e-wot?

More from TED.

I was fortunate to see Graham Higgins give an inspiring presentation at KM Singapore earlier this month. He showed clips of two TED presentations. They were fantastic. So I’m showing them both here. Get a cup of your favourite beverage, sit back and be amazed. Jill Bolte-Taylor on her brain - stunning, inspiring, amazing. Sir Ken Robinson on creativity in education - funny, wicked, inspirational. (if you get prompted to choose a player (7 or 8), choose either one. Both worked equally well for me.

Jill Bolte-Taylor.

Sir Ken Robinson.

YMMV but Delicious wins, Foxmarks comes second, Ma.gnolia third and Google bookmarks gets lapped several times before retiring from the race. Foxmarks? Not in the title above, I know, and it’s not an online bookmarking tool like the others, I know that too. But it’s good and worth a mention.

Why do I rate Google bookmarks so low? Well simply because Google released Chrome without support for Google Bookmarks. This is bad because in my view Chrome handles bookmarks appallingly, and given Chrome’s online app focus, a strong Google Bookmarks would have fixed Chrome’s shortcomings. Bad timing I reckon. Ivan’s blog also makes the point that Google has so many apps in development that their online bookmarks offer is bound to get neglected (compared with Delicious). Everything Google has is ‘Beta’, even Gmail. Yeah, right.

Ma.gnolia is the new kid on the block. Very pretty interface. Does pretty much what Delicious does, but I agree with these guys and PARAgiraffe for the moment.

Foxmarks now. This has got very good since they introduced favicon support. It was good before, but I reckon it’s got much better with favicon sync. Before Foxmarks I used Torisugari’s Bookmarks synchronizer, back in the day. But I switched to Foxmarks when Torisugari slowed down on updates. I rely on favicons in my bookmarks toolbar to find my most used links. I can click and go. Here’s a screenshot which I hope will show you what I mean:

Delicious wins for me mainly because it’s simple and effective. Also as Ivan’s blog mentions, it has a healthy business focus: it’s the only thing they do, so they’re committed. Another point in favour of Delicious is that our partners in local schools here in Singapore are using it. There’s also an excellent Delicious Firefox addon. The only gripe I have about this addon is that it takes up quite a lot of space on my NT profile at work - I had to delete this addon since Firefox 3 came out because I couldn’t log out: my profile was too big.

I’ve started a revolutionary move away from IE6 towards using Firefox at our school, but if our IT infrastructure won’t handle the Delicious Firefox addon we might have to do without it. I reckon we’ll manage ok. Here’s what ours looks like so far:

Apart from showing our teachers how great Firefox is, I’m also going to have to persuade them to start using Delicious in their teaching practice. I’m not sure these people know how to make the most of their bookmarks anyway, but that’s another story.

Innova Junior College seem to have the right idea though:

On the subject of how bad Internet Explorer 6 is… check out IE Death March just for fun.

Here’s a nifty little tool: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com

What does it do? Well, if you hit a site that’s doesn’t appear to be working, type the URI into this thing and you can find out if it’s just you.

I just tried it when I couldn’t get into Wikipedia. Here’s what it said:

So it’s not just me! Well now, that’s a relief (I think).

Chrome works well on an IWB. The small UI means that you get more web content on the whiteboard. Good use of whiteboard screen real estate. The tabs work nicely too, as you’ll see from this short video I made.

Oh, and I was using Portable Google Chrome running off my thumb drive. Get it from Caschy’s blog here

I was listening to Buzz Out Loud this morning (ep. 801)and it appears that Chrome is faster than other browsers. And much faster than IE7. Here’s a link to some graphs.

I’ve tried it out on an interactive whiteboard in a classroom. I like the way it looks, but I think that the tabs in the title bar might be a bit of a stretch to reach for the vertically challenged teacher or student. Oh well.

The title bar/tab thing does look rather good tho. Here’s a screenie comparison, first there’s Chrome:

Then there’s Firefox (I’ve got lots of tabs open, I know):

First the pros.

Wow, it’s fast! Damn fast. Faster than any other browser I’ve used. Woo!

I love the fact that they’ve put the tabs in the title bar. Title bars are a waste of screen real estate, I reckon. Good move Google!

Simple UI.

Installation was a speedy breeze on my home PC. Really fast and all my Firefox bookmarks and search engines were imported really quickly. Did I say how quick this was? I did? Well I’ll say it again. It was a very quick installation.

Drag a tab and create a new window. Add more tabs to that window. Wow! Very cool.

Now the cons

I can’t easily swap/select different search engines. I’m addicted to this function in Firefox. Can’t live without it in fact. In Firefox I can search one query across 10 search engines in under 5 seconds (I timed myself). Chrome won’t let me do this. Sad, but it won’t. Here’s a post explaining more. 

I cannot search my bookmarks. Crap. I’m so used to this in Firefox that it’s another thing I can’t live without. Seriously a pity.  One day, when I only use Delicious (or some other online bookmarking service), this might be ok. Until then, it’s not.

Sadly both of those cons are app killers for me. In every other way, it’s a nice piece of work. Can’t wait for it to come out of beta. Hopefully then they’ll have fixed it for me. =)

This video is from the Google Chromium site. Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome.

Here’s a post on what’s happening with Google Chrome for MacOSX

Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

• authors create and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
• learners find and explore content

Well, that’s what the blurb says on their site. The material in their database appears to be mostly tertiary level.

[edit - Cheryl Lemke mentioned this in her keynote at ICTLT]

Seesmic is like instant messaging with video. Or twitter with video. Basically, you have asynchronous conversations with other people by leaving your video postings on the Seesmic site. It’s a form of micro-blogging.

I reckon this could be quite fun to use with students.