine or web server.

I had problems with a redirect to SiteSpinner using the URL http://wp.chrisjohnston.org but adding /wp-admin to the end got me right to the login screen.

The username/password combo for the demo site is admin/demo

Below are current screenshots of the major working spaces. Click on the image to see a larger version in my Flickr account.

Dashboard
Write
  Manage
  Design
  Comment
  Plugins
Users
  Settings

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Tags: wordpresswp2.5 wordpress2.5 blog

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I highly recommend either viewing, listening to or reading this testimony. Read also Danah’s posts which are substantiated by statistical data and do far more justice to the topic than I can. It is interesting to see and hear from experts in the field, particularly as their testimony is often at odds with the fear pandering and net paranoia espoused by our media, and in some cases our government officials. Take for instance this sobering fact. When it comes to sexual predation, strangers account for only 10% of those cases. The predominant offender? Parents at 78.5% of reported cases.

As a parent myself, I understand and advocate for a greater level of parental involvement in the lives of our children. Any child predation is too much. However, it is also important for us to work from facts rather than assumptions. The bottom line is that online predation is far less a threat to our children than the lack of parental involvement, guidance and love in their lives. We don’t need more legislation, we need more communication!

[tags]online, youth, victimization, predation, netcaucus[/tags]

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[tags]slideshare, enterprise2.0, web2.0, collaboration[/tags]

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Tags: slideshare, enterprise2.0, web2.0, collaboration

Bottom line: Feed reader + subscription = A more manageable flow of information and a happier you!

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[tags]video, rss, reader, aggregator, web2.0[/tags]

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For those who are actually interested though, I’m not dumping the idea entirely. I’ve moved my Twitter posts to a new blog, johnericmartin.com/Twitter.

I do plan to keep on Twittering though. I really do like the stream of consciousness brain dump outlet it provides.

[tags]twitter[/tags]

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The Samuel H Wentworth Library serves the town of Sandwich and its 1300+ residents. It is also home to the grassroots wireless network, Cyberpine, which serves our town in lieu of typical broadband connections such as cable or DSL. This relationship allows the Library to provide free wireless access to patrons, as well as four public access terminals. Future growth of public net access is somewhat restricted as it is tempered by the availability of bandwidth through CyberPine which is currently served by a T1 line.

As of this moment, the Library does not have a web presence, although that is of great interest to its director. As I develop this technology plan, I would be interested in hearing what other libraries of similar size and capacity are doing to extend their services to their respective communities. Please drop a comment and let me know what you would like to see in such a library.

[tags]library, swl-library, technology[/tags]

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“Google is adding a feature to its Docs & Spreadsheets Web-hosted software that will enable people to create presentations and slide shows, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Expo.”

On the one hand, this is exciting in that it is strengthening the single venue approach to web office apps. On the other hand, is Google a day late and a dollar short when you consider the concept of “small pieces, loosely joined.” With all of the screencasting, slide sharing apps out there, how will Google’s product stand out from the crowd?

Guess we’ll have to wait and see. The article says soon but no specific release date was provided.

[tags]google, presentation, google-office, weboffice, powerpoint[/tags]

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According to the folks at PBwiki, they will be holding a joint press conference with their colleagues at YackPack tomorrow, April 12th, to discuss the delivery of a widget intended to provide an audio component to the wiki experience. The techie/tech journalist press conference will be held at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM EST, while educators and edubloggers will have their own press conference at 6 PM Pacific, 9 PM EST. The press conference will be held online at http://press.pbwiki.com employing the very technology being announced.

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For those unfamiliar, PBwiki provides free basic wiki hosting while YackPack is known for their work on unified communications services.

What new doors will this alignment of resources provide to educators, particularly those who work asynchronously with learners in other areas of the globe? It is an exciting time to be sure and leaves me wondering, as always, what tomorrow will bring?

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I find myself often inspired and amazed by what I come across in the blogosphere. So I too will make some time today to send a shout out to those who have inspired or challenged me. What a positive way to address the issues raised after last weeks Cyber-bullying downturn.

I’d post more on this but I’m off to thank my feeders personally. Won’t you join me?

[tags]cybercompliment, cyberbullying, inspire[/tags]

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Here is my map that I knocked out pretty quickly that tracks my active duty Naval career from home to boot camp to my last duty station and back home. I’m going to try and go back later to include some richer media.

Between this and the ability to create maps from Google Spreadsheet data, this is a great classroom tool for generating excitement and visual interaction for your students. If you haven’t tried this yet, I highly recommend it.

My suggestions for feature enhancement:

• Allow for ordering of sites to create a linear map tour – think mapping the major battles of the civil war in a chronological order.
• Ability to “lock” sites once placed – This is particularly helpful when trying to place accurate pins. I accidently moved my pin by tens of miles when I was attempting to draw a line and had to refind the street address of the prior location.
• A way to customize the My Map legend to include richer media.
• Tie this into one’s Google account for better and shorter URLs!!!

