EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
April 11, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
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RSS « Learning 2.0 @ SIAST - Annotated
This week’s discovery exercises focus on learning about RSS feeds and using Google Reader (a free online newsreader) to bring your feeds together. If there is another online reader that you are more comfortable with, or that you already use, please feel free to use it.
tags: rss, learning-activity, siast
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This week’s discovery exercises focus on learning about RSS feeds and using
Google Reader (a free online newsreader) to bring your feeds together. If there is another online reader that you are more comfortable with, or that you already use, please feel free to use it.
March 30, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
Listen to your maps with Wild Sanctuary | Tech news blog - CNET News.com Annotated
tags: conservation, google-earth, nature, science
Users can explore various sounds, and see their placement and contextual information on the map. What’s interesting about these “soundscapes” is that they can show the difference in an area before and after environmental impact both with visual maps and sound as. Several examples were given show instances where a once lush diversity of animal noises became quiet, following climate change, human settlements, logging, etc.
How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci « Wandering Ink.
tags: curiosity, learning, teaching
eLearn: 10 Web 2.0 Things You Can Do…To Be a More Successful E-learning Professional Annotated
tags: downes, edtech, productivity
The following list was inspired by eLearn Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lisa Neal’s blog post “Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional.” We’d like to offer the “Web 2.0 Edition” of Lisa’s list:
- Listen to a conference presentation. When you run across conference presentations while reading your RSS feeds (EDUCAUSE Connect is a prime source, as is OLDaily), save the conference site as a bookmark and revisit it to hear a presentation.
- Record a 10-minute presentation about something you are working on or learning about, either as audio (use Odeo) or video (use Ustream), and post it on your blog.
- Do a search on the title of your most recent post or on the title of the most recent thing you’ve read or thought about. Don’t just use Google search, use Google Blog Search and Google Image Search, Amazon, del.icio.us, Technorati, Slideshare, or Youtube. Scan the results and if you find something interesting, save it in del.icio.us to read later.
- Write a blog post or article describing something you’ve learned recently. It can be something you’ve read or culled from a meeting, conference notes (which you just capture on the fly using a text editor), or a link you’ve posted to del.icio.us. The trick here is to keep your writing activity to less than 10 minutes—make a point quickly and then click “submit.”
- Tidy your e-portfolio. For example, upload your slides to Slideshare and audio recordings to Odeo and embed the code in your presentation page. Or write a description and link to your latest publication. Or update your project list.
- Create a slide on Zoho. Just do one slide at a time; find an image using the Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr and a short bit of text from a source or yourself. Add this to your stick of prepared slides you use for your next talk or class.
- Find a blogger you currently read in your RSS reader and go to their website. Follow all the links to other blogs in their blogroll or feedroll, or which are referenced in their posts. Well, maybe not all the links, or it will take hours, not ten minutes.
- Write a comment on a blog post, article, or book written by an e-learning researcher or practitioner.
- Go to a website like Engadget, Metafilter, Digg, Mixx, Mashable, or Hotlinks and skip through the items. These sites produce much too much content to follow diligently, but are great for browsing and serendipitous discovery. If you find something interesting, write a short blog post about it or at least a comment.
- Catch up on one of your online games with a colleague—Scrabulous on Facebook or
Backgammon on Yahoo.
Or make a Lolcat. Or watch a Youtube video.
Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Wiki collaboration leads to happiness Annotated
tags: collaboration, fosspreso, wikinomics
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April 30, 2007 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Videos, Web 2.0
Check out this great intro to managing the mass of information available on the web from Lee LeFever and The Common Craft Show.
Bottom line: Feed reader + subscription = A more manageable flow of information and a happier you!
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.
