Fun and Nonsense

Twitter, Splashcast and I Feel Fine….

Blogging just seems to get quicker and in someways it is amazing what catches on. All this meta-data and micro-detail about our lives has led to the Twitter craze? Simply you can update with a small sentence and no more – what you are doing at that present moment. This can then be sent to your instant messenger or mobile phone, or more importantly to your friends messenger and phone services. The interesting point about this silly Web 2.0 service is that the web is being combined with messenger, and text on your phones….and communication can pass either way. This is starting to develop ways in which ubiquitous computing can allow communication anywhere from any connected device, and would lead to many applications for education and teaching and learning. I tried way back in the first year of my Masters to use an online application called in.mediat which is now defunct but tried a similar thing, as whenever I posted a blog post it would be sent automatically to a messenger service like MSN. The app was a little cranky but the idea intrigued me, as most of the students I teach readily admit they use their computer primarily as a messaging device even before using it for social networking. Anyway hopefully more developments will follow which I can research into soon.

Also just discovered ‘We Feel Fine’, which again shows the amaxing interconnectness and openness of the net today. The application uses an API to track anytime a weblog uses the words ‘feel’ in a webpost, it then feeds this all into an amazing online presentation tool which places them into a variety of categories. Much better to check it out, than to let me describe it. But again this shows how a tool, can extract data amazingly accurately from millions and millions of sources. Could this not be used in some form or other to extract reusable sources and educational activities?
The third of my amazing and fun finds this week, was Splashcast – which simply allows you through a flash interface to create your own channel of video, resources and much more into one package that can be embedded on any website. For instance their example of the front of their site, brings together all the TED videos into a package you can embed on any website. The possibiliites of this are endless, and much more transparent and immediate than the above two tools. I’ll get back to you when I have created my first channel.

(Editors Note: After all these wonders I was brought back to earth by the crass firewalls that schools keep on putting in place, leading to my school weblogs and MOODLE CICT site amongst other items not passing through the firewall. Great learning tool when no-one can access it at school..aargggh)

Happy New Year and Eid….

Karnak2Well this is just a quick message to say I am back from Upper Egypt and will now be blogging away my results and work for my upcoming deadlines for my assignment on Blogs and their actual effectiveness within a class setting in a secondary school.

Yes I know it already seems I’m blogging about blogging, but after my literature review it seemed very obvious their has been a great deal of academic research not just ‘Grey’ literature about blogging but very little actually deals with the qualitative outcomes of using blogs in a classroom. And especially within a secondary classroom. There is a great deal of quantitative analysis related to posts and interconnectivity of blogs with each other to form a community – but it almost seems that creating a community around a single blog within a school is considered a more lowly pursuit. Anyway more soon…
Hopefully tomorrow I will place up all the literature that I managed to find related to my assignment and provide finally the preliminary outline of thoughts, why I use blogs and why I probably don’t think they have a wide future use within education but will be used sporadically as a tool. Until then I hope you enjoy my photo from Karnak temple, a beautiful part of the world even if a little cold at this time of year?

The Wonders of CSS Styling and the Browser Wars

Well miraculously managed to solve the latest problems within the CSS stylesheet that came up when I realised that both blogs I am running were not rendering at all well in the new Microsoft Beta Browser IE7. I was a little dismayed as I happen to actually quite like the browser and it is a vast improvement over IE6. It will not replace my avid appreciation of Firefox but is now definitely an alternative that I will use on occasion. The use of tabbed browsing and the very similar Google search bar located in the top right hand corner all make it a browser I can now start to recommend again, especially to students who seem to love the world of Microsoft?

The biggest problem is how IE7 renders CSS stylesheets (for those unsure of what a stylesheet is check this simple site for an explanation) differently so causing the problems that I have now rectified simply by changing the “height: 100%” declaration in the “body” selector of the CSS file to “height: auto”. Go figure …huh! It makes little sense, but I can only see the problem actually getting even worse.

Anyways students..download IE7 and you can still see my blogs now …you are so lucky…

Lots of good stoof around…

As Will suggested yes maybe I should not be touching this computer, but I had a look at my bloglines account today and found loads of interesting stuff around. Not least the MoodleMoot has finished to which I might have been able to go if I had not travelled to Mexico! They are providing video and audio of all the presentations at the Moot so it is worth a look.

Also their is a great posting on the Around the Corner blog about the wonderful world of VLE acronyms, something which I talked about a little in my recent assignment. Miguel clears up the terms CMS and LMS rather well although I still think they are all slowly merging into each other.

Well I have been on this computer for well over an hour and where has the time gone again. Will need to look closely into how I am controlling my time on this ‘thing’ and the Masters assignments next year. Interestingly found a good article and tool about at least monitoring your time from David Seah which might help. Will have a go with it when I return to home!

Well have to go to lunch, will have to kerb my bloglines patrolling for the next few days.