Losing posts

Several students have lost what they posted to the class wiki. Sometimes when in class with everyone on at the same time, it's just that their posting gets hidden in an earlier version because of the differences in opening the edit page and saving the edit page. When outside of class, it may be due to using a browser besides Internet Explorer or Mozilla. I'm not sure. Still this can be avoided if first one writes in MS Word, saving every few minutes; next emailing the finished product to oneself; and then copying and pasting into the wiki. Even if the "save" does not take effect, it's easy to copy from MS Word and re-paste in.

Categorizing search engines

Google is an excellent search engine that can focus on images, shopping, news, and so on. Some other search engines cluster the search results according to category, which cuts down the number of internet sites you need to look at. Some clustering search engines are iBoogie, KartOO, and Vivisimo. Out of these, KartOO is the most aesthetically fascinating.

Putting photos online with Flickr

Flickr is a software tool for putting your photos up on the Internet. For tips on how to use it, read Giles Turnbull's article at MacDevCenter.com.

Find free pictures online

Anne Davis (Edublog Insights) posted about Yotophoto, the first search engine for finding free photos and images on the Internet.

The Internet and persona

Although I've mentioned articles that talked about the downside of blogging with respect to academic search committees, Michael Bugeja in The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about how an Internet presence can aid one on the path to tenure and promotion:

"For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books and in promotion and tenure evaluations. It is commonplace for external reviewers to Google Web sites or troll databases before rendering their decisions on behalf of publishing houses and institutions.

Search committees also are using the Web to evaluate the writing or scholarship of job applicants before inviting them to on-campus interviews."

The disagreement between the articles is only an apparent one. Those against blogging were against blogging that presented a less-than-professional ethos, while the article in favor of an Internet presence recommended establishing a professional persona.

Appropriate ethos is determined by audience, of course. What's interesting is that the job applicants were unaware of what was an appropriate ethos, even though they had a Ph.D. in their discipline.

Question: If such unawareness of audience is present at that level, then what level of audience awareness should be teachers aim at for first-year composition?

Bookmarking software

There seems to be quite a bit of software available for tagging websites and images.

Furl stands for File URLs, and it's a web-based application for keeping track of interesting sites you've come across that you can access from any computer on the internet and also archive pages so you can read them later in your Furl account.

Mark Bernstein brought del.icio.us to my attention. It's a bookmarks manager and more. One neat application is the ability to paste snippets from another site onto yours. See the picture he does this with from the play "Amerika." Graham Stanley (via Will Richardson) has an entry on how to use del.icio.us with podcasts.

A manager for tagging just images is Wists.

Categories

Categories