Sad news tonight. Bunny is gone. Olive took bunny on a trip to Colorado and lost him in the Minneapolis airport. Despite the efforts of those boarding the flight to Denver bunny could not be found.
Bye, bye bunny – we all miss you. Thanks for being a friend.
Cindy bought me a new netbook for my birthday. As is our custom, I actually picked it out and I am using it a week before my birthday. Not that romantic, but quite practical.
This is a Lenovo S10-2 with one gb ram and a 160 gb hard drive. It is presently running Windows 7 Starter (not sure what that means). I purchased it for $350 from Amazon (I mean my wife purchased it).
One of the university tech guys was in the department working on machines for a couple of my colleagues. We give each other some grief because I work on Macs and he only services Windows machines. Each time he shows up I ask if there is another problem with a Windows machine. Today I proudly announced that I had purchased a netbook and I was going to be running Windows. Attempting to be helpful, he asked what kind of machine, what amount of ram, etc. When I said I had one gb of ram, he told me this was seriously underpowered. I told him that I wanted the experience of running a machine schools might purchase for k-12 1:1 initiatives (which was true) and not to worry I also owned several real computers should I need more power.
This is actually take 2 of my netbook exploration. Take one did not work out well. My first experiment was refurbished machine I purchased for $150 and it simply stopped working. No hard drive and it was like the flash memory had nothing on it and I could not install another operating system. This time it is Windows 7 because I have heard good things (really) and I (Cindy) spent a little more money. Now we will see if I can do real work.
Setup was simple (I tried to ignore all of the free stuff I would eventually have to pay for). I downloaded Chrome and Picasa. Offloaded the image from my camera, edited in Picnik and posted successfully to my blog. So far so good. OS works fine. You do quickly discover that online services waste lots of screen space when you use them on a 10.2 inch screen.
My free time until Dec. 1 is going to have to be focused on a writing project and this focus will likely limit my blogging productivity. We are working on a new model for our book and the company wants some samples to help reviewers understand our proposal. I would rather just sign a contract, but I understand the expectation.
I am interested in how others use technology to work on complicated projects. Perhaps others might be interested in my approach. I think in terms of phases (which overlap). I am presently in the exploration and theme generation stage. This phase requires that I explore a lot of material (online and from print/pdf sources), store notes related to this material in a way that allows search and review, and then integrate these notes in a way that is closer to something I might write for others.
The tools I use for this process include Yep, Skim, Evernote, Google docs, Google Scholar and Diigo. Yep is software for storing, organizing, and tagging. I can download pdfs of most journal articles and pdfs from web sites. I use Skim to review this material because it allows the highlighting and annotation of even protected pdfs. I think of the process as overlaying the pdf content with my highlights or notes. If Skim can access the text, I can export my highlighted content and personal notes. If this is not possible, I manually review my highlights and take notes to Google docs. A screen capture of Skim in action appears below. I can use Evernote to screen capture content from any source and tag this content. I tend to use Evernote when I want to store Tables or Images. I tag this content and note the source so that I can refer to this material in later stages of my exploration and writing. Diigo is used to organize, highlight, and annotate web content I explore.
If what we are working on results in a contract, we hope to share this workflow more openly.
I like to personally try things I write about. Really. I think it is important to have spent enough time with a product or service to understand the experience rather than to rely on the comments of others. I admit that I also like to explore new technology.
eBook readers have been one area of personal interest. There are plenty of hardware options. I started with the KindleApp for the iPod Touch. The app was cheap (free if I remember) and the books reasonable. The books I have purchased so far have been in the $10 range. The issue for me has really been the reading experience.
The visual experience of reading on the iPhone was acceptable. I found a font size that was good and read several books. Of course, the iPhone Touch screen is small and the display contains a limited amount of text. I do hope Apple comes out with a tablet or some handheld device with a little larger screen.
Recently, I have been exploring the experience on the Kindle. The reading experience on the Kindle is very good and seems superior to reading for long periods of time on a computer screen.
My reading habits require more than text display. I seem to read very little for enjoyment preferring to listen to audiobooks instead. I spend a great deal of time doing is reading nonfiction and professional content. In exploring ebook devices, it was not the hours of reading from a device that concerned me, but the other activities that are a part of professional reading – highlighting and note taking. Kindle does offer these features. In addition to allowing you to mark up the text and insert notes, these additions to the original text are stored on the Kindle as a separate text file. You can connect your Kindle to a computer via USB and drag this file to your desktop. I must admit I am not a big fan of the Kindle keyboard so adding my own notes was tedious. Highlighting worked fairly well. A sample from the text file appears below. Perhaps downloading this file frequently and expanding these notes from a more efficient keyboard might be the answer.
I have been reading Robert Darnton’s “The case for books” on Cindy’s Kindle (there is something quite ironic here, but now is not the time to explore). Tech types may immediately shy away, but Darnton has a very interesting history including working on the Google book digitization project and the commitment of Harvard to offer faculty publications in the public domain.
Anyway, The case for books is a wide ranging exploration of books, writing, authors, and reading. The historical perspective is cool. One concept I picked up is that of a Commonplace book. As I understand the concept, readers attempting to educate themselves would copy passages from various things they read into a notebook and would organize this material into categories and would include personal insights, comments and interpretations. These commonplace books sometimes ended up being published or a least saved as historical artifacts. The commonplace books of Milton, Bacon, etc. are historical treasures.
To me, this sounded very much like blogging – a few personal insights, a few embellished posts focused on the works of others, etc., copied and rearranged (with tags). These activities representing a personal commitment to exploration and always the hope that the process will result in learning or a creative insight. I thought this association was likely new for educational bloggers and it may be, but the connection between blogging and commonplacing is far from original if one searches the web ( e.g, commonplacing on the WWW).
From the beginning, Twitter has had me somewhat befuddled. The 140 character limit seemed – well, limiting. I have settled into checking my feed a couple of times a day and I do pick up some useful links in this fashion.
The new “lists” feature sounded interesting and I immediately created a list, but again I was uncertain what to do next. TechCrunch explains a use of lists that would seem to have some potential. Generate a list likely to offer useful information and use the activity as a feed within another application. For demonstration purposes, I have inserted the feed from my “ParticipatoryWeb” list here. It would be more useful in the sidebar, but you get the idea.
The Mozilla project just released Sea Monkey – the newest version of the integrated web suite from the open source provider. I am not aware of the origin of the name, but this product appears as the updated version of a product that has been around for some time. At one time I was a dedicated user because I liked the idea of a “suite” of applications and found the mail and composer applications to be especially valuable. I used to use the Composer application in classes because it was a free tool for “composing” web pages (see below).
BTW, this is a mature application with none of the clunkiness you sometimes see in open source projects. I am pleased to see this project advancing because it seems to fill a niche.
Spending some time exploring the new offering did reveal just how accustomed one becomes to the way a particular tool works. Sea Monkey will not accept the Diigo Toolbar which has become a natural part of my work flow when using Firefox. I think it has become fashionable to refer to this as an affordance – making something easy shapes our behavior. The Diigolet (a bookmarklet) does work so there is still a way to save Diigo bookmarks.
I liked Composer because it filled a niche. At the time the less expensive web authoring tools seemed to be disappearing (e.g., PageMill, HomePage) and it did not seem productive to expect educators to master Dreamweaver or GoLive (alas now gone as well). The world has changed. The less demanding end of the authoring continuum now seems focused on online tools (e.g, Google Sites) or desktop and template based software such as iWeb. My thinking about classroom applications has come to focus more and more on efficiency. The tool is not really the focus and the core question often ends up being how much time will it take in learning and applying a tool to accomplish an educational end.
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