TinyChat: Micro Review

Thanks to Andrew Jeppesen for pointing out the TinyChat.com service to the Resources for Languages Group at Diigo. An associated TinyChat blog with only one post so far suggests that the service is brand new (Updates updates updates, 2009.02.18). Although a comment on the blog's About page suggests that there are some bugs getting messages going two ways (rwghezzi, 2009.02.19), it seems easy enough to start using; ... registration is unnecessary.

The Options include various ways of capturing chat logs before you leave them.

You can also get badge or widget codes for use on websites and forums. However, those widgets would have a limited shelf-live since the chats are temporary, a point the Terms of Services and the confirm departure dialog box (below) make amply clear.

For more about features see Girish's post, Group chat utility (2009.02.23).

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Pageflakes for Educators

Check out this SlideShare presentation by Gladys Baya, with an embedded YouTube video (below). It introduces RSS feeds and a tool for aggregating them, Pageflakes.

Vance Stevens, who moderated an Elluminate Live! session for a TESOL workshop in which Gladys gave the presentation, has made a recording of the session available with a TinyURL. Thanks, Vance!

Thanks, too, to Gladys for publicizing this all in a blog post, Pageflakes for Educators (2009.02.10), in which she also notes recent concerns regarding the stability and viability of Pageflakes.

Pageflakes4 Educators

View more presentations from Gladys Baya. (tags: webheads presentations)

Plaxo badge in sidebar

This is a quickpost: I've joined Plaxo, tweaked too many settings to mention or recall, and added a Plaxo widget to the sidebar (currently right). Since Plaxo was a TRUSTe certified site, I had few qualms about linking from it to many other web presences.

Google Docs: Synchronous user limits and document stat's

A couple quick gleanings from:

Fourteen Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom (Google Docs [presentation]) - a work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 License (slide 1), by Tom Barrett (slide 16), author of 100 Interesting Ways (ICT in my Classroom, 2009.01.26).

• 10 people can edit a Presentation at the same time.
• 50 people can edit a Spreadsheet....
• 10 people can edit a Document.... (Fourteen..., slide 4 of 16)
  

Doc stat's (Tools menu, Word Count) include an Automated Readability Index keyed to grade levels, in addition to word counts (Fourteen..., slide 7). Cherly Stephen's copyright article, All About Readability (2000) provides background for such indices.

See for yourself:

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhn2vcv5_8323t58h3ft

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Kumamoto Lantern Festival (2008.10.10)

Created from an iPhoto slide show [exported as a .mov file, uploaded to YouTube, and posted to a Blogger blog setup in YouTube

Notes:

• Blog setup in YouTube requires blog password.
• The YouTube video posting function affords text input (e.g.: the text above outside square brackets), but apparently not labels or tags.]
  

A word for today, and beyond!

Sheryl brought this word to my attention, "lagniappe" (Diigo: delicious4educators, Front Page, comment 11, 2008.12.09). It means a little something extra and, as she put it, "more ephemeral."

Visual Dictionary: Blog this - Blog tools

If you click on a "Blog this" button appearing on a Visual Dictionary Online page, you can get HTML code to represent dictionary illustrations and terminology on blogs and websites, with permission, for non-commercial purposes. Here is an example:



For detailed terms of use, see the Blog Tools page.

Birth and evolution of the Internet

For some reason, in 2005, I set October 29 in iCal as an annually repeating event commemorating the birth of the Internet. Perhaps that was because I had been reading up on it at the time. Below are some updated notes that I'd made about references collected, and left in the calendar entry, which I opened today because it reminded me of a website review that I'd done recently: NSF and the Birth of the Internet (2008.09.09).

In a report on the evolution of the internet, Rainie and Horrigan (2005) describe Internet use during the preceding decade, and explain "[h]ow the internet has woven itself into American life." They also provide a suite of "Other Internet Evolution References."

Elsewhere, in what may be a case in point, Lutus used to argue that Internet users' profiles, privileges, and preferences had changed, and included preferences for "Internet free zones" dedicated to "the free exchange of information, programs and content." For such sites Lutus had even prepared special logos indicating that site owners and developers forswore commercial advertising, selling, and spamming. Now a note heading the Internet Free Zone Home Page says the author keeps it as a reminder of previous idealism (Lutus, 1997).

References

Lutus, P. (1997). Internet Free Zone Home Page. Retrieved October 29, 2008, from http://vps.arachnoid.com/freezone/

Rainie, Lee; & Horrigan, John. (2005). Pew Internet and American Life Project: Internet Adoption. Retrieved October 29, 2008, from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/148/report_display.asp

Potpourri's first K visitors

A free NeoCounter Visitor Tracker tucked in the sidebar suggests that pab's potpourri has recently had its 1000th visitor. Though that's hardly indicative of a huge presence in any blogspheres, here's what visitor and country of origin numbers look like, over the past eight months:


The image above is an export from a Google Spreadsheet, based on a chart quickly generated in the spreadsheet; it includes no data from September.

