Web Teacher

Google+ Hangouts now have a remote desktop feature

Another reason to join Google +, if you haven’t already, is the new remote desktop feature available in Google Hangouts. This gives you the ability to work on someone else’s desktop to demonstrate or troubleshoot while you are chatting in a hangout.

The feature is listed under the Hangout Apps menu.

If you are teaching online classes using software that does not allow for remote desktop work, adding Google Hangouts to your repertoire of tools might be a good idea. There is existing software that gives you remote desktop access, of course. LogMeIn and GoToMyPC probably are the best known. Will Google + overwhelm them?

Useful links: Forms, Creativity, Acorn

Accessible Forms 1: Labels and Identification is an important post at Web Usability. I’ll bet there’s some info in this report that you don’t know, but can use.

Q&A with Adobe MAX Speaker Denise Jacobs who talks about creativity and the importance of storytelling on web sites.

Acorn 4 is out. Do you recommend this inexpensive image editor to students who can’t afford Photoshop?

Useful Links: Style Tiles, Posing, Video Slides

In a comment yesterday, Terry Morris mentioned Style Tiles. I was so impressed with this website that I wanted to add it here as a useful link, mostly so I wouldn’t lose track of it and because it is worth sharing. Thanks, Terry.

Stand up straight! Put your shoulders back! Yeah, I hear my mom, too. Whitney Hess reports that How We Pose Shapes How We Feel. She says, “It turns out that the way we sit and stand, the poses and postures we position ourselves in, have an enormous biological and emotional impact on us.” Or as Sheryl Sandberg might say, sit at the table and lean in.

This is a new idea. Video Slides that can create a presentation from a series of videos.

How is a web site like a book?

I’ve been doing some consulting with someone who is learning to maintain a website in Dreamweaver. We keep bumping into the concept that fiddling with new styles every time you create a new page of content is a bad idea.

Remember Virginia’s Law Against Unintended HTML? It goes like this:

Play with the way your content will look before the content is on the page, not after.

In looking around desperately for a concept or metaphor that will bring home the point to this Dreamweaver user, I’m wondering if thinking of a website as being like a technical book can help. I could use one of my own books as an example. Here’s what I’m thinking.

If you look through a technical book you see all sorts of formatting: headings, paragraphs, lists, images, tables. Every time you see something, for example, a chapter title, it uses the same formatting and appearance. You don’t see a different size title for chapter 6 or a different color title for chapter 8. The appearance for chapter titles is consistent throughout the book.

A web site should have the same consistency. Every page’s main heading should use the same formatting and appearance as every other page. This applies to other parts of the site, such as links, lists, images, etc. You decide before the book is printed what kind of styles will be used for the content. Then you stick with that decision for the entire book. A website should be thought of in the same way. You plan a look – the styles – and you stick with that look throughout the entire website.

If something changes in the future (because, after all, the web is a changeable medium as opposed to a book), any changes to the stylesheet affect the entire website, not just selected parts of it.

Does this metaphor work or is it confusing? How do you teach students that a website should have a consistent set of style rules and not a page-by-page mix of freshly hatched classes?

A Quieter Internet

Did you read In Defense of Filters and a Quieter Internet by Brad McCarty at TNW? The author talked about how he filters out noise from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. He uses a system of groups, lists, blockers, and keyword blocks.

In addition to those sources of noise, I am required to read a lot of email pitches and dozens of RSS feeds every day.

Years ago I took a speed reading class, and I still read fast. Plus, I’m a good skimmer. Those two skills help me with the daily onslaught.

I don’t block much of anything on Twitter. Instead, I skim through my main feed every once in a while looking for gems. I do have Twitter lists that help me track the voices I really want to hear. I’ve talked before about how much I like seeing everything collected for me from my Women in Web Education list into a paper.li format. Paper.li is a great way to deal with lists.

In Facebook, I have a very limited set of friends, and only occasionally do I have to block some type of post there.

In email, I can hit the Delete button faster than you can blink. In my RSS feeds, I click that Read All button after a fast skim through the new post titles for the day. I may actually read 20% of what comes in each day as new in my RSS feeds.

Sometimes I just step away for a period of time. After the bombing in Boston, it was clear that no one really knew what was going on the the immediate aftermath – a good time to step away and let the information gel. I avoided Twitter, the TV, and the radio for a while.

I don’t let things go or avoid looking through all the information that we get fed each day. I just deal with it a way that is efficient for me. How are you dealing with the information overload we have in our connected lives these days?

Interesting new apps and tools (and a wish list)

Yahoo! Weather is the weather on Flickr. It’s beautiful as well as useful. Here’s my weather from yesterday. Lovely, right? The photo used is matched to the current weather and location.

You can also see hourly forecasts and weekly forecasts. There’s a group on Flickr called Project Weather you can join if you’d like for your photos to be considered for appropriate locations.

Churnalism.com is a tool for detecting real journalism as distinguished from, well, churnalism. It’s the work of the Sunlight Foundation. Here’s their description of what they do:

Churnalism is a tool that matches fragments of text between two documents online by comparing it to our database of press releases and Wikipedia entries. You can either install an extension to your Internet browser to run Churnalism automatically, or you can manually paste in the URL or text of an article on the main site. In order to run the comparison, we built up a cache of documents that includes all of Wikipedia and press releases from PR Newswire, PR News Web, EurekaAlert!, congressional leadership offices, the White House, a sampling of Fortune 500 companies, prominent philanthropic foundations and many more. Churnalism searches for matching fragments across all of these sources and shows you a side-by-side result right on your computer screen.

Okay, app developers. Here’s a request for you. After a frustrating day trying to find a list of writers in my local library and going through the process of ordering books from interlibrary loan, I realized it would be very nice if an app like OverDrive (or some other app not yet developed) could be used to borrow electronic copies of books via interlibrary loan. Are you the one who could make that happen?