Flickr

Is it just me, or is everyone struggling to upload pictures from Flickr?
I found some great resources but am struggling to hit the right buttons on this one. Perhaps I am overlooking something obvious.
I did enjoy the mashup where you could spell your name in Flickr images, but agian, it would have been fun to download it and print it off.
Anyone with any tips on this?

Prezi

Huge fun this one.
I saw Prezi demonstrated before Christmas, and ok….it’s just another tool….but what a tool!
I’ve just converted a PowerPoint presentation on travel writing into a Prezi ready to unleash it on unsuspecting students next week. I must admit, it looks a lot more exciting and less pedestrian than the usual lecture presentations.
I’ve managed to get the paths working well, have imported pictures, taken it down the the limits in terms of microscopic text and had some fun.
The only drawback is the time it takes to do all of this. Because we are familiar with PowerPoint, it is fairly straightforward to put your lecture together, it is linear, you can think as you write. With Prezi, it is more fiddly to put together, you can’t add a slide in as an afterthought without going through the whole presentation again re-numbering the staging points, and you do need the lecture planned out with care before you start.
But for impact, you can’t beat it.
It won’t suit all lectures and I’ve yet to try to put it into Blackboard as a resource for students, but it is certainly one I would recommend for the teachers’ tool cupboard. It was easy to get started with it too, there are simple video tutorials which are very helpful.
Time for another cup of tea I think.

Slideshare

I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes looking at a PowerPoint presentation on the developments in online journalism, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was written by an american academic and gave me some insight into trends in the US, cited some US data which I was not aware of, and had a good bibliography. I hadn’t expected to like this site, but am pleasantly surprised.
With care, and considerable cross checking I suspect, this has the potential to become the world’s greatest electronic campus. You can study just about anything here.
The lecture I visited was http://www.slideshare.net/Brett509/trends-in-online-journalism
The downside to this site is that quite a lot of people use it to advertise themselves or their products, which is annoying (try searching pancakes and you will see what I mean). Also, you find a lot of amateur stuff on there too (….see pancakes again).
However, this is one of the 25 things I suspect i will come back to at some point or another.
A sort of thumbs up on this one.

Lanyard

I’m sorry, but I find incessant tweeting really irritating. I have been to a number of conferences where people sat nearby spend the whole time “vanity publishing” by tweet. They don’t really take in much of the conference as they are too busy telling other people at the conference that they are there, and are tweeting!

It’s the “hey look at me, I’m here, and look, my technology can tweet at you” approach that is so annoying. It must be distracting for the presenter too, as the tweeters spend so long looking at their Blackberries and pressing buttons that it is obvious they aren’t really listening to the lecture. It is certainly distracting for those of us who end up sat somewhere nearby.

Lanyard is then irritating by association. Sorry. I’ve signed up, and if anyone thinks they can convert me to a conference tweet fan, then you are welcome to try.

Twitter

As a journalism lecturer, Twitter is an important innovation to watch. The BBC gleaned details about the bombing in Mumbai, India, in November 2008 via Tweets from people near the scene. The trouble is, there is so much rubbish tweeted now that it is really hard to find anything worth following. If you are a journalist, there are certain Tweets you want to look out for, such as those listed by celebrities and their publicists, as news about Brittney Spears’ latest haircut has the potential to make it to the front page of the Sun. I’m just not sure how useful a tool it is in itself for those of us engaged in academic research. I think it is too new, still at the “techno toy” phase of its lifecycle, to have matured into anything really useful. Give it a few years and it could well have potential.

Citeulike

The video tutorial here made me smile. Our Australian friend who takes us through how he uses Citeulike has used some sort of screen capture programme, such as Camtasia, to demonstrate how easy it is to use Citeulike, but he has had similar problems to me.
Camtasia is great, but there is a danger that you um and ah all the way through your demonstration if don’t work to a script, and sods law dictates that while you are capturing your demonstration, the software you are trying to illustrate won’t do what you want it to! I normally go back and start it all again, but our friend here didn’t and the resulting video is a little comical at times.
As to Citeulike itself, it does look like it might be useful, BUT I can’t get the tool to open up in my browser bar, and it does rather depend on this for you to lodge academic research papers within its storage systems. I think I need a little more practise with it, and right now, I’m not sure I have time to really faff about with it.
I think that if i am going to embrace new research tools, they need to be easy to use, problem free, and fairly intuitive. This one doesn’t really hit any of these parameters for me.

