Stuff about using computers to help people teach and learn better.

Hi, I'm a Mac, but I won't play Apple's Videos

Posted Wed, 2006-06-07 16:03 by pfaffman

So you know those cute Mac ads? With the cool mac guy and the silly, stupid, stuffy Windows person (it's really about what OS the PC is running, not the hardware). Yeah, well, I'd heard about them, but I don't watch much TV these days, so I hadn't seen them all and they do seem cute. No problem. I have a Powerbook laptop. So I go to the Apple site, find the videos. I can hear them but not see them. Best I can tell, my OS 10.2.something--I don't know what stupid feline it's named after--doesn't seem to be able to get whatever this week's codecs are to actually play the darn videos.

I'm a Mac. I'm two years old. If you want to watch videos about how cool I am, you'll first have to fork over money for an OS upgrade.

Webliographer Has Arrived

Posted Fri, 2006-06-02 16:42 by pfaffman
Webliographer is, to the best of my knowledge, the first web-based application for managing and sharing bookmarks. The first usable version was in use in October of 1998. It replaced my home page, which consisted primarily as a set of categorized links. I was especially proud of the fact that it tracked the use of URLs, so when you clicked on a link a counter was updated in the database and links that got more hits were promoted to the front page of Webliographer's display. Though I used, and still use, Webliographer primarily for my own purposes an individual, my target audience for Webliographer was primarily teachers who wanted kids to use the web in their classrooms.

More Google Goodness

Posted Thu, 2006-05-18 15:00 by pfaffman
OK, so I'm starting to gush about Google. I have long known not to be a crazy zealot about Linux, in spite of how good I think it is and how I think it may be easier to run one Windows machine than one Linux box but that it's much easier to run 10 Linux boxes than 10 Windows boxes. (And you can replace "Windows" with Mac OS X in the previous sentence.) But Google keeps doing stuff that is incredibly useful. At some point I'll be worried about them having everyone's data, but I I choose not to worry about that right now.

No More HTML Training!

Posted Thu, 2006-05-04 10:34 by pfaffman
Synopsis: A student took two sets of classes to learn to create web pages. The results were, uh, disappointing. The same student used Tripod and GooglePages to create web pages. The results were rather impressive. Let's stop mistreating teachers by suggesting that they should know anything about web design.

How the Tech Guys Blew It

Posted Fri, 2006-04-28 02:59 by pfaffman

A continual question that we who think that computers can and will make a big difference---and improvement---in how people teach and learn in schools have to consider is why have we not seen these big gains? As Cuban and others point out, we have networked virtually every classroom in the country and have more computers what do we have to show for it? Where's the revolution? This piece proposes several answers to that question and some ways to jump-start the revolution.

Stone Aged Computing

Posted Sat, 2006-04-15 10:50 by pfaffman

In some talk somewhere I heard John Bransford use a "stone age" metaphor in some talk. I can't quite remember the context, but the idea (that I remember) was that it's often helpful to come up with the simplest possible way to do something. Here I argue that what we need are not more sophisticated computers and applications, but more ubiquitous access to computers and applications.

Transana: Qualitative Analysis software for audio and video

Posted Tue, 2006-03-28 12:31 by pfaffman

Transana is an Open Source package to facilitate analyzing audio and video data. Here's what they say about it:

Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.

I haven't used it. The favored platform is Windows. It could be worth a look, though. Thanks to Charlie Gee for pointing this out.

My Favorite Firefox extensions

Posted Mon, 2006-03-13 12:41 by pfaffman
My favorite Firefox extensions, in no particular order.
Flashblock
I love this. All those annoying Flash movies (most of which are ads) are replaced by a button that you have to click to make them play.
adblock
Removes ads from pages that you tell it to.
filterset updater
Let's someone else tell adblock what to block so that you don't have to. Once or twice it's blocked things in a confusing way.
web developer
If you do anything with web development ever, you should check this out.
viewSourcewith
Let's me edit textarea's with my favorite editor.
linkification
Makes things that should be clickable, clickable.
fasterfox
This seems cool. If nothing else, it tells you how long it takes each page to load.
customize google
I think this is good. I'm not quite sure what it does anymore. I think it's what lets Google searches guess what it is you want to search for. That's cool.
reveal
Not so sure about this one. It will let you, for instance, enlarge part of a page. Probably not a must-have
firefox showcase
This is sorta cool. It's sorta like that Mac OS X thing that shows you a thumbnail of each window. This shows you a thumbnail of each tab you have open.
Google Notebook
I'm still not entirely sure about whether I'm going to like this, but it looks pretty cool.

Google Page Creator

Posted Mon, 2006-02-27 15:05 by pfaffman

Connie Campbell sent this to the Tennessee Trainers email list. Check out Google Page Creator. (See my stunning example.) This is more fodder for my argument that normal people won't need HTML by 2010.