[tags]video, rss, reader, aggregator, web2.0[/tags]
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April 13, 2007 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Twitter Log
- @librarianmer: Glad to hear you arrived safely. Good luck in NY! #
- Trying to figure out YackPack on my PBwiki #
- It looks like I’ve got a message but I can’t see how to play it back. Scratch, scratch, scratch??? #
- Have I mentioned how much I HATE dial-up!!! #
- Um ok, I’m getting it now. Turns out that little number in the bottom right is just identifying that someone else is on the page with me. #
- Wondering how useful a sync tool like the YackPack widget would actually be in a collaborative environment… #
- At TLC Meeting to kick off the morning. #
- Just got back from planning our summer classroom tech upgrades - it’s gonna be a busy time! #
- Upgraded Skype to 3.1 and installed TalkAndWrite Extra for whiteboard augmentation. #
- Prepping for a PBwiki presentation after lunch. #
- Listening to the first part of the wiki workshop #
- Back from wiki workshop - low turnout
#
- Exploring BlogBridge Feed Library and having a bear of a time editing folders. #
- Turns out there is a FeedLibrary bug on this hosted site. Techs are investigating. #
- Still playing with FeedLibrary. It’s got a lot of potential to open up RSS to my faculty! #
- Heading home for the weekend. Got a test run of BlogBridge’s Feed Library up at http://plymouth.blogbridge.com #
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April 7, 2007 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
New bar codes can talk with your cell phone | CNET News.com Annotated
With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.
Motion-sensing comes to mobile phones | CNET News.com Annotated
- Who needs a Wii when you have your cell phone?
- post by edventures
The same technology used in Nintendo’s popular Wii video game console that lets you bowl strikes and hit tennis volleys like you’re Venus Williams is also making its way into mobile handsets.
www.sifry.com: State of the Blogosphere / State of the Live Web
- This page has links to the quarterly state of the blogosphere reports coming out of Sifry.com going back to October 2004.
- post by edventures
KickRSS :: Create An Aggregated RSS Feed
Education Week: Let’s Abolish High School Annotated
Were our young people
always required to attend school, and were their work opportunities
always limited to babysitting, yard work, and cleaning the floors at fast-food joints? Were they
always subject to so many restrictions? Are teenagers
necessarily incompetent and irresponsible, as the media tell us?
GeoRSS Home
- From Slashdot:
Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!’s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard.
- post by edventures
April 4, 2007 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Twitter Log
So for those wondering, these posts are tests of the Twitter to blog option of the Twitter Tools Plugin. I’m curious to see if or how this stream of consciousness post adds value to my blog. Probably less interesting to those following on RSS but personally, I’ve been finding utility in Twitter from the standpoint that folks Tweet on things that wouldn’t necessarily be blog-worthy but have value to those in their network. As an example, I’ve shared a few interesting Tweets with Luis Suarez, D’Arcy Norman and Jeff Utecht and added a new node (and kindred spirit) to my network - Jeff VanDrimmelen of UNC-Chapel Hill.
If you are curious about Twitter, feel free to add me to your list http://twitter.com/edventures as the search features leave a lot to be desired. Right now I use the trial and error method. Find someone I know, check out their friends and add those that are mutual and in some cases, make new connections I might not have otherwise.
Not sure how long I’ll keep posting these Twitter updates. I do wish there was a way to set it to post privately so that I can continue to log my days but not bore the world.
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April 3, 2007 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Twitter Log
- @elsua: Whoa, check out http://tweet-r.com/
It requires the new Adobe Apollo Runtime but it’s quick! #
- George Thoroughgood echoes my feelings right now - 1 bourbon, 1 scotch and 1 beer !!! #
- At portal content committee meeting discussing myPlymouth makeover #
- Back from portal content meeting #
- Wow, two 1000+ hit days for my blog. Love looking at Google Analytics anc seeing where folks are coming from. #
- @brlamb: Will you be in Boston this July? #
- @brlamb: How about integrating collaborative tech into a rigid LMS? #
- @brlamb - Bummer, was hoping to catch up with you. I put in a preso for using social bookmarking tools within a course through their RSS. #
- Heading home. Back online around 8 PM EST / 0100 GMT #
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March 6, 2007 at 6:36 pm · Filed under Readings, TechTalk
For those who actually view my blog and don’t rely solely upon my RSS feed, you will begin to notice some significant makeover work occurring on this site. Turns out that Internet Explorer doesn’t play nice with my current theme and I’m beginning to include more resources in my sidebar than a two column theme can provide. So I am trying out a new theme, a modified version of Fjords01, that I hope will better display the resources that I’m trying to share. Thanks also to Doug Belshaw for his hint on including shared Google Reader feeds. This will give me a reminder of the things I need to follow up on and allow others a glimpse into the topics that I think we should be paying more attention to.
