Monthly Archives: October 2010

Oct 10 2010

Reading Randomly

Sunday morning and it’s a great opportunity to get caught up on the events of the past week.  There was a time when that meant walking over to Mac’s Milk and buying a copy of the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and the Toronto Sun.  Then, armed with a couple of coffees, it was time to read them from cover to cover.  It was an activity that I really enjoyed.  As I think about it, it was largely a sequential activity as I would flip through the various pages, reading pausing here and there to read.

I still enjoy these publications but spend my reading time online with them.  Online affords one the luxury of getting to the content considerably quicker.  My reading experience has certainly broadened with the wealth of newspapers that are so easily accessible.  The Newseum is a great launch pad for newspapers world-wide.

Reading can be, as noted above, very sequential if you let it.  Random access is better handled online where you can pick and choose what you want to read.  But, it’s not just for news anymore.  To entice readers to return, publishers are embedding great entertainment as well in the forms of video and images.  The result is a great experience for the consumer.  Now, my primary sources are my Alltop page, flipping through Flipboard, and as I shared earlier this week resources that I accumulate in my Seesmic Desktop.  Alltop is, in fact, one of the start pages in my browsers.

Oh, and also the Ontario Educators and the Yoon Soo Lim Dailies too.

But, there’s another page that I enjoy enough to put in a second tab.  It’s a service called Popurls.

Like the Newseum, it’s a service that collects the best of the web.  If you’re looking for the most recent on Flickr, Reddit, Digg, or Yahoo! Buzz or well, so much more, this is the place to go.  You really do have to visit it to experience it.  Just visit or login with your OpenID to customize colours, content time, organization, etc.

With all of this so available, there’s no end for the news and reading junkie.  It fits nicely into a Flipboard page too.

But, everyone now and again, I feel the urge just for a random shot of something — anything.

Popurls helps out there with a service that they call Popshuffle.

It’s a little piece of code that you drag to your bookmark bar.  When you get the urge to read something at random, just give it a click and see what turns up.  Now, we’re all open minded people here so you’ll take my advice wisely when I indicate that you use the service wisely if there are people looking over your shoulder.  You’ll recognize that random is random and news to some is not necessarily news for all.

Despite this, it’s a wonderful resource if you’re looking for a quick random read.

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Oct 10 2010

links for 2010-10-10

Oct 9 2010

Window Shopping

Probably for good reason, I am forbidden from going to the shopping mall and especially any technology store by myself.  I’m a real sucker for window displays, I guess, and I am the poster child for impulse shopper!

I have a couple of problems when I go to the App Store looking for something for my iPad.  First of all, the store is huge.  By the time that I get done wandering around looking for what I’m looking for, I’ve forgotten what I was looking for!  I’ll also spend some time looking at the Top 25 lists and that’s a great way to browse but sometimes just doesn’t inspire me to find something interesting and new to play around with.  It can be frustrating at times.

But, I found there’s an application that eases the process.

It’s called Appsfire and is available through a website which is a great way to browse and find new apps.  It does involve a two step process since you then have to go to the store, download the app, and then synch it to the iPad.  What’s even cooler is that Appsfire is also an iPad application! 

Just like the finest stroll through the mall, you get enticed by a huge display of application icons.  And, if you want, they animate on the screen just wandering around drawing your attention.

Inspired by design, click it to get more details about the application.  If it’s what you want, another click and you into the application store and downloading.  Keep in mind that all of this is handily available from within the iPad itself.  It’s the slickest way to find new applications.  Head over to the website, if you’re so inclined, to create an account and share your finds with others.

Configuration?  Absolutely.  If you’re just looking for free applications or the Lite version before you want to purchase, this is a great way to proceed.

Just make sure that you have the settings configured appropriately.

If you’re an app junky, you’ll want to download and give this one a try.  It makes window shopping so easy from your iPad. 

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Oct 9 2010

links for 2010-10-09

Oct 8 2010

An Ontario PLN Timeline

It’s Friday and time to salute the best of your Twitter friends with a #FollowFriday shoutout.  I did a little creative, constructive work with a couple of websites to pull off my tribute this week.

http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com/ is a neat little website for some data digging.  Enter a user’s Twitter name and it returns the date that a person joined the micro-blogging service.  I had to check the truth of @benhazzard’s claim that I was the godfather of Ontario Connected users.  I checked him out  and found that he pre-dated me by five months!

