Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

And here are the pictures from our New Media & Web 2.0 seminar that we organised in Ghent in July 2011:

Below you can find the memolane for our New Media & Web 2.0 seminar which we organised in Ghent in July 2011:

Memolane is an web application that turns all of your tweets, facebook posts, picasa pictures, youtube videos etc. into a timeline that you can easily search. Alongside the currently supported services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Foursquare, Instagram, Tripit, YouTube, myspace, vimeo and wordpress, you can also add RSS-feeds.

What is Memolane?

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Here we go folks! With day 1 of the Moodle course behind us, we’re gearing up for some serious work with the database functionality.

Expect more news soon! And if you really can’t wait, why don’t you follow us in Facebook or Twitter…;-)

Randall Munroe (of xkcd.com fame) has blessed us with a new map of Online Communities. Yes, new, because he already did a first one in 2007. Interesting to see how the situation has evolved (e.g. Facebook vs. Myspace, and who would have thought that Farmville alone is bigger than Youtube?). Since the new map is based on the rate of activity in the various sites and communities, it gives you a pretty good idea of where things are happening at the moment. A word of warning, though:

Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).

Are you one of those people who really love Skype, because it lets you…

1. talk with people from all over the world for free;
2. chat through a simple interface, without all the unnecessary bells and whistles that many other messengers feature;
3. have video conversations?

Then we have good (and possibly some bad) news for you. Let’s start with the good news: a new beta version has been released. Skype for Windows 5.0 build 123 beta is available for download, and here’s what new in it:

• 10-way group video calling
• Skype Home experience
• Offline instant messaging
• New contact search and add experience
• Enhanced call experience under problematic conditions
• Post call experience
• General User Interface refresh

If you wonder what “Post call experience” is all about – don’t worry, we don’t have a clue either. We do like the 10-way group video calling feature, though (in a previous version this was limited to 5 only), and the offline instant messaging. Since my conditions for calling are indeed problematic (not everybody’s got access to the same amount of bandwidth, folks!) I’ll be interested in giving this one a go.

The possibly bad news is that I’ve read that this might be a free trial – what that means for the future of Skype I don’t really know, but I do hope they’ll keep the model as it is.

In his blog post Social media and trying to drink from a firehose Jason Renshaw comes up with a few interesting observations -seasoned Twitter & facebook users will undoubtedly recognize that sometimes it really can get too much, and that you can indeed spend hours trying to keep up with things. Luckily enough, there are also a couple of applications that allow users to keep all their social accounts manageable. Read the rest of this entry »

Fastcompany has an interesting read about the impact of smartphones and handheld computers on the way we teach (or should teach).

When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: “They loved to push the buttons and see it light up.” The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g.

10 years ago, when I was giving Comenius / Grundtvig trainings and tried to persuade that very “soon everybody would have a digital photo camera”, many of the course participants scoffed at me. By now it’s hard to find a phone without a digital camera, and many of them have built-in functionality to send the videos that have been recorded straight to YouTube!

Tactile technology is making it easier for kids to learn how to use advanced technology, and is going to empower them in a way difficult to imagine for the current generation of teachers. Now does that sound like an interesting challenge to you, or what?