January 03, 2007

Managing the Info Flow

Following my brother's advice, I set up a Bloglines account today. It's a great example of Web 2.0 tech; it keeps all of your blog info in one place, so all the news is in one place. Now I have one page where I can go to for everything from international news (courtesy of the BBC) to checking in on my brother and progress on his VW rebuild.

When setting up my blog feeds for bloglines, I noticed Tim blogging about Tiddlywiki (cute, huh?). It's wiki software that is very dynamic -- there are hyperlinks everywhere. Clicking on one brings up that entry in the top of the center column, sort of like a blog, but organized by topic rather than date of entry. At any time you can close one or all of the entries you've brought up. I have only looked briefly at the Tiddly, but it seems very cool. I think there are lots of educational and personal uses for such a thing, as well as some epistemological issues brought up by such a dynamic (and ideosyncratic) way of organizing knowledge.

Posted by Nakia at 03:29 PM | Comments (1)

August 29, 2006

Google Calendar

I've been taking a look at Google Calendar for my organizing needs. Now I use Outlook for calendar stuff, and it syncs with my Palm/phone. The good thing about Google is that it can be public, so other people can see when I've got stuff going on. But do I want that? Do I want everyone to know when I have meetings or will be out of town?

I'm also wondering if there is some way I can use the invitations feature to allow my students to schedule appointments.

Posted by Nakia at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2006

So Much Power!

I just walked down to the Instructional Technology Center to ask about Adobe Acrobat. I am going to try and make some PDF's to use with my on-line and other courses. I don't really know how to do this yet, but from what I gather, it's not too hard.

The ITC gave me the entire Adobe Creative Suite. So now I have Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and whatever else. So much computing power!

Of course I know how to use about .05% of it. And I currently only need about 12% of that power. Still, it's good to know that if I wanted to make sophisticated, graphics-intensive documents for my courses, I could.

Posted by Nakia at 12:00 PM | Comments (3)

May 30, 2006

Tuesday Tech

Don't know why, but I am in a techy mood today. Perhaps it's because I am beginning to get my on-line course together. I've got a meeting today at 2:00 with the resident on-line course guru, Becky Evers. She's helping me out with the development. We use WebCT here at Winthrop.

I also checked out Woot, an on-line store of sorts. It has a unique business model and a very cheeky attitude; it's basicly a blog that sells stuff, but they only sell one product per day.

I've also downloaded some extensions for Firefox. I got a local weather one that's pretty nice and (finally) an RSS reader. For the later, I chose info RSS. I am not nearlly savy enough yet to evaluate it well, but it seems very customizable and pretty easy to use so far.

I should also point everyone to Money and More. It's 803's newest venture -- a finanical magazine focusing on the Grand Strand region.

If I find more stuff today, since it appears I'm in a web surfing mood, I'll post it.

Posted by Nakia at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)