So I got a Google Voice account, and added a nifty call me widget to my website so people can call my Google phone straight from the site. I thought it’d be neat particularly for people using mobile browsers (like my iPhone), but alas, it’s a Flash widget, and there’s no Flash on iPhones, at least not in Safari.
/lament
Well the finish line is in sight! I’m working on a portfolio, of sorts – a site that details my curriculum in the IT program. It’s all under the new (aptly named) IT Curriculum heading at the top of the page, there. My program consisted of 11 courses, and there’s a little blurb for each of them describing what i was up to. Anyway, it’s all due day-after-tomorrow, and in typical fashion I’ve essentially left myself to burning the midnight oil to wrap it up.
Some better time management skills might have been in order, in retrospect. My wife’s in Seattle this week at a software conference, and I’m pooped from keeping up with my daughter 
Anyway, it’ll all come together. Have a peep at the new section of the site, if you like!
I think I forgot to post a screenshot of my RSS feed aggregator earlier on when I posted about RSS… I’ve been using Google Reader:
Just click for the (much, much larger) full version!
It’s been a while since the class used Diigo, the social bookmarking tool, but I thought I’d comment on it (again). Aside from the semantic, topical links I discussed before, I thought it might also be worthwhile to talk about another valuable use for this sort of software – its practicality within communities of practice.
I can search on a subject keyword on a site like Google and get tens of millions of hits. Google’s server software has a sort of page ranking built-in, so that the first page of hits I receive are, in Google’s estimation, the ones that it’s likeliest that I’m going to be interested in seeing. If I remember correctly, the ranking system is based on how many other things are linking to that page. More things pointing to it means that that resource is more authoritative; it’s a more “important” page.
The catch is, that may or may not mean that the first few pages I see are actually valuable to me. For example, if I search for a keyword in an academic database, the place I find my search term within an abstract may just be a supplementary reference, and the source itself may have nothing to do with my desired topic. And so with Google – the number of things pointing to another thing may not be the most reliable metric for deciding a page’s importance.
Enter social bookmarking. A site like Diigo allows me to create a community of practice, of sorts. I can find other people within my field, and look at the pages that they’re saying are useful to them. I can bookmark a site myself, and see that dozens or hundreds of people have also bookmarked it, and even left annotations leaving specific information about the site. Rather than start from zero in a search for valuable Instructional Technology information resources, I can look at the bookmarks of other people within the field, and have a great head start. It’s a step beyond what Google is capable of, because the sites have all been vetted by an actual person, who understands what the page is talking about, rather than being limited to parsing text that’s searchable with a keyword query. Social bookmarking is something I haven’t yet started doing a lot of, but when I think about it, that’s really my own failing, and not anything to do with the tool itself.
Good evening folks!
I uploaded a podcast to iTunes U earlier with modest success. Tooling around in Audacity and producing an mp3 file wasn’t any problem, and uploading the file itself wasn’t any problem. Unfortunately, following directions was in this instance a little problematic, as the ‘course content’ directory to which the mp3 was to be uploaded wasn’t available as an option to me. Instead, I had to opt for either the ‘Drop Box’ or ‘Shared’ directories. A screenshot of what I saw:
My thinking at the moment is that the ‘course content’ directory is available only to the instructor, which hopefully I’ll be able to test out tomorrow in class by asking Dr. O’Bannon to log in and see what her upload options are, and then logging her out and then logging one of the students in on the same machine to see whether the options differ.
In other news, linking to podcasts, when they’re on iTunes U, is a little interesting. In iTunes U, you can opt to have course materials either viewable by the public, or private and requring authentication to access. Our course materials require authentication. If you wanted to put up a link to a podcast, you can right click on it in the ‘course contents’ tab, and then select ‘copy iTunes store URL’. Then in your blog post, select your text and create a link by using the address for your podcast on iTunes.
