My study bar.  Lawrence told me about this.  Tools (all free or open source) to support learning.

MyStudyBar is a tool which helps overcome problems that students commonly experience with studying, reading and writing. The tool consists of a set of portable open source and freeware applications, assembled into one convenient package. Easy to install, simple to use, handy and effective, MyStudyBar provides comprehensive learning support at the desktop, where it is needed. And if this is not already attractive enough, a further eye-catching feature of MyStudyBar is that it is completely FREE to download and free to use.

From http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php

Why is this good? It’s the high aim: “Together, these have been designed to support the complete study cycle from research, planning and structuring to getting across a written or spoken message.”  Oh that more High Schools supported these goals.

We believe that visualizations gain power when multiple people use them to communicate, and that communication gains power when multiple people can visualize and explore information together. We want to democratize visualization, enabling anyone on the internet to publish powerful interactive visualizations and start their own data conversations. Many Eyes is designed to bring that power to you.

This is from the guys who brought us Wordle.  I didn’t know about all this other functionality.

http://umwblogs.org/

“No parameters, just engage honestly with what you are doing, thinking about” – Jim Groom, in his OpenEd session.

2900 users in 2300 blogs.  People given their own spaces.  Jim’s Blog.

Case study: “I want my students to build a literary journal”  http://literaryjournals.umwblogs.org/ They did it.

Random links: Flickr blog shots | The Blog story |

1.3 million and counting

The only browser still to have things I am jealous of is Safari.

1. Picasa now runs on Linux.  One step closer to a M$ free machine.

2. Control-Shift Y in Picasa gives you teddies.

For the whole story, go here.  And yes, you should be using Picasa with a few of it’s new features, like backup, and piles of photos – I nearly could do away with Photoshop – if it could add text to images, I think I could.

PS.  Apologies to my two readers.  My blog went west on Bluehost again, I have no  idea why.

1. Provide a structure for your story, scenes, chapters, numbering etc etc.
2. Then write.
3. Then, when you need to: see things in overview, detail, structural, character, scenes etc.
4. Repeat 2 and 3.
5. When you have finished, export it to your DTP program.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796&package_id=53473

Quite a nice little programme: automatically installed as a print driver in Word.  Have created several PDF’s and they all seem very fine.

Evernote

This is like a personal receptacle for all your thoughts and ideas with a flexible tagging classification system.  Quite remarkable.

From the PR: “EverNote is an ambitious attempt to categorize the uncategorizable. The good news is that with a few exceptions, it actually works. EverNote makes it easy to quickly store and later access typed and handwritten memos, website excerpts, e-mails, phone messages, addresses, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, documents, and much more.”

There are a few people talking about it:

Slacker Manager | Lifehacker | theOfficeWeblog

It’s Windows only (sorry).  There is a new version that will run from a flash drive ($19.95US) It could be what I need to manage the many fragments of work and thinking I generate.  Much better than a folder of files.  It’s OK finding things – search is great, but to flip from item to item quickly is still not seamless.

I tried a plug-in I had not seen before. Delicious Bookmarks.

This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by replacing the default bookmarking functionality in Firefox with a new experience that offers the following advantages:

- Search and browse your bookmarks
- Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
- Keep your bookmarks organized with tags
- Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
- Import your existing Firefox bookmarks

Installing did not go smoothly – twice. Firstly it hung somehow, so I followed the instructions (“Uninstal and it will restore your bookmarks”) and uninstalled it, to find it synced with my profile bookmarks (ie the desktop Firefox) and I lost the 512 sites I keep current. No matter, imported from backup. (Whew . . )
Reinstall plugin, does all the right things this time, takes a few minutes to synchonize, but: I loose al the folders, all bookmarks except 17 of them, a seemingly random group. And I have a gazillion tags in a sidebar. Nice. But I decided having done this, this is NOT what I want. For me bookmarks and tags are different.

—————————————

I use my bookmarks for several different purposes. eg

• CORE – daily visited sites, the first six open each morning – (course sites I teach into, current projects etc)
• REFERENCE – frequently visited sites (our homepage, newspaper, TV, whitepages)
• MORE REFERENCE – specific parts of sites (our staff phone list for instance)
• PROJECTS – what I’m working on . . . (eg a writing project on educational design)
• REFERENCE – links to specific pages: classified in folders. (over 450)

—————————————

I now realise these are different animals: CORE and REFERENCE are genuine bookmarks to sites – the others are better in delicious, pages tagged with multiple tags.
I don’t want my CORE sites in delicious. In fact, when I travel I use Netvibes for my home page, listing the sites I inhabit. All the rest is basically Google or delicious.

I need bookmarks for my basic core sites. And delicious/tagging for pages – maybe several pages in a site, and certainly several tags for the average page.

Not sure whether a combination of delicious tagged pages and bookmarks where bookmarks should be will work for me. I’ve looked at every bookmarks and delicious plug in at the Mozilla site tonight. None of them do it exactly right, or else they are buggy. I think it’s Opera functionality I need.

Powered by Qumana

Alex’s comment:

It’s true, I admit it, I put a google ad on my frontpage. But it’s supposed to be just the one wee small text-ad, it shouldn’t take up much space…
I can’t see it myself, either Google or my work proxy is blocking it..
Please let me know if this is not the case and you are getting something humongous, that’s not what I want…

Alex, since you cannot see it, here is what it looks like:

I presume this is what you want.  It is small and discrete . . .  and obviously the Google algorithm to detect words on the page is working.  I looked at the page a few times, and found there can be sometimes 2 ads, sometimes one. Hey – it’s not too bad.
Anaconda.  By the way, I read Alex’s comments on the Anaconda theme. (Which is the theme I use as well) “Also, it bothers me that they want to make some money out of it, when their theme seems to be assembled from other, freely available themes that are GPL…” and “The forum was is full of spam”.  Yes.  I noticed this (and yes, they have fixed the spam problem).  I was less worried about this than the fact that there were lots of OLD questions on the forum unanswered. Things have improved a lot now, but the replies are usually by guests rather than the guys from home base . .  which is OK again. They have Google adverts to, but scattered inside their posts as well, and not just one or two but lots . . .   I hope they do OK.

Book reading plugin.  One of the strengths of WordPress it the plugins.  Alex uses Now Reading from Roblog.  (and this blog has Google ads across the top even more prominently placed).  From Alex’s blog . . .
\

This is quite cool.  Links to Amazon, and has some quite complex incarnations like this blog: http://darkfaerytale.com/library.   Kind of like your own personal Shelfari on the edge of your blog.  Mark Bernstein’s was the first blog I saw featuring current reading, and I’ve often meant to do something about this.  Do I want another plugin to maintain when I have other things I have yet to do?

Alex, your blog is OK, the ads are discrete as you want.  (How can you survive not being able to see your blog??)  Have a Nice day.

http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=index

I’d wondered why I had not come across it.  OS X port in 2005, Windows Port in 2006, originally Linux – that’s probably why.  Looks good with just a short tinker, has understood the paradigm of DTP (which is NOT word processing), has a good community, frequent updates and good documentation.