Ed's Tech Tips

 

The MHC Education Summit wiki web site is an interactive web site for the Mount Holyoke College Summit on Education for faculty, alumnae and students. Hopefully the site will be the vehicle for starting and continuing conversations about education before, during and after the Summit. So often, a conference generates a lot of excitement and enthusiasm that unfortunately fades shortly after the event ends. The wiki can function as a collaborative conduit for sustaining a dialog between alumnae who are educators, college faculty, and students who are aspiring to be teachers. Teaching methods, projects and internships may evolve from the summit and be shared via the wiki. Additionally, this wiki offers examples of various open source or free web 2.0 technologies that teachers may find useful in their classrooms.

The summit wiki is  built with the open source community edition of Mindtouch Deki. It is a powerful wiki platform that allows for integration or mash-ups of other web services, such as, Google maps, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, Flickr videos, embedded PDF's and much more. At the same time, the wiki is very easy to use with true WYSIWYG editing, extensive search capabilities, revision tracking, page printing, built-in scripting, page level security settings, file attachments and easy to following menu navigation. Mindtouch Deki significantly lowers the barrier of entry for sharing and collaborating on content on a web site.The school district of Dearborn, Michigan (which is very aggressive in their use of web technology) is seriously considering switching to it to allow all schools to have their own wiki web sites thus allowing all teachers, students and parents the ability to contribute to the web sites, instead of the current 1-3 persons per school that update their respective web sites via Adobe Contribute.

In addition, the wiki will allow alumnae that could not attend in person to particpate remotely in online discussions. The keynote presentation and panel discussions are going to be web cast live via video streams using Stickam that will be embedded into the wiki. The  Stickam web casts also feature live text chat sessions. The live video feeds will be recorded and embedded into the wiki to allow for viewing after the event.

I recently turned 42 and decided that I need to get more serious about reducing my gut that has slowly grown over the past 15 years. I decided that I should take up running again. I ran cross country in high school and for fun afterwards competing in various 5k and 10k road races. I stopped because it became boring in flat hot Florida where I used to live. I had also started bicycling which is more enjoyable, however, it requires more time and a bicycle which I do not always have with me, plus my 15 year old hybrid bike is not what it used to be.

I now live in New England which has much more interesting terrain, plus there are devices that make running more interesting, such as, the Nike Plus iPod Sports Kit. It consist of a sensor that fits inside the left shoe of selected Nike+ running models (I have the Air Pegasus +25) and a small receiver that plugs into the bottom of a Nano iPod you carry or wear on your arm. It tracks accurately my progress (speed and distance, calories not so much) and provides vocal feedback (mid points, last 5 minutes, etc.) while playing my favorite upbeat tunes which consist mostly of classic rock selections (from the Beatles to U2).

When I am done with my run I can upload my results to the beautiful Nike Plus web site via iTunes which is the other half of the Nike+ Sports Kit. On the web site I can track my progress, set goals, challenge others, ask questions in the forum, find widgets for my desktop or Facebook profile and much more. I've added a widget to the sidebar on this blog.

I want to be able to run 5k and 10k races again and eventually work my way to half and full marathon distances. I've bicycled 100 miles before and my training rides were up to 60-80 miles a ride, so I think if I pace myself and establish my goals I will be able to achieve that distance and maybe further (ultra marathons maybe?). The Nike Plus web site will be a big help and bring some of the fun back into running.

 

 

 

Big Buck Bunny is a very well done short animation video created completely with the open source 3D design and rendering program called Blender. The Blender Foundation, the non-profit organization created to support the software, helped to produce the movie short with a professional production company as an effort to improve the software by pushing it beyond what the hobbyist community could do. In the end they created a great promotion for the software as well as helped to spur various improvements in it's development including the rendering of fur and grass. The video is free to download, but you can also purchase it on DVD or Blue-ray disk. In addition, because it is open source and released under the Creative Commons license, all of the models and music created for the animation are also freely available to developers and designers who would like to experiment with them or use them in their own projects. The next project that the Foundation is working on is a 3D game based on the characters in the movie called Apricot.

Open source projects like these are a real boon to budding digital artists or students since the tools and the materials or content are available for free. Well, almost free. You'll need the high speed bandwidth to download over 7 GB of data file. The finished movie is much smaller depending on what size you download. Plus, you'll need a computer capable of running the 3D software, which by the way, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms.

