Returning from battling the wind and the rain walking round Dove Lake in the Cradle Mountain National Park I did my usual Foursquare checkin that also finds its way to my Twitter stream. The unexpected tweeted reply from colleague Carolyn, @camcd, turned my thoughts to answering the question ‘If you were to open a new library, what would be your top priority?’. I assume a university library is intended.

As it happened just recently following my retirement I had been thinking of this very problem. I have come to think the functions of the traditional library should be present in every contact hour of teaching in every class. The Internet and web are where information is stored, accessed and curated, and so there is no need for dedicated physical ‘library’ spaces. Where librarians can still be effective is in the promotion and demonstration of innovative information discovery for the synthesis of new information in the learning and research processes.

In principle this ‘new’ library functionality can be exposed and operated online so no opening is involved as such. However the faculty and students in higher education have a strong tradition of being social so want naturally to come together in a physical space to exploit the new library functionality. In my own institution the students are well catered for in such spaces as the multimedia learning centre with its individual and group workstations, shared displays and collaborative technology.

My own top priority would be a similar space for faculty, deliberately shared by all disciplines. This is a throwback to the old staff common room or club only with information sharing at its hub in a modern, technological context. I imagine this common room to support many of the functions of innovative collaborative work spaces envisaged by the Harvard Business Review post by Adam Richarson. He mentions some of the features of theStanford d.school — a large, open, collaborative design space. Adam also observes:

Most corporate buildings don’t do a good job of supporting collaboration, brainstorming, and innovative work methods. They tend to be dominated by cubicles or offices which are suited for individual work, or by hard-to-book conference rooms that teams can use but only for short periods of time. What’s needed is a more flexible space that better supports teams and inspires more open thinking.

Adam proposes spaces that are inspired by design thinking practices in creative companies.

Starting from the base of an Internet café with all-day coffee and individual workstations, I would add shared workstation tables set for standing height where up to four people could gather, either bringing there own Internet connected devices or making use of embedded tablets built into the horizontal surfaces of the tables not unlike Microsoft Surface tables. All devices/workstations should be able to connect to a number of large displays for shared viewing.

With individual faculty offices now downsized and limited to seating 3 people there is a great need for a space where groups of 4 to 8 staff can meet either for serendipitous or planned purposes. Bookable small meeting rooms are needed as well as the individual and group open-plan worktables.

So I propose a traditional staff common room but with modern technological accoutrements and with librarians on hand to offer advice and hands-on demos of innovative information discovery and synthesis techniques.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

PressBooks lets you and your team easily author and output books in multiple formats including: epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and inDesign-ready XML.

http://www.pressbooks.com

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The first MOOC is Introduction to Artificial Intelligence a course offered by Stanford University that is in its 5th week. At the cut-off for enrolments over 160,000 students had enrolled. After a general introduction the groundwork is being laid for algorithm design, probability and Bayesian networks. What I find interesting is the simple and effective use of videos both for presenting information in a whiteboard-style and for conducting and the giving the answers to quizzes.

Rather than actual whiteboards the videos are constructed with the two lecturers, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, writing out information on paper with coloured pens as they narrate the content. The otherwise lengthy time taken to write and draw all the content is compressed by editing the video to match the narration – a very effective technique. If only this were possible in a live class in a lecture theatre.

The quizzes in these classes are also impressive. After the lecturer has written/drawn a case study or problem, the video ends with a quiz form overlaid on the last video frame. This contains radio buttons, check boxes and text boxes for answers as required, and a Done button for the student to check their answers. If correct, the student clicks Next and moves to the next video. If incorrect, there is usually an option for the student to watch a video explaining the correct answer before moving on – again an impressive facility.

Homework is available approximately every two weeks and consists of the actual continuous assessment done by the Stanford-enrolled students. The guest students can attempt the homework but are not graded. Solutions are made available after the appropriate deadlines have passed to enable self-assessment of progress.

The second MOOC I am following is Change: Education, Learning, and Technology being facilitated by a trio of education technology experts Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Dave Cormier. This MOOC runs for 36 weeks with a 2-week holiday break from 12 Sept 2011 to 20 May 2012 with a different invited guest facilitator each week, all well-known in the edtech community. We are just starting week 7. The number of participants is varying as you can register at any time, and like me, duck in and out as the topics takes your interest. From last year’s experience the number exceeds 1,000 and this year activity seems to be much higher.

