Early Windows 7 Multi-touch Demo

We now have a demo video below of some of the early features of multi-touch coming to Windows 7. There is little that is new in terms of multi-touch itself, although the on-screen piano keyboard is cute.
Of more significance will be the new hardware that is needed. Even today’s tablet PCs aren’t useful since they [...]

Enrol in Your Own Social Media U

With other colleagues at my institution we are trying to persuade the powers that be of the benefits of social media. Sarah Perez would escalate the issue considerably into a Social Media U. She proposes eight lessons:

Personal Branding: buy yourname.com to secure your brand, make a video resume, start a WordPress blog, use Google Reader, [...]

Blogging 2.0 is Upon Us Already

According to some we are entering into the next phase of blogging inevitably named Blogging 2.0.
Duncan Riley (blogoz panellist and ex TechCrunch blogger) has recently created his own professional blog, Inquistr. He takes a cogent look at  ‘blogging 2.0′ where all of a person’s social media activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well [...]

AideRSS is even Better

Eight months ago in a previous post about AideRSS I lauded the benefits that I had found after only 2 weeks of use. These benefits have progressed in the interim so that now 6 out of my top 20 most frequently read blogs are filtered by AideRSS. This amounts to a saving approaching 300 posts [...]

Connecting Blackboard to Facebook

This influence Facebook has over the social networking of university students across the world is undoubtedly significant and probably growing. The dominant learning management system used in universities is Blackboard. However by design Blackboard is a closed system within each institution and it would be very difficult to emulate Facebook’s global reach.
It is quite natural [...]

Showing Twitter Trends with Twist

Via Twitter of course, Peta put me on to Twist. This site allows you to enter one or more keywords whose frequency of occurrence in Twitter are plotted so that trends emerge.
I quickly tried it with ‘twitter’ and an unexpected trend resulted:

From memory I believe the two noticeable peaks correspond to significant outages for the [...]

Simple Online Games to Help the World

Flashie Battle wrote a very interesting post the other day that predicts that online Flash games (bite-sized games as he calls them) are starting to become a major games category. [For my new student readers Flashie is a very successful Bond IT graduate who writes online Flash games for advertising purposes on major accounts.]
As a [...]

Recent Reading

I love Librarything which I use simply to record the books I read, virtually all borrowed from our public libraries. The last 30 on my list are:

Mobile Phones not Clickers

An article in Wired Campus by Catherine Rampell would have us encourage our students into ‘constructive’ use of mobile phones in the classroom:
1) Check the spelling/definition of a word2) Research a topic3) Look up reference images4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video6) Fact check on [...]

More Intranet Evolution Needed

Peta points us to a very telling slide presentation by James Robertson on where intranet use stands in most organisations:

 
Note that Communication has a way to go whereas the scope for Collaboration (social network tools like blogs, wikis and team sites) to improve is very high. Activity (form filling and data gathering) is just [...]