Here is demo video of the game:

 

 

I'm writing this blog post from within the new Flock 2 Beta web browser. I've written about before, because it included some cool features especially options pertaining to social networking. At the time I did not adopt it, because I was not that much into the social networking scene. However, I'm starting to use Facebook, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter more often via different applications or extensions with Firefox.

Flock has recently released the beta of version 2 of their social networking browser which is built on top of Firefox 3 and takes advantages of many benefits and improvements of Firefox while further integrating the applications I am finding myself using more and more.

The RSS reader is pretty nice and has links to blog, bookmark, email or Digg an article. From within Flock I can easily upload photos to Flickr, as well as follow Twitter in the sidebar, post an article to my blog or keep tabs on updates in Facebook without having to be on my Facebook page. Flock seamlessly brings all of these different services and much more within easy reach.

Read more at: Flock 2's Beta Edition: Good, And Only Getting Better - Open Source Blog - InformationWeek

Tags: web2.0, browser, flock, social networking

 

Wu-Tang Clan's RZA has partnered up with ChessPark.com to create WuChess.com, a different kind of chess site. From their About page:

Designed for chess enthusiasts addicted to hip-hop music, WuChess.com is the place where your favorite music, movies and celebs will be all while you get your game on. WuChess members will get exclusive offers such as MP3s you can't get anywhere else, playing a surprise celebrity guest, access to one of a kind video clips and many more surprises. This is hardcore chess with half the stuffiness.

WuChess understands that it is important that today's youth develop life strategy skills, so to help their efforts a portion of WuChess revenue will be donated to the Hip Hop Chess Federation's scholarship fund.

Unfortunately, the site is not free. It costs $48 a year, but given that chess unfortunately does not attract a large numbers of fans it is to be expected. However, it looks like an interesting community. I wish it was around when I started a chess club at my daughters' high school. You can read more about the site and RZA in a recent New York Times article. 

It has been said that "information is power" and now sites like OpenCongress are utilizing Web 2.0 Internet technologies to shift power to the masses and bring about a revolution in participatory politics by making it very easy to learn and follow what is happening in the halls of Congress. That may sound like a lot of hyperbole, but I do not think it is. The Internet is changing our democracy and hopefully for the better.

I've written about Barack Obama's web site and how effectively it has been used to create an online community that has motivated him to not accept public financing for his presidential campaign, because he has been able to reach out to millions of small donors via the Web.

From the OpenCongress About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.

Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

There is even a Facebook Application to help you track bills through the House and Senate.

 

 

 

Last week I received a new device, the AMOD AGL3080, that I think will really enhance our travel photo galleries. It is a GPS Photo Tracker that assist you with geotagging your pictures so that you can show exactly "where" you took a picture by recording the GPS coordinates or longitude and latitude of the location of where the picture was taken.

The device is relatively inexpensive considering what it does. It costs about $70 from Amazon. Not only is it one of the cheapest trackers, it is one of the few that is Mac compatible. It is the size of mobile pager, if you remember what those are. It takes three AAA batteries, has three LED lights on it and two buttons, a power button and a flag button.

To use it, you simply power it on, wait for the satellite icon to blink, clip it to your belt and then start taking pictures. Make sure that the clock on your camera is set correctly. You then come back to your computer and download your photos. In addition to iPhoto I like to use a free photo management application called JetPhoto. I use JetPhoto for all of the Alumnae Association photo galleries and use it to upload pictures to Fickr as well. There are versions of JetPhoto for Windows and Macs and it supports geotagging manually or with a device such as the AMOD AGL3080. After your pictures are imported into JetPhoto, you then connect the AMOD to your USB port and import the GPS file, which is a text file that contains line after line of time stamps and coordinates. No drivers are required and if you are using JetPhoto, you do not need to install any additional software.

JetPhoto synchronizes the location data with the time stamps on the pictures. You can view the photos on a map and easily tweak the locations which are for the most part accurate within a few feet or yards. You can press the flag button to flag a location where you shot a picture, but you do not have to and just let the software match the photos with the locations.

Jetphoto can export your geotagged photos to a Google map photo gallery or to KMZ or KML files which can then be imported into Google Earth. I took a walk around campus on Thursday and shot photos of various dorms, academic buildings and some buildings just off campus in South Hadley. Within minutes I had the images in a Google map photo gallery. The satellite photos are out of date. Since the images were taken, the new dorm has been constructed, the soccer fields and track have been rebuilt and the tennis courts by the lower pond no longer exist.