Again the tools used to support this course are interesting. The purpose built course wiki site directly supports tools like discussion threads, email/online daily newsletters and a blog, as well the content pages for each weekly topic. Each week includes a live webinar meeting of which recordings are available, although some technical difficulties are still being ironed out. The wiki is just the base template and all ‘students’ are encouraged to create other shared tool spaces for collaboration which can be linked from the wiki. Short communications use Twitter with the #change11 hashtag. Other tools the participants have so far created include Facebook groups, Diigo groups and a host of other blogs.

As I predicted the highlight for so far has been week 3 with Martin Weller talking about digital scholarship based around his new book, The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice, which is free to read in HTML format.

So the AI MOOC is highly structured and requires a few hours each week to keep up. The Change11 MOOC allows you to duck in an out on the topics that are attractive. Both have immense value and advance the state of the art in MOOC development.

Relevant books:

Analytics and visualizations experts = data scientists

Personal productivity www.rescuetime.com

Empower end-users by giving access to and means of interrogating data

Personal data reveals our sentiments, our attitudes, our social connections, our intentions and what we might do next.

Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their learning contexts, in order to understand and optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs.

Use learning analytics for: learner success, use of university services, predicting at-risk learners, understand help-seeking behavior, alerts, interventions, learner dashboard, path of concept development, real-time analytics

Not all analytics are learning analytics, these are not:

• Classroom optimization
• Staff allocation and performance
• Web analytics, time on page

Analytics are pervasive in their negative influence

Analytics need to rooted in learning sciences

Analytics produce patterns, not insight – only human have this

Open learning analytics architecture (see diagram below)

• Integrated 
• Modular
• Extensible

Society for Learning Analytics Research, SOLAR, www.solaresearch.org

Learning Analytics Open online course 23 Jan – 17 Mar 2012

LAK2012 Conference, Vancouver, 29 Apr-2 May 2012 http://lak12.sites.olt.ubc.ca

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Mark spoke on 7 major topics:

and by Getting Ready he means:

For me the main takeaways are:

Can you use information about me to help me?
How to make the human moments precious?
Tuned blended learning per student   
OER repositories – the junk draw
Be a rookie every year
Student pathways – from entry to endowment, find haemorrhage points
Courageous learning – the ability to continue to learn new things
Learners inherit the future, the learned are equipped to live in a world that no longer exists
CAVE people, colleagues against virtually everything – if you don’t know one, you may be …

This is highly recommended viewing, follow the talk link above then click on Resources to see the video link.

Key terms and takeaways for me are:

Context-aware computing (CAC) uses end user activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction …

App stores … an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs

Next-generation analytics … enabling use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time

In-memory application servers … results in improved transactional application performance

Low-energy servers … will remove virtualization and lessen the shared use of systems

Cloud computing …dropped from number one on the list for 2011 to number 10 for 2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Cengage published the etextbook using the VitalSource ebook publishing system. This allows the purchased etextbook to be accessed everywhere on the web from a wide range of browsers and downloaded to computers, smartphones and tablets for offline access at any time. Notes and annotations can be made and shared via the web on up to 2 desktops/laptops and 2 mobile devices per student.

Ebooks are one of the topics in the Knowledge and Society subject curriculum and I took the opportunity via a question in the mid-semester written exam to determine the students’ reaction to the personal use of an etextbook for learning. Students were asked to list advantages and disadvantages of using the etextbook when studying for the exam. From 164 scripts students mentioned 14 advantages and 15 disadvantages (my classifications) with 533 occurrences in total.

The advantages were:

Personally I always rate the ability to search within an ebook as the main advantage, so I was surprised to see reading on multiple devices and no extra weight to carry around coming out on top. Environmental responsibility is always up there. Being able to buy the ebook by the chapter is obviously a very minor consideration.

Against this the disadvantages seemed more numerous:

In the past eye strain has always been the top disadvantage so it is strange to see it eclipsed by the need to own and use a working device. The survey of the same students revealed they owned a plethora of devices so the attitude is doubly strange. It is still the case that 1 in 6 students simply prefer printed books. At least bemoaning that ebooks have no second hand value is in decline.

