iterativelearning

Screencasts are a popular alternative to documentation since most people would rather see how something works than search through a manual. Still, some screencasts can be awfully boring (e.g., monotone); others can go over the top with trying to be too funny or sarcastic. The screencast for the task manager Teudeux strikes a nice balance.

I’ve been using Omni Focus for several months as my project/task manager. It’s a Mac software that nicely covers all the bases such as adding start dates, due dates, reminders, project notes, and multiple sorting configurations. One of my favorite features is its integration with Mac Mail where you can convert email items to tasks by forwarding them to your Focus inbox. However, every once in while, I have problems forwarding through one of my email accounts due to firewalls or some other related security measure. Today, though, I inadvertently discovered a work-around for this. If you highlight part of a message and then press CTRL-Click, you’ll see an option to add it to your Focus inbox. It even gives you the option of adding the due date from within your mail message. Pretty nifty.

I’ve been experimenting with another one of those highly addictive Firefox extensions; this one is called Feedly and I like it quite a bit. It’s got a snazzy, light UI and makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of some of the most active feeds in your news aggregator by pulling from your Google Reader and Twitter accounts. It also comes with various modules that allow you to configure Twitter posts, YouTube, and Flickr. You can even enter hexadecimal values if you want to customize the background color and link colors (read and unread). There are, of course, lots more options under the Preferences section.

Feedly is also Safari and Chrome-friendly.

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Feedly

When it comes to technology and the classroom, it’s hard not to hear at least one person mention Twitter. Among higher ed faculty, you can find your Twitter aficionados and your detractors. Mashaable Mashable reports on Purdue University’s development of their own customized application (Hotseat) that combines both Twitter and Facebook. After looking at the intro video [scroll to the bottom of the post to see it], they’ve configured it with the same 140-character limit, but have added a voting feature. So, for example, a professor could see how voting patterns identify specific content areas that need further elaboration. In theory, this would help faculty more quickly get a read on confusion. Another possible advantage is that unlike clickers, the language and terms of the communication is being determined directly by the students.

What’s interesting from a research standpoint is how this isn’t a story of one early-adopter faculty who has a techie-fondness for Twitter, but rather one of a school and its broader, more systematic effort to see if this technology actually resonates with students.

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Instructional Design, Mashable, Purdue, Educational Technology

Not a lot of men have to wear neckties these days and so when those special occasions warrant one, it’s easy to forget the 9 variations of knots. Well, fortunately, there is at least one instructional designer out there who sees no task as too trivial and accordingly, has developed a video tutorial, iTie.

This computer-based tutorial capitalizes on the webcam that comes with most laptops so that an animated necktie (produced by the software) is superimposed over the physical necktie (generated via the webcam). One particularly interesting detail is the contrasting colors (blue, yellow) that help to more clearly show which end of the tie to manipulate.

Credit: Marek Plichta via Vimeo

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Instructional Design, Tutorial

I’ve been working on an collaborative instructional design project for the last few weeks and we’ve been using Google Docs for most of our work as well as a little bit of Zotero for bibliographic stuff. As we’ve been compiling our various bits of information from readings, meetings, email, chats, and video, I’ve been thinking how nice it would be if we had something like Basecamp or DeskAway that’s priced for educational use. While Deskaway has a free option, it limits you to 25MB in storage and as most quickly discover, it doesn’t take long for a big project to exceed that cap. That said, both DeskAway and Basecamp sport slick, intuitive interfaces and do a nice job of creating one central web-based workplace where everyone on the team can store (e.g., docs, images), communicate, and coordinate logistics.

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Basecamp, DeskAway, Instructional Design, Zotero

Very interesting post in the Programmable Web by Daniel Jacobson on Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE). Two big standouts for me are how it foregrounds portability (e.g., to mobile platforms) and feasibility for organizations with limited staff and money (e.g., schools). He also includes a presentation on it.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I would try and jot down some more thoughts on the very writer-friendly tool, Scrivener.

Today, I had an opportunity to try out the Compilation feature and was very pleased with the results. Essentially, the Compilation feature functions like a publication tool where you can select all sorts of finishing options, and Scrivener makes it really easy. It gives the feeling of a major desktop publishing platform without all the layers of complexity; it’s just a matter of checking or unchecking boxes.

One hidden gem I noticed in today’s initial run was the Load button. With this, you can save your publishing settings by simply clicking it. Very handy if you need or plan to publish with a very specific set of formatting options more than once.

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Scrivener

I was using netLibrary a couple of days ago in preparation for one of my instructional design classes and thought about how nice it would be if there were more robust annotation tools (e.g., text highlighting). It appears that there might be a version that allows for this, but I’m guessing that this option comes with a pretty hefty price tag. There’s also no date on this press release so it’s not clear how current (i.e., applicable) this information is. Along these same lines, it would be even better if the ebooks could be published in the open ePub standard so students could read it on all different kinds of mobile devices.

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netLibrary, ePub, Kindle

After fooling around with it, I’ve decided to switch to Scrivener for all my serious writing projects. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a word processing software designed for the Mac, but in my view it’s so much more than that; not so much because of its features (although it’s got a ton of them and many that I find particularly nifty), but it’s really designed for people who have to do serious writing projects like academics, screenwriters, and novelists.

I may write more about other features in future posts, but I thought I’d point to a couple of real standouts.

First, I really like how it accommodates modularity and makes it very easy to move and arrange chunks (e.g., sections and chapters) of a major writing project; you just click and drag whatever you want to move.

Another feature that immediately caught my eye was Snapshots. All too often on past writing projects, I’ve deleted a sentence or paragraph that, at the time didn’t seem very important or relevant, but then later realized it would have been better to keep. Instead of trying to reconstruct that specific passage from memory or use some kind of kludgy software hack, Scrivener’s Snapshots allows you to quickly capture that text in a separate holding place that can then be recaptured with a simple keyboard command (CMD+5) or via a pull-down menu option.

The more I’ve used Scrivener, the more I’ve realized that the maker, Literature & Latte, genuinely understands what it’s like to tackle a major writing project. If you’re a Mac user and find Word too Windows-like and Pages not quite robust enough for your big projects, I recommend giving Scrivener a whirl. They offer a free, 30-day trial, but in my trial run with it, I think it took all of a week or so to realize that the $39.95 price tag was more than worth it. L&L also offers an educational price of 34.99.