Reply to: How Many Friends is Too Many? – ReadWriteWeb

My post in reply to: How Many Friends is Too Many? – ReadWriteWeb

Can you call them friends or contacts? In this scenario it is better to call them contacts. Linkedin for example is not a site I use to find out what my friends are doing. I use Facebook for keeping up with friends. If you have over 10 or 15 friends in Facebook are you then using Facebook like Linkedin or more like an RSS feed about people you know, once new and are networking with. Facebook might better be considered a linkedin with non-business and/or non-work related contacts in a scenario with many friends.

Facebook for dummies mentioned that it is a way to keep in contact with friends and family regardless of changes in address, telephone numbers, email addresses, or career changes. Facebook is kind or an Outlook (or other MS hater contacts manager that keeps notifying you of your friends status, location, and updated contacts.

collegedegrees.com: a serious resource for the Digital Learner

College Degrees is a great resource for digital learners and the instructors that teach them. Their articles are well thought out, through, and well researched. Their suggestions are practical, easy to understand and dad-gum handy.

My favorites are

• 57 Habits of Highly Effective Gmail Users: This is an excellent resource on how to use Gmail to the fullest.
• 50+ Useful Firefox Extnesions for College Students defines some of the best Firefox extensions for the digital learner and how to use them. Just when I thought I was going to be able to cut back to less than 30 extensions. Oh well.
• The post that takes the cake is the 50 tips and tricks to create a learning space in second life. I couldn’t have done better myself.

Secondlife is one of the tools for the digital learner that I believe has the most untapped potential. Even if universities like Ohio State have bought whole islands I still believe there is much more that the educator can do to take advantage of it.

Take a look at the blog and let me know what you think. I think its great.

Social Bookmarking Madness

Just how many social bookmarking apps are out there and how many do we really need?

socialmarker proudly boast that it supports 47 bookmarking services. 47. Its is a miracle that they found a way get it done. Aggregating other parts of the lifestream seems to be difficult.

I was of the opinion that social bookmarking was a niche in the web 2.0 toolkit. socialmarker demonstrates that social bookmarking isn’t so much a niche anymore. Now social bookmarking has niches. (Niching niche niches?). You should be familiar with del.icio.us and maybe Google Bookmarks. I may be back in the social bookmarking stone age but I didn’t even have a clue that Ximmy and Bibonomy were even services.

Social bookmarks definitely have a place in the toolbox of the digital learner. It is quite possibly the one tool that is the easiest to justify in the classroom. How many college instructors haven’t either handed out a hyper link to a student to research a topic? How many papers are submitted to instructors without a reference to a website within the last year? How many students have struggled with keeping up with their bookmarks and sharing with their friends?

A shared social bookmarking site makes more sense than a wiki or blog. socialmarker brings into question the value of social bookmarking by offering more options than answers. An instructor considering using a web 2.0 tool in there curriculum may make the most sense but the sheer number of options could steer the timid away from web 2.0 altogether. After all, if making a decision about social bookmarking is this difficult then what about other web 2.0 apps?

It could be argued that Del.icio.us is the best social bookmarking tool. Digg must be considered as a viable option. Ma.gnolia.com and Furl should at least get honorable mention. (Ma.gnolia.com did’t make the socialmarker cut but OYAX did?) But within a breath, or at least this paragraph, there are 4 different answers which by no means should be considered definitive.

It comes down to research, commitment and a plan. An Instructor must consider the role social bookmarking will have in the curriculum in the first place. Develop a plan of how social media will be used in the classroom. Consult the student body to see which social bookmarking tool is the most useful. Commit to the research and the decision. A hasty decision could have disastrous consequences when making future decisions about web 2.0 and social networking tools in the future.

Plan and plan on using it. The students already are.

