A conference on Web 2.0 called mesh! – In Toronto, May 15 & 16. Looks interesting –
I’ve signed up, and am looking forward to learning and discussing.
Category: Uncategorized
Browsers & Reading with RSS
Now that you’ve read and learned something about browser-decisions, using browsers, and, browser tabs, it’s time to learn about how to use what you can find with those browsers, and how to do it easily.
“RSS” can be a mysterious and intimidating code, but it’s really very simple – “Real Simple Syndication”, that is. Many blogs and websites have RSS or something similar called Atom, or some other less well-known technical trick, which you can find on their sites. For example, if you look to the right, immediately under “Links” – you can see the link I provide, called Subscribe to WebToolsForLearners. Other sites often have an icon that looks like this –
If you do an ordinary (right) click on it, you’ll see a page of techical gobbledegook, like this –
or a simpler, cleaner page if they’re using a service like Feedburner, as I do –
Basically, you ignore these pages. You left (or Apple) click on the RSS link, or whatever subscription link, copy the link, and then you go to an aggregator and paste it in. Before you can do that, though, you have to know what an aggregator is and have an account on one.
Kathleen Gilroy describes what aggregators are here – an excerpt –
With an aggregator, subscription channels are called RSS feeds. The “SS” in RSS stands for Site Summary because that is typically what a feed contains – a summary of what is on a blog or web site. When something new – an article, a photo, a podcast – is published, it automatically goes out in the RSS feed. If the aggregator is tuned – or to use RSS language, subscribed – to that feed, it collects whatever is in the feed. In terms of the user experience, RSS aggregators can be thought of as “Tivo” for your desktop. You subscribe to a set of channels through which information will flow. Aggregators can subscribe to feeds from every major media outlet and of course the huge blog universe. But feeds are not limited to blogs and news. Aggregators can also subscribe to a feed that lists the new books available at your library, or the latest changes to a company’s policy manual, or the houses for sale. A feed is just an envelope and the possibilities for what it can receive in that envelope are limitless.
There are many aggregators; TechCrunch supplies a list in this post.
I use Bloglines, a very popular aggregator that looks like this – 
To suscribe to the blog or site I am interested in, I have clicked on “Add” (just under the Bloglines logo on the left) and I simply paste the RSS url I saved when I left (or Apple) clicked on a blog I want to read regularly. I paste it in on the right, where it is indicated. And the blog joins the list on the left, easily available for me to read when I go to Bloglines.
More about aggregators and how amazingly useful they are in a future post.
Browser Tabs
Another post on browsers!
I like Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari better than IE, (Internet Explorer) because they have tabs and IE doesn’t, at least not yet. What are tabs, and why do I like them? Here’s a picture –
Using my Firefox browser, I have 3 tabs open, three different URLs are available to me at a click
– the lighter tab is the one I was on when I took this screenshot, WebToolsForLearners, this blog,
– plus my Elgg blog with my name showing, and
– an interesting blog, The Adventures of Accordian Guy, a Toronto blogger.
I can move back and forth between any of these without opening new pages. I can have more tabs, and, when I click on a link in Firefox, if it is set to open in a new page, it will open as another tab. I don’t get lost in a pile of open pages; I have them all laid out side-by-side.
What’s the point of having more than one URL open at the same time? Sometimes it’s useful when working on a project. Say I’m writing up a post, like now, and I decide I could communicate better if I showed a picture, I can go to File and open a new tab. Then I can go to my Bookmarks Toolbar and click on my bookmarked Flickr account and find the screenshot jpeg I uploaded earlier, get the size I want, and copy its URL. Then I click back into the tab with my my Blogger post and paste the URL into my post. Two tabs, two sites open, and moving back and forth between them.
Or I could be writing up something in Word, and want to look up a point in Wikipedia, and keep Dictionary.com open to check obscure word meanings – no problem – with tabs.
I have my Firefox set so it opens with two homepages, two tabs. There are lots of uses. Now, before I save this post, I’m going to add some Technorati tags. I never remember the HTML, so I’ll open a new tab, click on my bookmarked link to the Technorati page that gives my the HTML for tagging, click back into this tab, paste the HTML in, and then add the words of the tags. Back and forth – no problem.
And I get the links to add to my text the same way, using a tab opened beside my post workspace.
