Rounding Up Christmas Break: A New Ning, Rounded Corners, and Free Music
By RR | January 2, 2009
Well, I didn’t get any of the items on my Christmas wish list. Never mind: if you wait long enough, the Web (in an abstract sense) usually seems to invent what you need. When I put together the Lake Michigan Writing Project web site in 2007, for example, I was looking for easy-to-use social networking. I found a few solutions, but nothing like Ning was out there yet. I like the site, but today, I would set it up with Ning.
And speaking of Ning, I am in the process of converting the current MCTE site (Wordpress-based) into a Ning-based social network. Ning is great for organizations, though it would be cool if it supplied a membership tool and event organizer that tied into PayPal or Google Checkout.
On a completely unrelated note, I’ll no longer have difficulty creating rounded corners for web graphics (look at the shoddy job I did on this blog). Even with Photoshop, I can’t manage to make a professional-looking rounded corner. But now, I’ll use the really helpful site Rounded Cornr , which allows you to create, well, rounded corners with no hassles. Check it out if you are into design and know of the rounded corner dilemma.
Another random find this break: the music site Groove Shark. Listen to any streaming song. Embed it on Facebook or your blog. Cool. Right now, I’m revisiting a few mid-80s bands whose tapes I trashed a few years ago. Anybody out there like the Hooters or the Thompson Twins?
Categories: News | Tags: miscellaneous | No Comments »
My Christmas Wish List 2008
By RR | December 21, 2008
Most tech blogs I read publish a “best of” list around this time of year. Typically, these lists include favorite Web applications, best freebies, and/or most useful tweaks or hacks. (See Life Hacker’s list of the most popular Windows downloads, for example). My list this year is a little different: it is a wish list of applications or modifications that I wished existed. So here goes:
1. Open Source Ning. No doubt about it, Ning is the best show in town for setting up and maintaining a social network. I have set up five Ning sites for various purposes, including a course resource, a conference home page, an professional organization site, and more. Ning just makes it so easy to add members, modify features, and change the look and feel. But Ning does not currently allow web developers to download the application and install it on their own servers. That’s how Ning makes money, I know, but I would love to see a one-time download fee that would let me set up Nings on the servers I own.
2. A Social Network for my Social Networks. And speaking of social networks, I have a hard time checking out all of mine on a daily basis. So why not have an application that keeps track of all of them in a single site? Better still, the application could create a feed bundle for all of my social networks, making all of the updates readable in Google Reader or another feed reader.
3. A Few More Google Reader Features . I love Google Reader. I start every day with a cup of coffee and a read through of my Google Reader account. It is still in beta, I know, but I would like a couple of additional features. First, I should be able to manage all of my subscriptions from the main page, which would include better dragging and dropping and the ability to create new directories without going to the manage subscriptions page. And this is not really Google Reader’s problem, but I would love to see it interact more smoothly with library databases: getting feeds from within our databases seems pretty hit and miss right now.
4. Better Video Embedding. I have finally found a pretty good video hosting site in Viddler. What I would love now is the ability to embed a video player with a playlist (along the side or bottom) instead of embedding multiple videos on the same page (as in my screencast page). So far, my search for this kind of player has turned up empty. This a pretty minor request, so you would think it an appropriate (and free) application would be out there somewhere. No luck so far.
5. Universal Video Format. Generally, a little competition is good for the web. Competition gives us Firefox and Google Chrome as opposed to the formerly dominant Internet Explorer, for instance. But the sheer number of video formats out there make producing and viewing video online a real challenge: Windows Media (.wmv), Quicktime (.mov), Flash (.flv), Real Player (.rv), MPEG, DVD, and now Blue-Ray (plus all of their high definition versions) make for a big headache for anybody trying to put video on the web. The VLC media player can handle playing nearly all of these formats (except Real), but it would be nice if all of these proprietary formats, each with different strengths and weakness, could be collapsed into a single, universal format that was recognized by all browsers. It happened with audio: mp3 now rules audio format. What about a generic video format?
