This morning, we discovered how to open more than one wave in the dashboard.

To make this work, you first have to collapse all the waves you want to display at the same time.  Then you close the inbox, the navigation, and the contacts panels.  Once you have cleared the dashboard, restore the collapsed waves.  You should be able to view all of them at the same time.

Of course, after we did all this we got the error message:

Naturally, I don’t *really* think it was our fault!  But it was fun trying to see how many waves we could open at the same time!

The purpose is to take a web app and run it in its own window, stripped of all tool bars and assorted browser enhancement clutter.  Supposedly, you can enter different parameters and add them to the desktop, the task bar, and the quick launch bar.

I selected the stand-alone version and installed it.  Once you extract, you will need to send the shortcut to the desktop for convenience.  When you launch, you can put the URL of your choice into the dialog box and select an icon.  It said that the fav icon of the website would be automatically used, but it didn’t work for me.  I got a default globe instead.

Prism is meant to use with web applications.  One web application that I use quite a lot is Moodle!  So I decided to test it with Prism.  I launched the application, added our instance into the URL box, and saved.  Unfortunately, every time you run it, you get the scary box that says this publisher is unknown and you are running a security risk by proceeding.  But if you click run anyway, it will bring up your application.

Moodle looks like this in Prism.

All the toolbars are gone (which means, of course, that if you NEED a toolbar as a matter of course, you probably should not be using prism for that particular website.)  The application is running in a separate window (so if your browser crashes, this window should not be affected).  The prism Moodle is accessible from my tool tray or from a convenient icon on my desktop.  In all other respects, Moodle works just like it always has.  Any link that opens in a new window also opens in a new Prism window.

As I worked with it awhile, I noticed that I missed being able to search, open new tabs, copy and paste, and bookmark sites as I created resources to add to my course.  I could certainly do that, but it required me to switch back and forth between windows rather than tabs.  I remember how long it took me to get used to tabs!  This was like going backwards.

I did like the cleaner interface, however.  I had more screen space since there were no toolbars.  I thought that for making screen captures in Camtasia or Captivate, it would be nice to have the more streamlined interface.

If you have tried it out with other applications, let me know which ones and how you liked it!

Once of the first posts I read on this new tool was from Will Richardson, New Reading, New Writing.  (April, 2009) He wrote about Steven Johnson’s essay in the Wall Street Journal “How the E-Book Will Change the Way we Read and Write” (April 2009).  If you follow the link to the essay, and you are a member of Diigo, you will see a considerable amount of highlighting and commenting on different portions of the story.  Just as it was supposed to be!

Fast forward to today, some four months later.  I have been seeing more and more “public commenting” on major pages–facebook, news sites, now my iGoogle page.  These comments are, at least, an annoyance and, at most, spam.  So far as I can tell, you can’t turn off individual comments.  You can filter for private comments (hopefully the ones you left yourself!) or comments left by group members.  Evidently, the Diigo team is trying to deal with this onslaught.  I logged into my iGoogle account this afternoon and saw the following (see image here).

Comment spam is becoming a topic on the Diigo forums.  Diigo has published some guidelines on the issue of public vs. private annotations:

Private vs. Public

• Sticky notes are either PRIVATE (default), PUBLIC, or GROUP. Private sticky notes are viewable by the author and any forwarded recipients.
• Public sticky notes can be seen on the page by all Diigo members with the Diigo toolbar or Diigolet installed, and its viewing mode set to “All“.
• The highlights associated with public sticky notes also become PUBLIC, i.e., viewable to all Diigo members.
• Public highlights and sticky notes should be done with care. To minimize graffiti and spam, we have raised the bar for making public highlights and sticky notes:you need at least two friends in the Diigo community to do so.

There has been at least one blogger posting out of frustration (Krishnan Subraminian, July 2009).

Diigo has added a feature to hide annotations on individual URLs.  To solve my iGoogle page problem (I did not think it very likely that I was going to get any riveting content via stickynotes on this page!), I clicked on the Diigo options menu and proceeded to the “bookmark and highlight” tab.  Here, you have the option of creating your own blacklist with “hide public annotations on selected pages”.  I believe this will be an adequate fix for me.  I expect spammers are going to limit their attention to major first level pages.

I was very pleased to find such a wide array of citation generators available on-line.  Not all of these citation generators cover all styles or all types of content.  Some are more oriented toward younger students or internet based content rather than print materials.  These are the ones I looked at today:

• Bibme
• Citation Center
• Citation Wizard
• Citing Internet Resources (This one good for younger students)
• Easy Bib
• Good Citations
• Hedges Library Citation Generator
• KnightCite Citation Service
• NoodleTools:  NoodleBib Express (good for younger students)
• Son of Citation Machine (the first one I used, by David Warlick)
• Citation Builder

In April of this year (2009), the MLA released a new edition of their style manual.  Citation generators producing MLA style citations will be revising their services to accommodate.  You might note whether or not each generator is compatible with the 7th edition if MLA is a style you or your students use.

My on-line class is going to pair up and investigate each of these citation tools.  I have set up a shared google spreadsheet to enable my students to construct a comparison matrix.   Our first collaborative project!

If you know of any other citation tools, please add them to the comments below.   Thanks!