With 313 advantage occurrences as against 220 disadvantages I make the assumption that the class are split approximately 59% to 41% in favour of ebooks. This then allows comparison with similar ebook data from previous years reported in a past post:

From this data it is clear that ebooks have lost a little ground over the last 12 months at least in the minds of these students. This is obviously against the trend of the ebook industry as a whole. As an institution we have some more educating to do in convincing our students that ebooks are the way forward.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The central argument of Jaron Lanier’s intelligent and argumentative book, You Are Not a Gadget, is that technology wants us to become more like technology itself — and this is a bad thing. Jaron believes that as technology advances humans tend to make themselves more machine-like and less human. For instance, he claims that we tend to alter our behavior in a non-desirable way in order to use poorly designed computers, today’s internet, and many hi-tech gadgets. We start to think like a machine in order to use a machine. More worrisome, we may become dumber in order to use dumb machines. Maybe we speak slower, or use simpler language. Or maybe we restrict our emotions and freedoms so that a computer can read us. Perhaps we accept that we should produce things for free because the internet “wants” things to be free. Jaron sees this as a long slippery slope as we make ourselves into gadget-beings. But he warns, “you are not a gadget.”

via The Technium: You Are a Robot.

This is an example of a rule or task as ifttt calls it. The ‘this’ part is a specified event on trigger channel, a typical activity on your chosen social network or channel. I chose a check-in with a photo in my task. For the ‘that’ part I chose to upload the photo on Foursquare to a chosen album on my Facebook account. It works extremely well and took only 30 seconds to establish.

ifttt comes with several default channels but it is very straightforward to add your own social networks. My list is on the left. I have used less than half of the social networks (channels) supported.

Each channel typically has two of more possible actions from which you choose. Some actions require parameters which are entered via simple forms. For example, I was able to define the message content that accompanies my photo when it finds its way into Facebook. You can see that my 17 channels allow 1485 different possible task combinations.

A simple ‘{{ … }}’ notation is used to transfer key information from the trigger to the action such as {{VenueMapImageURL}} from the Foursquare check-in in my example. ifttt checks for triggers every 15 minutes so the typical delay in the action being executed is half that time.

For me one of the key omissions at the moment is a Google+ channel, but of course we need the API to be extended from its current read-only capability before ifttt can make use of Google+ in a full-featured way. ifttt is free and easy to get an invite by leaving your email on their web site.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

ISBN: 9789264114203 Publication: 13/9/2011

(click on the image to download the publication)

Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators

Across OECD countries, governments are having to work with shrinking public budgets while designing policies to make education more effective and responsive to growing demand.

The 2011 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance. It provides a broad array of comparable indicators on education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.

The indicators show who participates in education, how much is spent on it, and how education systems operate. They also illustrate a wide range of educational outcomes, comparing, for example, student performance in key subjects and the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment.

The Excel™ spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts in this book are available via the StatLinks printed in this book.

via Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators.

–

Volume 27, Number 5

September/October 2011

Turning Digital Natives into Digital Citizens

By DAVE SALTMAN

Today’s K–12 students are commonly called “digital natives” because they have grown up with digital technology. But natives can run wild, using the Internet to (wittingly or unwittingly) plagiarize others’ work or bully peers using social media.

via Harvard Education Letter.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Knowing since the start of the year I was coming up to retirement at the end of August I set myself an ambitious weight loss target. Returning from holiday in Tasmania in February I joined Weight Watchers Online attracted by their new Propoints system. The daily calculation and recording of Propoints consumed provided the incentive to change my food intake substantially. Apart from completely giving up alcohol except for infrequent special occasions and very strict portion control my diet changed little. This made it easier to conform.

Sunday 28 August was the target date. This was the day before my retirement day and by coincidence my 65th birthday. An unexpected reverse in my weight decline occurred the week before and I only made it down to 89.3 kg just 300 g short! Pretty close.

The upturn blips are interesting. The first coincides with my last conference attendance in Sydney and the others visits and dinners with friends, all part of life’s tapestry. The major downturn blip followed significant periodontal surgery.

Overall I am thoroughly pleased and look forward to a fitter retirement.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My live mindmap is on Mindmeister. Peta put her slides on Slideshare.

As part of the Emerging Technology Committee I was able to join in a further hour of discussion following her talk and toss around many of her ideas at greater length. The two and a half hours away from marking not only was a pleasant break but a most stimulating one with many new ideas to pursue.

Immediately I liked the simple bookmarklet for capturing web pages and the effective integration with the major social networks. As is only to be expected you can share any collection you create under a suitable topic and explore other curation topics created by others. Anyone can suggest additional links for a curation topic, and for your own topic you can decide whether to add the suggestions or not. Key page links from other topics can be rescooped into your own topics which is a handy feature and another measure of popularity.

