EdTech @ ADW

As you know, it can be incredibly difficult to keep up with all the different websites and blogs that you like to read regularly. Often, even remembering which pages you have checked can be difficult - especially while on holiday and away from your regular computer. This is where feed readers come in.

Basically, you subscribe to the webpages and blogs that you regularly read using their RSS feeds. As new stories are added to the webpages and blogs that you read, your feed reader will automatically have been updated with that information. Therefore, you only have to check your feed reader and browse through the stories that are new and read the ones that are of interest to you.

Google Reader is my feed reader of choice. It is easy to use and is web based, which is an advantage when you are travelling. I will blog more about Google Reader over the next few weeks. Here is a screenshot of how it looks.

Happy Reading!

This article by Chris Brogan details the advantages of Social Media. I’ve pared down his list to include those that most apply to education settings. However, his original list is definitely worth a read.

• Podcasts (video and audio) encourage different types of learning, and in portable formats.
• Social networks encourage collaboration,  and can promote non-email conversation channels.
• Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interest.
• Social bookmarking means that entire groups can learn of new articles and tools.
• Blogs and wikis encourage conversations, sharing, creation.
• Social software, promote human-mediated information sharing.
• Online versions of your materials and media are searchable.
• Podcasts are a way to build intimacy with information.
• Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster.
• Human aggregation and mediation improves the quality of data you find, and gives you more “exactly what I was looking for” help.
• Innovation works much faster in a social software environment.

The internet, in addition to allowing us easy access to business documents, research papers, free encyclopedias and some great books, also provides us with tutorials to absolutely anything.

Want to learn how to grill a great hamburger, or how to program in PHP?

This web page posted on dumblittleman.com details 15 such super-useful sites, which aim to provide you with all the tutorials you’d ever need.

Here’s an article that claims that voicemail is dead. The writer cites the following reasons:

“It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.”

The writer warns you to think before you voicemail, because more and more people just find it annoying - and prefer to be emailed instead, especially if the message is important.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Here’s a very good article containing tips for achieving cross browser compatibility: Click here

For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article, here’s a summary:

1. Always use strict doctype and standards-compliant HTML/CSS
2. Always use a reset at the start of your css
3. Use -moz-opacity:0.99 on text elements to clean up rendering in Firefox, and text-shadow: #000 0 0 0 in Safari
4. Never resize images in the CSS or HTML
5. Check font rendering in every browser. Don’t use Lucida
6. Size text as a % in the body, and as em’s throughout
7. All layout divs that are floated should include display:inline and overflow:hidden
8. Containers should have overflow:auto and trigger hasLayout via a width or height
9. Don’t use any fancy CSS3 selectors
10. Don’t use transparent PNG’s unless you have loaded the alpha

It’s not possible, you say! It is possible, I retort. With services like Qik.com you can with a compatible handset broadcast video live from your handset. Your viewers can follow your broadcast at the Qik web site. Another alternative is FlixWagon. It seems both these services are closed for new users for now. I’ve registered with both though so let’s see what they look like.

I’ve uploaded the presentation I made at the EdTech retreat yesterday. It’s a QuickTime movie so it should play on pretty much any platform. It is available at http://nystedt.s3.amazonaws.com/rss.mov

Here’s a great article about how we read online. This article provides serious food for thought for any e-learning materials designer. Click here to read this article

A quick excerpt:

“That’s Jakob Nielsen’s theory. He’s a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.”

I was commissioned by Ed Tech to come up with a small Flash Application that reads the RSS feeds being generated from the college web site.
The specifications for this application were the following:

• It must be 230px x 110px in size.
• It must be built using Action Script 3.
• It must be able to display RSS feeds of the 10 most recent posts related to college events on the currently-being-developed Abu Dhabi Women’s College Web Site.
• It must enable display of 3 feeds at one time.

• Each feed being displayed must have active links: That is, be clickable and take the user to the appropriate web page associated with the RSS title being displayed.
• In addition, 3 invisible buttons were used, and links dynamically set for each of these buttons by referencing the link nodes in the RSS xml.

Below is a picture of the resulting feed. An XML parser class was used, and the XML nodes referenced to produce html output in each of the three text areas on the application.

A timer event is encoded on the main timeline of the application to trigger a change event every 8 seconds, causing a wipe transition to occur on current feeds, followed by loading of the next 3 events listed in the RSS XML.

This resulting application will not go online until the college web site goes live. When it does, it will be placed in the SharePoint college webpage, and alert all faculty to recent and current events within the college.

It has been difficult to start a culture of blogging for us ‘Digital Immigrants’. In an effort to take advantage of sparks of creativity there is a link to ‘Write a Post’ on the EdTech SharePoint site. Hopefully this will help us get posting when ideas are in our heads!