Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Author: joanvinallcox
Joan Vinall-Cox, Ph.D. is a lifelong learner, retired communications professor, rabid reader and poet who has taught in both the college and university systems.
Her Ph.D., in 2004 was an Autoethnographic Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry focused on moving from technophobia to technophilia.
She is a widow from a happy marriage and a mother to a strong and kind daughter.
Her interests include Centering Prayer, Multiple Intelligences, Attention Deficit Disorder and its connection to creativity, Jung, Campbell’s Monomyth, and Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry
The Web is About Connections
Holiday Monday and I’m playing on the web. I’m scanning through my MakeUseOf.com subscription and decide to look at this – http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/technology-explained-how-the-internet-works/
I read this:
Look at a map of the Internet sometime and you’ll see that it is like a million superhighways with no lines painted on the road. It’s a snake pit of computers attaching to modems attaching to phone lines, or cable, or satellites, or cell networks, attaching to more computers, servers, routers and modems and so on, and so on. There is no beginning. There is no end.
It’s the big picture, and it has a picture
In the image above, you are looking at one very small part of the Internet. See that star-burst like image it is extracted from? Go take a look at the full image.
I take the invitation and find this image
It’s stunningly beautiful, in my opinion, and my mind makes another connection; it’s the macro to a micro image metaphor:
Dandelion fluff, courtesy of Yahoo’s image search, 
(I used Yahoo’s controlled image search to find a copyright clean image -filtering for Creative Commons images.)
A quick puff and the dandelion seeds spread out into the world, finding places to link to.
The web is made up of connections, and that’s how our minds work to: the visualization of the web looks like a dandelion, and knowing the global nature of the dandelion, I can grok the global outreaching of web connections.
The web is made up of almost infinite connections, and when I land on one, my mind makes the connections that seed my use of the web’s connections. I link on/with the web.
The Web is a Creativity Generator generating a Culture of Creativity
Photo by Tabea Dibou, from Flickr 
We can see more people creating more works than ever before in history. And it’s because of the web and because the web is social. On the web, much is possible. Whether you are finding the right beautiful photo (with the right Creative Commons license) to illustrate metaphorically the connectivity and the beauty of the internet for a blog post, or whether you are playing with a web app (Skitch – http://skitch.com/) to draw
or to explain something
The web is a space where people want to make, to create. I’m creating this blog post, because it’s FUN! And easy. The phrase “user-friendly” developed with the personal computer. Web apps are aimed at being user-friendly to entice and encourage people to use them, to be creative.The social aspect of the web, the possibility of being seen/heard/recognized, even if only by a very few others, encourages people’s creativity. I might not have composed this blog post if the one I created yesterday hadn’t been re-tweeted, and got a comment. That thrill of recognition is energizing. So people are playing on computers and posting their creativity on the web. As we get responses ourselves, and even if we just see others get responses, we are encouraged to join in the play. And playfulness spreads.
So serious people who sell cars and race cars become part of the crowd playing:
Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien / plmd.me ) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car.
The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman. ( openframeworks.cc )
Which I downloaded – nl.toyota.be/iqfont and played with.
Art, play, creativity – that’s how we humans learn and that’s what makes us happy and healthy. And the web is our creativity playground.
Why I Use More than One Social Bookmarking Service
Not that I’m paranoid (or maybe I am but I like to call it cautious skepticism) but I am always aware than any of the free web services that I use, or even ones I’ve paid for, could go belly up and my stuff on it (them) could vanish into a black hole. So when I read about speculation that my wonderful collection of bookmarks on del.icio.us could disappear, I feel my paranoia is justified.
Internet search marketers could lose some invaluable free tools from Yahoo such as their Site Explorer. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb was concerned what the deal meant for Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), Yahoo’s search developer platform Search Monkey and social bookmarking service Delicious, which he described as “one of the last era’s most heartbreaking symbols of untapped potential in social media”.
Bing is exciting as an effective challenger to Google, but if that competition comes at the cost of cannibalising Yahoo’s innovative search work – then we won’t be so excited about Bing any more.
via guardian.co.uk
I also celebrate that I have a strategy to deal with this. What are the odds that two similar web services will disappear at the same time? Not good, I hope.
My web stuff paranoia has led me to set up another social bookmarking service called Diigo. So I have two active accounts on different social bookmarking services.
So does that mean I have to save everything I like twice? Well, sort of, but that’s because I’ve recently taken to using Evernote, a broader and more visual saving application. But back to strictly social bookmarking. I only save once.
How? you ask. In Diigo, under my account name, I go into “Tools” where I can “Import Bookmarks”, but more importantly, I can “Save Elsewhere”. I have added my del.icio.us account here, and every time I save to Diigo, I also save, without any extra work, to del.icio.us.
So I’m prepared! If Yahoo and Microsoft let del.icio.us die, I still have all my bookmarks in Diigo. (Same thing if something happened to Diigo.) And I have Evernote too!