The purpose of buying the device is to use it during some of the Alumnae Association travel programs. In the past I have tried to get staff to manually map where photos were taken, but they could usually only generalize where they had been, whereas the AMOD will be able to pinpoint thier location down to the street corner they were standing on. By being able to map the photos, it will make them more interesting. I would anticipate that once camera manufacturers reach the practical limit of th enumber of megapixels they can squeeze into a photo sensor, they will start including GPS into their cameras, along with WiFi and Bluetooth. There are a couple examples, one from Ricoh and another from Navman, which is a combination GPS navigator and camera.

 

Let me be up front, I am a Democrat and Obama supporter, as well as being a techno geek nerd. So, naturally I take notice of how my political party and candidates are making use of technology and the World Wide Web.

The Democrats are taking full advantage of the web. They have recently launched McCainpedia, a Wikipedia like site that details his political positions of the Republican candidate from a Democratic perspective. They are using Mediawiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.

The Democratic National Convention has an attractive web site built with an open source content management system called SilverStripe from New Zealand which I think might be a very promising CMS for the Alumnae Association web site. SilverStripe has a tightly integrated administrative back-end and a ton of built-in features, such as, a built-in image editor, support for development and production versions, a forms builder, web traffic reporting, searching, blogging, commenting, widgets, membership management, work-flow control, menu editor, shopping car, image gallery and much more. The drawbacks of the software are that it is relatively young and does not yet have the add-ons or community that Drupal, Joomla or Plone has, but they are off to a running start and are showing great potential.

It's great to see the Democratic party utilize open source software and when the Dems win back the White Office and additional seats in Congress, maybe the open source movement will be further championed in the federal government. One can dream, right?

I also reviewed the web sites of Obama, Clinton and McCain. I think Obama has an excellent site and is taking full advantage of what the web has to offer, more so than his opponents. He is on every major social network (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter) and then some that I was not aware of, such as Eons, BlackPlanet, Glee, MyBatanga, AsianAve,  and FaithBase which target certain social demographic or ethnic groups. I am not going to link to all of them. You can go to he Obama web site and scroll down to the lower right hand corner for the links.

There is even a my.barackobama.com social network component within the web site  where you can post your own blog, join groups, look up local events and find friends. You can even subscribe to notifications on your cell phone, as well as, download wallpapers and ring-tones.

Why do I share this with you? I think we can draw some inspiration from Obama's web site, not just politically, but technically for the Alumnae Association web site. I think they do a lot of things right which relate to the type of things we would like to do on our web site. The company behind the Obama web site is Blue State Digital. They use ExpressionEngine which is not open source, but is available in free and paid versions ($99.95 and up). 

 

 

 

I just discovered the Jing Project this past week. It is a project of TechSmith, the developers of the popular Camtasia Studio and SnagIt screen capture programs for Windows. The Jing Project is for both Windows and Macs. It allows for screen captures and screencasting videos. The cool thing about Jing is how easy it makes it to share the videos you create. It is a simple process of capturing the screen, uploading the video and sending the link. The video above does a great job of describing the project which is currently free and I hope it remains so. I do not need to create screen captures that often, but when I do I appreciate something that is easy to use and share, such as Jing.

Last month (I cannot believe how quickly the past month has gone by) the Alumnae Association hosted  an Alumnae Summit which was a gathering of the alumnae volunteers that sit on various boards and committees of the Association. One of the items I developed for the  club committees was a Google map that identified the locations of all of the domestic and international clubs. There is a sidebar that list the clubs in alphabetical order. Click a club name and the location marker is highlighted and a pop-up balloon list the contact person and a club web site link if applicable. 

One of the coolest things about the map is what you do not see. The data for the map is listed in a Google spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet is updated, so is the map. Also, the spreadsheet can be updated via a form that can be delivered via email or embedded on a web page.  Check it out on the clubs overview page. It looks best in Firefox, OK in Internet Explorer, but does not work correctly with Safari.

This is another cool tech tip sent in from M. J. (who by the way, also works at Mount Holyoke College). Zemanta is a brand new application that acts as a research assistant for bloggers. Unfortunately, it does not work with LifeType (yet), but it does work with WordPress, Blogger and Tyepad. What it does is suggest related photos, articles, links and tags (keywords) based on what you are writing in your blog. Plus, inserting items is easier than copying and pasting, just click to select an item from the list and Zemanta inserts it into your blog. This is pretty clever and helpful. It will make blogging more fun when additional information comes to me, much like when my readers send me ideas for articles. 

Zemanta indexes around 300 top media sources and numerous blogs of our users. Therefore the more people that use the more resources it will have to pull from and a real benefit is that  links to recent blog posts frequently result in return traffic.  

