RETOOLING THE CLASSROOM: NEW APPROACHES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Bridging the Gap Connecting education with how young people use digital technology in their personal lives
Posted by Sachin Agarwal to The Official Posterous Posterous
The Posterous API is a direct replacement for the TwitPic API used in desktop twitter clients and iPhone applications. It lets you upload photos to your Posterous site using just Twitter credentials.
Except it's better. We allow you to upload multiple photos and you get an image gallery. We offer the full size download of the image, or a zip file of multiple images. It posts to *your* Posterous site, which may have a custom domain and Google Analytics. And we autopost not just to Twitter, but also Facebook, Flickr, and many blogs. Oh, and TwitPic is down all the time. That's no fun.
Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, and Rainn Wilson all use Posterous in place of Twitpic. They email photos to Posterous, and we update their Twitter and Facebook accounts. We're extending this to the desktop and iPhone apps with this API.
Coming soon: support for audio, video, and other files. We can handle it all.
If you use a Twitter client that has TwitPic support, email them and let them know they can add Posterous support today! We use all the same methods, responses and errors, so integration should be a breeze.
It says a lot for the continuing battering ram that is Google that Microsoft, who based their fortune and world domination on operating systems and applications for the desktop, have announced their move into the cloud with Microsoft Azure.
With the promise of being able to write and host applications on Microsoft's servers rather than their own, Microsoft hope to take a slice of the emerging market for web based applications that include the basic Google Docs as well as more ambitious CRM and invoicing applications.
The only question is: is Microsoft too late?
This is worth keeping an eye on. With the right sort of lobbying Microsoft may be persuaded to include a set of educational tools and hosting for educators along with the promised web versions of its Office products. Here's hoping...
The tales of colleges being unable to implement any good practice involving IT (as defined by, amongst others, our HMIe overlords friends) are legion. Most of it is related to the baffling willingness of educators to allow support staff to dictate how we should teach.
While I can see the reasons for blocking certain sites containing, for example, porn, and the rules for access to JANET are clear, the stories of colleges blocking perfectly usable sites are mounting and becoming more ridiculous by the day.
Why, in the name of all that's Web 2.0, does a college of my acquaintance block Google Mail? Or Google Docs come to that? Descriptors abound requiring students to access newsgroups. Only problem is many colleges block NNTP traffic. Why? Even worse why, when asked to unblock this traffic, do system administrators refuse on spurious "security" reasons? And why do we let them! The same applies to e-mail or chats.
If any administrator can come up with a sensible reason for this, and that excludes any explanation that includes the phrase "in case", then I'd love to hear it.
It's the 21st century. I spend half my time listening to tales of there not being enough IT equipment and the other half hearing that students are unable to bring their own laptops into colleges. Is there a relationship here?
The bottom line is this. Support services are there to support and if education is being compromised then we have to address this; and sooner rather than later.
I bow to no-one in my admiration of Richard Stallman. Anyone who can found the Free Software Foundation as well as creating GNU (as in GNU-Linux, the bit that does most of the work) is well worth listening to. So when he talks about cloud computing being potentially dangerous it is as well to stop and listen.
Although hearing anyone use a phrase like "worse than stupidity" gives pause for thought. And not in a good way.
The gist of the argument is that computing in the cloud, whether mail via GMail or documents stored on Zoho, are a trap. In the same way that traditional software applications forced you into using their software (I'm looking at you WordPerfect), cloud computing may trap your data.
And that's true; as far as it goes. However this is not a criticism of cloud computing. It's a criticism of anyone who doesn't properly back up their data. That's a problem whether you use Notepad and save your data on a floppy disk or photos stored on Flickr.
As it happens I'm a big fan of cloud computing. As almost every computer I have has a net connection it saves messing about with floppies, pen drives or external hard disks. I'm not stupid enough, however, to trust that my data will always be there. Even Amazon, who have a history of reliable web services, had a glitch that knocked out their S3 data storage service for a working day.
If I turn up to give a presentation I have e-mailed myself a copy, saved it on Mozy, have a copy on various on-line services and kept a copy on a pen drive attached to my key-ring. In other words I don't make it out the door and into my car if I don't have my data.
It's frustrating that this far into the history of computing people are still writing "Back up your data or you'll be sorry" articles. Even more frustrating when the person saying it has written the back up software themselves.
EDIT: Richard Stallman must have the computing gods working for him. Just as I tried to post this my net connection went down. I'm sorry Richard. Please don't hurt me again.
I read blogs using a feedreader. (Bloglines is still my preference despite Google Reader continually attempting to woo me over.) For many people, though, feeds, RSS and Atom are dark arts best left to geeks and techno-freaks.
That's a shame as there's lots of good information out there (step forward Bobby Elliot's SQA Computing blog) and if you don't subscribe to it you may miss out.
FeedMyInbox.com addresses this problem by taking RSS feeds and converting them to e-mail so that even the techno-luddites can receive automatic updates.
Can I suggest you try it using, for example, this blog?
We've all done it. Been 90% through a project only to find that we're stuck. The libraries don't work like they should or some dependency problem rears its ugly head. You ask friends, look up programming books and, of course, ask Google. Nothing works.
A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
And something in Japanese.
Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (from excellent blog Coding Horror) have tackled this problem with StackOverflow.com, a programming site with questions and, more importantly, answers. As the answers are voted on by the members you get much better replies than with traditional searches.
StackOverflow has just come out of beta and looks like it's going to be great. Give it a go.
There are times when you might want to let students on your VLE have a glimpse into recommended books. This is where the Google Book Search APIs come into use.
Simply put the APIs allow you to embed Google Book Search into web pages, either as a button or, as previewed here, as a complete book viewer on your web page.
Even better there are many public domain books that can be shown in their entirety. Bet you wish you were reading one of them instead of this right now...
Google live on the Internet and so it makes sense that they would want to influence the nuts and bolts of web browsing. To that end they have introduced their own browser, Chrome.
Some of the choices made in creating the browser such as multiple processes, secrecy mode and a brand new Java interpreter are interesting to say the least and are well explained in the accompanying comic. (It's Google, of course it's a comic!)
You can download the browser here (Windows only at the moment, Mac and Linux to follow). It's certainly worth a look and, as the code has been open-sourced, it's only a matter of time until at least some of the ideas appear elsewhere.
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