Kudlian Soft - Podcaster

More podcasting software from a British company. This one is free and geared toward education.

via Educational Weblogs

FileMaker 8

FileMaker announced version 8 today. Can't say I feel too excited about this after just going through the FileMaker 7 upgrade... which we just worked on over the summer.

JotSpot Live

Jotspot is a great wiki-hosting service that I think I have mentioned here in the past. Now there's JotSpot Live, which takes advantage of AJAX to allow you to see edits live. Free accounts are available.

"Live, group note-taking. Five people in a meeting? Take one set of notes instead of five."

Personal images in ARTstor

ARTstor announced this morning to Primary, User Support, and Technical Contacts from subscribing institutions that it is making Personal Collection Tools available.

"These Personal Collection Tools have been developed to allow individual end-users to add their own images into the online ARTstor environment. Each user will have his or her own private Personal Collection section of online ARTstor. Once a user uploads images to this part of the site, he or she will be able to add those images to public or private image groups and make use of them like any other image in ARTstor."

Pretty exciting stuff! Thank you, ARTstor!

Blogs we read

After doing some work on a class blog, I decided I needed to spruce up our site a bit. So, I just added a blogroll in the right hand column of this site that is generated from my Bloglines account.

These are the blogs that I read most frequently. If anyone would like to add (or subtract!) from this list, let me know. It should reflect our group's preferences.

Google Planimeter

More fun with Google Map Hacks...

According to the Google Planimeter, Wheaton College is "30.06 hectares / 0.3006 km² / 3.236e+6 ft² / 74.28 acres ". I got these measurements by going to the site and placing points on a Google Map around Wheaton.

(Relatively) New Vocabulary: Web 2.0

And the term of the day (month? year?) is... Web 2.0

A post on Kairosnews points to some good articles about new directions in Internet technology:

"If you haven't heard of it, you will: Web 2.0. It's exploding into conversations online at the moment. Is it a useful way of describing the way that the web is turning to a distributed environment where users push/pull/share content in communicative acts rather than just visiting static virtual spaces? Or is it just business hype?"

Zip Codes on Google Maps

Alan Levine points to another interesting application of Google Maps on CogDogBlog. On this site, find an outline of any zip code on a map.

Cast Easy

Here's another application for podcasting that I came across.

Podcast Maker

If we ever get into podcasting, this might be something worth looking at.

Raw Sugar and Social Bookmarking

The start of school frenzy has put me a bit behind in my blog reading and writing. So, here's a link to a post by Bryan Alexander from earlier this month on the MANE IT Network Blog about Raw Sugar. Raw Sugar is another social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us with some added features that definitely makes it more appealing. (You can even import your del.icio.us bookmarks into it.)

If you haven't tried, social bookmarking, you should. At first, I didn't get what the big deal was... on the surface it doesn't sound all that exciting. But once I got started, I began to see the appeal of being able to access and update my bookmarks quickly and easily from anywhere, while also collaboratively combing the net for resources with others.

I wonder a bit about whether social bookmarking has any pedagogical potential. It seems like it should be a nice quick and easy way for students to share resources on a topic -- especially for group projects. But now that we are using RefWorks (which can be used to serve a similar function for all kinds of sources, not just web sites) would there ever be a need for a social bookmarking tool?

Google Blog Search

Chrissa just pointed out to me that Google now has a Blog Search. Wheaton's Latest and Greatest Blog (i.e. the one you are reading now) comes up fourth when you do a search for it. When I narcissistically search for myself, all of my posts on this site come up immediately. Nice.

Post for Religion 204

Hello World. I am teaching a blogging class right now.

ARTstor OIV 2.0

ArtStor has just announced that the Offline Image Viewer 2.0 is now available for Mac users (2.0 for Windows was released several weeks ago). This new version is significantly different than the previous version -- the main difference being that users can now construct PowerPointesque presentations if they want to.

Here's some text from the ArtStor announcement:

"The latest release of the ARTstor Offline Image Viewer (version 2.0) contains additional features and enhanced functionality that were not available in previous versions of the software. Many of the new features are a direct result of user feedback and recommendations.

In addition to all of the functionality of previous versions, the new release of the Offline Image Viewer will include the following new features:

• Blank "slides" can now be created for each screen of a presentation;
  ARTstor images and local images can be pasted into the slides;


• Customized text can now be included along with images when presenting;


• Multiple images and text fields can be accommodated on a single slide;


• Zoomed-in portions of an image can be saved for display on a slide;


• The background color behind the images and text, as well as the entire slide, can be customized;


• A smaller, presentation-only file can be exported without requiring the full-size image files;


• Presentations can be exported in a format compatible with the previous version of the Offline Image Viewer;


• Connections to ARTstor for authentication and for downloading Image Groups can be accommodated through certain proxy servers;


• Users can choose where the image file cache will reside on their machine;


• Users can choose the maximum amount of memory the application will be permitted to use on their computer.

"