 

In some previous posts I was critical about Twitter and I'll admit I should not have been so without actually trying it out for myself. I had thought I would not have had control over the messages that stream in, but I do. I can select who I follow and block those that I do not want following me. Also, individuals are not the only ones Twittering. You can subscribe or follow the likes of CNN, Google News, NPR and MacWorld.

What's Twitter you might ask? "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" Quick messages are short messages of 140 characteristics or less.

I do not need to access Twitter with my web browser. There are numerous Twitter clients that push or display messages on your computer desktop. At first I was turned off of the popular Twitterific, because it cost $14.95. I checked some of the free clients for the Mac, such as Twitterpod and a Dashboard widget called Twitterlex. They worked, but lacked some features, such as, an easy way to reply to messages, so I took a look at Twitterrific and determined that it is the better Twiiter client. The interface is really slick and you can use it for free if you do not mind the occasional ad displayed in the Twitter feed. 

You can view the tweets of those I follow in the sidebar. If you use Twitter, I invite you to follow me. 

Check out more Twitter related applications at the Twitter Fan Wiki. 

The latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version is almost ready for prime time. It is now in Beta 4 and there are some marked improvements:

One of the most notable improvements is performance and memory usage. Since version 2 of Firefox, after a while it would become non-responsive and I would have to force-quit or terminate the browser. I use Firefox on a Mac, but I heard the same complaints from Windows users. There were memory leaks in Firefox that were so bad it would eventually consume up 1.5 GB of real memory on my system and slow everything else to a crawl until I killed and restarted it. Grant it I am a heavy browser user. I always have multiple tabs open and a lot of extensions installed. I use my browser to access and edit wiki's, blogs, email, Flickr and Google Docs. The browser is the one application I start and end my day with and use all of the time. I started using Safari for sites that I did not need Firefox's javascript compatibility or extensions for, but it is cumbersome to be switching back and forth between browsers. Firefox 3 appears to be handling memory usage much better, as well as, just rendering web pages faster.

The new full page zoom is a great accessibility feature. From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the entire layout, including text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site. Previously, you could increase text size, but if the layout was not fluid, it could get distorted. 

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Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone/iTouch last week. It is a pretty much a complete package. It is based on Xcode the same development tools used for Mac OS X. It gives you access to all of the hardware of the iPhone including the camera and accelerometer - the device in the phone that responds to tilting the phone. There is even a iPhone simulator so that you can test your apps on a virtual iPhone which allows you to develop for it without having to own one. It even allows you to simulate the pinching touch feature. This opens the device to some cool gaming possibilities.I won't go into detail because other sites have done that, as well as, Apple's own pages dedicated to the SDK. I'll just relate some issues from my personal experience.

First, why is this cool or important. Well, initially it appeared that Apple was not going to open the platform for outside developers, but now it has and it opens the door to thousands of applications. If you have used a Palm you know that there are many possibilities for small applications on a portable device and even more so on the iPhone because of it is screen resolution, multimedia playback capabilities, touch interface and connectivity to the Internet. Applications will range from currency converters to pharmacological encyclopedias and beyond. ReadWriteWeb offers some more sophisicated possibilties.

Also, the cost of entry is fairly low. The SDK is free. It is a 2 GB download that expands to take up 5 GB of space. It is not compatible with PowerPC processors, which I'm a little miffed about. It  only works on Macs with Intel processors. Like other features in Leopard, the PowerPC processor is not fully supported, but that was inevitable with the move to Intel's dual core technology. The G5 and lessor PowerPc chips just cannot keep up with the demands of the newer software. But, I'm on a tangent...

While the cost of the software is $0, the developer program cost $99 and $299 for proprietary, in-house developers. Applications can only be made available through Apple's App store which will be available on the iPhone and iTunes.  The developer sets the selling price. Apple takes it cut of 30%, but handles all related costs of distributing the application, including credit card processing and bandwidth.If you are giving away your application there is no cost beyond the developer fee. I think it sounds like a pretty good deal, especially for small developers to get their products in front of thousands of potential customers.   (More)

How many times have you taken a photo that is over or under exposed? Either the highlights are blown out and it is too bright or there are too many shadows and the image ends up too dark. This especially happens with sunrises and sunsets or when taking photos indoors during daylight near a window or open doorway. You usually cannot capture the details in the shadows and the highlights at the same time or at least not in the same shot. This is where those exposure and bracket settings on you digital camera come in handy.

