Education Technologies

Collaboration with Skype and Mikogo

Image via WikipediaI’m indebted to Andrew from the Mikogo team for letting me know that they have come up with a great tutorial for their web conferencing add-on to Skype, Mikogo.What is Mikogo?Developed as a free tool with the private user in min…

Image via Wikipedia

I’m indebted to Andrew from the Mikogo team for letting me know that they have come up with a great tutorial for their web conferencing add-on to Skype, Mikogo.

What is Mikogo?

Developed as a free tool with the private user in mind, Mikogo provides an easy-to-use online meeting tool, equipped with valuable features to ensure the perfect desktop sharing experience. During a meeting, users are able to:

1. Share each others’ screens.
2. Switch presenter – let a meeting participant share their own screen.
3. Access remote keyboard and mouse control – the current presenter may grant control of their screen to another user at any time.
4. Transfer files – the organizer and guests can send files of up to 200MB to each other
5. Select applications – Got an open application which is not required for the meeting? Select to hide it.
6. Pause transmission – take a meeting break and suspend the transfer of screen data.

You can invite up to 10 participants to any Mikogo free online meeting under a secure connection. Mikogo employs the superior 256-bit AES end-to-end encryption, ensuring the safety of all data.

This is definitely worth checking out for an inexpensive introduction to web conferencing.

Mikogo Skype Extra

Related articles by Zemanta

Tutorials for Programming Languages

Image via WikipediaI’ve blogged before about StackOverflow.For those who haven’t come across it here’s the site’s own introduction:Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers ??? regardless of platform or lang…

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve blogged before about StackOverflow.

For those who haven’t come across it here’s the site’s own introduction:

Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language. Jump in and share your software engineering expertise! No registration or account required.

As a part of this aim it has put together this page containing tutorials for many different programming languages. Many of them are on-line and free – perfect for education…

Language Books/Tutorials for popular languages – Stack Overflow

Related articles by Zemanta

When DID the IT Staff Become Our Bosses?

Image via Wikipedia

The tales of colleges being unable to implement any good practice involving IT (as defined by, amongst others, our HMIe overlords friends) are legion. Most of it is related to the baffling willingness of educators to allow support staff to dictate how we should teach.

While I can see the reasons for blocking certain sites containing, for example, porn, and the rules for access to JANET are clear, the stories of colleges blocking perfectly usable sites are mounting and becoming more ridiculous by the day.

Why, in the name of all that’s Web 2.0, does a college of my acquaintance block Google Mail? Or Google Docs come to that? Descriptors abound requiring students to access newsgroups. Only problem is many colleges block NNTP traffic. Why? Even worse why, when asked to unblock this traffic, do system administrators refuse on spurious “security” reasons? And why do we let them! The same applies to e-mail or chats.

If any administrator can come up with a sensible reason for this, and that excludes any explanation that includes the phrase “in case”, then I’d love to hear it.

It’s the 21st century. I spend half my time listening to tales of there not being enough IT equipment and the other half hearing that students are unable to bring their own laptops into colleges. Is there a relationship here?

The bottom line is this. Support services are there to support and if education is being compromised then we have to address this; and sooner rather than later.

Weblogg-ed » Filter Fun

Is Cloud Computing Safe?

Image via WikipediaI bow to no-one in my admiration of Richard Stallman. Anyone who can found the Free Software Foundation as well as creating GNU (as in GNU-Linux, the bit that does most of the work) is well worth listening to. So when he talks a…

Image via Wikipedia

I bow to no-one in my admiration of Richard Stallman. Anyone who can found the Free Software Foundation as well as creating GNU (as in GNU-Linux, the bit that does most of the work) is well worth listening to. So when he talks about cloud computing being potentially dangerous it is as well to stop and listen.

Although hearing anyone use a phrase like “worse than stupidity” gives pause for thought. And not in a good way.

The gist of the argument is that computing in the cloud, whether mail via GMail or documents stored on Zoho, are a trap. In the same way that traditional software applications forced you into using their software (I’m looking at you WordPerfect), cloud computing may trap your data.

And that’s true; as far as it goes. However this is not a criticism of cloud computing. It’s a criticism of anyone who doesn’t properly back up their data. That’s a problem whether you use Notepad and save your data on a floppy disk or photos stored on Flickr.

As it happens I’m a big fan of cloud computing. As almost every computer I have has a net connection it saves messing about with floppies, pen drives or external hard disks. I’m not stupid enough, however, to trust that my data will always be there. Even Amazon, who have a history of reliable web services, had a glitch that knocked out their S3 data storage service for a working day.

If I turn up to give a presentation I have e-mailed myself a copy, saved it on Mozy, have a copy on various on-line services and kept a copy on a pen drive attached to my key-ring. In other words I don’t make it out the door and into my car if I don’t have my data.

It’s frustrating that this far into the history of computing people are still writing “Back up your data or you’ll be sorry” articles. Even more frustrating when the person saying it has written the back up software themselves.

EDIT: Richard Stallman must have the computing gods working for him. Just as I tried to post this my net connection went down. I’m sorry Richard. Please don’t hurt me again.

