Monthly Archives: June 2009

Jun 11 2009

A TED Goldmine

In the evenings and early morning, my computer and I head off for a little tangental learning.  While my true educational interest is in the Computer Sciences, due to my job, I need to learn about all that I can in all areas.  Fortunately, I enjoy the sort of reading and research that the web provides and I just scoop it up.

I also bookmark the best of my daily reads on Delicious so that I can quickly go back to a


Image via Wikipedia

great resource if need be.  This strategy serves me well and I know that there are folks who learn along with me as subscribers

to Delicious or through the posting of links to this blog that happens sometime in the early morning hours.  You see them reposted or retweeted on Twitter.

In preparation for the NECC Conference, I’m boning up on my American History and want to learn as much as I can before going to Washington so that I can take in things in the evenings.  It was on this journey that I landed at The History Teacher’s Attic.  It’s an interesting place but what caught my eye was the posting “TED Talks Demystified for Teachers”.

Here, the blog has identified some of the TED Talks to be used in an interdisciplinary manner.  I’m fully perked now and ready to dig into this.  What a great approach!

But, amazingly, the real gold mine was hidden in a link.  This link takes us to a Google Spreadsheet summarizing all of the TED talks with links, author names, short descriptions, and the whole shooting match.  If you’re a TED reader and enjoy the enormous wealth of knowledge delivered in the TED format, this is an incredible “keeper”.  All in one spot, you’ve got a great reference.  The TED website has the same content, obviously, but the Computer Scientist in me is just salivating at this resource.  It can be sorted, filtered, searched, …

Where do I start?

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Jun 11 2009

links for 2009-06-10

Jun 10 2009

Grab Your Identity

This weekend, Facebook will allow users to grab “their identity” on the social networking service, as announced on the Facebook blog.  It’s a simple concept.  Instead of sending your friends to a link that includes a lot of technical looking content including “id=592952074″, you will be able to grab your brand and use it when you send people to your Facebook resources.

Rather than just turn the feature on, the folks at Facebook have given everyone notice when they log in that this is coming.  I guess the concept is to stay up late Saturday night or early Sunday morning to grab your name?


Image via Wikipedia

This feature will be of great value to people who use the same name or brand on their social networking services.  For a consistent presence, they’ll want to be known by the same name everywhere.  Those with egos will want to grab their name before someone else does.  For the rest, they’ll probably just enjoy sleeping.

Whether you rush to get online or not, the fact remains that social networking presence and establishing your brand is increasingly important.  Is Facebook the answer for everyone?  Maybe not, but the numbers indicate that you may wish to take a second look.

If you future depends upon an online presence, you may want to think this through.

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Jun 10 2009

links for 2009-06-09

Jun 9 2009

Getting Speedy

I’m wandering my way through the recently announced enhancements to the Macintosh OS X operating system included in the new release called Snow Leopard.  They sound exciting and we’ll look forward to the September release.

Of particular interest to me is the announcement of a smaller hard drive footprint (the announcement indicates that it could be 6GB smaller) and quicker start up, shut down and movement to and from sleeping.

I really welcome these enhancements.  This is going to make computing far more personal.

We all start with new computers that are fairly snappy in performance.  However, over time with the addition and removal of programs, creation of documents, etc., things end up moving at a snail’s pace.  My computer running Vista has reached the brutal stage and my Macintosh isn’t the speed demon that it was when first taken out of the box.  I’m not here to throw stones because I know that much of it is self induced.  Once they do boot, then life is happy again.

Over the years, operating systems have just become bloated, trying to be everything to everyone.  I’d really like to see one that starts with a bare kernel and then snaps in the functionality as it’s needed.  Instead, we seem to start with everything and then up going through hacking and slashing to try and tweak some performance from the machine.

The worst of all cases has to be education where you have a class full of squirmers who just want to get down to work but are delayed with hourglasses and spinning disks.

But, I am happy to hear that developers are recognizing these things and fixing them.  The pre-release of Windows 7 appears to be a joy in this realm too.

In my heart of hearts, I think that we have the Netbook to thank for this.  There is nothing quite so nice as turning it on and watching Linux get started like a speed demon.  You should be able to hit the keyboard flying and be on your way without the aggravating wait.  If Snow Leopard performs as announced, this is going to be an exceptional upgrade.