The stats feature gives you an indication of how popular your curation topics become. I initially chose four topics to curate:

• Cloud Apps
• Chromebooks
• Education Gallimaufry
• Technology Gallimaufry

[I was hunting in the thesaurus for an interesting word for a collection and became hooked on gallimaufry as you can see.]

As of this writing my stats look like:

The blue columns show the page links I have added to one or more curation topics and the cumulative line graph shows accesses by others. Unsurprisingly Cloud Apps is my most popular curation topic.

Apparently my efforts have earned me the right to invite others to ScoopIt but I don’t come close to my favourite topic of all which is future school by Steve Wheeler – he’s well into the thousands for views.

I should start by admitting I don’t yet have a Chromebook to test, but I can’t wait to get one and use it productively. This post was triggered by a colleague sending me the post by Galen Gruman with the indicative title ‘Whatever You Do, Never Buy a Chromebook’. Yes, it was a totally negative review, negative piled on negative. The only ones I agree with are the lack of Bluetooth, Skype and convenient printing. Personally I see the ’primitive’ hardware and OS as huge positives. I have a great deal of my files already in the cloud and look forward to having more of them there.  Better a Chromebook that a PC/Mac laptop costing up to 5 times as much.

I already have constant Wi-Fi/3G Internet connection on my iPhone/iPad devices where perhaps less than 10% of my work/recreation/socializing can be done without the Internet. I stream everything where I can such as podcasts, music and video, and only ebook reading and game playing are done offline. Chromebooks have instant on from sleep just like iPhone/iPad and boot from cold in a quarter of the time. Laptop boot times are left in the dust.

A much more balanced and believable article is by Audrey Watters entitled ‘A Day Without Native Apps: My Chromebook Experiment’. She actually used her Chromebook for a day’s real work, and mentions the sometimes unexpected pros and predictable cons. After a day her conclusion ‘ at the end of the day, despite a lot of reservations, I think the Chromebook is very much doable for most folks’, grudging admission of some capability.

I think both authors missed out in considering the significant long-term benefits. Chromebooks automate or eliminate many common, time-intensive tasks like application distribution, deployment and installation, patching, and upgrades. No upgrading ever is huge, judging by the constant complaining of my friends and neighbours and their parents and kids. Even their iPhones/iPads languish with tiny numbers of apps and old versions of iOS. The constant need for upgrading is a killer. Although not an Android user my guess is the same applies to those smartphones. What use an app for everything if few know how to use native apps.

The tiny attack surface and lack of local storage are other major pluses for Chromebooks. There is no need to purchase licences for anti-virus, data encryption and data back-up software, all major problems for my not-so-tech-literate friends.

For those who think that Chromebooks are just an experiment that will eventually be swallowed by Android take a look at the post by Alex Chitu with the title ‘Google Makes Money from Chromebooks’. It would seem that many commentators on technology are selling Google short.

When I have a Chromebook in my hands I may be proved wrong but currently my confidence is high that everyday users, not computer-savvy tech writers, will see Chromebooks as an answer to their prayers. Here’s a mother-in-law who has even loves a CR-48!

Apple luddites keep up the mantra of the iPad leading us into a post-PC world. I love my iPad but it definitely is not a PC replacement but most certainly is a PC-extender and, for that matter, an iPhone-extender. My iPad is integrated into my daily life at times and places where neither a PC or phone are useful devices. But as I have noted before the iPad is not a laptop replacement, and is only a first step towards a post-PC era.

Most definitions of a post-PC era, like Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, point out strongly that we are not talking about PC replacement. She emphasises the obvious post-PC transitions; stationary to ubiquitous with anytime/anywhere computing; formal to casual with instant-on devices; arms-length to intimate with always-with-us devices; and, abstracted to physical with touch and gestures.

Laptops and/or desktops will continue to be our motherships with sales over the next few years still predicted to continue at present levels although rate of increase will almost certainly decline. But what Google are now sensibly calling Chromebooks are the nearest I’ve seen yet to a viable, genuine PC replacement, provided we are willing to work only with cloud-based apps and data.

My earliest post about working online was over 3 years ago. Since then I have been lobbying for working in the cloud to become the norm as more and more viable cloud services become available to replace native apps on desktops/laptops. Even native smartphone apps that allow us to be creative must use a cloud backend to store the objects of creation in order to be useful.

