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Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego
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In the last few years, publishers have finally started to embrace digital publishing and now lots of books on lots of different topics are available for various eBook platforms. If you’re into social media (and who isn’t?) check out these ten can’t-miss eBooks!
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Doctors are said to be people that help those who are sick or in need of medical treatment. Most doctors are seen as benevolent towards society as a whole, but maybe not by those people who need to get their routine vaccinations.
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Guess what? One single device wins this award in my book. It wins for both best and worst simultaneously. What is it? It’s the OLPC XO.
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Microblogging service Twitter reached profitability ahead of expectations in 2009 in characteristic style, with just two strokes of the pen, Business Week reported Monday.
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In the tradition of year-end lists, we're introducing Facebook Memology. "Memology" refers to the study of how "memes," or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook. For this year's list, the Facebook Data Team mapped the top trending words and phrases in U.S. status updates for 2009
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Ever seen a hashtag on Twitter, and wondered what it is all about? Now you can look it up, and cast your vote on the definitions. And if you don't like the definitions, or none exists, you can create your own in seconds.
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For those that are interested to see who is surfing the web and where they are at are the top 10 countries that are using the Internet continuously:
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Works with all desktops and devices. ZCS Features (PDF) Download a Free Trial See whats new in 6.0
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"The primary goal of “Having Fun with Computer Programming and Games” is to promote and instill an interest in programming and computer science to transition year students (age 15-16). This unit uses a freely available software tool that was developed by the MIT Media Lab called Scratch."
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could become as important a journalistic tool
as the Freedom of Information Act
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Muppet Christmas Carol
Thanks, Tim Stahmer, for this trip down memory lane…
Day 3 with Windows 7
Yesterday was a great day with Windows 7. No hard reboots at all. I’m taking that that is a good sign that I’m removing things that are no longer of any use. One thing I did want to get though was the update to the Active Protective System from Thinkvantage. I’m rough with my computers and so this laptop does get moved quite a bit and the current software is announced as incompatible with Windows 7. Like what happens whenever I do anything with Thinkvantage, I have to update the updater first and the APS was available. I decided to remove the modem driver since I never use it. It’s a little nervous because sometimes the modem driver is hooked into other integral parts of the system. But, I was able to remove it.
APS wanted a reboot which made sense and, upon reboot, Windows notices the modem and insists on downloading updates from Microsoft Update. Who am I to argue with Microsoft? At the very least, I’ll have the latest driver. I may be fickle, but at least I’m an easy going fickle. System boots and life is good. But, something is wrong.
Despite my Windows experience of 5, something is amiss. Actually, a couple of things are amiss. While the menu is nice, it still does require that you load the menu, go to a program group, and then launch your application. I’ve learned about pinning applications to the taskbar but if I pin everything I need, it will be full upon loading. Then, it dawned on me – I really used the Quick Launch toolbar.
No problem, I figure, it’s probably just disabled. I right click on the toolbar and ask to see all of my Toolbars and there are the usual ones. Links, Address, etc. but no Quick Launch. That’s strange. I know that I didn’t remove it in the upgrade from Vista. It’s got to be around somewhere. I do a search and the first result is “What happened to the Quick Launch Toolbar?” It’s not included? Hmmm. That’s the way I do things, Microsoft. Well, the early football game wasn’t terribly exciting so I decided to poke around the hard drive and found the Quick Launch toolbar from the old system at: C:\Users\Doug\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer. This really is important to me as many of the shortcuts from my old system had been moved to the Quick Launch. I wonder if I could restore it?
Easy.
Right click on the taskbar to create a new toolbar and I navigate my way through the hard drive (thank goodness I reveal hidden folders) and I select the folder and add it to my taskbar. But, it’s at the wrong end! Instead of being next to the Start button, it’s beside the clock. And, it’s labelled too. Surely that’s fixable and definitely it was. Just unlock the task bar and the objects are movable. Turn off the name and I drag the three apps that I use most Chrome, Seesmic Desktop, and FirstClass to the task bar for my quick and easy way of accessing applications rather than pinning and I’m happy. I drag the others around on the Quick Launch bar to put them in alphabetical order and I’m really happy now.
There’s even the shortcut to Show the Desktop and it still works. So, the trick is to open up the taskbar to show just the first three icons and then lock it again. With the room for organizing icons gone, there’s now room for the four that I need.