Google Pages for the Rest of Us

Google moves Google Sites from the enterprise and adds a wiki. Google Sites Wikis for the classroom perhaps? From TechnoCruch:

When Google Sites launched in February, it was part of the Google Apps group that targets enterprises large and small. Now, consumers can create a wiki Website using Google Sites, without the need to have their own domain.
Google Sites gives you a basic template to create a Website that can be edited by the public at large or a smaller group of people. Photos, widgets, videos, and other elements can be added. Here is a video showing what you can do:

Another Firefox Extension I can’t live without

It may be easier to list the Firefox extensions I can live without. It might be a shorter list. Not much shorter, but shorter no less. I might exaggerate a wee bit.

Taboo is another must have. I use To Read Later to keep track of things I’d like to read during a browsing session. On many occasions I have found that I have more web pages I want to review than I have time in a session. I am writing this post at 12:30 in the morning. I have a class at 5:30 in the morning. The 25+ web pages with white papers and in-depth articles are not going to get read by the time I read this post, get any sleep, get ready for class, and teach tomorrow later today.

That is where Taboo comes in and saves the day (er night or whatever the case may be). I just go through all the tabs I have opened and click the Taboo button. Now I have a pictorial graph of all the sites I want to visit, comment on, add as research and write articles about. If I am judicious enough to Taboo those pages and close the tabs I might even help Firefox run better.

I had not intended this blog to be a commentary on Firefox extensions. Firefox has become the central tool of my life. I use it more than I use a word processor. Between ScribeFire and Google Docs I don’t need a word processor or open office or much of anything else. With a couple more extensions and a web connection all I would need a computer for is to power up Firefox.

Well. Ok. I still need Second Life, IMVU, Visio, Wink, Adobe Professional, VMWare workstation, Phrase Express…

Nah, some one needs to write some new Firefox extensions!

RE: Twitter, Tina Fey, and the Future of Micro-Blogging

This is a post I wrote in response to some comments made in Bernard Moon’s article on Mashable: “Twitter, Tina Fey, and the Future of Micro-Blogging.”

“Twitter hasn’t gone mainstream? Did I miss something?

I may use twitter differently than others. I use twitter as a means to keep up all of the web tools /sites I use. I use it to keep my Facebook page up to date. I use it in my blog to make short points that don’t add up to a full-length post. I use it to keep up with ideas including mine as well as others. I use it as an advanced RSS reader, a research tool, to stay in touch with what my friends feel the need to say, to share what I think is interesting with people that are interested in what I have to say, to keep up with the websites I recommend, and it’s archive feature to keep up with what I have said. In short I use twitter as a lifestreaming service.

I would like to hear what people say when they tell others about twitter unsuccessfully. To call twitter a micro-blogging service is like calling Firefox a web browser. At its core Twitter is a micro-blogging service just as Firefox is a web browser. I have over 37 extensions (and growing) in my Firefox “internet toolkit”. Couple that with Google Docs, Facebook, and a sprinkling of Web 2.0 apps (including twitter) and it is difficult to find another tool on my computer I use even half as often as my “Web Browser”.

Trust me. If I can find 4 or 5 ways to use a micro-browser then there are others thinking of 40 or 50 ways.

Twitter is no Firefox yet. Keep in mind that Firefox is a relative newcomer to the browser wars. Twitter is in it’s infancy but it’s a big baby.

Speaking of other ways people are thinking about Twitter, I like the idea of channels. Now I am using Digsby and multiple twitter accounts to cut back on the noise. I am sure that someone will have that figured out soon.”

Critical Firefox Extension for Bloggers

I have written a couple of post about blogging extensions I am trying and using to post to this blog. I have been playing with Interclue for other reasons but they have another extension (in beta so you have to create an account and log on to Mozilla Addons) called Lazarus that I can no longer live without.

I have mentioned that I use a learning management system called Moodle for all of the coursework I do. Moodle has templates that all the coursework is done in. A workshop, for example, uses the same form boxes regardless of the number of workshops you make. A workshop is a workshop after all.