You can read the persuasive overview of Chromebooks from Google but for working effectively post-PC the key features for me are:

1. laptop form factor with productive keyboard and mouse editing; on smartphones/tablets swipe scroll and pinch zoom are great for navigation but poor for editing large bodies of text; even tapping for selection needs finger-sized buttons/links
2. Chromebook independence; access your private app, documents and settings from literally any Chromebook; allows secure sharing of physical laptops
3. forever fresh; this Google slogan is my favourite; Chrome OS, browser and apps are always the latest version – no tethering to update a myriad apps; no old versions to become a security risk
4. potentially improved security; browsers bring the advantage of a security sandbox in any case; this now extends to the whole machine
5. USB and SD device support and limited but recognisable local filestore; starts to match expectations we have for PCs

Chromebooks match tablets with Wi-Fi/3G support for being always connected, with the same battery life, and with an 8-second boot time and instant resume.

One of the first questions people ask is ‘can I turn my existing laptop/netbook into a Chromebook?’ I would answer no since points 2 through 4 above are not supported on existing hardware. Chromebooks are definitely a new class of device although on the surface they look like compact laptops or large netbooks.

Of course I admit I haven’t handled or used a Chromebook, and in Australia it looks like I have still a few months to wait beyond the 15 June release in the US and major European countries. I comment here on the concepts only. Provided Chromebooks perform as expected I suggest they will soon become devices of choice for individuals, businesses and educational institutions.

[As an aside I used Scrible for the first time to collect and assemble material for this post and have been impressed by my increase in productivity.]

At the time of writing 116 students (63%) had replied out of a class of 184. Students are drawn approximately equally between our Business, Law and Humanities faculties, and for 40% of students it is there first semester. The computing devices results are:

Approximating doubling from last year 52% use Macs. Counting netbooks as well 72% use Windows machines. In one year tablet use, presumably almost all iPads, has grown from nothing to 14%. My first surprise was the low usage of ereader devices at just 2%.

All students surveyed owned a mobile phone of which 91% are Internet-enabled. The breakdown of mobile phone manufacturers shows the dominance of Apple iPhones at 59%. All but one of the Other category are HTC phones which puts them on a par with Blackberry and Samsung.

Again all students surveyed used online sites for their communications of various types with Facebook dominating at 92%. The only near competitor is the 83% use of online email. Twitter use is about the average for the population as a whole. The only disappointment is the low use of LinkedIn. At 8% this will need to grow as the students’ future employers are relying heavily on LinkedIn information to decide on who they will recruit. Blog use again, at 14%, is about the norm, and hopefully will increase as they become familiar with their weekly blogging task in the early weeks of the subject.

Overall these numbers confirm the increasing use of Macs and the near universality of Facebook. At only 3% I found Foursquare use disappointingly low especially as it may be a useful tool in tracking students within the university context.

Scientific research has an enormous impact on our world and the lives of citizens. It is therefore important that science is not, and is not seen to be, a private enterprise, conducted behind the closed doors of laboratories, but a public enterprise to understand better the world we live in and our place in it. Effective dialogue about the priorities and insights of science and its relation to public values is vital. Scientists can no longer assume an unquestioning public trust. Ubiquitous digital media offer a powerful means for the public to interrogate, question and re-analyse scientific priorities, evidence and conclusions. While some such interventions can distort debates involving science, others generate tough and illuminating questions, and expose important errors and omissions. Though it has difficulties, such public dialogue is something to which the scientific enterprise must adapt.

We have until 5 August 2011 to submit ideas.

For me, and for an increasing number of fellow academics, publishing in traditional journals is becoming increasingly anachronistic in the digital age of social media communication. We can be our own publishers now. We can build up audiences and loyal followings that are larger than most journals and publishing houses could ever boast. For me, blogging is now the first place I consider when I want to disseminate my ideas quickly, directly to my own community of practice, and in a form that is considered relevant and accessible to those who are engaged in that particular sphere of activity. Blogging is freely accessible, and it is usually concise enough to be assimilated in a few minutes.

I say hear, hear or as those around me probably prefer, good on ya mate.

Knowledge is no longer that which is contained in space, but that which passes through it, like a series of vectors, each having direction and duration yet without precise location or limit.

…

In the future, it seems, there will be no fixed canons of texts and no fixed epistemological boundaries between disciplines, only paths of inquiry, modes of integration, and moments of encounter.