The Web is a Bottomless Toy Chest
I like to play on the web, and my biggest problem is my “I-can’t-catch-up” anxiety. There is always more to explore. And for free, either for the basic version or for a month. I can never try everything out. I can’t catch up. Ever.
I make things even more intense by following people who suggest really interesting web toys. Like Jane Hart, with her Jane’s E-Learning tip of the Day
If you teach or train, or just like to play on the web, you should check out her blog, and subscribe to it.Another of my current people to follow ’cause they give really neat toys – whoops, I mean URLs – away, is Steve Rubel – http://www.steverubel.com/ – Twice he mentioned Posterous. The first time, I tried it but left it orphaned. The second time, months, maybe years, later, I found my original account and started playing, even sort-of lifestreaming, copying him. Great fun.
His constant exploration and evolution is inspiring. Check him out, and subscribe to him in Posterous, and maybe to me too;-> As they say on tv, “Time well wasted!”
Reading Content; Content Reading
All learning is contextual, in my opinion. You have to already know some aspect in order to learn more. I remember my Psych 101 prof, many, many years ago, saying that any book with more than 10% new content would be unreadable. So this video, found through krea_frobro747 on Twitter, appeals to me because it makes sense of my experience both as a reader and as a teacher of reading. Anyone concerned children learning to read, here’s foundational knowledge. (Might help mild dyslexics, too.)
In fact, when I roam the web trying to learn, I have problem trying to understand posts where I can’t bridge the gaps because I’m missing crucial knowledge. I guess the real take-away from this video is the more content you know, the more texts that are accessible to you, and the more you can teach yourself.
It’s like watching (or reading) the news. Initially it’s all disjointed and confusing. But watch and read long enough, and you pick up what you need to know to understand it. You see the patterns; you learn more faster. That’s why experience is valuable; your knowledge net is large and finely detailed.
Of interest … 07/20/2009
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Styles in MS Word – A Jing Video
I’m attending the PBWorks Camp for teachers, and this is my homework for my second week, a screencast made using Jing on how Styles in MS Word can help in writing long pieces such as academic papers or business reports:
2009-07-02_1211
I re-did this a number of times, dealing with –
- fitting what I wanted to say to the time available
- figuring out what to leave out
- making sure my set-up worked
- reducing the size of my Word screen so I could fit everything into a smaller frame
- stumbling while I was recording
I really like learning from screen captures myself, so I enjoyed creating one
Social Bookmarking – Diigo
Social bookmarking is one of the most useful aspects of the web. You can use it to create your own online library, organized to your own interests by using tags. Although I’ve been using some form of social bookmarking for years, every so often I want to review what I can do with the social bookmarking tools I use.
Currently I use Diigo and del.icio.us.
One of the useful aspects of webapps is that many give you notice when an upgrade is available, and then, when you install it, open a page explaining all the changes. Diigo has recently upgraded and among the items available in the upgrade page were these very informative videos:
I use two social bookmarking apps because I’m wary of any web app closing down, and having two makes it more likely that I’ll still have access to most of my saved bookmarks if one closes. But who wants to do that extra work you ask? It’s no extra work, because I can save to Diigo and have my new bookmark automatically added to my del.icio.us account.
The final step I’ve taken is to add a del.icio.us widget to my blog so readers can see what I’ve been saving.
If you don’t already use social bookmarking, you might want to give it a try.
Twitter Means Business
I’m ambivalent about my title because I use Twitter mainly for learning, communication, and entertainment. I recognize, however, that business is becoming increasingly a part of Twitter. I recently posted a picture on TwitPic …
and commented that it reminded me of a Liberty print.
(I have fond memories of a dress made from material I got at Liberty’s in London, and several scarves I treasure, including one my husband discovered in a second-hand store and bought for me. I haven’t shopped there for years because I haven’t been in London for years.)
What happened next was this –
plus an invitation to follow them. I looked at their site and saw that they had a number of people tweeting using the business name plus the (I assume) first name of the person posting the tweets, which strikes me as a good way to display a business and keep the personal touch so important a part of Twitter.
I didn’t chose to follow them, because I live a continent away and because my prime interest is people I know, web businesses that can have an impact on what I want to do, and people I can learn from. (I love the freedom of not following back without feeling rude. So different from invitations in symetrical social sites.)
I found it very interesting that my casual mention of their business brought them directly to me; they are obviously monitoring Twitter, which I didn’t expect from such an old and traditional company – which shows me I should be careful about stereotyping. ;->
Today, in a Google Group I am part of, Gloria Hildebrandt – http://ohouse.ca/ – linked to this site –
It is clear to me that even businesses not directly connected to the web and social networking are seeing the business possibilities that Twitter offers.
So while I keep on enjoying the learning and entertainment that Twitter provides me, I also recognize that it has many uses beyond the purely personal.
