Until recently, I did not know of a good free image editing tool that I could have my students use. Composer helps them create great webpages, and make links galore, but they had terrible trouble with images - they need to crop, they need to resize, and they don’t want to pay $50 for Adobe Photoshop Elements (that’s the price in our bookstore). For a while I tried having people use the wonderful GIMP for Windows - which I think is a great tool, but it is just not user friendly enough for the novice.
But just recently I became a convert to IRFANView. What a great piece of software!!!
IRFANView is free for personal use at home, free for educational users, and for non-profit humanitarian work. Three cheers to Irfan Skiljan in Austria (via Bosnia) for this great product! Apparently at least a dozen women have written to him wanting him to father their children, all because of this piece of software - ha! I wonder what Darwin would say about such natural selection in the digital age. (Although he does not seem to have taken them up on their offers…) Continue reading ‘IRFANView: Great Free Software For Image Editing’
Archive for May, 2003
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XPLANA CW Demonstration Course: Technology for Martians
Technology for Martians. Technology for Martians. Technology for Martians is a story-driven training framework for teaching the basics about the technology used buy teachers and students. It is based on the encounters of Bob, a radio talk-show host in Jupiter, U.S.A., and Zotz, an adolescent martian who has come to Earth to give Bob a hand. Thrown into the mix are Bob’s long-suffering attorney/wife Darlin’ and their spoiled dog Roger. In order to augment the narrative play of the course, Technology for Martians features the actual Radio Web site for Bob’s show, his personal blog, and Zotz’ personal blog. There is also a daily comic strip, Cosmic Radio, that pushes the narrative sequence. Continue reading ‘XPLANA CW Demonstration Course — Technology for Martians’
John Romero, one of the fathers of the PC classic game “Doom,” appeared at E3 this week to promote Nokia’s upcoming N-Gage device. “We really believe the game industry’s future growth is in mobile gaming,” Romero said. He would have been even more correct if he had taken out the words “the game industry’s” to give his statement more sweeping and global vision. Continue reading ‘Mobile Gaming Will Change the Way We Teach’
There is currently a huge gap between the emerging technologies and standards on which digital archives are being built, and the resources that most faculty members have at their disposal. I’m not sure how we can close that gap, but there is a probably a lot we can do to narrow it! The other day, I showed an example of a static website, published with bare-bones software and web-hosting - which is pretty much what most faculty members have access to. What I’d like to talk about for the next couple of days are the free tools that faculty members, and students too, can use in developing online content. The perception - rightly or wrongly - is that the Internet is free. So it makes sense that we should try to find some free tools for people to use in developing the content that they are going to giving away for free over the web.
So, you want to make webpages for free? Or - just as important - you want to help your students make webpages for free? There are two options: blogging, and creating static webpages that can be published on a web account provided by your school. For static webpages, I think that Mozilla’s Composer - also available as part of the Netscape Communicator package - is an absolutely great option! I first learned how to publish webpages using Composer and have shown literally hundreds of people how to make use of this delightful tool. And it’s gotten better and better in its most recent iterations. For those of you who have not looked at Composer since the iterations in Netscape 4 - you will be favorably impressed. But if you still attached to the old Netcape 4 version of Composer, you can install Mozilla, run the “Classic Theme” and you will see the new version of Composer with many nifty features… looking just like your old Netscape 4. Continue reading ‘Composer, A Great Free Tool for Web Publishing’
There are many proponents of distance learning but the multitude of benefits raises both enthusiasm and fear. Many ask, is it possible to get the same, or even better quality of education by replacing the traditional classroom experience? Do we have to simulate it, pattern it along the same lines, or change it altogether? These important questions are subjects of further investigation, experimentation, data compilation and serious thinking. These are topics and issues I will come back to at a later time. However, when it comes to any question dealing with technology we can detect a vague global anxiety; does technology have a dehumanizing effect? Should we curb our enthusiasm and resist change? Continue reading ‘MYTH OF SISYPHUS — Does Technology Make Us Less Human?’
Great timing - since Susan published an article today on the BIT-GUT strategy for coordinating 
the publication of online materials across distributed sites, I’d like to chime in with some questions that individual teachers can ask themselves about the content that they are developing: how do you know when your webpages are worth it? I just spent the past couple of days working on Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books - and it was an excellent chance to work with existing web materials, transforming them into something even more useful. The key is incremental change: every time we publish something on the web we need to be taking the information that exists, and then extending and consolidating and improving its usefulness, both for ourselves and for others. Even without any special web programming skills, teachers can create extremely valuable online content.
Continue reading ‘Worthy Webpages: My Weekend With The Fairy Books of Andrew Lang’
Conceptually, it’s simple. Further, everybody likes it. It’s the idea of making information available through a digital library so that remote locations can share information.The first steps are usually not too difficult. A website can be made for each entity. Weblogs can be set up. The toe has entered the water. The tentative first step has been made. This is all very good.
However, without good project management and a great deal of coordination, this first outing in the cool web-waters can become a grisly shark-fest. To avoid a complete disaster, the following Business Information & Training Guidelines for Unified Tasks (BIT-GUT) should be followed: Continue reading ‘INTO UTOPIA: Learning and Technology Outside the U.S. — Azerbaijan: Part 4′
One of the biggest obstacles facing online content and product providers is the issue of online payment. In a recent collaborative survey from Javelin Strategy & Research, eContent Magazine and PaymentOne, 61 percent of the participants said they would be more likely to make online content purchases if there were an easy and secure alternative to the credit card.
Of the more that 10,000 people contacted for the survey, 59 percent had purchased Internet services or online content at least once. When consumers who have not made online purchases were asked what would persuade them to buy online content, 53 percent cited more secure payment options. Payment security was chosen over price or product-related responses by more than a 2-1 margin. Continue reading ‘Secure Transactions Online — The Key to Making Money on Content’
The New York Times ran an article this past week that discussed the changing times for computer majors. The boom of the 90’s ended in a bust, and further layoffs and dim forecasts by the technology industry have caused many students to reconsider the profitability of a degree in computer science.
At Carnegie Mellon University, applications to the School of Computer Science for next fall are down 36 percent from their peak in 2001; applications to Virginia Tech’s computer science department have declined 40 percent since 2001. At M.I.T., renowned for its computer science curriculum, 20 percent fewer freshmen declared electrical engineering and computer science as their central focus this spring than did in 2001 or 2002. Continue reading ‘Gaming as a Solution for Computer Science Woes’
Yesterday I talked about the need to get people involved in proofreading work that is published on the Internet, using user feedback to compensate for the downside of quick-and-dirty publishing. The Attenza Knowledge Base that we use where I work has a great feature that lets users quickly post corrections to articles - it’s not a comment, it’s not a discussion board, it’s just a way to let the owners of the content know that there is some kind of error that needs to be fixed. We all know that not everybody has time to join in an online discussion, and some people are just not inclined to discuss - but getting them to help correct errors is surely a good thing. Continue reading ‘Radio Paradise and What Feedback Is All About’
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