Instructional Technology, mLearning, Personal Technology

Living & Learning with the iPod Touch

Yes, this is my iPod.Welcome to a new system for my Adventures in Technology!!! That probably means that you’ve never seen this blog before, or you managed to find the trail of breadcrumbs left at ye olde site. A giddy ‘Welcome’ to everyone, as we settle into our new home. I still need to paint, rearrange the furniture and maybe buy a new entertainment unit (I broke the old one in the move), but I’m still happy to be here!

With all of the excitement of moving, I’m feeling a little tired and lazy. Instead of coming up with something entirely new, I thought I’d share some info that I found on another blog (one I’ve mentioned before, Kinda Learning Stuff). I recently got an iPod Touch, and am really trying to fit it into my life, for more than just listening to music. Of course, I want to see how it can be used for education as well!!! I came across this article a while back, and keep returning to it to find another task that I can add (I’ve been adding them little by little… don’t want to overwhelm it with apps and features I will never use!!). The format of the blog post on KLS was to introduce the article they read, then add their own thoughts. Sounds good to me… I’m going to do the same!! Maybe someday we can compile a definitive list!!

Articles of Interest:

Some Highlights:

  • Screen-grab – this is my next thing to play with, but sounds like a great tool to have!!
  • Note-taking – I use this feature ALL THE TIME (mostly for groceries). Granted, it’s not the most flexible tool, and I wish I could load pre-made text files from my computer, but it’s handy dandy. Oh, and you can email your notes elsewhere.
  • Synching Calendar & Contacts – this one saved me… I thought I could only access my Gmail, using the available mail option. Little did I know that I could also synch my Google Calendars and stuff using the Microsoft Exchange part.

Some Additions of My Own:

  • Delicious Bookmarks – an app that pulls in your del.icio.us bookmarks and tags. I recently switched ALL of my bookmarking over to del.icio.us and now do not use the internal bookmarking in the browser. Since all of my bookmarks are stored centrally, I can pull them into any browser I like, and yes – even my iPod!
  • WordPress – another great free app, will let you update your WordPress blog using your iPhone/iPod Touch! Yes, you might be able to do this using the browser interface, but the app makes it that much simpler. Pretty handy, if you ask me!
  • WPtouch blog plugin for WordPress – OK, this is not specifically an iPhone app… but it is related to accessing WordPress blogs on an iPhone. I’ve also started testing the WPtouch, which automatically generates an m-version of your blog! While it does strip out the “look & feel” of the site, and is a little wonky when you have large videos embedded in your blog, it’s pretty cool! It works for iPhone/iPod Touch, as well as Android! (sorry, Blackberry)
  • Google Apps (via the browser) – still not 100%, but really improving. I can access (but not edit?) my Google Docs, Picasa Photos, Google Reader, etc. Still painful to use with Google Maps, though.

I’m still exploring, and will hopefully have some learning-specific posts after a little more practise with my new toy.

A Few More Articles:

Instructional Technology

We love Free! Or do we? We do! But do we?

What is the cost of free? That topic came up in a great blog post I read on the Kinda Learning Stuff blog.

I’m sure we’ve all participated in the discussion around online tools (like blogs, wikis, podcasts – even email) and whether universities really need to have their own, in-house systems to offer them. It seems like the culture is moving away from our offering the needed services, and towards being open to supporting the tools available online.

In my daily job, these things come up all the time. Sometimes there aren’t the resources (human or otherwise) required to implement certain systems – and definitely not for ALL of the systems that people may want to use. I’ve always been of the opinion that if we can offer the services in house, we should. It offers the users a safer feeling environment, a possibility for better user support, possible integration with our existing systems, etc. There’s also the wee issue of the US Patriot act, which makes it difficult for us to recommend or support the use of any hosted online service that uses servers that aren’t in Canada.

Until I read this article, I hadn’t really considered another possibility: free online systems can magically disappear, taking all of your hard work with it! As the ‘Kinda Learning Stuff’ blogger learned the hard way, sometimes companies don’t feel that non-paying customers deserve notice of the end of their accounts (or the entire system!). Very risky!

Do I think that Google will remove all of its lovely services (Docs, Email, Reader, etc.) without any kind of notice? Not likely… it wants to succeed in taking over the universe!! But some of the smaller services could be at risk of going under, and we’d never be the wiser until it was too late.

Thought I’d share that new (to me) insight with you.

Cheers!

Instructional Technology

Tricky-Wiki

Why is it so hard to find an appropriate wiki?

 Good question… I’m not sure I can answer that on my own. I’ll admit that I have a set of features that I’m not willing to do without. There’s also a general lack of consistency across wiki tools, which make it hard to compare.

I have actually become a HUGE wiki user in the last year or so, tracking all sorts of projects and investigations on a wiki. Some are on my private wiki, that only I (and a few sys admins!) can see. Some have been posted to one of my group wikis, so my colleagues can possibly benefit from the things I’ve discovered. (FYI: I’m currently using a wiki tool called Confluence, which is a fairly "techie" wiki tool, and may or may not be exactly what we need for our wider University community). 

 What is a wiki?

At its core, a wiki is a collaborative document. Users can all edit the document, and work on it together. Their changes are tracked, so that the different versions of the document can be compared. At the end, there can be a cohesive product document that everyone worked on, without having to be in the same room together!

What can a wiki be?

Another good question. I think we’re still working on this one. It can be a collection of documents that track the progress of a project — or, the documents could BE the project. Wikis are great for evolving projects, where the information needs to be updated at different times, by different people involved. Wikis are great for growing concepts from different viewpoints. In education, wikis are often used for groupwork, for the development of the class materials by various instructors & assistants, for research projects, etc.

What features are important in a wiki?

Here are some of the things that I’m looking for:

 

  • Page hierarchy, so people can build a navigable collection of wiki documents. Since wiki pages aren’t physical, there doesn’t need to be a strict folder structure — just a nice user interface that allows the user to contextualize what they’re doing.
  • Easy to understand navigation of the content you’ve built!! I like tree structures and breadcrumbs (the list of links at the top of the page that link back to the outer layers of sections — you know, like an onion, and therefore Shrek), but they aren’t the only way to go.
  • The ability to easily embed various media types: quicktime movies, windows media, flash, audio files, youtube clips, etc.
  • An easy to use rich-text editor for editing text and embedding things (links, attachments, media, images, etc.) AS WELL as the ability to edit the code (not sure if I require wiki markup, or if I’m OK with HTML — the concept of HTML code for a wiki baffles me a little, but I think I can be cool with it).
  • The ability for a wiki administrator (not just the system administrator) to manage who has access to the wiki, and to what extent. Is it totally closed to the public? Is it viewable by the public, but only editable by a select group of users? That choice is important!
  • The ability for us to host our own server, mostly due to confidentiality issues, but also so that we can have things like authentication using our current my.ryerson accounts and the possibility of creating enrollment-based groups.
  • Auto-saving of documents while a user is working on them. I don’t know how many times I’ve been working on something, just to be kicked out of a system when I click the Submit button and having to re-do EVERYTHING because there was no auto-save.
  • An easy way for users to link to: other pages in the wiki, webpages, users’ email addresses, etc.
  • Change tracking and version comparison.

The key thing, for ALL of these features is that they need to be EASY to use, and ‘not too techie’. 

So, tell me… are these the same things you look for in a wiki? I’m not even sure anyone reads my posts, since I’ve never gotten a reply to my questions sent through the ether. Just like with the blog investigation, input is always welcome – whether you agree with my wish list or not!!

Always wikilicious,

S

Exploring Instructional Technology