What’s going to happen is this: if you’re not already logged into “My UTK on iTunes U” the link isn’t going to fully work. What will happen is you’ll be diverted to the login page on the UT website, and once that’s verified, you’ll be brought into the iTunes program and put on the UTK homepage – not at the location of the podcast itself. From there, you have to browse manually to the correct course and podcast.
However, if you *are* already logged in to “My UTK on iTunes U”, the link address will work – it’ll bring you straight there.
So, if you want to put a link to your iTunes U podcast on your blog or somewhere, just do this. Also in your blog post, make a note that you need to log in first in order for the link to the podcast to work. The address to log into ‘My UTK on iTunes U” is:
https://itunesu.utk.edu/cgi-bin/login?where=UTK
Oh, and for example, here’s my podcast about uploading podcasts to iTunes U.
Happy podcasting!
So yesterday in class, we tooled around with Google Presentation. It’s a neat little piece of software! Especially for being web-based… it’s not on the order of Powerpoint or Keynote or anything, but for a free piece of software that’s accessible to anyone, anywhere, and doesn’t even need to be installed, it’s not bad at all.
Julie and I were assigned to do a scavenger hunt for a bunch of nature-based things. We went to the UT Botanical Gardens and got pretty much everything in one fell swoop. Here’s a screenshot of the images we used for our presentations:
This was a lot of fun. I’m a closet shutterbug to start with, and I’ll probably wind up taking this little presentation file and seeing what all I can do with it. I saw that it can be exported in a number of different formats, and thought I might try to import it into iMovie or something, and lay down an audio track and make it into a different sort of presentation, like one of the voiced over galleries you’ll see on the New York Times website or NPR’s or something like that.
Yesterday in class we experimented a little with photo sharing. We created accounts on Flickr, and poked around finding some images to upload.
We started out by talking a little bit about copyright, and the value of images released into the public domain. I wound up using 10 images of fish that I found on stockvault.net. After finding some content, we used the lab’s Photoshop Elements to optimize the images for the web. We’d started out with high-res imagery, which is really about the last thing you want to put up on Flickr: the file sizes are just huge. So in Photoshop Elements we adjusted the size of the images (a few inches high rather than the original size of thousands of pixels) as well as the pixel density (down to a web optimized setting of 72 or 96 pixels per inch, rather than 300ppi, which is itself really geared for print).
Anyway, I figured out how to make Photoshop Elements batch process the photos, and apply the same settings to each image rather than me having to resample and resize each image individually. It saved the results into a folder, and then I batch uploaded the pics to Flickr – which by the way works in Internet Explorer, but not in Firefox, at least when I tried it. Once they were there I still needed to rename them, because the batch process had just created filenames that were a meaningless number – so I went and named everything appropriately – goldfish, seashell, etc.
Oh, before I forget, I should probably put up a link to my little play gallery on Flickr.
I’d really only dabbled a little bit in photo sharing previously; I have a handful of pictures up on Facebook. My wife and I have a ton of pictures, though. Right now they’re all on a file server at home, but it would probably be a good idea to look into archiving them all off-site somewhere in case the hard drives fail (had that happen once, bye bye $1000 for data recovery… we use mirrored RAID on the home file server now, lesson learned).
The question then would be what’s the best way? Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Myspace, something else? For that matter, it might make the most sense just to put the stuff up on our own domains, and just use some open source web gallery software. Reason being, we have far more than 100 megabytes of images (which if I remember right is the maximum Flickr will let you upload, and if the others are much like Flickr, they’re going to a little sparing in how much free server space they’re going to offer us. They’re not in the business to be our free storage, I suppose.
That 100MB limit by the way is yet another very good reason to doctor your photos with Photoshop or some other software (there are several good open source options, like the Gimp, short for the GNU Image Manipulation Program) before you upload. Space is generally at a premium when someone’s giving you some for nothing! Google excepted possibly… if they’re giving me 8 gigs of email space I’ll be curious to see how much space I get to play with on Picasa.