The next step was to take a look at http://www.timetoast.com which creates an interactive Flash timeline based upon data that you provide.  Put them together with a little time and you have an interactive timeline of Ontario educators!  So, yesterday, as Ontario educators tweeted, I added them to this timeline.  The complete list of Ontario Educators is at:  http://twitter.com/#!/list/dougpete/ontario-educators

Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn’t allow for the embedding of your own created Flash objects, but PBWorks does.  The best I can do here is give you a static screen shot.

 

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As you mouse over the little dots, a popup flag provides details about the individual entry.  To get the full effect though, please visit the object live at:  http://dougpete.pbworks.com/w/page/Ontario-PLN-Timeline

There are two different ways to visualise your data.  The traditional timeline approach shown above does a great job and the website provides a copy/paste approach to embedding it.

Alternatively, there is a list view where the results are displayed in table form.

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You can see that Ben and I are in great company with fabulous Ontario educators in Joan, Doug, and Rodd.

But, this is just a small sample of the power of timelines in the classroom.  Timelines are graphic organizers that allow for the creation, understanding and visualization of data.

We normally think of timelines as a way to show things like the provinces entering the Dominion or a chronology of Prime Ministers but it can be much more.

  • sequence of steps as you solve a problem;
  • outline the plot of a novel;
  • life cycle of an animal.

In true analytical fashion, the individual datum is just as important as the final product.  Click the + sign on any item on the timeline for an expanded zoom view.

Timetoast is a very powerful utility that gets the job done efficiently and attractively.  Next time you need to analyze data in this manner, give it a shot.

Oct 8 2010

links for 2010-10-07

Oct 7 2010

Video Challenge

The current edition of the MindShare Learning Report announces this year’s version of its annual National Video Challenge.  Students and classrooms in the Canadian K-12 educational realm are eligible to take part.  Students enjoy working on a cause or sending a message and being published and recognized nationally is a real perk.

But the real perk comes for the three winning classrooms.  They’ll share in the over $50,000 worth of prizes that MindShare Learning has amassed for the competition.  Complete details are here.  We’re not talking about 90 minute epics here.  There is a limit of 4 minutes to submissions.

Classrooms across the country are addressing media and language literacy through the power of the video.  You see so many of these inspirational offerings on YouTube or on school websites or wikis already.  Why not also enter them into this Challenge?

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Oct 7 2010

links for 2010-10-06

Oct 6 2010

Having it all

I do a great deal of reading on a daily basis.  Some comes from here, some comes from there, some comes from over there, and more.  Frustratingly, it means different utilities to get it done.  Some might come from Facebook, some from Twitter, some from websites, …  You get the idea.

At one point in time, I thought that RSS was the answer.  Then, I thought bookmarking services was the answer.  Then I thought creating my own start portal was the answer.  All of these worked, but seem primitive compared to the functionality that the recently released Seesmic Desktop 2 provides.

Into the world of Twitter browsers, this immediately stands out.  Sure, you can download it, set up your Twitter account and start browsing.  You can do that with all of the quality browsers available.  Then, you need to be able browse lists and do searches to find the good stuff.

Seesmic Desktop 2 takes the concept way further.  In the web browsing world, modern browsers allow for the concept of extensions or plug-ins to extend its functionality.  Seesmic Desktop 2 brings the same thing to your Twitter browser!  The newest version has its own “marketplace” where you pick and choose plug-ins to configure your information browsing experience.

 

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You’ll recognize some of the names immediately.  Klout, Facebook, FourSquare, Topsy, Bing Maps, YFrog, and so much more.  Once you dress up your browser, amazing things happen.

Inline images!  See what people are sharing, the moment that they share it along with statistics of the poster.  No more switching to another window or clicking a link to make the magic happen.  It’s all there.

 

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Who doesn’t like a wander through the Huffington Post for the latest in opinion?  Seesmic Desktop 2 supports the concept of channels and the Post is there, upfront, with its contents further categorized.  The reading just never stops.  Of course, that’s not the only channel, but it’s a wonderful start.

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Where Twitter does fail (grin) is that you can’t turn off the conversation stream just because you’re going to do something silly like going to bed.  People just keep on sharing.  Believe it or not, there’s a plug-in for that.  The Cadmus plug-in keeps track of conversations while you’re away.  Last night, Alec Couros’ eci831 open access course had Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach as a guest speaker talking about Learning Communities.  I missed it; but I didn’t miss the related conversations.

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Or, Chris Pirillo noted that the Apple store was unavailable.  Very quickly, I can get up to speed with what the world is thinking about this!

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Bottom line here is that Seesmic Desktop 2 can change the way that you gather and absorb information from your reading channels.  Pull your favourites together in one spot.  You may never need to leave your social portal to stay up to date again!  Download it from here – Macintosh and Windows.

Oct 6 2010

links for 2010-10-05