Week twelve

Basic use of the default Microsoft Internet Explorer was certainly familiar, as for most people, but with Mozilla’s Firefox I’d only remembered some of their earlier unreliable versions (pages didn’t load, or the browser ended up crashing).  although I’m aware that Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been the preferred choice for many people, so it should be more reliable in the current format.

The Opera software site offering their Opera 9.6 browser seemed to be something different and a bit more of an alternative to the more popular or mainstream I.E or Firefox,  they have a little more quirkiness in their website so I’d possibly give Opera 9.6 a bash instead.

Mashups were something I’d never heard of before.  After a little browsing around the mashup awards site a couple of interesting things were discovered.  They don’t seem to be the most technologically refined and sometimes end up stalling, although they are meant to be easy to set up and done with limited technical skill. 

The Wikipedia Vision http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/ displays a world map of (almost) real time edits taking place on Wikipedia.  This itself doesn’t offer a great deal of work potential, it was slightly addictive to watch though and sometimes fascinating to follow edits as they popped up on the world map, on anything from obscure furry animals in Scandinavia to members of the Pussycat Dolls.

Week ten activities

The introduction to virtual worlds has so far been the most interesting part of learning2.0 and worth exploring further.  I’d seen news reports about Second Life before, as on occasions it has hit the headlines where various controversies had emerged, most recently a story about “virtual world” affairs leading to real life divorce… there were a number of stories over the last couple of years about the world of virtual worlds.  After setting up an avatar (which was fairly straightforward) we’d managed to enter Second Life and wander about, unfortunately it was not possible that day for everybody attending the workshop to make it to virtual Imperial College London.

It could be worth having another go and trying to get anyone that wants to (possibly using 5 minutes during the wrap-up session?) back in to Second Life and over to virtual Imperial.  In terms of work or academic teaching value, there are certainly possibilities such as the virtual Medical School (SAF building) exercise demonstrated, for students to gain some sort of experience and learn certain aspects of their subject, even if it were slightly detached from reality.

Overall virtual worlds seem to have the broadest and biggest range of possibilities (work/academic/social) out of all of the things we’ve been introduced to so far.  There was something recently about how an avatar of a real life person could eventually become living itself, in that the person wouldn’t necessarily have to operate their avatar in the virtual world.  This has certain possibilities, for example the real life descendants of a real life person who had been dead for a long time (maybe great-great grandchildren) could locate their virtual ancestor through the virtual world and meet with them to learn about their family history. 

It is alarming at the same time when considering how virtual worlds could perhaps become too advanced.

Week seven activities

Unfortunately I’ve fallen behind with the last set of activities (hence the lack of updates for week 4, 5 and 6) but hopefully back on course now!  The email invite for the Learning 2009 wiki had appeared and after joining there is a bit of navigating around to be done to see what features are available, or what discussions are currently running (e.g. a few of the ”deliberately controversial” threads have been found).

week three activities

This week we had a go at social bookmarking, using del.icio.us to set up a web bookmarking page.  There are a few advantages using this sort of social bookmarking, it can be a useful for work groups/ teams who want to link and share useful or important information and to have this all in one accessible location, especially where multiple users can log in with one username and update the bookmarking from any location. 

For the individual user though, who uses a computer in no more than two locations it did feel a bit too similar to having any other “Favourites” web browser list, or just putting a list of links on an RSS feed or personalised homepage.

Although by exploring around del.icio.us a bit more, there are other features to discover e.g. clicking on the number next to a bookmark shows a list of others who have the same link, plus other facilities, functions, bits ‘n’ bobs to click on. Maybe there is a way to have a preview window pop up when hovering the cursor over a bookmark (similar to viewing a link on the learning2.0 blog). 

del.icio.us also appears to allow RSS feeds from bookmarks.  A demonstration of pageflakes in the workshop looked more impressive, which allowed multiple pages of more complete content to be shown, even an Outlook style calendar. Things get more busy on the screen though if you have several bookmarked/ linked pages, perhaps a large plasma television on the desk would help!

Haven’t made it to the second and third activity from this week yet.

http://delicious.com/Mmpat

Week two activities

Week two introduced us to both RSS aggregators and personalised homepages are new to me as well, activating Google Reader seemed fairly straightforward and simple to navigate around.  A few of the example feeds had been added to the page (learning2.0 blog, BBC Weather RSS feed, Dr. Who).  Google Reader doesn’t seem to allow the entire content of the BBC Weather page to be viewed in the same way as the actual webpage (icons, images),  although there is probably some way to be able to do this or maybe in other RSS aggregators.

Week one activities

Right now I’m a week behind with the blogging so this is the very first post, about the activities we have learnt in week one.  MSN messenger & hotmail was something I’ve not used for 5 years now, the old functions, icons and layout of the application were familiar and not much seems to have changed since around 2004.  It was just the blogging part that is completely new, hence the posting now.  So far it looks like there is alot of additional functionality alongside the basic posting/commenting to become familiar with, making multiple blogs, polls, users, settings etc…

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