The Performancing extension for Firefox was just updated, and they added some great new stuff. It’s now tied into del.icio.us, and adds a “Page Tools” view that looks up the current web page in Technorati (handy, but no handier than a bookmarklet).
Firefox is still not quite as nice as Safari, so I don’t think I’ll be using it full time (page scrolling performance in Firefox is terrible on my ‘book, and text rendering isn’t quite as nice as in Safari). Maybe I’ll try it for a few days to see how it works out.
It’s been a LONG time since I’ve played with Ecto. I used the previous incarnation (KungLog) before it changed to become Ecto, and lost touch with it since then. I’ve been using the browser-based WordPress posting interface almost exclusively, with occasional dabbles into the worlds of Firefox+Performancing and Flock.
Gotta say, I’m less impressed with Ecto’s write-and-preview flow (and by default, it’s not even a live preview, and the “automatic” preview isn’t quite “live”). If an app is going to provide an interface like this, it really should go the extra mile and use a full-out WYSIWYG interface (with the option to revert to source editing mode). And the controls for entering/editing hyperlinks are, well, bizarre and non-intuitive. A mini-toolbar at the bottom of the editing window is pretty un-Maclike, and odd when considering all other controls are in an almost-conventional toolbar above the editing pane…
It was pointed out that I’d neglected to have a “presentations” page, so there was no easy way to grab stuff from any of the presentations that I’ve had the chance to be involved with.
I just added a new “Presentations” section, listing (I think) every presentation I’ve done since I started here at the Learning Commons. There may be a couple that I’ve missed, but at least the “big” ones are there. I’ll keep it up to date as new ones come online.
I’m posting this to remind myself to not get sucked into this stuff. It’s good that people are thinking about how to improve on the LOM, and even deprecating the term “learning object” (replaced by “resources”) but for the love of all that is holy and good, please focus on the content, context, and pedagogy and not on the metadata.
This post is the 1,000th post I’ve made to my blog (not counting the ones that made up the early months of the blog, which have been lost forever). As I’ve been publishing more stuff to it, writing more, ranting more, it’s interesting (and curious) to see the fluctuations in traffic to the blog. As of right now, there have been 168,031 actual human visitors since stats started being monitored (on 5/25/2003).
I was able to put together a version of the presentation as an “enhanced podcast” using a borrowed copy of Garage Band ‘06. It worked very well for the task, with one glaring issue - apparently GB can’t handle audio longer than 65 minutes, so the last couple of minutes of the presentation audio is truncated. No big loss, as it’s mostly just wrapup (and there is an 11-minute section of awesome Q and A around the 30 minute mark - at the “Wiki Discussion” chapter).
Christa McAuliffe was to be the first schoolteacher in space, sent up as a payload specialist. She’s the one most remembered, but all seven crewmembers were lost in that tragic accident. I still shudder thinking of the ride they must have had, trapped in the cockpit as it fell to the water…
I just put the almost-finishing touches on a presentation I’ll be giving to folks in the Faculty of Education tomorrow. The topic? It’s basically a tour of things like wikis, weblogs, RSS and podcasting, with a presentation at the beginning, some live demos, and some hands-on time. Essentially “The Read/Write Web 101”
I merged a couple of my other presentations (intro to weblogs and intro to wiki) and added some refinements. It’s grown to 105 slides, which sounds scary, but there isn’t a bullet point in the bunch, and most slides are only on the Big Screen to give a background while I talk about something. I’m guessing the presentation will run between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on audience participation. We’ve got a 3-hour slot, and would like to have as much “hands-on” time as possible.
Brian’s asking for comments to help build a presentation tonight. I’m cutting it awfully close to the wire (the presentation starts in just over an hour) but hopefully another trackback will help…
What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?
The biggest thing about these self-publishing tools is that they’re self-publishing, natch. You don’t need to be a geek to be able to publish to the ’net anymore - and this stuff has the potential to “fix” the web, which was supposed to be a dynamic network of linked content published by individuals, but got co-opted into a variation of the TV broadcast model, with users sitting in front of glowing screens receiving the content that The Man wants to feed them (picture a scene from Max Headroom or something). Instead, we can effectively publish our own content, with whatever authority we can muster. Individuals are just as able as companies (large and small) - as an example, this blog currently has a Google rank of 6, which is higher ranked than some companies. That would have been impossible without easy and effective self-publishing tools.
Not sure if I can cross off one of my 43Things - which is to write a novel. Apparently I’m an accomplished pulp sci fi author. I’ve since moved on from writing about cats, though…
Seriously, though - be sure to check out Alan Levine and Brian Lamb’s latest wild and wacky presentation: Beyond The Blog. They’ve put the online resources up already, in the form of a Flickr album. Alan’s sheer bliss at stretching metaphors shows through in spades, along with Brian’s literary sarcasm ;-)
