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Finding the message in medium
I had a play with medium the other day. It’s an interesting bit of software – it installs a sidepanel on your browser and then creates a visual radar of sites similar to the one you are visiting. You can see which other medium users are at these sites. You chat with them by putting out a general call on the bulletin board. I found it a bit disconcerting though, having these people watch the sites you visit. You can make yourself anonymous, but even so the thought of being observed feels rather intrusive, and so I turned it off and it has remained that way since. I also found…
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Is Nielsen a stickability kinda guy?
A few people (including Dawud Miracle) have blogged about Jacob Nielsen (it is law that I have to use the term ‘usability guru’ here) and his interview with the BBC where he suggested web 2.0 was neglecting good design. Nielsen speaks good sense sometimes (I particularly like his top 10 UI bloopers in Hollywood), but I’ve always found his design rules rather steadfast, or rather that people taken them and apply them too rigourously. I remember sitting in a meeting with the ill-fated UKeU and someone gave us a lecture on usability, based entirely on Nielsen, which was to form the basis of their VLE design. I pointed out that…
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When I missed the Gabbly bus
No. 2 in an occassional series of things I didn’t follow up on (see When I missed the wiki bus). A few years ago I suggested that we develop a tool that allowed instant messaging on a specific page, ie it showed you who was reading that page at the same time and you could chat with them. This was intended for study, so students reading the same page in a VLE could say ‘I don’t get this, do you?’. I even had a natty name for it – ‘StudyBuddy’. Of course, nothing ever came of it, but recently I’ve been looking at Gabbly (possibly as a tool for the…
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OpenLearn conference
Patrick McAndrew (keep blogging Patrick!) sent me a call for papers for an open learn conference here at the OU, which might be of interest to some readers: The call for papers is open for the openlearn 2007 conference: researching open content in education. Deadline for submission by short papers (~1000words) is 31st May 2007. The conference will be held 30-31 October 2007 near The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. There will be no charge for attendance with priority for registration given to those responding to the call for papers. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.…
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Value of EdTechie
John pointed me at this Cyberwire site which calculates the monetary value of your site – pointless but irresistible. Mine is worth $5,662. For one moment I thought that was a monthly figure, but it’s annual. We always said we didn’t do it for money didn’t we? (and I bet if I did start plugging this site for adverts as much as they suggest the traffic would wane).
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The future is here…
.. we just haven’t noticed it. I had a fairly normal working day today, but I reflected on how technologically infused it was. This posting isn’t meant to be smug and purvey how modern my life is, since I’m aware that (strange though it may seem) some people are not working in educational technology, and so the working day of, a plumber say, may not be so affected (but probably more financially rewarding). And also there are people who live a far more technologically enhanced life, but it struck me that we have these small incremental changes and occassionally we have to take stock. Below is my day, and I…
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What a difference some design makes
I came across wetpaint today – a service that allows people to easily create wikis. Nothing particularly new there, but here’s the catch – they look good! Most wikis are a bit on the bland side, but without any specialist programming skills anyone can create an attractive wiki here. It seems to have caught on too with lots of hobby and interest sites flourishing, although a lot of them seem to be just using it to create websites that don’t really do much by the way of wiki. I am currently considering where we house the FLOSScom summer school (which will be about learning in an open source community), and…
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Flickrvision and glanceability
I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I’ll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn’t so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and…
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A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content
I haven’t looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including: Cardiff news stories Cardiff photos A google map with Cardiff events marked on it Cardiff weather Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking ‘that’s cool!’ (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term ‘cool’ in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info…
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The poetry of webcams
When I first started out on the web, around 1995, I thought web cams were marvellous. They’ve kind of fallen off my radar since (maybe they’ve been made a bit grubby). I was playing around with Google Desktop today and one of the widgets you could add was one that cycles through webcam shots from around the world, which you can then call up. I spent an hour or so looking at these, and there is still a thrill at being able to take control of a camera on the other side of the world and turn it to look down the street. It strikes me that a better writer…