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Jun 9 2009

links for 2009-06-08

Jun 8 2009

Staying in Touch

Twitter and Facebook are incredible resources for staying in touch with the pulse of whatever you want to stay in touch with!  But, with the information that flies by, how do you stay on top of things?  The best advice that I game myself a long time ago is that you can’t.

However, with the new Seesmic Desktop client, I can try.  And, using some strategy, it seems to be working out for me.

There are really three things that I want to stay on top of…

  • Everything – by this I mean postings by my friends in Facebook, things that I subscribe to with my Twitter account, and news services serving content on Twitter;
  • Things with my name in it.  I used to think it was important to follow @dougpete but there are sometimes folks that forget the @ or are experimenting with random characters to get around the newly imposed Twitter rules for seeing related tweets;
  • Ontario Educators – While I subscribe to a wide collection of educators world-wide, and they appear in the category of “Everything”, the folks within one or two day’s driving distance have immediate messages and content that I want to know.

Seesmic lets me handle all of the above.  What I do is break open three columns to handle the above.  “Everything” is easy and the others are the results of searches.

Even with the above strategy, there are still spur of the moment things that I want.  Thankfully, a quick search and management of userlists allows for a quick toggle to see what’s happening in that part of the world.

The strategy seems to be serving me well.  The only thing that I can’t solve at this point is finding the time to read it all!
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Jun 8 2009

links for 2009-06-07

Jun 7 2009

When Good Things Go Bad …

It was with mixed feelings that I read the Twitter Blog yesterday.

A perceived problem has arisen on Twitter in the form of account impersonations.  You know; someone wants to be someone else and so put in a claim to their name.  The goal could be just mischief or it could be part of a phishing or other sort of scam to get you to read information or follow and get reeled in.

It’s so easy to do when you just take a cursory look at the text.  An example of this happened back in January when mguhlin.org posted an article that it was selected as the “Worst Edublog“.  Now, this was of interest because it’s generally one of the better Education Blogs around and so I decided to check it out.  It turns out that it was an attempt to teach some media literacy.  If you’ve been online for a while, you do learn to question everything and check for secondary sources to verify things.  My first instinct was to question whether the source was legitimate or not.  The author captured the responses and posted to his site indicating that not everyone did the second level of checking.  That’s good procedure, but should it be necessary when coming from a source that you have always assumed credible?  We accept fun and games on April 1.

So, Twitter’s move takes us into the realm of verifying certain accounts so that when you read, you don’t have to be worried about being yanked around by impersonators.  It’s designed to protect those who bring their celebrity to Twitter.  Names like Oprah may wish to ensure authenticity – there are those who are in the public eye and this will be an opportunity for them to secure it.  I don’t have a real problem with that; I do want to know that it’s the real CBC or Rodney Atkins or 10 Downing Street when I read posts from them.  However, I do think that it’s another case of responsibility for the consumer to verify their sources.  Before you follow someone, should the onus not be on ME to make sure that this account is something that I wish to follow?

After all, where there are rules, there will be those who try to get around them.

I am concerned more about those who earned their celebrity through Twitter.  Daily, I look forward to Alec Couros or Jeff Pulver or Robert Morrison as they have insights that I would never have known except for their presence on Twitter.

The plan is to offer this verification to those who bring their celebrity to Twitter first.  When enacted, this will truly create two levels of accounts.  Even though Twitter is quick to point out that it doesn’t mean that verified accounts are no less credible, what is the Twitter consumer to assume?  There will be a rush for everyone to get “verified accounts” as it will be a badge of honour for those who want to be branded with some level of authenticity.  The good thing is that the frequent spammer accounts will be easier to find and ignore.  But, does it make those of us who don’t have celebrity closer to them than we would be to the others?  Maybe this is the long awaited way to monetize Twitter by selling these premium accounts.

When those of us who use Twitter signed up, we did have a verification process albeit a simple email verification.  Perhaps some persistent checking of these accounts would be a way to offer verification to the masses.

It’s just sad that it has to come to this though to protect such a valuable resource.

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Jun 7 2009

links for 2009-06-06