A Good List of Open-Source Software

If you are at all curious in using open source software for personal computing, these two sites that I ran across this morning seem like great places to start:

Open Source Windows - Free, Open-Source software for Windows

Open Source Mac - Free, Open-Source software for Mac OS X

Open Source Mac/Open Source Windows is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X/Windows. We aren't trying to be a comprehensive listing of every open-source mac/windows app, instead we want to showcase the best, most important, and easiest to use. This page should be a handy reference and a useful tool for getting more people to start using free and open-source software.

I'm not sure who maintains these sites, but they seem to be right on target in their recommendations. And they are not biased toward Mac or Windows! They just need a list for Linux too.

Online Productivity Software

We may indeed be moving away from running desktop applications and toward using web applications in the future. There seem to be a lot of software developers out there banking on that idea anyway. Just a few examples: With Writely you can do all of your word processing online. Jotspot Tracker allows you to create spreadsheets online. Thumbstacks gives you PowerPoint-like presentations. And Gliffy lets you create diagrams and flowcharts.

Today I ran across this one: Pixoh: Edit pictures online. I tried it out on one of their test images. For really basic image editing it seems to work well.

Women DO play online games afterall...

I am often told in conversations about online gaming by the skeptics that one of the real problems with it is that the whole activity is really male dominated. Well, maybe not... According to this post on jill/txt, entitled the myth that women don’t play games:

Apparently 24-35 year olds are the heaviest gamers. According to a recent survey, 65% of women in this age bracket play games. Only 35% of men in the age bracket do. The survey found that women play “slightly less” console games than men and that many more women play casual games, like flash games in web browsers, solitaire or online Scrabble. They didn’t think to ask the women why they liked casual games, but assume that it’s because they’re non-violent and non-cometitive (they can’t have played many games at games.com). Great. Let’s just assume gender stereotypes instead of asking.

Interestingly, Nick Yee’s statistics from MMOGs show the same trend: while boys are clearly dominant among teenaged players, women players outnumber men for players above 23 years of age

(via Liberal Education Today)

Google Trends

Google Trends was launched yesterday:

With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

Here's my comparison of myspace (in blue) and blog (in orange):

Art history with Flickr

Bryan Alexander posted last week about an art history professor's use of Flickr for one of her classes. In this example, students comment below and within the picture itself! Pretty slick.

Seven Things about Podcasting

Seven Things You Should Know about Podcasting: part of Educause's brochure series that I just happened across. Maybe we could use it as a handout at the upcoming faculty workshops?

NITLE's Online Publication about Visual Resources in Liberal Education

At the beginning of last month NITLE published (on their website) an article about Visual Resources by Roger C. Schonfeld. Something worth a look as we continue to think about Digital Asset Management at Wheaton:

The Visual Resources Environment at Liberal Arts Colleges

Here's a little piece from the introduction:

The findings are based on visits to seven liberal arts colleges in late 2004 and early 2005, which were designed to examine the role images play in teaching and learning. Although a number of campuses had developed viable strategies for the provision of digital images and the organizational plan and campus culture to support those strategies, several of the institutions we visited suffered from an organizational structure or campus culture that was ill-suited to take the strategic choices needed to encourage a transition to digital images. As the section on Campus Roles and Responsibilities explains at greater length, we saw two fundamentally different organizational models for the information services units that support image provision, one of which was much more successful than the other. [1] The role of the slide library or visual resources collection was the ultimate variable, and those campuses on which the slide library takes a campus-wide perspective (rather than serving the art history department alone) seem to see much easier and more successful transitions to digital images.