Most digital cameras have a often overlooked bracket feature which when set, will allow you to take three or more quick successive shots when you press the shutter key where one image will be underexposed (dark), another will be moderately exposed and the last will be overexposed or too bright. You will want a steady hand or a tripod when using this feature. This can be a useful option to use when you are not sure how the camera will interpret a scene or when you want to insure every bit of detail is captured at a variety of exposures to be combined together later in a single tone-mapped image that is a combination of the original three photos.

Do a search for "tone mapping"  on Flickr for a variety of images which are either hyper-realistic or on the other extreme dreamlike or surreal. This photo of sunflowers almost looks like a painting to me:

Here is a example of an interior of a church. With tone-mapping, the detail of the wood work and the stained glass is captured in a single image that originally started out as six seprate images:

A digital camera can only capture a limited range of lights and darks from the full spectrum that we can perceive. Even the monitor that is displaying the words you are now reading can only display a limited range. No matter how many mega-pixels your camera has or how fine your camera lenses are, your camera is no match to your eyeballs.

You could compensate for the limited dynamic range by using extra lights and reflectors to reduce the shadows, but it is not always practical or feasible. Fortunately, through some software trickery or complex algorithms, there are programs (some free or not too expensive) that can combine your multiple images of various exposures into a single image. You can do this to a certain extent with Photoshop by combining or blending the multiple exposures in multiple layers. See this technique explained at Luminous Landscapes and Eric Krause's web site. Now there are free or inexpensive software applications that you can use for this specific purpose without needing to purchase and learn PhotoShop:

• Bracketeer: A Mac OS X only application that cost $19.95. Just drag and drop your images into the program and let it do it's magic. This application is actually a graphical front-end for thefree free command line utility called Enfuse. Bracketeer always outputs a loss-less TIFF file. Bracketeer is for Mac OS X 10.4 or later. It is a Universal Binary application, so it runs native on either a PowerPC or Intel based Mac. You an almost instant preview of the image before it is rendered.
• Xfuse: This is another Mac OS X only graphical front-end for Enfuse. It is not as polished as Bracketeer, but it is free and offers some more control over the process. You can save in JPEG format and import more than 6 images, the limit of Bracketeer. Like Bracketeer, there is no auto-alignment so you do need to use a tripod to shoot your images. Even with the SteadyShot feature on my Sony DSC-H1, the final output by hand was blurry.
• Hugin: This free open source tool is primarily a panorama photo stitcher, but does integrate Enfuse as well which is appropriate when you think about trying to capture a panoramic scene and balance the exposure of the image. It has options to help align your images if they were shot by hand instead of using a tripod. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing there was not a stable version of 0.7.0 for Mac OS X. 
• Qtpfsgui: This is an older multi-platform (Mac, Windows and Linux) free open source program designed for processing and developing HDR (high dynamic range) images. It supports more image formats and offers even more control over the process, however, it is  about 5x slower than Enfuse and the results may not be as desireable without some considerable tweaking. See the article on Linux.com for details. You also need QT4 installed which makes installation more of a hassle.

If you have some money burning a hole in your pocket there are some commercial applications that are specifically geared toward tone-mapped and HDR images and are more complete packages than the above applications. Although these cost upwards to $99, they are still less than PhotoShop or a set of lights and tripods and may offer more support and hand holding than the open source applications. 

• EasyHDR: This is a Windows only application available for 30 euros. They sponsor a EasyHDR Flickr group where you can see numerous HDR images created with EasyHDR.
• Photomatix Pro: This $99 program appears to be the higher end HDR utility which is available for both Mac and Windows. The site features numerous examples, FAQ and links to resources. The same company offers a PhotoShop plug-in. There is a free trail version to check out if you want.
• Hydra: Briefly mentioned in the April 2008 issue of MacWorld, this is probably the most elegant HDR program I have seen with a slick interface that integrates well with Apple's iLife suite. Like PhotoMatix and EasyHDR, this prgram also attempts to line up images that may not perfectly match up if the camera was not on a tripod.  The cost is $59.95 and it requires Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5. You can download and test drive the program for free which is what I did. The alignment feature worked very well. You get an instant preview of the HDR image. It saves in JPEG and TIFF. However, I thought the output of Xfuse was better as far as contrast and color, but the image was not as sharp. I'm looking forward to a stable version of Hugin to how well the alignment feature works. 

Here is a video posted on YouTube that provides a succinct explanation of HDR with some examples that were processed with Photomatix:

Hopefully, this inspires you make a little extra effort to take better photos and make your family think that you took a photography class.