Thanks to a pointer from Alan, I took another look at my 43Things account. It’s a place where you can track stuff you’d like to do - like a shared wishlist. There are 2 other related sites. 43Places lets you track places you’ve been and/or would like to visit. 43People lets you track people you’ve met or would like to meet.
Sounds a bit lame on first blush. Why do that in a public place? What are they doing with the data? Amazon is an investor, so why would I feed my data into the corporate beast?
Dave Hyatt Tim Hatcher announced last night that the latest nightly builds of Safari now include a new tool for web developers to view DOM and CSS elements/attributes on a web page. I tried it last night, and it’s excellent - even better than the one built into Firefox. You just right-click anywhere on a page, and a contextual menu item will let you “Inspect Element”. This is perhaps more intuitive than Firefox’s “enter a new mode, then click somewhere on the inspected page” method of visually selecting an element to inspect.
It took a bit longer than it did the last time I switched (I’m older now, I guess), but I think my transition to the Dvorak keyboard is nearly complete. I now “think” in Dvorak - my fingers are naturally finding the right keys without any intervention. Most of the time. Occasionally I have to pause to think about where a letter is - mostly when entering passwords or shell commands.
Structured Blogging was just updated to version 1.pre13, and one of the changes is apparently a new content type (well, it may have been in 1.pre12 - I skipped a version) that supports a structured review of a journal article.
This could be quite useful in academic blogging. Imagine a spider that crawls the blogs of your students (or of students and professors across the ‘sphere), indexing journal article reviews. It could make it very easy to share notes and thoughts on an article, or to create a distributed journal bibliography for communities of practice…
Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.
But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc… are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.
So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.
James Farmer just pushed the Nonscholae.org website, which was born from the “learning to swim” discussion in the edublogosphere a few weeks back. From the site:
nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus We learn, not for school, but for life - Seneca, Epistulae
We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.
Every now and then, I remember about the great search application called Kartoo. It’s a flash UI on top of a bunch of search engines, and does some really interesting things with the aggregated search results. The coolest (and most visible) thing is the “concept map” view of search results - and this display doubles as an on-the-fly social network diagram.
For example, I just did a quick ego search (don’t laugh - you do it too. fess up!) for “darcynorman.net” to see what kind of diagram came up. I was surprised by how on the mark it is. The diagram is a good starting point (although far from comprehensive) for getting an idea about what interesting bits I published (since only those will be linked to by others), and you get a rough idea of my immediate social network. The display is paged, which is unfortunate and counterintuitive (since you can zoom and pan the diagram, and pagination only makes sense for text lists…). Here’s a screenshot of the second “page” of results mapped out:
I spent about 2 minutes playing with Moodle today, in response to a question from Gord about how to add resources to a course. He started adding a resource yesterday, but wasn’t sure how to finish the process (it was a website link, and he wasn’t sure which fields were mandatory and which were optional). So I log in with the temporarily-shared administrative account, navigate to the course, and open the “add resource” panel.
If Apple has decided to replace “Power-” with “Mac-”, and add “- Pro”, ala “MacBook Pro”, does that mean we’re going to see a “MacMac Pro” as the new Intel-powered desktop?
Here’s hoping the new naming scheme isn’t taken too literally… :-)
I’ve been watching way too much of The Incredibles since Christmas (finally got a DVD player, and Evan’s a huge Pixar fan already), and all I can picture when I think about the mythical MacMac Pro is this.
I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between “portfolios” and “dossiers”. I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a “Teaching Dossier” system as part of its offerings. I’m not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant - it’s the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.
In my continued activities as the designated CMS Twiddler for the Learning Commons, I’m putting together a site for a client that will serve as both a “traditional” website (but they can edit through a browser), and a “community” site, with blogs, forums, resource databases and the like. I was playing with both Drupal 4.6.x and the betas of 4.7 (now up to beta 3), and I’ve found a combination of modules that will let us do pretty much exactly what we had planned on.