SearchCrystal

This is an experimental post in which I'm embedding a searchCrystal widget. Thanks to MaryH for pointing it out, and providing a concrete example of its use.

I discovered this interesting visualization tool on the IES Book and Literature Circle Blog, in The Little Prince Literature Circles Week Two post (2008.05.28), through a Learning with Computers network connection in a Shelfari Group: Book, Short Stories Suggestions for the Classrooms and Activities (2008.09.04).

According to the page where I got the widget embedding code for this post (seachCrystal: Widgets), "The searchCrystal Widget visualizes the overlap between the result sets of five major search engines," for example, images on Ask, Flickr, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! (searchCrystal: Home). In order to fit the current template for this blog, I reduced the size of the display (below) from a default 600 pixels square to 400 pixels.

Exhibit A in PictoBrowser and Flickr displays

This post displays a Flickr photo set (Exhibit A, public), embedded with a new-found slide show tool, in which I'm just beginning to fiddle with display parameters other than height and width to fit this blog's template.



Thanks to Alan Levine for pointing out Pictobrowser on the CogDogBlog (Slick Flickr Browser, 2008.08.13). It sure is easy to use.

For purposes of comparison, I'm including a Flickr generated slide show the same size below.



The most noticeable differences apart from border shades (colors) and the like are:

1. Thumbnails and jump arrows for navigation appear constantly in PictoBrowser display, while only briefly after starting the show (">") or on mouse-over in Flickr;
   
2. Slides advance only manually in PictoBrowser, but automatically or manually in Flickr;
   
3. Titles get displayed in overlays at the foot of the graphics in PictoBrowser, but only in full-screen view with "Info On" in Flickr (or on the Flickr site);
   
4. Notes - Descriptions from Flickr - appear in PictoBrowser on mouse-over ("Notes"), but only in full-screen view with "Info On" in Flickr (or on the Flickr site); and
   
5. As Alan suggests, PictoBrowsers "spawn" - you can generate another PictoBrowser slide show on the spot, by clicking on the link at the lower right-hand corner of the display frame, while you must got to the Flickr site to accomplish the same feat.
   

Wesch introducing YouTube at the U.S. LoC

Billed as "an excellent backgrounder to social media, user-generated content, and online communities through the lens of anthropology" by Alec Couros (2008.08.03), this YouTube video resonates in a similar post by D'Arcy Norman (2008.08.06). The video represents a June 23, 2008, appearance of Professor Michael Wesch at a U.S. Library of Congress (LoC) podium to display and describe his and his students' findings from ethnological investigations into YouTube as participant observers (Wesch, 2008)

Wesch describes media such as YouTube as neither content, nor tools of communication, but rather as a landscape that mediates human relationships. He suggests that changes in "the mediascape" correspond to changes in human relations (approx. 12 of 55 minutes in), reflecting manifestations of participatory culture and networked individualism. Eschewing Powerpoint, he and his students remix dozens of independent video productions to portray a mediated state under tension between personal expression and social aspiration:

• individualism and community,
  
• independence and relationships, and
• aggrandizement and authenticity.

"More info" in the YouTube sidebar provides a timeline for the video itself (Added: July 26, 2008). However, you've got to see the presentation to believe it!

Reference

Wesch, Michael (Dir.). (2008). An anthropological introduction to YouTube. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

Social media: Is there anything but?

August 7, 2008, Chris Brogan listed ebooks that he'd found available for free, and thought looked worth reading to learn about social media. I've made five quick picks from his list of twenty; my fifth pick (his 19th) is actually a journal article:

1. The Zen of Blogging, by Hunter Nutall (2008);
   
2. A Primer in Social Media: Examining the Phenomenon, Its Relevance, Promise and Risks, by Eric Karjaluoto (2008);
3. Effective Internet Presence, by Ted Demopoulos (2008);
• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
  
4. Introduction to Good Usability, by peterpixel (2008); and
5. How blogs and social media are changing public relations and the way it is practiced, by Wright and Hinson (2008).

I've made one more tentative selection from Chris' updates:

• The Essential Guide to Social Media, by Brian Solis (2008)
  

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[Notes: What first caught my eye was Siemens' musing about Brogan's list, "In the sense that all media ... require a producer and consumer, doesn't the notion of media have an inherent social trait?" (elearnspace, 2008.08.21). I'd been wondering the same thing with regard to a local course entitled Social Communication, because even though communication may manifest anti-social characteristics, it is fundamentally social.