Tagging and Diigo

I’m getting the hang of tagging. It seems to appear all over the place and is part of the international language of social sites/social tools.
The trick of course is two-fold:

One…..remember to tag your own contribution wherever you are. As you understand your own conventions better than anyone else, you should stand a fighting chance of finding what you saved and tagged.

Two…be creative when searching using tags, as each culture has it’s own way of describing things.

The limitation on tagging of course is that of language, as we all seem to call things by different names. And while tagging is meant to solve the problem of information overload, so far I haven’t hit on the right subset of words to give me the information I want. I’m finding I’m either swamped with irrelevant articles, or am hitting zero. I suspect it requires practise, like most things.

Diigo is interesting. I like what it aims to do, and as a remote storage/reminder facility, it looks good.

Will I use it regularly? I’m not sure. I have developed my own systems and have an innate distrust of technology. My fear would be losing everything if the site went down. Also, we are a little spoiled at the University as we have central drives we can store information to. I think I might find it confusing using too many storage systems, and am not sure how much use I would get out of Diigo. This one isn’t exactly a thumbs down, but it’s not thumbs up either.

On tags and things

I hate to admit this so early into the programme, but I got stuck this week, big style.

All was going well with the reading, but on trying to sort out tagging, Google Reader and RSS feeds……not a hope.

The good stuff first…
I enjoyed looking at Technorati. This was a very interesting place. As I teach journalism students, I shared it with them and talked about how useful it could be in conducting background research, spotting trends in stories, unearthing obscure facts and figures, etc. In general, we agreed we liked it. I’m not sure how useful I will find it for academic research, but it is certainly something to keep in mind.

Now for the frustrating bits. Starting with trying to tag my blog. I couldn’t find how to get back into it to do this, and am still struggling. I can see how to tag the blog as I am inputting in the QuickPress part of the Dashboard, but haven’t yet worked out how to tag existing blogs. I spent a lot of time trying to work this out and gave up.

And I can’t work out how to search WordPress using tags either. It really is frustrating and not an intuitive system. The Help section wasn’t much help. In the end, I used my initiative, and having got the URL as far as ending in …tag/ I simply typed my search term in to the end of the URL string, and found what I was looking for. There must be an easier way, but I haven’t found it yet.

When it came to RSS feeds, I gave up after an hour and had to ring Graham, who I must say was very helpful and incredibly patient.

It turns out that you have to set up Google Reader first, THEN ask it to add RSS feeds.

When I eventually managed this with the help of the telephone tutorial from Graham, it was very satisfying. I’m not sure yet how useful this will turn out to be, but will give it a go.

Now having caught up with week two, very belatedly, I am about to embark on week three.

Getting started

OK, so I’ve just started a new on-line course to improve my use of technology.

Two reasons for this:

One – my children know more about technology than I do, and that is a little worrying.

Two – my students also know more about technology than I do, and ditto.

I’m not a complete novice, I do know about the basics, but am finding the pace of change a little too fast to keep up with by just absorbing new info as it comes along.

Case in point today…..setting up a blog.

You have no idea how long it has taken to get to this point, and actually, I’m still having trouble. This page should look nice and sharp with a black border (I think) having chosen one of the themes on offer via WordPress. Unfortunately, to me, it still looks grey, bland, and uses the Times Roman font. I’m missing something here team. And I have pressed the activate button as advised.

I need help!

I’ve followed the online tutorial supplied by the site, but still feel that something is not right.

Any suggestions (other than keeping out of the blog sphere entirely) will be much appreciated. I can’t go home and admit to my teenage son that I can’t work out how to set this up properly.

Many thanks……

Ahhhhh…….found it.

Just worked out that by pressing the preview button the thing does look like I hoped it would!

Lesson one then is that when using the WordPress dashboard, you do get the bland (inoffensive) grey, but when you publish it, you are inserting text onto a themed page.

Now that is satisfying. Cup of tea I think…..

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