6. Better Cloud Computing. As I indicated in several previous posts, I love the idea of syncing my files between the web and several machines. I also like working on my office desktop from the comfort of home. Live Mesh, Drop Box, and Logmein all offer these services, but none offer all three without major issues (Live Mesh is particularly buggy). Cloud computing is pretty revolutionary, I think, so it would be nice to get something working right out of the box–or right after the download.
7. More Cloud Computing: Stream all of my Music from Anywhere. Here’s another wish along the same lines: I want iTunes to let me listen to my music from any computer. Again, I’ve tried a few solutions like Anywhere.fm (now defunct) and Imeem, but most of them either require huge uploads (I have 11 GB of music right now) or leaving your music computer on at all times. Neither of these options is very appealing. Here’s what iTunes should do instead: take a snapshot of my music library. Exclude all mp3s that are uniquely mine–say, my bootleg U2 tunes. Include only iTunes mp3s/mp4s in the snapshot. Then let me listen to those tunes via the iTunes database using any computer.
8. Better Looking Wikis. Okay, so wikis are cool. Easy to use. Collaborative. But man are they ugly. The good thing about web 1.0 was that it fostered high quality design, as pros with tools like Flash created really sexy looking sites. The web today is an uglier place, I think, as more amateurs (okay, like me) create blogs and wikis with very little flair for design. Wikis are notorious for their ugliness. I run a wiki at wikispaces.com, and I’ve been trying to change the design for months now. Why can’t I get just a little more control to make it look just a little sharper?
9. A Better MUVE. The inadequacy of multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) has been a frequent grip of mine. What we need is a great-looking, low-requirement (no special hardware) universe that is accessible via a browser, easy to program and highly modifiable, and free. A tall order. Could I set up a three-dimensional world and design a game in that world in an afternoon?
10. A Better Windows Laptop . Everyone knows that Macbook Pros are the coolest thing out there: sleek, user-friendly, and well, Mac-y. Why can’t a Windows clone create something as aesthetically appealing as the Mac? Design matters, as Apple knows. You just don’t see people with Dell stickers in car windows.
That’s my list, for now. Turned into a bit of a gripe session, I know. But that’s all I want for Christmas (that and a drain snake to undo some of the damage my three-year-old did while I was writing away . . .)
Categories: News, Web 2.0 | Tags: 2008 | No Comments »
The Writing Life: Rehearsing Some Ideas
By RR | December 19, 2008
This could be a wonderful morning for writing: we are blanketed in snow, it is quiet in the house, and day seems long. Enter the two kids: the sixteen-month-old, who has somehow found a toilet brush to play with; and the three-year-old, who is hungry and demanding a “nola bar” for breakfast.
I love the name that Donald Murray gives to the interior conversations you have before writing begins: rehearsal. I have been thinking about a new book for some months now, sketching its rough contours in my mind–adding and subtracting ideas, finding words and phrases I like, thinking about starting and stopping places. If it is ever realized, the book is going to discuss teacher creativity and curriculum design–a favorite subject of mine lately. Technology will have a role, but it will be secondary, part of the larger, more sweeping idea of what it means to be a creative English teacher in the twenty-first century, and how to go about becoming one. The central vehicle will be theme and topic-based curricula that pair multiple genres (classic works, non-fiction, drama, young adult fiction, graphic novels, web material) in innovative ways. The text will cover eight to ten themes/topics, perhaps beginning with a chapter on, well, vampire literature.
The book will also have to say a few words about the forces working against teacher creativity–namely, pre-packaged curricula, standards-based teaching, commercial literature anthologies, and the Grendel behind it all, No Child Left Behind. It will have to take on the notion that there can be such a thing as teacher-proof curriculum–and that we should reward objectivity at all costs.
So, it is time to write, but I love the rehearsal, when everything is possible. That, and it is tough to get started when the kid who finished his granola bar now wants some juice.