Though I've only peeked under the covers of a couple of items on my short list, it seems that my choies differ in concentration on marketing from other items and articles Brogan later added to his list. As a subset of social activity, he may be focusing more on the commercial than the educational. (2008.09.08)]

Tools, types of site, and such

Without delving into the nitty-gritty of many actual sites, I've been tracking and listing up most of the tools and types of sites that I've used over the past week, since deciding to do so while writing Tools I use (2008.08.27). I've taken cross-sections of what's up and running on machines at work or home just after lunchtime, in the middle of an academic recess.

The spreadsheet below represents my current findings. It also enables me to continue working in details without necessarily having to tweak or follow up on this post. Such details may include:

• Future sampling periods, possibly:
  
• during academic sessions, and
  
• including computer laboratory applications;
  
• Other (unexploited) possibilities in my tool chests; and
  
• What's free or open source software.
  

A Gift that Gives for 15.5 Years

Reading back through Mctoonish to 4 Generations (2007.01.23), I discovered a powerful short film by Robert Thompson documenting the acquisition, delivery, and aftermath of a surprising gift. Here it is (in various formats and sizes).

Image by geofana (2006): There is a Creative Commons license attached to this image.
AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works

Tools I use

At the first of the year, Heather Ross [(McToonish, 2008.01.08)] posted a list of the tools that she uses least once a week. She had gleaned the idea of making a list for comparison with those she may be using next year from Will Richardson [(Weblogg-ed, 2008.01.06, who had taken a cue from Michael Arrington (TechCrunch, 2008.01.01)]. This sounds like an interesting project, especially since Heather's MacOSX@home - WindowsXP@work situation is a mirror image of mine.

Listening to a podcast about open source software, in which Heather took part (EdTech Posse Podcast 2.1, 2006.09.18), while reviewing a number of posts in which she mentions or recommends tools, sites, and extensions, I've decided to make a list of my own, and will try to sort it out in terms of platforms as well as open-sourced-ness.

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[Note: I've detailed the references to chronicle the stream of the meme Richardson mentioned, and decided to do my list during summer academic recess, when I'm most likely to have a full rack open (2008.08.28).]

Balance, on all fours

Balance, on all fours, seems to be what keeps tails from wagging dogs. For educational technologists, these days, the balance and interplay of humanity and technology seem to keep coming to the fore. The technological end of things has been twisting my noodle since I chewed over Achieving Sleep/Network Balance (Ceraso, ELT Blog, 2007.10.21) in pab's potpourri (2008.01.28).

Call it a rush, or addictive, vacuous pressure to adopt more and more diversified web tools, join more and more diversified professional and social networks, hold further discussions - with more people, explore existing topics more deeply, share and try new ideas, compare findings, pool and package resources, ..., and what do we get?

Loud whooshing sounds as our lives evacuate online, or something graphically represented as an exploding head, for which Alan Levine suggests he is "lacking an easy answer beyond shrugging it off, unplugging, letting stuff slide, or just floating along til the groove returns." Nonetheless, he keeps contemplating "how much 'power' we acquiesce to technology tools" (CogDogBlog, Exploding Heads, 2008.07.22).

Without ever having tried twittering, I'm inclined to agree that doing it needn't make everyone who does micro-thinkers. Yet humans are creatures of habits, and Levine wonders, "If some of the most sharp and clever people I know and respect find themselves overly immersed in something like twitter, what does that portend for the many more people who look to them for guides?"

If collection and recollection of both data and thoughts becomes largely and ubiquitously mechanical and piece-meal, it may lead to flattening of the web, and bode ill for discursive thought patterns, coherent conversations, cogent analyses, and deliberative syntheses. When push comes to pull, which way will online educators be leaning - towards the flat, quick, and transient, or the deep, rich, and stable?

It comes as some relief to hear of folks abandoning twitter accounts before I ever got one. However, I felt a twitch of dismay yesterday discovering So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet) (Marielle, Authorship 2.0, 2008.07.03), about which I growled on the LTD Project Blog (2008.07.24). Marielle reminds us "not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, [and] reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue." I wonder how long it may take twitter-free digital immigrants to groove deep enough into the web for the rest of the world to hear the music.

Photo by Andrey Sukhanov (2008)
Creative Commons License BY-NC 2.0

The World is a Mosaic!