This resonates with my own thoughts so well. For years I have been advocating our higher education teaching should be organised into physical inter-disciplinary groupings around degree programs high in student choice rather than the conventional discipline-based departments/schools/faculties. I only wonder why it has taken me so long to find others supporting this view, in this case by observing the changing nature of knowledge itself.

Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, Berkeley; University of California Press, 1997.

However one of the impressive CCA-EDUCAUSE keynote speakers, @BryanAlexander, tweeted a link to his organisation’s annual conference, the NITLE Summit, which is live streaming and making the recordings available to the world. This is how it should be done.

Twitter and Facebook are used as well as email for readers to disseminate links and their comments to their social circles. For many of the articles the public readership can provide feedback via comments and questions in blog style. This is just the forum in which to expose university research outcomes to public scrutiny and is a welcome change.

Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty sets out the hopes for TheConversation:

How Peter Doherty views the potential of TheConversation

From the technical viewpoint the Delicious service has an extensive list of features that have grown over the years. While the UX has been redesigned significantly on a number of occasions I find it now suffers from an undue complexity even though Delicious more than satisfies my bookmark repository needs.

My own collection of bookmarks rose to about 1100 then, after a severe weeding, a more useful 500 or so. Despite my efforts to simplify my tag count reached 600 which by some effort I cut back by about 50%. Apart from personal use I have used Delicious extensively for holding bookmarks for a good many of my classes. I thought I was tied to Delicious with no prospect of change.

When Yahoo insisted on the use of a Yahoo account for Delicious this introduced an ongoing irritation that still persists. It was strangely apparent that Yahoo was putting little or no effort into taking Delicious forward. Furthermore the Yahoo announcement that the future of Delicious hung under a cloud added to my nervousness. Then hearing continually of the Diigo service from several other higher ed teachers finally made me consider a serious change (I had dabbled with Diigo months before and already had an account).

It was the Diigo group facility that seemed the main attractant for my colleagues. From the Diigo graphic you can see groups came in version 3.0 and the last two iterations added features bringing music to the ears of higher ed instructors. Another major stimulus was the Diigo webslides feature which uses Diigo lists discovered by colleague Peta Hopkins. I subsequently used webslides extensively for teaching. (As is the way of Web 2.0 Diigo webslides is now replaced for me by Pearltrees in a further migration.)

Of course the most significant migration effort involves the transfer of the bookmark data to Diigo from Delicious. As you would expect Diigo makes this very straightforward by importing from Delicious export link files. If you can’t bear to abandon your Delicious bookmarks Diigo has a feature to save all harvested Diigo bookmarks to Delicious as well.

First though I needed to spend a lot of time cleansing my Delicious bookmarks. I found many of my older bookmarks were redundant, superceded or had become irrelevant with age. I determined to quarantine all my bookmarks used for teaching. For example the bookmarks contributed by students in my September 2006 class about web applications still exists as http://www.delicious.com/mrees/inft232-063. This URL will be forever branded in our Blackboard learning management system amongst the online materials for that class.

Eventually I reduced my Delicious bookmarks from about 800 to 102, of which 93 are quarantined from past classes. My surprising discovery was that I had only 9 bookmarks likely to be of use in the future and worth transferring to Diigo! Equally disappointing is my remaining tag list contains 78 different tags!

This migration experience has been invaluable in that it shows I need a stricter, more disciplined approach to bookmark storage. Both the Delicious and Diigo browser integrations make it trivially easy to add bookmarks. It is clear from this exercise that I need more strength of will and bear in mind:

• the bookmark collection needs constant maintenance, probably once a month at least
• keep the number of tags as low and as general as possible, and treat solo tags with high suspicion
• bookmarks that age quickly should not be stored and located with just-in-time search instead, but provided always that no special proper names or obscure keywords are involved – mapping these to easily remembered tags is preferable

Even in a few months my Diigo collection has risen to 275 bookmarks and I’m guessing less than 20% will be used again. Perhaps the golden days of bookmark repositories are coming to an end.

One report I read indicated these were US-only services but they worked well with my Amazon account from Australia. It was really simple to get started:

Of course Amazon now offer to deposit a copy of any media purchased from them into your Cloud Drive, but as of the time of writing we are not able to purchase media from Amazon so only our own media can be uploaded. To control the uploading process Amazon provides the MP3 Uploader desktop app to synchronise your media from Windows Media Player and iTunes (AAC is supported but not WMA). I have only about 800 songs in the supported formats so at 3.6 GB they fit well within the 5 GB limit. I am still uploaded and it appears I will need 10 hours due to my 1 Mbps cap on the upload on my Internet service.