Mahara does allow for csv upload, so I struggled for a while getting my file in shape.  The required fields are:

username,password,email,firstname,lastname,studentid

First, I had to pull the rosters from our student management system.  The data was not in the correct format, so I worked on that in a spreadsheet for awhile!

Then I checked it in notepad, since I have seen numerous extra commas and spaces magically appear where I did not want them.  And there were MANY extra commas and spaces that had to be cleaned up.

Even though we use LDAP for authentication, a password is required for the csv file. From the mahara user guide:

Your password must be at least six characters long and contain at least one digit and two letters. Your password may not be the same as your username and is case sensitive.

Eventually, I wrestled the file into the correct format, and the import was successful.  Now I need to work on creating some sample views.

I think this blog post from SEO presents some good points both for and against using the tags.  The author (Joshua Odmark) sums up: “In conclusion, even though I think twitter hash tags are a dying art, they are not dead yet.”

I checked with some folks in my own twitterverse and they confirmed that they still use hashtags.

Which makes sense.  I think the real benefit to using hashtags is to cut down on noise.  In the examples given by my friend (course comm & sharing, seminar backchatter, and public workshop notes), the hashtag allows you to search on a pre-defined tag.  If you have a term that is rather unique (like “moodle”) then maybe you don’t need it.

We have the keynote with Martin Dougiamas tomorrow, first thing.  I expect him to talk about Moodle 2.0 and some idea about the future roadmap.

I had a great time listening to Patrick talk about theming moodle this morning.  Tomorrow I will attend Helen’s workshop on Moodle 2.0.  It will be nice to get a tour from an expert rather than trying to figure it out on my own!

I believe there are around 130 people attending, which is a slightly larger group than last year.

I found a lot of lapdesks at amazon, and an old review of lapdesks at cnet.

And then this comment caught my eye:”Don’t waste your money on this piece of future landfill material (aka “junk”). See $2 solution below”.

The writer suggests that a really good solution would be to use a plastic cutting board.  Good size, not slippery, plenty sturdy, and can take the heat.

I immediately jumped up and grabbed my black 12×18 cutting board out of the cabinet and set out to test the suggestion.  Results?  I like it very much.  Lovely size (just enough room on the side for the mouse).  Excellent surface–don’t need a mouse pad and the laptop does not slip.  You will need some kind of padding underneath, or it will hurt your knees.  Fortunately, I had made a quilted laptop bag (really, just a big envelope to stuff my tablet in since my rolling backpack is quite stingy with padding), so I put that underneath the cutting board and the result was quite comfortable.  Perhaps it would be nice to have a little “stop” at the front to keep pencils or pens from rolling off, but I would think you could add that with some hot glue.

So no more shopping for lap desks!  I think this solution will work just fine.

We installed the most excellent twitter tools plugin by Alex King.  This plugin integrates twitter with wordpress in a variety of ways.  First, you can set it up to make all your tweets into full posts.  If you don’t want to do that, you can set it up as a widget and the posts will appear in the sidebar.  You can also set it up to automatically or on demand (via checkbox) send out a tweet announcing any posts you publish.

Of course you don’t have to do any of those things; you could simply display the rss feed in the rss widget, but with the handy-dandy auto installer provided by wordpress (point to the zip file and press the button!), what is holding you back?

Here is what a WP blog would look like with both a widget and posts generated by this plugin.

We are still discussing the best way to incorporate the twitter feed into the site.  In this particular case, we may elect to allow the plugin to generate a post for each tweet.  This is a low volume twitter account and the announcement-like content is suitable for blog posts.

Twitter tools is a very flexible and useful addition to your wordpress instance.  The main thing I still wish for is that there was some sort of separation between posts to make them more readable.  Either a line or perhaps alternating/tiger-stripe backgrounds for each post.

Now, we need a badge!

Tweleted is an interesting tool with both a “good” and “evil” face (try switching them with the link at the top, but I think you get the same results either way).  According to the author, “Deleting a message from Twitter itself doesn’t delete it from other sites, including search.twitter.com.” AND the messages in twitter search hang around for at least a month (see Search API limit).

I verified this on my own account.  I was experimenting with SMS tweeting, and twitter went down for maintenance.  The tweets were eventually posted, but in the wrong order.  So I deleted all of them.  But they are still showing up on tweleted!  According to twitter, a user can request that a status be manually deleted from the stream.  According to handsmobile, one of the comments in this post, the deleting was not happening very quickly.  I did check that username on tweleted as I write this, and posts prior to early May are not reported.  Either they were deleted, or perhaps they have passed the expiry point!

As a (sometimes careless) user, I think that deleted tweets should be deleted in the stream AND on twitter search at the same time.  After all, it is pretty easy (especially when texting on a cell phone with no keyboard, virtual or otherwise) to made a mistake with a direct message, enter an incorrect URL, or otherwise send a tweet that would better be retracted.  But even if twitter DID remove the tweets more quickly, there are hundreds of third-party apps and clients that maintain their own caches.

So there you go.  If you are going to be visible on the public stream, then you must also accept that (along with so many other things!) your dialogue is and will remain public.  That trashcan doesn’t really mean much!