April 2007 Archives

Cole, Allan, Chris, and I just got done recording another exciting edition of ETS Talk. This time we talk about the application of gaming elements to web 2.0 and learning design. The discussion was sparked from a session Millet attended at Etech.

Yesterday I tuned in (via elluminate) to Open, Connected, and Social (Many too Many?). D'arcy Norman was talking about aggregating content produced by students in a particular class from various services (wordpress.com, institutional blogging service, flickr, etc). This is in contrast to the traditional LMS model, where all the content creation happens in one central location that becomes inaccessible after the class is over and can never be accessed by people not involved in the class.

D'Arcy has been experimenting with using Blog Bridge Feed Library to gather all these feeds together. He just might be on to something, although I don't know if the average user should have to ever see or copy and paste an rss url. Then again, perhaps that is just the price we will have to pay to have an open (not-centralized) content playing field. Users deal with email addresses and web site URLs, why not rss urls. It just may take some more time to catch on. As I am writing this today, I really am of two minds about it.

update: You can find a recording of the presentation here.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of helping out at the Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. I, along with Christian, Tim, Gary, Mark, and Jim, manned the demo area where we showed examples of social computing. I mostly talked about flickr and tried to use it as a jumping off point to talk about both tagging and examples of how web 2.0 aids collaboration.

Probably due to the many good sessions during the day, we didn't see a lot of traffic in our area. While we may not have had many visitors relative to the high turnout for the symposium this year, I feel we did get a chance to have a good dialogue with the attendees that did stop in. Are more people around campus becoming familiar with social tools and thus didn't feel the need for further explanation?

Cole wonders if students will come to a university blog solution since they already have facebook and other blogging tools.

I think part of the equation is that people use different online tools for different communities. I have heard stories of college students that got upset when facebook opened to high schools because other members of their family could intrude into their facebook lives.

Facebook may not be the place where students want to showcase their academic work, or engage in discussion related to their field of study. The same could be said of whatever blogging or social tools they may already be using.

For example, I started this blog even though I already had a blog of my own. My other blog is an amalgam of thoughts related to various topics, things I find amusing, links to personal photos, and few sprinkles of randomness. I decided I wanted a different venue to communicate about my work. I also wanted to get everyday experience using the blog platform here, since I have a hand in the project.

At the same time, maintaining multiple blogs increases mental overhead and can quickly become too much.

Of course I don't really know how the tool will be used here at Penn State, or how much it will be used. Only time will tell. I do see it as an important opportunity to offer, even with the facebook and blogger.com out there.

Firefox OS: Why My Hard Drive & Software are Obsolete - lifehack.org

This page linked above reflects what I have been thinking for a while. That more and more of my computer life is just living in a browser and terminal window. What difference does it make what operating system I use?

Unfortunately we are not there yet.

I still need software to deal with my various devices. I need iTunes to manage my ipod. I need to get my address book onto my phone, and addressbook to sms with my computer keyboard when I am at my computer.

Twitterific sure makes twitter pretty, and quicksilver makes accessing and manipulating the data (on my computer, and, to some extent, on the web) easy.

I still use iphoto or the gimp to edit photos, but I use flickr to organize them. I treat my flickr as my photo archive and it is where I go to find and view my photos. The killer feature of flickr that makes up for any issues inherent in the modern web UI is that I don't have to pass through any gate or boundary when going from viewing my photos to viewing those of my contacts. The ability for comments and annotations to live right where the photo lives, not in a separate space, is killer for me as well.

Same thing with Google Docs. I just rather start out any document in there, even if I don't plan on ever sharing it. If it ever do change my mind, the option is right there. And really, if you think about it, almost all documents you produce end up shared at some point, don't they?

In the PSU area - I can access Oracle Calendar via the web interface. I still find the desktop Oracle Calendar app more useful though. I wish the web version had an in-tray like the desktop app.

Of course the one downside of doing everything on the web is that you need to have a decent connection to the web in order to use them. For some people this is just not acceptable. For me, I have access to a connection almost all the time. On the rare occasion that I don't - then that is a chance to unplug for a while, like they did in the old days. Adobe's Apollo promises to allow developers to create web apps that also can work on the desktop without network connection.

One of the upside web apps is that you can access your material on multiple devices. I don't just mean multiple computers, but cell phones and living room devices (wii!).

Anyway this is just some ramblings about how I am using more and more web-based apps instead of desktop apps. What do you think? Do you use many web based apps? Will they start to replace desktop apps more broadly?