Using Browsers – Works Best With …
After my last class I was talking to one of the computer-savvy students about some trouble I have having playing some of the audio files for the most recent class assignment. He told me that I should be using IE (Internet Explorer). He agreed that it wasn’t as good as FireFox in many ways, but it has an important strength. It is the most used, and most web applications are designed to work with IE while they aren’t always designed to work well on other browsers. So I’ve taken his advice and opened my IE so I can use it to listen to my students’ recordings of their narratives.
I accepted his advice because I respect his knowledge, and because I’ve stumbled against this problem myself more than once. I use a Mac platform, and I love my little iBook and OSX. And I really like Safari, the browser that came with it. But far fewer people use the Mac platform than use Windows and although most applications work quite well on the Mac platform, sometimes exclusively Mac
applications don’t get as much support. Here’s a small example.
Sometimes I forget to use Firefox for composing a Blogger post, and start doing it in Safari. This is not a good idea –
As you can see, above, I get more Browser usability in Firefox than in Safari, so I like to use Firefox when I’m composing, like now.
My computer-savvy student also suggested I use Mozilla, which is connected with Firefox, but not as trendy or adaptable. I’ve always liked Mozilla, which is what Netscape morphed into, so I might re-download it. It has Composer, which is a free, really easy, really handy WYSIWYG webauthoring application.
The short story:
My current favorite browsers: Safari, Firefox & Mozilla. Sometimes I use IE.
Academic Research is Changing!
Anyone who does academic research, or teaches others to do it, is facing a rapidly changing landscape.
From Educause,
via a feed in my Bloglines Account –
“The European Commission is to build a European digital library able to display around six million books, photographs and films and available to all internet users by 2010.”
US Internet search giant Google started an international race to build an online library when it announced plans in December 2004 to digitise books and documents from a handful of big libraries.
Since then, US Internet and software giants Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon have announced separate plans while France, upset that private companies took the lead, has pushed for the creation of a public digital library, AFP reports.
Add this to other evolutions – such as I have posted on previously – and you’ll see that academic research has changed more since the arrival of the web than in the previous few hundred years!
Browser Decisions
While you’re deciding which homepage is the most useful or satisfying, you might want to think about what browers you use. Yes, I used the plural. I strongly recommend that, whatever your platform, you have at least two browsers on your computer. The three following are free, and good.
Some browsers are better than others at certain thing and on certain systems. While most people just go with Internet Explorer, in my roamings through posts of the ed-tech part of the blogosphere, one particular browser keeps coming up, and that is Firefox. 
I’m not technically-oriented, so I want extreme ease of use. Firefox gives me that. The technically skilled like it because they can fiddle with it, making interesting changes and setting it up just the way they want. I did look at the Preferences, but I only made a few simple changes. Firefox is the browser I use most of the time. In a future post, I will explain why I recommend at least two browsers, and how you might use them.
One is not enough. My Mac laptop came with Safari on it. (BTW, Firefox works on any platform, Mac, Windows or Linux.) 
Safari is a Mac browser, so if you’re a Windows person, skip the rest of this post and just download Firefox.
I like Safari; it’s fast and easy. However, because it is a Mac product and therefore has only a small part of the web populace, it doesn’t always get good support from some of the products. I always use Firefox when I’m writing anything on my Elgg blog because I have had Safari swallow posts or comments instead of posting them. Too much frustration. And Safari does warn me it’s unsupported when I forget and do Elgg work on it. So Safari is good for Mac users, but not fully complete because not all applications work well on it.
I have recently downloaded Camino 
I haven’t played much with it but it is part of the Mozilla family, just like Firefox, but aimed at Mac users. It looks interesting, but I will have to play with it more.
So my main message is – have at least two browsers.
Home Page Decisions
The web is huge and growing exponentially. That’s enough to turn off lots of people, or intimidate them. But there are some ways to manage your web experience, starting with what you use as your homepage.
Many people use a comercially created portal, such as Yahoo’s:
Some may set their homepage to a newspaper or some other news source, such as the CBC:
Many people set theirs to the institution or campany they work for – 
While still others choose to use their own website or blog:
Here are two more suggestions. If you have more that one blog or site, you might want to compile them using SuprGlu, as I have described here.
Or you might want to aggregate all the important (to you) web pages and/or blogs and/or news sources using an aggregator like Bloglines, as I have described here.
All of these are choices for homepages to start you off when you join the web.
A brief note: Although Blogger can add photos, they don’t transfer to SuprGlu, so I use Flickr to put them in my Blogger blog, and then they transfer smoothly to other web pages.