This is a very significant advance by Amazon and is just the service I have been waiting for. When Cloud Player works on my iPhone my cup will be full.

I have used Prezi for a couple of years or so but only for giving special talks. It is easy to use once you master the click and zoom approach and produces smoothly animated presentations in which you can embed media of various kinds. Here is a Prezi I did a couple of years ago:

http://prezi.com/20995

Another summary talk about Twitter I gave for a lecturer in another Bond subject is at: http://prezi.com/kggkswvvxlnl/

Provided you make the Prezis public you can show them from any Internet machine with a browser but it must have Flash. This excludes iPhone and iPad where you have to use a special app.

For formal presentations which are part of a subject syllabus I don’t find Prezi very useful. It is not possible to tell the students ‘check the information on slide x’ and the student must have an Internet connection to see the Prezi (less of a problem these days).

While I would dearly love a relevant alternative to PowerPoint I don’t think Prezi is it.

At the time of writing this post I notice Prezi is equal 7th on the emerging Top 100 Tools for Learning being compiled by Jane Hart in her well-regarded Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. The excellent Slideshare presentation repository for conventional slide decks is sitting at 11th and PowerPoint itself is at equal 48 on the list.

After sending the message I reflected further and asked myself the question ‘What would I use rather than PowerPoint for lecture slides?’. Of late I have tried other Prezi-class Flash apps that employ the conventional slide-by-slide model. SlideRocket (especially the Google Chrome app) is one but response times are slow, the free version is limited, and exported slide shows are watermarked.

My current favourite of this type is 280Slides which is snappier, simpler and offers export direct to Slideshare. Exporting to PowerPoint format now appears to work although needs to use the repair option in PowerPoint before the presentation will open properly. Like Prezi these two Flash-based apps will not run on iOS on the iPad and iPhone and require dedicated apps on those devices.

Far and away my favourite ‘replacement’ for PowerPoint is the Presentations component of Google Apps. This is a very simple copy of PowerPoint running in a browser and hence is very easy to learn. The ability to create and insert Google Drawings in a slide makes for professional presentations for only slide shows. Google Presentations display correctly on iPhone/iPad but as yet can’t be edited. Nevertheless Documents (like Word) and Spreadsheets from Google Apps can be edited on the iOS devices and we can expect Presentations to follow soon.

The process works like:

• You share a Dropbox folder with DropPages.com
• Changes to files in your shared folder are synced with a web server
• DropPages render your pages for your website’s visitors

DropPages provide you with a sample web site in a Zip file to populate your Dropbox folder. You can then modify the contents of the page files, templates and styles to create your own content which is what I did here. In my case I have reduced the site to just this page. The template structure is a little tricky to follow at first and the multi-column layouts need some CSS knowledge. However simpler layout are simple to introduce.

To get started according to DropPages:

• Download the sample site
• Rename demo.droppages.com to something like myname.droppages.com
• Share your folder with server1@droppages.com
• Wait for approval

There definitely are the benefits claimed by DropPages:

• Simplicity. Edit your files on your computer, save an you’re done.
• No logins. No passwords to remember. woop!
• Sharing. Need someone else to edit pages? Share the folder with them.
• Backup. Everything is synced between your computer, Dropbox and DropPages. It’s safe.
• Fast. Quick to edit, quick to render.

DropPages suggest you use the dreaded Markdown language of early wikis to format your pages. Ugh! Fortunately if your pages are in HTML (like this page) they will render correctly.

This definitely opens up a very simple way to host and maintain a simple web site. We need to thank Dave McDermid for this creation.

Like many others I used 2 or 3 different machines when building the Zotero collection, a problem since Zotero initially assumed a single, local database of references. Eventually I solved this problem by using Windows Live Mesh to synchronise the Zotero database and files between several machines (see previous post 1 and post 2).

I gorged heavily on Zotero’s excellent facility not only to store a web link reference but also to store the actual contents of a web page with all its images, styles and scripts intact. It was late in the piece that I discovered these files occupied about 700 MB on disk totalling over 70,000 mostly tiny files! No wonder Live Mesh struggled when my new netbook appeared – it took 12 hours or more to sync those files.

Zotero finally supported shared libraries and associated files but was limited to only 500 MB for free so I was stuck with Live Mesh. However another insidious development was taking place – I was becoming hooked on Google Chrome – and Zotero was only available on Firefox. In the end I turned to Mendeley which not only has shared libraries from the get go but also has desktop apps on all major platforms and a mobile presence on iOS.