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera are still available from the Quick Launch so that I have all of the apps that I need for testing web pages. I’ll use small icons so that I get more real estate.
Somewhere in the midst of all of the above, I noticed the little 3D button next to the clock and learned by accident the “Look at Desktop” and “Peek at Desktop” feature. That’s going to come in handy.
I really feel a sense of accomplishment now. As I’m using my computer, I have the functionality that I’ve grown accustomed to plus a knowledge of even more of Windows 7’s new features.
I love learning.
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2009-12-20
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Site tracking and analytics tool StatCounter Global Statistics now shows that Firefox 3.5 is the most used browser in the world.
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Research tutorial from Rutgers university
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When you need a pat on the back
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View the list of the Top 100 Videos for Teachers. This list is provided by SmartTeaching.org, a leading online resource for current teachers, and aspiring education students and student teachers.
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ohCanada is simply your portal to the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter games. The application gives you the schedule for each day by date or by event
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Huge collection of language arts and literacy resources
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A "World" of multicultural stories.
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Online Photo booth, en francais
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Welcome to TelevisionTunes.com, a library of TV theme music and songs from yesterday and today.
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Play neverending quiz, memory
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Name tags help in identifying and recognizing people in functions, parties and events. Free Name Tags is a nice site which makes the task of creating and printing name tags quick and easy.
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Great collection of secondary school math quotes, puzzles, etc.
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In spring 2009 I offered for the first time a newly developed 200-level course designed primarily for Dickinson College students majoring in Middle East Studies, International Studies, and Political Science: Media, Mass Communication, and Political Identities in the Middle East and North Africa
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We often think of computers as a very modern phenomenon, but there were actually plenty of computers around 50 years ago.
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The idea was to build a bare-bones, but visually compelling and highly usable to-do app based on Tina’s personal ideal work-flow.
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This Digital Literacy Toolkit began with the premise that multimedia authoring, which is happening with the extensive use of PowerPoint in classrooms, must be taught as a skill, just as traditional text-based writing is taught
Day 2 with Windows 7
I did a great deal of learning yesterday. As noted earlier, I did an upgrade in place from Vista to Windows 7 rather than a clean install. My logic was to give it a shot and then, if it didn’t work out, do the clean install.
It was a rocky start but with a lot of persistence and deletion of programs, it seems to have become a pretty stable system. With my slash and burn technique, I may have inadvertently clobbered some programs that didn’t need to be clobbered but they can always be re-installed. My first attempt at optimization came when my Comodo firewall started learning my habits again. That seemed kind of weird and so I started poking around in the Control Panel in a section called “Review Your System Status”. Now, I had installed the third party firewall because of some system projects that I had been involved with before and disabled the Windows Firewall to try and make the old Vista system more secure. With the upgrade, it looks like the settings for the Comodo firewall had been reset and it was learning how I use a computer all over again.
By default Windows 7 turned on its own firewall and I was counselled about the evils of having two firewalls on a system. It’s good advice; which one to disable? Microsoft had taken such bad press with its Vista firewall that I’m thinking that that this new one has to be engineered differently. I hadn’t read about any concerns with Windows 7 firewall. The topper though, came when it was reported that I had two anti-virus programs active. I had the desired NOD32 product but the system also reported that Comodo had an anti-virus running as well. A little poking around and I noted that the Comodo security package gives you 30 days of its anti-virus when you install the firewall. That made the decision easier – for this moment in time I removed it.
While looking around at NOD32, I determined that version 3 is not supported on Windows 7 – but there is a version 4. I’m good with that so version 3 removed and version 4 put into place. That seemed to go well. We’re still reporting that both NOD32 and Windows defender are keeping guard against malware. This time, I’m not taking the Windows route – defender takes a back seat on this one. This isn’t a state of the art computer but a “Windows Experience” of 5.0 is making things pretty snappy at this point. I was only 4.2 with Vista. Have the rules changed or is Windows 7 that much more optimized?
One of the things that I really do like about the configuration section is the ability to find out details about what all of these things mean. “How does a firewall protect my computer?” While those of us who have been around the block for a few laps understand, it’s great learning for a new person if they care to take the time to look at it. There’s even a helper session that I hope I never need – “Run programs built for previous versions of Windows”. I’m assuming that it’s a nice interface to take you into compatibility mode. The good news is that I haven’t had to run it yet. My computing habits are such that I’m typically using recent titles and they are designed for Windows 7. The real challenge will be digging into some of the older educational titles. That’s where it could get ugly. After all, we manage to get 130ish titles working under Windows XP. It’s going to be a pretty significant project to check them all out as we move forward. The biggest challenge has always been keeping all of the applications happy with older versions of Quicktime. My thoughts about those programs as we move into 2010 will come as a separate entity. Windows 7 could mark the end of “drill and kill”.