Research Tools
One of the big advantages of being a teacher is that you can learn from your students. In my Oral Rhetoric class last week, students gave presentations, and I learned something from each of them. Two tools I learned about, I must pass on to you. Anyone who is doing academic research, or showing others how to do academic research, needs to know about the following;
GoshMe is different from any search tool I’ve seen before. You put in your search topic, check off the areas that you want to look in, and then it gives you a list of Search Engines with the links each of them has found. I gave it a whirl, and found very different responses from when I simply used Google. I think it is a very powerful search tool. To find out more about this Brazilian initiative, check out GoshMe’s AboutUs page, especially the section on the Invisible Web.
The other tool Rizwan Choudary, Vibhuti Gupta, and Mehreen Hasan alerted me to in their presentation on research using the web was an aspect of Google Scholar I wasn’t aware of. 
Not only can you use Google Scholar to search for academic papers and other research material, you can use it to search the databases of institutions you are associated with IF said institutions have made that arrangement with Google Scholar – see Support for Libraries. In Google Scholar Preferences, you can search for your institution, and, if it has agreed, you can set it as part of your preferences. A proviso and a positive:
1. You have to be able to access these databases already using your I.D.
2. It’s actually an easier and one-stop interface.
So, thanks to Rizwan, Vibhuti, and Mehreen, I can pass this information on to you.
Nurturing the [Blogging] Network
Clarence Fisher, a teacher for over 10 years, has an interesting blog called Remote Access. 
As a teachers with students on a community blog, I found his post both insightful and helpful. Part of what he said was –
As teachers we need to be the leaders, and the “tenders” of our classroom networks, but just as importantly, we need to teach our kids how to do this. We need to teach them how to support each other in their growth and their understanding of the possibilities opened up by blogging. New forms of writing, new forms of connection, new opportunities for knowledge growth are all possible,
You might want to add his blog to your Bloglines (or other news aggregator) account.
Blogging: Part of our Shifting Semiosis
Often I harvest quotes from other people’s blog in order to encourage readers to check out the ideas there. Christian Long, in his think:lab blog, has a post called 
Blogging and the Changing Environment of Education and Collaboration is a long but well-written post and hits some of the central points about what is happening with the web, communications-in-general, and communications-in-education in particular.
In this excerpt, he sets the context:
We live in a remarkable world where the Internet has moved from a research experiment to a social curiosity to a dot.com frenzy to a normal part of each of our day-to-day existence. In many ways, schools and classrooms are at the center of it all. Computers are tools and in many ways similar to pens and radios and a screwdriver in the fact that they exist simply to help us do things. On the other hand, the raw existence of the Internet is something far more powerful. And what’s just beginning to unfold in blogging, podcasting, and other Web2.0 ways is even more impressive and curious.
In this excerpt he introduces readers to the power of the “read/write” web, often called Web2.0:
Blogging, on the other hand, explodes at the same moment that typical research begins to end…and this is the beginning of what is known as the Web2.0 world, or the second iteration or generation of the Internet. It is also known as the “read/write” web because by its very definition it only exists when the owner of a website and the audience interact, read and write together, share ideas, and collaborate. While the owner of the blog technically ‘owns’ the site, the information is truly open-source. Anyone that can find the website can write back, add information, and take the conversation in a new direction. And instead of a being merely a new ‘tool’, the power of the Web2.0 world and experiences like blogging is based upon the realization that information is no longer static and ‘owned’ by one individual or group. Information is collaborative and forever being added to or challenged or evolved.
In this final excerpt, Long shows his readers why this change has created a revolution in the way we humans communicate:
You see, blogging is merely a simple software tool. On the surface it’s merely a website with content and images. And if you stop by and look at one a time or two nothing really happens. You’ve seen a million sites like this. Check in, check out. But if you stick around for a bit, if you follow a link, if you add a comment or two, if you come back a few days later or weekly or even more often and see what’s been added, if you create a blog of your own, if you add the link to a friend’s blog or a classmate’s blog or a blog of someone from the other side of the world, and if you wake up one day and you receive an email from someone you’ve never met who wanted to tell you how much they appreciated your ideas on something you cared deeply about, then you begin to realize that something really powerful is happening in this Web2.0 world.
Those of us in the education field would do well to take advantage of the possibilites provided by the “read/write” web so our students can garner the learning provided by this communication tool.
Learning Living 