Depot’s core features center around the notion of sharing–specifically, making it as easy as possible to share example Content Enhancement diagrams with others. In these video clips, I’ll show you how much easier it is to share your work in Depot than it was in the Content Enhancement Library, and guide you through this process. In less than 20 minutes you’ll be a Depot sharing pro!
We’re big fans of RSS technology around here, and evangelize it whenever possible. (No idea what I’m talking about? Check out Amber’s RSS in About an Hour mini-course in the Stratepedia Learning Labs.) That said, I know there are a lot of people who haven’t gotten around to checking out RSS readers or finding feeds for their favorite sites, or you may just not know that a handful of CRL-related sites with RSS feeds are out there. So, as a little exercise, I created an easy, one-page view of these feeds’ headlines at feeds.stratepedia.org. Add it to your bookmarks and open it up whenever you’re wondering what’s going on at CRL!
Do you know of some feeds I missed? Leave them in the comments below. Adding Jim Knight’s blog to this list is a to-do item for me; for some reason I can’t get the RSS from it to show up properly. Are there others? Are there things at kucrl.org or stratepedia.org you’d like us to make RSS-friendly?
Leopard’s new Stacks feature has done wonders in terms of keeping my desktop tidy, but I still manage to garner some clutter. It normally doesn’t bother me too much, but if I’m giving a presentation or creating a screencast those extra icons make me feel self-conscious. In the past I’d do something like create a new folder and shove everything into it, but that just confounded the problem.
Here’s a better way: Just hide everything! Camouflage, another handy, free utility for the Mac, makes this easy. Just fire it up and, viola, a clean desktop! Don’t worry, those important files haven’t disappeared–you’ve just thrown a sheet over them for the duration. (How many of you have resorted to this tactic at home when company’s on the way over?) When you’re done presenting, just locate Camouflage’s icon in the menu bar to turn it off and reveal your messy desktop.
Download Camouflage and get a tidy desktop. As always, if you have questions or comments, just add them below.
Isn’t it annoying when you’re presenting and, during some discussion about your slide, your screen saver kicks in or your computer puts itself in sleep mode? If you’re using a Mac, you can keep this from happening by giving your computer a little jolt of Caffeine.
Caffeine is a small, free program for the Mac only. When you start it up, you’ll see a small coffee cup in your menu bar. Click it off and on to enable or disable screen savers and sleep mode. When you’re done using Caffeine, hold down the Apple key (or the cloverleaf key–located to the left or right of your space bar), click the coffee cup, and select Quit.
Download Caffeine and give it a try! Windows users: Do you know of a similar program or trick for your computers? Share in the comments below.
By the way, if it’s your audience that’s falling asleep, this won’t be of much help. You’re on your own there.
As you may know, I’ve been an iPhone user since a couple of days after their big release last summer (no, I didn’t camp out for it; I strolled into an Apple Store a couple of days later and they had plenty in stock). Of course, one of the first things I began thinking about was how to put it into use in SIM and education in general. A particularly nice feature is that a savvy web programmer can develop sites and applications designed to work on the iPhone’s smaller screen and touch-friendly controls–this puts mobile application development within the reach of what we do at CRL.
Anyway, last week I worked on a small school project in which we explored the merit of iPhones in education. This is still a new topic, so there’s not really any published literature on it, but we found some like-minded souls in our search. Abiliene Christian University, a small, private school in Texas, is leading the way. They have an excellent blog called iThinkEd where their findings.
Yesterday, ACU announced they will begin handing iPhones out for free to incoming freshmen, beginning this fall. Students will be able to “receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances” via web-based applications developed by the school.
This is going to be a great model for what we want to do in terms of Stratepedia and the mobile web. Imagine feeding data into Dossier from the back of a classroom by quietly tap-tap-tapping an iPhone screen, or accessing on-demand video models anytime. We’re pretty excited to see what we can start rolling out.
If you’re interested in mobile uses of the Internet in general or the iPhone in particular, the ACU initiative will be a project to keep an eye on (tip: check out Amber’s RSS tutorial, then add iThinkEd’s feed to your feed reader).
Got any other iPhone questions or mobile web services you’d like to see Stratepedia provide? Leave a comment below!
Talkshoe, the audio conferencing tool we told you about a few weeks ago, has been optimized for the iPhone. We’ll try it out this week (we had problems with the regular desktop/laptop interface during our experiments) and let you know what we find.
TalkShoe community chat services goes to iPhone (via MacWorld)
We’re getting ready to roll out a new, really useful feature in Dossier–automated scoring of the Stages of Concern questionnaire. Just use Dossier to enter the data and access the scores.
I want to test this out with one or two small-ish groups, like one or two schools but not a whole district just yet, and definitely not a whole state. If you’re interested in trying it out, leave a comment below or e-mail me at help@stratepedia.org.
Imagine my surprise when I pulled the latest Stratenotes from my mailbox and saw my name (and Amber’s, too) on the front page. Twice. A big thank you to Don for promoting the work we do at Stratepedia.
As Don mentioned, a big part of what we do at Stratepedia is keep up to speed on technology and then figure out how to apply it intelligently to the challenges facing us in the SIM community.
Do we always get it right the first time? No. Anyone who was in on the great Marratech video conference experiment of 2006 can attest that, sometimes, in spite of what the movies may suggest, technology isn’t quite ready for prime time (or, we’re not ready for technology). That’s part of what makes this job fun (albeit frustrating at times)–we get to dust ourselves off, evaluate what we’ve learned, and keep moving forward.
I also want to remind you that we do not work in a secret lab. A lot of times we need guinea pigs volunteers enthusiastic about trying new technologies for our projects. We’ll post in this blog whenever these opportunities arise. In addition, this new publicity is timely as Amber and I have talked about how to use this blog to share more about what we do, things we’re trying, and what we’ve learned. You’ve joined us at a great time.
So now that you’re here, keep reading! We have several ways you can keep tabs on this blog, including via e-mail and RSS. Or you can just bookmark the site and check back at your convenience. You can also tell us what you think on any post–just fill out the short comments form you’ll see at the bottom, no account required.
Thanks again for visiting!
Aaron
This afternoon a few of us experimented with TalkShoe, an online conference call recording application. It’s not perfect, but it has promise. If you ever wanted to host your own call-in program, here’s your chance.
With TalkShoe, anyone with a browser and a decent Internet connection can listen to your show. You can also download a program and add your own voice to the conversation. This application also allows the host to mute and unmute other speakers, kind of like a switchboard. We had problems with this software but eventually got it up and running. If you’re not by a computer, no problem–you can also participate by phone over a (toll-based) conference line. We had better luck with this.
TalkShoe is currently free–not sure if that’s going to apply forever but for now it gives us a chance to experiment with it and see what we might do with this technology. One possibility I’m thinking of is hosting the StrateReaders conference calls with it, and providing the recorded calls to anyone who’d care to listen later. What other things might CRL do with this?
Due to some unannounced (to me, anyway) changes to the mail servers we use to send you important things like Learning Labs posting notifications and password reset help, we’ve been able to send you messages for the better part of the last few days (I’m not even sure when this started; my logs tell me nothing useful). I’ve rerouted mail to go through a different server. The problem is this is the server that AOL hates and won’t un-blacklist.
I’m going to try to find a better workaround. In the meantime:
You could also try another e-mail account–for example, messages are arriving correctly to my ku.edu and mac.com accounts. If you’re on AOL and have an alternate, you might give that a try.