I haven’t noticed any comments along this line with the research I’d been doing in preparation for my upgrade but I really struggled to get the 16GB that Windows 7 wanted for the upgrade. After the upgrade, and with my paring, it seemed to have generously offered me some new storage space. I’m currently quite happy to report that I’ve got over 30GB free space. I’m very happy with that. Will I be able to sustain that? Hmmm.
So, Day 2 was way better than Day 1. Things are running snappier and smoother. Only one hard boot was required. A major player in the way that I work, Seesmic Desktop, has never run so well. At this point, I’m a pretty happy camper. However, as my friend Ron is quick to point out, I’m on record as being a fickle computer user and being in maintenance / setup mode is killing me.
On to Day 3…
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2009-12-19
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EvaluTech offers expanded access to resources that are aligned with the work of the Educational Technology Cooperative. It is committed to providing high-quality information to K-20 education agencies —states' departments of education and higher education agencies— in the 16 states.
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Twilk takes your Twitter friends' faces and puts them on your Twitter background.
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ipl2 is a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment. To date, thousands of students and volunteer library and information science professionals have been involved in answering reference questions for our Ask an ipl2 Librarian service and in designing, building, creating and maintaining the ipl2's collections
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Trying to find people that will actually engage with
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What is the solution, then? Give your kids the opportunity to play puzzle games and strategy games as well – here’s a small list of entertaining games that will teach them logic, planning, concentration and deep thinking, allowing them to make good decisions in complex, real life situations
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With the growth of the internet, technology and especially with web 2.0 tools it is now easier for each of us to build a unique online Personal Learning Network (PLN).
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@courosa's presentations
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Resources for Classroom 2.0 LIVE show on December 19, 2009. Special Guest: Alec Couros Topic: Open, online university courses
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These templates are to be used for educational purposes only.
All Game Templates were found by searching on other sites. -
We are NOT affiliated with Facebook in any way. We pride ourselves on providing you the best LOL moments in facebook history
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KlickableTV is the easiest way
to make your videos interactive -
What's Special About This Number?
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AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you great alternatives, based on user recommendations. Also a version for mobiles.
Can’t Blog — Working
Today is the first day of our Christmas Break so I should be relaxing, right? Not this guy.
I’m anticipating that there will be a lot of computer Christmas gifts this year to take advantage of the public wireless network when we get back to work in 2010. If you’re headed into any of the computer stores, you’re buying a computer with Windows 7 on it. So, I figured that the two week hiatus from work would be the time to do the upgrade. So, I got myself the software and finally got a chance to look at it yesterday afternoon.
Thankfully, Microsoft provides a utility to scan your system to see if you’re ready to upgrade. I scanned this and I decided to do an upgrade in place. With all of the stuff that I’ve installed over the couple of years that I had this computer, I received one of those “Geez, you need some hard drive space here, Doug” messages. So, after I backed up my working files, I did a slash and burn on the applications that I’ve installed. Windows wants at least 16GB of storage space but I managed to get her 20GB so that’s lots of room. There was one application that had to go and lots of warnings about upgrades to be made but that’s OK.
It’s not like I didn’t like Vista. I think I’m one of the ones that was good with it. Once you get into a Vista mindset, things make a lot of sense. Personally, I just tired of the 15 minute boot time that could be blamed on it and my desire to have a gazillion applications to run. Plus, I need to know if eTeacher and Markbook, our two major reporting applications would run under Windows 7 and what little gotchas are there with them if they do.
In retrospect, I actually made a good decision for once. I had done the backup and cleanup and was ready to go about 1:00pm. I could start the upgrade process and let it run while I did a bunch of other things. But, the little voice in the back of my head counselled me to wait and do it at home. For once, the voices in my head made the right choice. A quick internet search indicated that some upgrades in place could take 20 hours. I was moving from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional and I really did want to make it home for supper so delayed the upgrade until later. It turns out this was a great choice. While my upgrade wasn’t 20 hours worth, it did take almost 5 hours.