Categories: Courses, News | Tags: writing | No Comments »
More Cloud Computing: Switching from Live Mesh to Dropbox
By RR | December 18, 2008
Ah Live Mesh. Grand concept. Not so good in practice. I’ve been a big fan of Microsoft’s Live Mesh since it came out in beta earlier this year. I love the way it syncs multiple computers seamlessly, and I love being able to get to my data from anywhere. All of this for free–if you can fit all of your data in 5 GB storage space, which most people can.
Problem is, the program is buggy, and no one seems to know why. I have spent hours combing the Live Mesh forum and the Microsoft Connect help center in search of a fix for the multiple issues Live Mesh has on two of my computers. I have waited for about two months for a response and even did an angry-guy email, to little avail. The standard response is “we’re working on it.” Bill Gates gets $1,000 per second for this? As you can tell, I am still a little riled.
Riled because I hate paying for applications that I can get for free. But today, I finally switched over to Dropbox, which will back up everything and sync multiple computers for free (2 GB) or $99.00/year (50 GB). I went with the 50 GB and am now in the process of backing up my data. Unlike Live Mesh, Dropbox runs quietly in the background without consuming all of my processing power.
But an unfortunate dissimilarity to Live Mesh is the ability to selective sync–that is, on Live Mesh, I could have computer X synch folders A, B, and C (but not D) with computer Y. With Dropbox, all folders are synced automatically. This means that all 7 GB of digital pictures that are currently stored on my wife’s laptop are now downloading onto my work laptop. I liked her photography, but I don’t need to store all of it on my work machine. Dropbox promises to fix this in future releases. Guess I have heard that before.
At least all of my data is safe–no more floppy backups. I’ll use Logmein to substitute for the cool remote desktop feature Live Mesh offers.
I guess I’m a little Scrooge-y today. Cloud computing? Bah humbug.
Categories: Multimedia, News, Web 2.0 | Tags: dropbox | No Comments »
Embed Documents with Scribd
By RR | December 16, 2008
Lindsay Stoetzel, one of my former students who just finished student teaching, did an amazing honors project on using social networking in an English classroom. Lindsay used Ning (free social networking site) to create a network for her students, who used the site to blog, participate in forums, and share resources such as video and audio. I will probably share at least some of her work here eventually when I get her permission to do so.
Lindsay also used a wiki (at Wikispaces) in conjunction with her social network. One of her students was frustrated with the basic ugliness of the wiki site–it’s hard to really change the appearance of a wiki page. This is generally true of wikis and part of their charm. Lindsay’s student pointed her to Scribd, another cutely-named 2.0 site that allows you to upload documents and embed them in other sites, such as wikis. Her students ended up designing more attractive pages in Word, uploading them to Scribd, and embedding them in at Wikispaces for a much more attractive end product.
I decided to check out Scribd. I used it to upload a couple of documents with the results below. Unlike Google Docs or other online word processors, Scribd is really all about storing, displaying, sharing documents, not creating and editing them. A Scribd document can be embedded in any web page (and there is an easy-to-use code for Wordpress blogs).
Categories: News, Web 2.0 | Tags: scribd | No Comments »
Some Theme Changes
By RR | December 14, 2008
Some of you may have noticed I changed the look of the blog oh-so-slightly. Really no reason–I was just a little bored with the old look. I thought about changing to a new theme, but Wordpress doesn’t really seem to support these any more. In any case, the new look is meant to be softer, more minimalistic, and maybe even more Mac-y. Tell me what you think.
Categories: News, Web 2.0 | Tags: secondary worlds | No Comments »
Sex, Vampires, and Adolescence
By RR | December 13, 2008
I’m spending the weekend reading final papers for my English 330 course (Studies in Fiction), which I taught as a study of vampire fiction. I was inspired to do so in part by the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which I am only partly ashamed to admit that I read like a middle-school girl this past summer, even attending the release party for Breaking Dawn. The books have been receiving a great deal of attention since the November release of the movie. This month, the Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan has a fantastic piece on the appeal Meyer has for adolescent girls. She writes:
The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.