Over the course of a couple of days I reduced my Zotero references down to well under 100. I discovered most references were captured web pages that:

• had content likely to be out of date
• could easily be found again by Google search
• occupied large numbers of small files
• only need their URL and title stored in a simple link database

It is clear the cost of storing captured web pages is only useful for transitory information that can later be recalled directly from local storage.

I therefore retained the bulk of the conventional references of journal papers, books, reports and similar for which Mendeley is primarily targeted. It was then very pleasing to see in Mendeley a direct import tool for Zotero as long as its database exists on the same machine on which the Mendeley desktop app is running. The only downside seemed to be that PDF files in Zotero references did not transfer automatically. Should you wish to continue using Zotero then this Mendeley tool will keep the two reference stores in sync.

In my case I bid Zotero a fond farewell even though multi-platform and smartphone support is promised.

Many times I have heard of members of my social circle spending several hours if not days re-theming their blogs, especially those WordPress users with self-hosted blogs. Thus I was determined to allocate no more than 30 minutes. Browsing through the now more extensive WordPress.com theme library I found several new, simple 2-column themes (only ever 2 columns for me) that I could consider using. This is a big improvement on a couple of years ago when I last looked.

I chose the more subtle Enterprise theme with smaller, less in-your-face font size to my previous Journalist theme originally selected because it could accommodate images of up to 650 pixels in width. So far so good although no off-the-shelf theme is perfect – if only I could eliminate the lower grey band. I like the non-underlined links and generally neater appearance.

At the same time, continuing the minimal layout, I eliminated a few of the widgets from the sidebar while still retaining basic functionality for essential links, a QR code, previous posts, categories, archive and Twitter integration.

Probably the biggest change but less obvious is the my switch to the minimal Creative Commons licence CC-BY. I watched a convincing video by an author I can’t recall that convinced me Non-commercial and ShareAlike requirements meant little if your intent is to share information with the world in a completely open manner. So CC-BY it is.

And, yes, all this took no more than 30 minutes even allowing for checking out 2-3 new themes. I now just hope this will lead to more blogging from now on.

1. Windows Live Writer for blog posts like this and web page publishing on WordPress sites
2. WordPress blogs for research, comment and as a teaching tool
3. Google Reader for ongoing discovery of new information and trends from a large collection of blogs, as well as reading and assessing student blogs
4. EverNote for information gathering of all kinds that can be searched and recovered later with ease
5. Google Sites for research, curriculum planning, work group collaboration, educational materials dissemination and a host of other uses
6. Dropbox for file syncing and backup, and sharing with others both staff and students
7. Camtasia for screencast capture and editing
8. Twitter for personal use, research and teaching
9. Google Chrome and its apps and extensions from the web store for a whole range additional information gathering, editing and dissemination for a wide range of media and structured data
10. Diigo for link repositories, group sharing and web slide shows

It was hard to eliminate this second list of tools that I use a lot but just failed to make it into my top 10:

1. Yammer for private discussions with colleagues in my institution
2. PowerPoint for slide presentations
3. Archive.org for free media storage particularly audio and video
4. Skype for research, research students, and online project meetings
5. Slideshare for presentations for teaching, research and administration
6. Mendeley for references and PDF files of papers
7. SnagIt for screen capture and image editing
8. Elluminate for webinars
9. Adobe Digital Editions for online reading of PDF and ebook files
10. Windows Live Photo Gallery for image and photo collections and simple editing

On the whole I am moving all my app use online where the bulk of my data is stored in any case.

Nevertheless I am surprised almost every day by the effectiveness in terms of productivity gain of the extensions and apps available via the Google Web Store. My favourite of the last couple of weeks is the Readbility extension that has been around for a while but is so useful in its new incarnation for Chrome. In blog posts, news articles and similar, Readability removes all the extraneous header, footer and sidebar contents and just shows you the text and links in the main page content using a readable font family and size.

As an example, the first paragraphs from this page fragment:

become, at a single click in the toolbar, a much more easily read:

Buttons allow you to return to the original page, print and email the readable text.

My only beef is that Readability uses a fixed-width, centred layout which generally wraps some longer lines of text in my favourite 960×1080 (half HD) browser window size. This is a problem that is very easy for Readability to fix so I hope they are ‘listening’.