Technically Random

The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About …” series.

7 Things You Should Know About Wii

The Wii is a video game system that uses a wireless controller capable of sensing position and motion, allowing users to interact with the game applications through physical movements. The controller has captured the interest of academic researchers and hackers, who have used the technology to create applications such as a collaborative choreography tool and an inexpensive, interactive whiteboard. Wii technology is used as an input device in virtual worlds and as a training tool that allows learners to perform physical tasks in a digital, risk-free environment.

There’s some very cool videos of what on researcher did to turn the Wii-mote into a lowcost interactive whiteboard and a multi-touch finger tracking device. The discussion boards for this project can be found at: http://www.wiimoteproject.com/

It seems to be a never-ending quest to find a blog editor. As good as the editor in WordPress is, I just don’t like dedicating a browser window to it and it feels too much like typing in a web form and not an editor. (Picky, picky…) I wrote earlier about blogging from Word 2007, but the limitation of only being able to select one category, and the time it takes to get Word up and running has kept me from going back.

Now I think I’ve found just the thing. ScribeFire is a Firefox plugin that lets you easily post to your blog. By default it runs in split-screen mode, but you can also have it launch as a new tab or in its own window. It has some nifty features that make it very easy to include a link to the page your looking at or to drag and drop formatted text. Best of all, it’s always there in the browser so I don’t have launch another app or open a new tab and go to my blog to add a new post.

This is the second post using ScribeFire and so far no deal-breaker irritations. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to Angie Rosette-Tavares for pointing this one out: 

Adobe recently released a slimmed down version of PhotoShop for the web, PhotoShop Express: http://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html

While it likely isn’t something most of us will need on a daily basis, it’s yet another tool that might obviate the need for local software installations. 

So Word 2007 now lets you write and publish blog posts directly from Word. I’m trying this for the first time with this blog post. I like having the big edit window of the Word document and some of the autocorrect features are actually pretty handy, especially for quick and dirty posts. I don’t have any fancy formatting in this post, so we’ll have to test that out later. My only gripe so far is that I normally use CTRL-N to create a new document and by default it creates a new Word document. If I want to start a blog post I either have to move my hand all the way off the keyboard and use the mouse or do an ALT-F (to bring up the file menu) then select ‘N’ for a new file. This is nothing new, of course. This is what I have always had to do to create a new document using a template. A minor irritation, but one I’ve grown accustomed to.

So, here goes, I’m about to press the ‘Publish’ button.

Oh, wait… seriously, it will only let me select one category? Well now that’s really irritating.

-Corey

The latest in the “7 Things You Should Know About… ” series from Educause.

 7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps

Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser. The applications include communication tools (Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar), productivity tools (Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations), a customizable start page (iGoogle), and Google Sites (to develop web pages).

-Corey

Check out this article from Read/WriteWeb about Twiddla, a web based tool for collaborative web based whiteboarding. It’s a pretty neat tool for any kind of collaborative work. You can start from a blank page or open an image or web page to draw on and mark up. Imagine doing a brainstorming session with some members of a group sitting in a meeting room with their laptops and the whiteboard displayed on a projector or display monitor, and other group members either in their offices or even across the country at a conference. Since it’s a whiteboard, you could create lists, mindmaps, task or workflow diagrams or wireframes for web page design.

The comments in the RWW post also point to a couple other online whiteboarding tools, Scriblink and Vyew.

-Corey

Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies hosted a head-to-head matchup of citation management software and tools in CiteFest 2008.  The tools they looked at were: CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks,  and Zotero.

The posted the preliminary results earlier this week and Zotero won, narrowly edging out EndNote.  Zotero is a Firefox plugin that lets you collect and manage your citations from within the browser.  They’ve made a lot of improvements in the last year so if you haven’t looked at it for a while, it might be time to give it another shot.  Close to 80 other libraries and universities are recommending or providing instruction on using Zotero.

-Corey

JotSpot, the structured wiki that was bought by Google in 2006 and promptly closed down to new users has been opened back up to the world as Google Sites.  Sites is part of the Google Apps suite of productivity and collaboration tools and lets you quickly and easily build web pages and collaboration spaces and include file attachments, information from other Google applications (documents, calendar, YouTube videos, images from Picassa) as well as free form content.

I’m signing up and poking around, but since the name of the game is collaboration, it’ll be more fun if there are others in there to play with.  If you sign up, send me a note and we can try to take it through its paces.

-Corey

A couple of related articles came across my RSS reader within a few days of each other.

Virtual Worlds Poised to Become Valuable Work Tools from ReadWriteWeb talks about a new report from Forrester on the use of virtual worlds in the workplace.  I’m not going to repeat the whole post, but it does talk about the ways some big organizations are using virtual worlds, like Second Life, to bring employees together to meet and collaborate.

Prediction Markets at Google: A Guest Post appeared on the NYT Freakonomics Blog a few days later and it discusses some research done at Google on predictors of success in their internal prediction market.  One of the biggest predictors of success, it turns out, is physical location of the individual’s workspace.  Participation on the same cross-departmental project did not have any effect on trading behavior, though participation on similar email lists did yield similar trading behavior.  One of the comments to this post describes how the work spaces at Linden Lab (creator of Second Life) have been arranged so that people do not share office space with others working on the same team or project.  Team and project work happens in virtual office space in Second Life.

These two posts got me thinking about information flow and idea generation in our organization.  We are spread across 700 acres on the Seattle campus and 70+ miles up and down the Puget Sound corridor.  Where’s the water cooler?  We have some intentional sharing gatherings like the Final Friday Information Literacy Group meetings but how can we have those hallway meetings when our hallways are in different buildings?  The articles above show that the physical arrangement of staff and the smart use of technology can go a long way to enhancing communication in the organization.

This just came across ResearchBuzz, Google Offering a Nifty Chart Generator.

The Google Chart API is a simple tool that lets you create many types of charts. Send an HTTP request that includes data and formatting parameters and the Chart API returns a PNG image of the chart. Embed in a webpage with an image tag and you’re done!

There’s a Google Chart API FAQ at http://code.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=13605, and a developers guide at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/.