So bear with me and hopefully this will be a relatively painless process. Dang it there is no wood on my keyboard! Oh well, you get the idea.
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January 10, 2007 at 2:00 pm · Filed under TechTalk, Web 2.0
I’ve been testing Office 2007 for compatibility issues on our Plymouth State University campus. For those who haven’t seen the interface, it is SIGNIFICANTLY different from Office 2003 and will likely require some bridging support for those who may not enjoy being beta test guinea pigs like the rest of us! Our Office of Teaching & Learning Technologies anticipates an increase in demand for user training.
Note: All of the images below can be viewed in larger format from my Flickr account by clicking the image.
Microsoft Outlook 2007
I’ve dropped a couple of comparative screenshots of Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 below.
Image 1: 
Image 2: 
One interesting thing to note is that Outlook is the one app in the suite which doesn’t look radically different. It has the same general interface with the addition of another column on the right which provides a heads-up display of your calendar, events and tasks.
Image 3: 
Microsoft did add RSS support to their app in this version. It integrates with mail and new
posts are treated as unread mail.
Image 4: 
Here is an example of the feed from think:lab
Image 5: 
First the things I like:
- Integration with my mail client is nice although not necessarily new compared to say Thunderbird. The ability to flag items and mark them for follow-up as you would your email is convenient.
- I like the display format as it doesn’t require retraining.
- Integrates nicely with Internet Explorer 7 for finding and adding feeds.
- Outlook provides the option to download the post and any embedded files as attachments (although I don’t know that it has a particular methodology for viewing or integrating those items with its other products such as Windows Media Player mimicking iTunes podcast service.)
- There is a nice context sensitive search feature (with an additional plug-in) that makes for quick searches through your feeds.
That said, therre are a few oddities with Outlook 2007 that I find inconvenient and/or frustrating:
- It may just be my install, but it takes forever to run through a Send/Receive process as Outlook processes both your mail and feed at the same time. Not a big deal for those on high speed internet but it has the potential to bog down dial-up users.
- My Inbox feeds don’t automatically refresh, it shows I have new mail but unless I click on another category and then back to Inbox, I can’t see my new messages.
- I’d also like the option to separate my new RSS posts from my actual mail when it comes to Unread items.
- The feed view also does not seem to provide a way to view all new messages as is found in most other feed readers. You have to click on each feed individually to see the feeds. Clicking on the RSS Feeds header simply displays the screenshot seen in Image 4 above which touts the new RSS feature.
- Not all my feeds imported nicely from my OPML file. While the feeds render just fine in other readers, for some reason Outlook 07 has issues with some feed formats. I’ve seen posts around the web which mention that Outlook 2007 really depends upon Internet Explorer 7 so I did upgrade my browser to see if that would remedy the problem. I now do not have as many errors but still see a few feeds which will not render. Hmm… I sincerely hope that Microsoft is not taking a proprietary stance with its RSS reader to ensure that it only works well with IE7 rather than via other browsers and/or the copy/paste or import of feed URLs.
All in all, Outlook 2007 is an interesting development. Now I am no seer, but I do feel that the adoption of RSS in Outlook and its integration with IE7 will lead to a surge in the use of RSS, particularly among those who aren’t familiar with the technology. It may not be my primary offline feed reader as I prefer the simplicity of SharpReader but with a few improvements I might consider using it instead.
technorati tags:microsoft, outlook, 2007, msoutlook2007, rss
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February 15, 2006 at 1:49 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
It’s time for a bit of a change, and I wanted a less restricted view of my posts. This may be going to far in the other direction but it will do for now. Most everyone else is reading this via RSS anyway.
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