And, as smoothly as a 5 hour upgrade could be with its rebooting, it went relatively smoothly. I figured I’d just get connected and let the system download any needed updates overnight. But, I couldn’t get connected. Well, I could get connected to my wireless; I couldn’t just go any further. I was connected to MY access point but was getting a static IP from another setting. D’oh! The machine is a Lenovo and had the Thinkpad Thinkvantage apps on it and I’m guessing this is one of those that will need upgrading. Time to sleep. Maybe magic will happen overnight.
Nope.
Still having the wrong connection which locks up everything else. At least I know that holding down the power key for 10 seconds turns it off and there is a safe mode which you boot from an unnatural shutdown. I delete the Thinkvantage Connections and set things manually, and here I am. Connected; Windows Live Writer is working, upgrades are downloading in the background and I’m off to explore whatever else need fixing.
Back to work.
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2009-12-18
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How to Photograph Christmas Lights
Here's a neat little lighting exercise that has nothing to do with off-camera flash. -
From startlingly ignorant PC questions to appalling displays of sexual confusion, people have some pretty strange problems–and the depth of their cluelessness is nowhere more evident than on the pages of Yahoo Answers.
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Sharetronix Opensource is a multimedia microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company, or group to exchange short messages over the Web.
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This year companies continued to be felled more by usual issues such as lost laptops, un-patched or poorly coded software, inadvertent disclosures and rogue insiders, rather than by sneaky new attack techniques or devastating new hacker tools.
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In our virtual mall, you can play games, design ads, chat with customers and store owners, and much more. You’ll learn key consumer concepts, such as how advertising affects you, how you benefit when businesses compete, how (and why) to protect your information, and how to spot scams. What better place to do it than at the mall!
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The best historical pictures on the internet
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Understand your followers
A day in the Internet
With all of this going on…
Created by Online Education
…you found my blog. Thanks, gentle reader.
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2009-12-17
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Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010?
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Getting people to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site enough may sound easy, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work, and much of the right formula is deduced through trial and error.
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While the frivolous iPhone apps usually get most of the media attention (yes, there really are over 175 apps that can produce rude bodily noises), there are quite a few apps that can help you do your job as an IT worker. While less notorious, they are worth your time to download and check out.
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The role that social networking will play in education
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Masher lets you easily create a video by mixing together video clips, music tracks, and photos all for FREE!
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Have you ever wondered how the zombie apocalypse might unfold? Binary Space has created a Zombie Outbreak Simulator which allows you to witness the viral spread of the great zombie outbreak in Google Maps as it sweeps across Washington DC, in an area close to the Catholic University of America, north of the Pentagon.
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12 Best Tools To Find And Manage Proxy Servers
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A way to organize your information in a virtual infinite space.
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LocaPoint is the state-of-the-art location pointer code that can express any location of the world, only with 12 letters.
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All images listed at Open Stock Photography come from Wikimedia Commons and as such "can be used by anyone, for any purpose[1]"
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Pearltrees lets you organize the web your way. Use Pearltrees to keep at hand the contents you find everyday on the web, to discover new contents from people who share your interests, to drive them through your own web.
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WriteCheck presents users with easy to interpret results showing which sections of a paper appear to be unoriginal and that the writer should verify as properly cited, summarized or paraphrased.
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Online interactive whiteboard and collaboration area
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About Lesson Planner Advanced
Has been designed and developed by experienced teachers working in real schools with real pupils -
Periodic table of the elements – great for the SMART Board
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DOC Cop is a plagiarism, cryptomnesia and collusion detection tool that creates reports displaying the correlation and matches between documents or a document and the web.
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Engrade is a free set of web-based tools for educators allowing them to manage their classes online while providing parents and students with 24/7 real-time online class information. It's private, secure, truly free, and unbelievably easy to use – so join over 150,000 teachers and start using Engrade today.
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Comapping is online mind mapping software to manage and share information. Use it to take notes, plan and organize. It's a way to have one set of notes. One set of files. For everyone.
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Magnetic online, in your browser word board
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BrainHoney allows any educator to quickly and efficiently leverage online learning
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Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr images, and more!
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Send Instant Private Video Messages
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"KZero Worldswide is a consulting company positioned at the heart of the rapidly growing and wildly exciting sectors of virtual worlds, virtual goods, augmented reality and 3D gaming."