I may make 5 or 6 workshops a day. I use some custom HTML formatting when I do a workshop lab outline that is tailored for each different workshop I use. If I switch between them and hit a next button or so then I can possibly loose a good deal of work. Needless to say I have lost a good deal of work, hair, and emptied a number of stress medication bottles when this happens.

This is where Lazarus comes in. Lazarus saves the work I am doing in any one workshop. But it also saves the work I am doing in any number of workshops. When I go back to the form I am working on and right click Lazarus shows a list of forms I have filled so I can choose from the list.

Lose 2 or 3 workshop forms I am working on? No worries Lazarus saves them all. I can choose from the list and bang! there it is.

Unlike the other extensions I have tried Lazarus has no character limit as far as I can tell. I know I have written extensive post and Lazarus has saved all the work. Since I do all of the HTML formatting in the custom HTML text editor I do not know if it will save the custom formatting also. I am not willing to blow up a workshop when I am writing the custom HTML but I am sure I’ll run into a situation that I will soon and I’ll let you know.

I have found the Interclue as handy and a play pretty and I have not run across any must have functionality. Lazarus on the otherhand is an extension that I will never install Firefox without.

Firefox Extensions Dilemma: A new WordPress editor and Auto-Save text fields as you type.

I am an instructor at Fountianhead College of Technology. I use Moodle to create lesson plans, labs, etc. I don’t how many times I will fill in a form or long complicated entry only to have it lost when I hit back space or accidentally swipe the touch pad on my laptop. [ -rant- I used to think that the touchpad was a really cool nifty neeto gadget. But it has become more of a nuisance than a help. I guess I could carry around a usb keyboard and mouse but that kinda defeats the purpose of the laptop as a 'portable' device dosen't it? -end rant-]. So I am checking out some Firefox extensions.

1. Scribefire: It has an auto save feature. It might also work with my (this) WordPress blog. Testing Firefox extensions for WordPress is my other quest, journey, homework assignment, red herring, etc.
2. Auto Save Document: Which looks like a text editor
3. AutoSaveTexttoCookie: It can also use documents and shows up as AutoRestoreData in the extensions list
4. Session Manager: This is a great extension for disaster recovery but hitting the back button is not (technically) a disaster in the classic sense.

I am leaning towards Scribefire as it is replacing Deepest Sender as my WordPress editor of choice. I thought I had that Firefox WordPress extension dilemma beat. Oh well.

The Auto Save Document has not been reviewed and it looks as if it has a overwriting mechanism.

AutoSavetoCookie AutoSaveTexttoCookie has only one review by an unhappy WordPress blogger. Ick.

I will be updating my experience with these extensions as I use them over next couple of weeks in my Twitter feed (see sidebar). Let the blogging begin!

And the winner is! Deepest Sender Firefox extention.

The Firefox extension Deepest Sender wins out over WordPress.com Sidebar. I like the pretty interface and its settings options better. Firefox spell checking feature works without having to type the post in a separate box like in the WordPress.com Sidebar. Deepest Sender also has the option to load in the sidebar but I like to use it a word processor just for WordPress.

Alas, it doesn’t let me add tags, just categories. I still have to login to WordPress and edit the post to add the tags. Until I run across something better, Deepest Sender wins.

Digital Learning Tools – Del.icio.us

Links to educators articles and commentaries about using Del.icio.us.

“The Power of Educational Technology: Networking with Del.icio.us” (http://tinyurl.com/2grdan)

“classroom2dot0 » Social Bookmarking” (http://tinyurl.com/5o6yeu)

“Social bookmarking tools – Teaching Hacks” (http://tinyurl.com/2k625l)

“del.icio.us libraries – April 11, 2008 « mélange” (http://tinyurl.com/yvn48r)

“PBS Teachers | learning.now . Tag – You’re Delicious! | PBS” (http://tinyurl.com/6zzlkt

“How delicious is changing academic research” (http://tinyurl.com/342vsx)