Google has been quite patchy these past few days. Even my wife’s been complaining. So it must be bad. Cos she just uses Google Search.
Well, I’ve just spent three hours trying to sort out a Google Sites account for a community of practice that I’m in using Google Sites, and it’s been really painful. Server error is the message I get. I’d prefer a nicely crafted Google message. Oh well.
Ewan McIntosh nails it when he writes about Ken Robinson’s new book The Element. It’s a great blog post. Ewan reminds us
It’s not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher’s life easier) or even assessment. This is something I’ve been reporting back from research for two years (and which I’ve been blown out on more times than I can count). It’s not about letting students lead the way with technology and “show us teachers” how it’s done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.
No, it’s how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.
Great stuff. One of those blog posts that really hits the spot.
A great article from Maish Nichani. Click for How to design good educational apps for the iPhone
To sum up:
Good educational apps have the following qualities:
I’m in love. I <3 Delicious. mmm.
It’s been three days, and I’m already settling down into a very sweet relationship with Delicious. I’m slow, I know Delicious has been around a while. And I know I’m not the first… But it took me a long time to get away from the traditional idea of keeping all my bookmarks saved on my computer – computers (plural) that is. That’s me, a traditional guy (with too many collections of bookmarks on too many computers).
But I’ve been around a bit, experimenting with other ways to sync my bookmarks. I tried syncing my bookmarks with Bookmarks Synchroniser (predictably, I guess), but that went all crazy and I finally had to end it. Foxmarks was fun for a while but didn’t quite have what I was looking for. I even tried Furl (blush). All along I knew about Delicious, but somehow we didn’t ‘click’. Maybe the timing wasn’t right, our stars weren’t aligned (or something).
And then one day I was playing with Google Chrome and getting annoyed at how I couldn’t search my bookmarks as I was used to doing in Firefox. Then it dawned on me that Google didn’t want Chrome to be like Firefox, they wanted us to use the ‘cloud’ and online apps an’ stuff. They probably want us to use Google Bookmarks, pfff. Well, I took a look at Google Bookmarks and compared them with Delicious and then it clicked. Oooh, Delicious. You so fine.
And the finest thing about Delicious for me? The Delicious addon for Firefox and IE7. It’s awesome.
So now I’ve combined my home, work and other saved bookmarks into one, and they’re all on Delicious , and all in all my sidebars, on all my computers, all the time. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.
When I ‘Ctrl D’ to save a bookmark, up pops the Delicious prompt suggesting tags to categorise the link. Easy peasy.
It’s too good to be true. I’m waiting for the honeymoon period to wear off. But until it does, I’ll shout it from the rooftops. I <3 Delicious .
My Firefox was behaving badly. The pages were not loading properly. So I bit the bullet and tried to solve the problem. The solution turned out to be my Firefox profile. I guess it had become corrupted. Anyway, I fixed it. If you also have this problem, then here’s the solution on Windows XP. It’ll take an hour at least. Take a deep breath.
Well, that was long. But that’s what I did to fix the problems I was having with Firefox. What a relief.
I tried other approaches, but this was the solution that worked for me. I hope you have equal success.
No posts from me in a while. I’ve been busy, what with Xmas and everything.
I’ve been struggling with a web developer who’s missed a big deadline. It’s been emotional.
On the lighter side of busy, I’ve also leveled my Death Knight (in World of Warcraft) to 80 and I’ve been playing GTA4 on my PC… both have taken up much of my holiday spare time.
I’m sorting out some Google stuff to post, some tips for handling web developers (lol), and my take on GTA4.
I’ll brb
Meanwhile, check out the BBC’s In Our Time podcast about Darwin. It’s great.
And if you haven’t tried Google Chrome, you should. It’s faster than Firefox (which now feels painfully slow by comparison). I’m almost converted, but not quite.
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).
Twitter: Markhamster
