All posts by James Clay

stuff

Asus Eee PC arrives

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I have been wondering how good the Asus Eee PC is. The small linux UMPC is certainly creating waves in the tech world as well as the MoLeNET community.

Asus Eee PC arrives

Lilian (one of the MoLeNET mentors) demonstrated one at the MoLeNET Online Conference last Friday and I was quite intrigued.

So you can imagine my surprise when the one I had ordered arrived today.

It was interesting to see how this small UMPC was going to work out.

It booted up fine and after a minimal setup process was ready to work. Already loaded with internet, office, media and other applications it is ready to go.

I tried a few things such as running a PowerPoint presentation and playing a video file.

It handled the few things I tried with ease.

I still need to try the internet applications, so it will be interesting to see how the Eee PC can be used to access our college VLE and other online services.

web 2.0

What is Web 2.0?

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Today I got asked, what is Web 2.0, well there are various definitions available on the web.

From Wikipedia

In studying and/or promoting web-technology, the phrase Web 2.0 can refer to a trend in web design and development — a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.

From O’Reilly

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

and

If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0.

It can even be a picture.

What is Web 2.0?

However I think this video really sums it up.

psp

PSP Featureless

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Have been installing and trying out some new features for the PSP. The new 3.90 firmware includes support for Skype, which installs and works, but I have no audio input, so no phone calls for me.

PSP Featureless

Also installed the internet radio, but can’t seem to pick any up, back to the normal radio then.

Finally there is a new service called GoMessenger, however though 3.90 supports it, the software isn’t available for download yet, should allow for instant messaging when it is available.

Overall a bit of a disappointment really.

stuff

New Mobile Browser

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There’s a new browser for mobile devices providing a desktop experience on your windows mobile smartphone or PDA. Symbian and other platform editions are on their way.New Mobile Browser

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mWUoxiLZFc

The makers claim that it is the first mobile browser fully compatible with technologies such as asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), Java, and embedded Flash.

Currently it’s a free download for US users only. Update now active in the UK too.

More info at:
http://www.skyfire.com/

From Handheld Learning

jisc

Go to the naughty step…

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Let me ask the question, who is to blame?Go to the naughty step

The JISC statement says:

Eduserv had asked JISC for a non-negotiable price for the provision of the Gateway Services significantly above what the JISC Board believed could be justified as a balanced or fair expenditure within the JISC services budget and as a value for money option for the education community as a whole.

The Eduserv statement says:

The non-negotiable offer we received from the JISC did not approach the projected full economic cost of the service in 2008/2009 or provide a sustainable basis for the future.

So who is to blame?

Who was not willing to negotiate?

Both these statements relate to the provision of a gateway to allow access to Athens resources from an institution that uses Federated Access Management.

On the JISC-Shibboleth mailing list there has been a fair bit of discussion about this and from my perspective the problem is as follows.

Basically it looks like if you use Athens only authenticated resources then you will need (as an institution) subscribe to OpenAthens.

If you are subscribing to OpenAthens then you will be able to access Federated Access resources through the OpenAthens Gateway.

If you use Federated Access Management then you can access Federated Access resources.

However there is no Gateway for Federated Access Management users to access Athens resources, so you will need to also have OpenAthens as well.

If as an institution you have not moved along the Federated Access Management route, the question has to be asked should you bother?

If you don’t bother then should publishers bother moving along the Federated Access Management route if institutions need to have OpenAthens alongside Federated Access Management.

A Roberts on the list says

Am I the only one that feels like they are witnessing a school playground argument?

No you’re not the only one.

At the end of the day, it is the learner who will suffer from this argument, not really anyone else, it’s learners who will suffer.

There are two organisations which need to be on the naughty step and think things over.

jisc, keynote, presentation, youtube

Sharing my presentation

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Today I have been at a JISC workshop on repurposing resources at which I gave a ten minute presentation on the institutional perspective on repurposing resources.Sharing my presentation

This gave me an opportunity to share my presentation with others.

Now I know I could just upload my PowerPoint presentation, but that means people need to download and open it. Problems arise as I used Apple’s Keynote presentation software and not everyone has that. Yes I can export to PowerPoint, but that is not always perfect, more so if you use some of the more advanced features of Keynote.

So I decided to use a feature of Keynote which is to send to Youtube.

This works quite well, though some institutions ban YouTube so less useful there then.

I also used Slideshare and uploaded my presentation there as well, though I had to export as PowerPoint first.

On both presentations there is (virtually) no audio, which to be honest the presentation does need. I think I prefer the YouTube version as it captures the transitions from Keynote which Slideshare doesn’t.

Another option would be to use Google’s Presentation.