Web/Tech
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Be a debaser
It's a boring truism that nearly every new technology is decried by certain parties (certain newspapers, self-appointed guardians of social mores, etc) as fundamentally undermining the fabric of society. From the first wave of communication and broadcast technology – radio, television, and telephones all had their dystopian critics. From my generation the social evil was the home video recorder. What havoc it would wreak, our juvenile minds rotted by video nasties, and our social skills stunted by spending all our times in front of screens. And of course come the PC and internet we've had enough scare stories about games, social networking, and hell, the internet as a whole, to…
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I’m aggregating, aggregating (a shiny show special)
Image: Different uses of tools from last post, created in Gliffy Following on from my last post, I have been looking at tools which allow users to collect together different online resources for sharing. What I'm interested in is aggregating and sequencing content together so you can distribute your sequence to others easily, a kind of flash mini-course creator. Scott Leslie twittered the other day, asking a similar thing and pointed me at the wiki scratchpad for his upcoming educator as DJ talk. So I worked through some of these, and here si my experience: Tumblr – as I mentioned in my previous post, I've rather taken to Tumblr. It's…
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I’m disaggregating, disaggregating
Adblock I had a play around with different sites for aggregating together different resources and social profiles recently (see next post for comparison). As a result I have started using Tumblr quite a bit. As a result I have found a new slice of my online identity which a) I didn't know needed expressing and b) is distinct from other parts of my online identity which are currently satisfied mainly by this blog and twitter with a bit of Facebook, LastFM, delicious, etc thrown in. So how am I using Tumblr? Pretty much as you'd expect, it's my online dump for anything interesting I come across, any half thoughts I…
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Technorati – grounds for divorce
Elbow – Grounds for Divorce Adblock Found at skreemr.com (play song while reading) Technorati has always had it's problems, but like in any relationship, you can overlook them for a while. However, they've been adding up lately, and I think we've reached the stage of irreconcilable differences. Here are the grounds for divorce: It's broken – speaking just as this user, I know it doesn't work reliably. Exhibit A) – my authority hasn't changed for 20 days and even if I ping it manually, it still says 20 days ago. Exhibit B) – there are several people who I know have linked to me that don't show up in Technorati.…
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Microsoft, Apple and the Triumph of Love
<Image: There's nothing you can do that can't be done by anth – http://flickr.com/photos/anth3000/2582043116/> Here's a question you've probably never pondered: why didn't Microsoft invent iTunes? It's not as dumb as it sounds, after all with their MSN network Microsoft had a global media platform which they were seeking to exploit as a content delivery route. And they had the financial and political clout, they could have wrapped up the music market in the way Apple have. Ask yourself this: If you had to place a bet back in 2001 on which company would have online music locked down, which one would you have bet on? It's not like MS…
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Shiny show 2
Following on from the hugely irrelevant Shiny Show 1, I bring the next instalment, where I look at any new technologies that have crossed my path and evaluate them from an educational perspective. The usual proviso that some of these may not be that new, it's just when I get to them. Odadeo – a social network site for dads. It is built around the concept of 'pledges', eg 'I pledge to be more patient', or 'I pledge to take my daughter to see High School bloody Musical 3'. You can then 'pip' your pledges when you do something towards them. You can share pledges and there is a 'Dadsdaq'…
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Shiny Show
In the first of an occasional series I offer up Shinies to the following tools, as potentially interesting in higher education: TwitterFountain – oooh, shiny. Picked this up via a tweet from Brian Kelly. It aggregates tweets and flickr photos that have been given a specified hashtag, in a nice visual interface. Educationally, it's just a nice way of aggregating some feeds that can be embedded in a page. So, a course might decide upon a hashtag and in their course page (WPMU?) have a twitter fountain running. Not sure it adds much pedagogically, but it provides a stimulus for conversation. One problem – it will pull in any flickr…
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SatNav – a microstudy in digitisation
<Image Mapa antiguo de America del Sur – thejourney1972> We have only recently got a SatNav system for the car (it's invaluable if you are towing a caravan, no matter how small and trendy, as doing 3-point turns is not easy, or popular). Using it has made me reflect on how the process of digitisation and connectivity changes behaviour and our relation to certain artefacts. I think what is true of SatNav and maps, is probably true across all forms of content. Here are the changes as I see them: The need for a particular skill (in this case map reading) which was previously thought essential becames largely irrelevant. This…
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Quick play with xtranormal
Tony pointed me at Xtranormal (and the CogDog reminded me that Tony had pointed me at it). It's a service that allows you to create little movies, adding in dialogue, camera angles, music, expressions, etc. So, while having my ham sandwich for lunch I had a quick play and produced the following. It's not very good, but you get the idea: Adblock A better one is this take on FightClub.
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Documentally is waki
The other day social media journalist documentally was invited by Reuters to attend Gordon Brown's press conference. Being a streaming video kinda guy (to put it mildly), he streamed live via Qik: Adblock This went around on Twitter, and I tuned in. It occurred to me that I wouldn't have bothered to watch it live on TV, so why did I watch this time? Partly it was out of curiosity, this being one of the the first times social media type journalists have been in on a big, proper news event (ie a non-techie one). So I wanted to see what it was like. But there was also an element…