AppAppeals Map of theWorld 2.0, with hot-linked graphics in the original (World Mosaic Created from 1001 Web 2.0 Logos):

Source: http://media.appappeal.com/map/appappeal-mosaic2.png

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Diigo bookmarking for Learning with Computers

To increase visibility of a Learning with Computers group discussion going on in Diigo, just one of several venues in which members of that group interact, I'm going to cross-post here a bit that I wrote there:

I'd like to offer some reflections based on observations and suggestions that other participants have made already. To those I will add a few of my own ideas about collective bookmarking.

Joao Alves (among others) urges us to adopt the "tags Diigo suggests...[, and]... agree on a special tag for the group like 'LWC' that we would always add to every bookmark we tagged" (message 5).

Recommended tags are a start, but I'm always curious about who recommends them, and what for. I suppose they represent collective practices that may be more spontaneous or less focused than ours. LWC sounds quick, and easy to remember, yet may be quite obscure to other Diigo uses who don't already know that it stands for Learning with Computers.

After many hours on screen, I prefer tags with greater visual definition than all CAP's, so CamelCase is my favorite for MultiWordTags. I'm not sure, however, whether Diigo defeats capitalization. If not, I'd prefer something like LwC.

Joao goes on to suggest,"Organizing tags in topics or bundles like in del.icio.us would be helpful to find the most relevant site about the subject we are interested in." Though bundles in del.icio.us are quite powerful in that they enable multi-purpose uses of individual tags, as well as consolidation of similar ones, I have a distinct impression that bundling may work better with single word tags.

Having done most of my bookmarking in del.icio.us, up to now, I've hardly ever felt a need to double or triple up on words, since searching for intersections or conjunctions between tag sets in del.icio.us is a given. I'm looking forward to finding out whether Diigo offers such powerful search options.

Mary Hillis points out: "... [Y]ou could simply use quotation marks for "lesson plan". Maybe this is another advantage of using Diigo" (message 4), and Joao agrees: "... [Q]uotation marks are very useful to write tags that have 2 or more words. I have always appreciated this feature in Flickr" (message 5). The use of quotation marks to demarcate exact phases may be common to Ma.gnolia bookmarking as well.

Earlier on Susana expressed preference for using nouns as tags (message 3), a preference we share to some extent. I tended to use plural forms for countable nouns. I still do sometimes hoping that bookmarking tool search engines will recognize the word noun as a subset of the category nouns more readily, perhaps, than they recognize the word nouns as a derivative of the tag noun.

If such search parameters aren't available yet, they should be. Otherwise, generic web searches for exact quotations and partial character strings may more than suffice for finding content for which interpretation into special terminology is unnecessary.

I've also experimented with a greatest common denominator strategy that works, I imagine, rather like a bundling strategy for similar tags. Take, for instance, collaborat, a tag I tend to favor in de.licio.us to capture the essence of collaborate, collaboration, collaborative, and collaborators. Nevertheless[,] I realize that tags such as collaborat, like the tailor-made one Susana mentioned, edudiigolwc, call for awareness-raising, if not public definition and explanation, in order to be of use to wider and wider groups of bookmark browsers or connoisseurs.

Tag clouds added to blogs, for instance, or provided in group bookmarking tools themselves, for example: de.licio.us and Ma.gnolia, are means of raising awareness. Yet Diigo, as options for individual commentary, comments earmarked for groups, and discussions like this one illustrate, affords ample opportunities for explanation in situ to those wish to elaborate for the benefit of a community such as the Learning with Computers cohort. What a pleasure it is!

(How should we use the tagging system to better organize our group bookmarking, message 6, 2008.06.24 [JST])

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The Learning with Computers group venue @ Diigo is public. Please feel free to share comments here, or join us there.

Spring into Summer

At long last, I've got Spring Widgets working again. The exasperation was unbearable. It has taken almost a year to get to where I almost was last spring. That is, to:

• Display more than one feed in one widget, if any at all, and
• Get one logo to display at the head of more than one feed in the widget.

Work-arounds among Feedburner, SpringWidgets, Firefox, and Safari finally succeeded! Though I'm not sure I can replicate, or even remember the steps, an RSS Reader near the top of the sidebar now displays feeds from two Edublogs:

1. The Language Learner Development Project Blog (my newest), and
   
2. The Language Teacher Development Project Blog (oldest, second only to pab's potpourri).

Saving the logo separately for each feed in Feedburner seemed to do the trick for the display, but had to be done for both before getting the widget code for either blog from Spring Widgets. The bar divider between SpringWidget blog feeds worked in Safari, today. I should have tried that instead of Firefox months ago, when I first encounter scripting errors while trying to retrieve widget code through Firefox.

Yet just now, drafting this post in Safari, I was unable to use standard copy and paste keyboard commands. So I saved this post there, opened it again here in Firefox, et voilà!