iterativelearning

I’m not a photographer, but I’ve recently been playing around with Photoshop as part of a couple of projects. As everyone knows, this software packs a lot of power, but amidst the dizzying array of tools and options, it’s sometimes a challenge to figure some of the more basic problems.

One early error message that greeted me was, selected area is empty, or something along those lines. This typically occurs when you’re trying to change or manipulate some part of the image. One solution for this is to create a new layer via copy.

1. Select the current layer (e.g., “background)
2. Use one of the select tools (e.g., marquee) to select part of the layer you want to change
3. From the pull-down menu, click Layer>New>Layer via Copy. Alternatively, you can CTRL-Click and then select the New Layer from Copy that way.
4. Select the new layer you just created and make the desired changes.

If I need to make some basic drawings, diagrams, or Wireframes, I use Omni Graffle. I like it because it’s native to the Mac and it’s less expensive than Illustrator and plenty robust for my needs. Anyway, for this post I thought I’d do something along the lines of a tutorial tid-bit related to Graffle.

I generally prefer and/or need to work in pixel dimensions rather than inches, however, the default in Graffle (at least in my version) is inches, and so I was wondering how to make that quick little change to the settings. My first instinct was to check the ruler, but later found that this needs to be done via the Inspector.

Under the Canvas: Size panel (bottom-most panel on the Inspector), click the Ruler Units pull-down menu and select pixel.

Last week I had a chance to do a little podcast experiment with Skype. It came about as a result of an EdTec class I’m teaching where I interviewed a guest blogger — fellow ed-tech’er, Andy Petroski from Harrisburg U. Although Mac software like GarageBand makes it pretty easy to produce a podcast if you’re the only person involved, it gets a little more involved if you want to tie it to an interview that you run through VOIP (e.g., Skype).

Fortunately, I came across an excellent resource from the New Media Center at Mary Washington University. It saves you all the tech details and breaks it down to the most essential tools: Soundflower and LineIn – both of which are free.

Flickr image credit: Colleen AF Venable

With Google’s recent announcement of editing docs on mobile devices, it got me thinking about why I haven’t seen the same for wikis. I use PBWorks and really like it, but one limitation is the lack of mobile editing.

Wikis seem like a good match for mobile because so much of the adding and editing tends to happen in smaller chunks rather than long, winding paragraphs. A mobile option for wikis might also increase levels of interaction and participation – that ongoing goal of DE educators.

Flickr image credit: Diego_3336

DuckDuckGo (my search tool of choice) came out with a new look and so I used the occasion to check out some more offerings under the hood.

One that I hadn’t noticed before was the automatic password generator. For example, enter pw strong in the search box and it automatically generates a strong password for you. Or if you want to drop it down a few levels, enter pw avg for one of average or medium strength.

I’ve been increasingly relying on Scrivener for my writing projects and today they introduced a brand new set of features. Two that immediately catch my eye are mobile options (iPad, iPhone) and Revision Mode where collaborators can view and compare changes. I see an upgrade in my future …

Spending most of the week at the annual AECT gathering and this morning saw a good session on mobile learning and game design. Chris Blakesley talked about the University of Wisconsin’s Aris project. As I understood it, it’s an open source authoring tool that taps the affordances of narrative – a universal tool for knowing as well as telling. The demo presents a case scenario of reporter covering a protest on the UW-Madison campus in the 60s. Beyond their demo, one other interesting deployment I liked was by some faculty at the University of New Mexico who use it to teach Spanish 101. Essentially students use it to explore the nearby Los Griegos neighborhood, and in doing that, hopefully move their understanding of the language beyond just memorizing verb tenses and vocabulary.

Some interesting developments happening with OpenOffice as its changing its name to The Document Foundation and its corresponding suite to OpenLibre.

The FAQs do a nice job of laying out the key details associated with this changeover. One that caught my eye related to development:

We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.

No doubt we’ll see some compelling stuff come from this openness. I’d love to see some activity on their Education project.

Caveat: I’m a big Zotero fan. I mean if you’re a serious, geeky academic researcher how could you not be?

But for those who had left Firefox for Chrome, or dedicated Mac users who love the aesthetics of Safari (and the engine power of Webkit), they were perhaps a little reluctant to venture outside the cozy confines of their browser homes.

But now today, Zotero announced that it will soon be releasing plugins for Chrome, Safari, and IE. So no more excuses. According to the post, this new version of Zotero will include a radically expanded API and mobile access. I’m very glad to see the addition of the mobile option, which is nearly a requirement for any new software rollout these days.

On the promotional end of things, they’re calling this Zotero Everywhere. I like it. Will there be a t-shirt?

Zotero is a great research tool for students and academics. I find it immensely easier and more intuitive to use than EndNote, RefWorks, and other sorts of similar packages. If by chance you’ve been missing out on all the fun, you can get a quick overview here. Their latest and greatest effort is a standalone version that would work with browsers beyond the ever-extensible Firefox.

One thing Zotero makes easy to do is sharing. It’s drop-dead easy to create groups ( essentially, click the group folder icon and send email invitations). One thing I’ve noticed with Group libraries though is the lack of a search function within a specific group’s bibliographic library. This isn’t a big deal if the group doesn’t have a lot of cites that they’re sharing, but if there are a bunch of cites being stored there (e.g., more than 50), searching for them becomes a little unwieldy because you’re going to have manually click through multiple screens. I don’t know how widely the Groups feature is used among the Zotero community, but if it’s a feature under consideration, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.