So, really, the Twilight series has two things working for it: first, it is about the secret emotional life of an adolescent girl, narrated for the most part from the perspective of a narrator in the clutches of love. The second and more interesting observation here is that the medium of the novel–and the act of reading–also sustains the secret emotional lives of adolescent girls. I think this is exactly right, and that this phenomenon also explains why so many readers are willing to look beyond the faults of these books (even the normally judicious Flanagan calls them “fantastic”) and embrace them. Reading Twilight means sharing Bella’s secret emotional life.
Why 30-something academics find Twilight compelling is another matter altogether.
Categories: Courses, News | Tags: Twilight | 2 Comments »
Vote for our Podcast! Another Shameless Self-Promotion
By RR | December 10, 2008
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that this site had been nominated by Edublogs for the best educational use of audio. You can now vote for this (and blogs nominated in other categories) at the 2008 Edublog Award Site. While you’re add it, put a vote in for Literary Worlds as the best educational use of a virtual world. This application is based on my dissertation work and I’ve done a ton of work inside of it–including the role-playing game Thoughtcrime.
For visitors coming from the Edublogs award site, you can check out the nominated podcast by selecting audiovisual–>podcasts from the navigation bar above. Our podcast consists of student-created audio trailers for young adult novels. You can listen to a few recent episodes here:
- Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
- Slam by Nick Hornby
Thanks for listening!
Categories: Web 2.0 | Tags: edublogs, podcast | No Comments »
Virtual Realities Still Waiting for the Killer App
By RR | December 5, 2008
This is the topic I thought I had buried when I didn’t get a small NEH grant to develop a MUVE (multi-user virtual environment) based on 1984 within Second Life, the popular but declining virtual world. Okay, I thought, I’ll stick with the MOO version of Thoughtcrime (the 1984 game I developed), perhaps working on it occasionally, but basically putting it on the back burner indefinitely. Recent interest in the game by a few teachers, however, has got me thinking again.
More than thinking–checking out alternative platforms for the game. For a while, I thought that Second Life was the key, but it is just too pricey and its hardware requirements prohibit most secondary schools from using it. Then came Google Lively, a stripped-down but easy-to-use and browser-based virtual reality. Lively is not nearly as versatile as Second Life, but it had potential. Potential, that is, until Google decided to kill the project at the end of the year. I was briefly entertaining the alternative MUVE platform Multiverse, but it too has prohibitive hardware requirements and seems beyond the scope of my expertise. After all, if someone with big funds (Edward Castronova at Indiana University’s Synthetic World Project) couldn’t quite get his project Arden (a Shakespeare MUVE) to fly using Multiverse or eventually, NeverWinter Nights (though there are some prototypes), how could I expect to with no funding and no creative team?
I’m still poking around, of course, and in doing so, I have discovered OpenSim, the open-source MUVE platform that is currently in beta form. Looks like it has a pretty steep learning curve, too, and some of the same hardware demands as Second Life.
So, I’m still waiting around for the ideal platform: easy to use, program, build, and access. Maybe it will never happen. Or maybe, as James Gee (What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy) told a friend of mine, you need at least 20 million to develop a good game. Then again, no one thought that we would all be listening to .mp3s instead of CDs . . .
Categories: Simulations | Tags: thoughtcrime | 2 Comments »
Blog Your Secret Passion
By RR | December 4, 2008
Jon Stewart’s comments are often more on-point than those of the mainstream media. In this interview with Arianna Huffington (the Huffington Post founder), Stewart raises some pointed questions about blogging. For her part, Huffington says a few things that sound a bit like Peter Elbow. I may even have to buy Huffington’s new book on blogging. Take a listen.
Categories: News | Tags: blogging | 1 Comment »