Archive for December, 2008

Dec 29 2008

Profile Image of suzievesper
suzievesper

The Courage Campaign

Filed under Uncategorized

The Dumesnil-Vickers Family – Originally uploaded by courage.campaign

Through a random series of web page clicks, I ended up on the Flickr set from the Courage Campaign group that are protesting the decision in California to outlaw gay marriages:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/couragecampaign/sets/72157611501972510/

This is an issue that I feel very strongly about as a long time advocate for gay rights with a large number of gay friends (one of whom was a bridesman at my wedding!). I think that all couples, same sex and hetrosexual, should have the same rights in the law and in our society. If gay couples want to get married, then I believe they should be able to. I think that loving, healthy relationships should be what we aim for in our society rather than sticking to some antiquated ideal of the family unit.

This set of photos on Flickr is a great way for people to show the world their support and solidarity for gay couples in California! I’m going to take a photo showing my support and invite you to as well.

Tags: ,

One response so far

Dec 28 2008

Profile Image of suzievesper
suzievesper

Wikispaces – editing in Safari and bulk student account creation

Filed under Uncategorized

OK – so I am obviously a bit slow out of the starting blocks given that the following blog post on the Wikispaces blog is dated the 10th of December! Still, this is very good news. I have always liked the speed and clean lines of Safari but have steered clear because of how heavily I use sites like Wikispaces that have previously not given you ‘WYSIWYG’ editing in Safari. This has now changed! The following is from the Wikispaces blog:

safari-logoFor
all those Mac users out there, we now offer Visual Editor support for
Safari 3. So if your school’s computer lab is full of Macs, or
you just love the speed of Safari, you can now enjoy the ease of
Wikispaces with it.

This new release also brings support for other WebKit-based
browsers, such as Google’s new Chrome browser.

I also note from the blog that Wikispaces have also made it easier for teachers to bulk create student logins. Again from the blog:

For
the past 3 years, Wikispaces has offered a service to educators where
we would create all the accounts for their students in bulk. We are
excited to announce that we have made this process even easier.

Now, for any of our K-12 wikis, you can create accounts for your
students without having to send us an e-mail. Simply go to
“Manage Wiki,” and then “User Creator.” All you
need to begin are the usernames and passwords you want for your
students. With the new user creator, you can:

  • create accounts with or without e-mail addresses
  • have passwords generated for you
  • add a suffix or prefix to all the usernames to ease creation
  • and make them members of multiple wikis straight away

All of these features help keep Wikispaces as my wiki of choice.

In saying that, PB Wiki has really added a lot of functionality in recent times including document management tools and an increase in the amount of storage space for free accounts (now up to 2Gb and if you pay $9 US, you can have unlimited!). You can put all of your uploaded files into folders to make it a breeze to locate them again.

I also like the way you can set a variety of access levels for members: administrator, editor, writer, reader, or page level only. If you want to move into using wikis for digital portfolios, the page level access option is exactly what is needed (eg if you want to make only certain pages available to parents and children).

It has also had the bulk student account creation tools for quite a long time.

So the race for the best wiki tool continues with both Wikispaces and PB Wiki having excellent features. People are always asking me to tell them which one I recommend and it is becoming harder to be as definitive in with my opinion. It will be interesting to see how each of these continues to develop! One thing I am going to investigate is backing up all of the work I have on my wikis. After losing the collections of feeds I had (see previous post), I am particularly aware at the moment of how fragile all of my work is sitting on servers on the other side of the world!

Anyways – I hope you had a wonderful Xmas (we had a really nice chilled out day at my parents) and that you do something fun for New Year’s Eve!

No responses yet

Dec 17 2008

Profile Image of suzievesper
suzievesper

And so it begins…

Filed under web 2.0

Closed signOne Monday morning, I went to run a workshop at Wellington College for a group of teachers on a range of web 2.0 tools. I opened up my http://learningweb2.wikispaces.com site and during the course of the morning went to go to where I have all my blog collections so that I could pull up secondary school examples. On my ‘Finding blogs’ page I was in for a nasty shock – all of the feeds that I had aggregated using a tool called RSS Mixer were no longer there. When I visited the site, there was a message that it had closed down 15 days earlier taking all my feed collections with it! I had spent quite a long time putting these together so this was obviously not the best news!! I have messaged them on Twitter but so far have heard nothing back.

One of the tools I talked about when at the workshop was a favourite I had picked up from Lenva called CircaVie from AOL. I received an email today from Mark Callagher who organised the workshop to say that there was a message on the site saying it is closing on the 15th January. I head there tonight and sure enough this is the case. There is a similar tool out there called ‘Our Story‘ which I hope I can use instead but I am starting to feel as if the ground is not that solid anymore beneath the web 2.0 movement.

Basically, a lot of these sites are starting to look rather less than stable – even with larger companies like AOL behind them. I wonder how many more will topple with the credit crisis in full swing. Or would these have pinged out of existence without the current financial climate. This is one of the definite drawbacks to using web 2.0 tools – you can’t be sure that they will still be running next month!

Just to top off all of this bad news, the announcement has been made that VoiceThread is no longer allowing multiple logins at the same time on the same account. Say goodbye to the ability to have kids logged into a single account using the sub identiies to switch to a different picture at the same time as other kids. Now you will need to have multiple accounts for them to log in with to have them working on a VoiceThread at the same time.

Hmmm….lucky that Christmas is coming up to cheer everyone up :-)   To make up for this bah humbug post I will do something extremely upbeat before Christmas (now I just have to figure out what!)

Do you know of any other online tools that are closing up shop? Do you think this is directly related to the financial crisis?

Flickr image by Gaetan Lee

9 responses so far