[tags]google, google-maps, map[/tags]

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Coop is a prototype nextgen browser that is intended to “leapfrog” Flock. Considering that one of the screenshots is from a Flock pre-release, it seems that what Flock has done has garnered interest in the Mozilla developers. As well it should, Flock does a great job of integrating new technologies such as social browsing, photo sharing and blogging right out of the box.

The primary focus seems to revolve around keeping track of what friends are doing online and being able to share content with those friends. Content such as “Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc.” The stated assumption is that “the most common social interaction on the web today is sending someone a link.” And this prototype builds on that assumption.

Their use cases also point out that the browser should enable the user to “keep up to date with a friend’s web activity.” This done I am assuming via RSS. One would follow a friend by clicking on their avatar in a top bar or side bar to get more information. Four mock-up pictures were linked to from the site. I’ll include those in a bit as I’m cutting them down to size.

A few ideas came out of this for me:

• Twitter is already doing what the Mozilla developers are considering for “who’s doing what when,”
• A feed reader such as Google Reader takes up too much real estate – perhaps there could be a SuprGlu type aggregation of feeds to minimize impact on available space and give that stream of consciousness effect.
• The idea of avatars is nice but give the viewer the choice of how many avatars to view at one time and in what size. Give them the choice between a view of who’s doing what chronologically or by virture of their importance/relationship to the viewer.
• Ok, we’re seeing who’s doing what but if we want to share what we’re seeing with others, how about a screen markup like that in Diigo for sharing annotations? Even better if it could be done in real-time!

Now this prototype is cool, no doubt, but is it really the nextgen browser? Where are we heading and what will the nextgen browser really look like and what will it do for us?

Heck at this point I’d be happy for a browser that doesn’t suffer from memory bloat like Firefox and Flock.

[tags]mozilla, coop, browser[/tags]

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Kathy Sierra is one of my favorite reads. I’ve been inspired by and have learned so much from her blog and although I do not know her personally, her writing and passion have painted an image of her in my mind. Apparently, her writing has painted other images in the warped and twisted minds of a number of individuals who cower behind their anonymity as they post the most appalling things to a number of sites whose sole intent is to bully others. My own personal sense of decency has led me to choose not to repost the links to those sites here. It is one thing to disagree with someone, but it is something else entirely when your disagreement devolves into death threats and terrorism, as was so sadly demonstrated in Kathy’s case.

I admire Kathy for having the strength to write about her experience. I’m outraged that there are individuals who feel that it is o.k. to terrorize others. What Kathy is living through goes far beyond the pale, to the point that law enforcement is involved and legal action quite likely. To the point where she feels that her life is truly endangered. What sort of example does that set for our youth? It sure doesn’t help our efforts as educators as we attempt to break through the barriers which bar our students from active participation in the community of the web. I’d even like to treat this as a teachable moment if it weren’t for the fact that I wouldn’t willingly expose any student of mind to the viciousness and criminality of this series of events.

My thoughts are with you Kathy. You are stronger than they are. The best I can offer is the fervent belief that the best thing for us to do is to shine a great bright light on the dark side of the web and expose it for what it really is.

[tags]kathysierra, blogging, darkside[/tags]

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My thanks to the edublogosphere for the wealth of ideas to chew on and to Diigo for the annotated link posts. Diigo has been a wonderful tool. I really like the way it helps me organize my ideas, it has changed my approach. It still has it’s rough edges but I have to say that Maggie Tsai and crew have been really responsive to community feedback.

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WINWINI or What I Need, When I Need It

I like the Win-Win fit and the extra “I” at the end points out the personal touch.

I’ve always had a problem with the term “Just In Time” training because it always seemed to give the impression that no prior thought had gone into the process beforehand. WINWINI on the other hand speaks to the growing trend of on-demand service. On-demand training, on-demand learning, on-demand entertainment – where the focus is on the individual. It is not to say that it is a selfish perspective rather one that acknowledges that in today’s fast paced and multi-channeled society, expectations on us are evolving and our support needs and personal expectations are following suit. The ability to get what you need when you need it – by knowing where to turn or who to turn to will become an increasingly valuable skill.

[tags]winwini, support, training, edtech[/tags]

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UPDATE: Upon reflection, this is only kinda cool. It is great that your G-Talk contacts are available from your own personal home page and embedded YouTube videos are a neat trick but it seems to me sort of an obvious next step. Obvious as in should’ve been done months ago. When I first saw this, I somehow read it to mean that the Call function was included which would have made this widget ROCK but in testing, it launched Google Talk as an external app so it is clear that the real time VoIP functions are not yet embedded in this widget. Oh yeah and while you can modify the height and width parameters, this really wants to run in its native 320×447 size to see all the neat new embedded functionality. It needs the same “pop-out” feature that the G-mail version boasts to be worthwhile. So hey Google, call me when you build in both of these features and I will upgrade your status to WAY COOL.

You check it out in action under my Google Shared Items widget in the sidebar. Note that this is not yet a true widget, just a script embedded in a text widget.

To find out more, visit the Google Talkabout page. To download it yourself, go to the gmodules page.

[tags][/tags]

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[tags]video, epic2015, whatif[/tags]

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[tags]video, 2020, whatif [/tags]

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