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Related articles by Zemanta

RSS to eMail Tool

Image via WikipediaI read blogs using a feedreader. (Bloglines is still my preference despite Google Reader continually attempting to woo me over.) For many people, though, feeds, RSS and Atom are dark arts best left to geeks and techno-freaks.Tha…

Image via Wikipedia

I read blogs using a feedreader. (Bloglines is still my preference despite Google Reader continually attempting to woo me over.) For many people, though, feeds, RSS and Atom are dark arts best left to geeks and techno-freaks.

That’s a shame as there’s lots of good information out there (step forward Bobby Elliot’s SQA Computing blog) and if you don’t subscribe to it you may miss out.

FeedMyInbox.com addresses this problem by taking RSS feeds and converting them to e-mail so that even the techno-luddites can receive automatic updates.

Can I suggest you try it using, for example, this blog?

Feed My Inbox ~ RSS to Email ~ Feed to Email

Related articles by Zemanta

Answers to Those Pesky Programming Problems

Image via CrunchBaseWe’ve all done it. Been 90% through a project only to find that we’re stuck. The libraries don’t work like they should or some dependency problem rears its ugly head. You ask friends, look up programming books and, of course, a…

Image via CrunchBase

We’ve all done it. Been 90% through a project only to find that we’re stuck. The libraries don’t work like they should or some dependency problem rears its ugly head. You ask friends, look up programming books and, of course, ask Google. Nothing works.

As Joel Spolsky puts it in his blog Google gives you:

A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
And something in Japanese.

Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (from excellent blog Coding Horror) have tackled this problem with StackOverflow.com, a programming site with questions and, more importantly, answers. As the answers are voted on by the members you get much better replies than with traditional searches.

StackOverflow has just come out of beta and looks like it’s going to be great. Give it a go.

Stack Overflow

Related articles by Zemanta

Plus Ca Change

Image via Wikipedia

I’m indebted to Word Magazine for reminding me that it is fifty years since the untimely passing of Geoffrey Willans, creator of the indefatigable Molesworth.

If anyone has not yet been introduced to the delights of Down with Skool!, illustrated with aplomb by Ronald Searle, then stop reading at once and go pick up a copy of The Compleet Molesworth.

How does this impact educationally? Well, one of Molesworth’s quotes is

It is a funny thing, but headmasters are always very keen on conferences, committees etc when they discuss how to educate boys chiz tho it does not seme to make much difference we are all IGNORANT.

In my darkest hours that is exactly the feeling I take away from the various conferences I have myself hosted.

Word Magazine

OtherInbox Redux

Those nice people at OtherInbox (see previous post) wrote to remind me that they are still in beta and that those who tried to sign up following my post may have been disappointed.Fear not! Simple email me at betaapp@tonygurney.otherinbox.com for …

Those nice people at OtherInbox (see previous post) wrote to remind me that they are still in beta and that those who tried to sign up following my post may have been disappointed.

Fear not! Simple email me at betaapp@tonygurney.otherinbox.com for your beta invitation. I’ve got 25 to give away. First come first served.

Related articles by Zemanta

PIs in Computing

The conference organised by the SFEU addressing the continued problems with Computing performance was fascinating.Speakers, including representatives of the SQA, HMIe, SCQF and SFEU, presented irrefutable evidence that Computing as a subject requi…

The conference organised by the SFEU addressing the continued problems with Computing performance was fascinating.

Speakers, including representatives of the SQA, HMIe, SCQF and SFEU, presented irrefutable evidence that Computing as a subject requires to address its problems, and sooner rather than later.

It was interesting that during the One Minute Challenge ™ where participants were asked to name the one thing that would make the biggest difference to the subject we received many tremendous suggestions although none were reflected inwards at the practitioners.

What do you think? Are Computing staff perfect and the problems lie firmly at the door of, for example, SQA for course design or HMIe for unfair inspection techniques; or are the problems closer to home?

SQA Computing blog: Computing performance problems

Other Inbox

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeOne of the nastiest side effects of using e-mail is the potential for abuse. We’ve all been there; you sign up to some web service or other and shortly you are bombarded with spam from destinations far and near.Oth…

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One of the nastiest side effects of using e-mail is the potential for abuse. We’ve all been there; you sign up to some web service or other and shortly you are bombarded with spam from destinations far and near.

OtherInbox addresses(!) this problem by giving you your own sub-domain, such as fredflinstone.otherinbox.com. You then create as many e-mail addresses as you can eat like fred@fredflinstone.otherinbox.com, wilma@fredflinstone.otherinbox.com and pebbles@fredflinstone.otherinbox.com. These addresses are then automatically sorted into folders in your OtherInbox web interface. If you start receiving spam simply block that address. The addresses don’t need to be pre-assigned and you can create a new address for every web site without setting it up beforehand.

This is a cheap way of managing your e-mail. And yes, I know that you can use the same trick with your own domain (I’ve done it myself for a couple of years) but this takes away the technical knowledge required and makes it available for everyone.

Related articles by Zemanta