Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Big Ask - Cyberpower for the environment?

As a dedicated environmentalist, I hope that actions such as The Big Ask (UK - BE) may help to wake (especially our Belgian) politicians up, and get them to act.
Can you imagine that no politician was willing to participate in a radio debate this morning to answer some of Nic Balthazar's questions, while they spent hours debating the non-endorsement of three French-speaking mayors in Brussels? Setting priorities straight?



Why does this message appear in a blog about educational technology?
  1. The Obama campaign illustrated the power of viral campaigns on the Web to mobilise voters. I wonder whether education might benefit from this mobilising potential?
  2. Can the use of web technology support more environmentally-friendly education? Is distance education a sustainable alternative?
  3. CELSTEC - my department at the OUNL, formerly known as OTEC - is performing an experiment on distance working. For instance, can the use of technology prevent me from having to drive 130 km every day to work - and still allow me to get the same results in my work?
But most of all, because I strongly support the initiative, and want to contribute to it through my blog.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Flock2.0 - A powerful social web browser

Flock logo
Thanks to Henry, I got (re-)acquainted with Flock, the social web browser. I installed it yesterday, and played around with it a bit. Here are some thoughts.

People browser
I linked the "Friend feeds" from my social networks to it (Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace), so now I get automatic updates of all my friends updates'. I am missing LinkedIn, but also the more local networks, such as Netlog or Hyves, and there does not seem to be a way to add people feeds from non-supported services (yet).

Flock1.jpg

Media browser
Next, I added the my Flickr, Picasa and YouTube accounts, and all the media feeds from these sources are centralised in a media bar at the top (or bottom) of the browser. This means any channels you subscribe to, or new additions from your friends. And you can view media either by opening the media bar, or as a widget on your startup screen.








Feed reader
Next, I exported all my Netvibes feeds to an OPML file, and imported it into Flock. Of course, this is an offline feedreader - as opposed to Netvibes - but it is nice to have all these functions combined in one tool. Moreover, it allows me to read all new feeds in one single page (a feature that Netvibes does not support yet).





Blog editor
A very neat feature is the platform-independent blog editor (which I am using while writing this post). Flock allows you to add your weblog accounts, and then provides a simple editor for writing a post. When you are finished writing a post, you can choose which blog to post it to. However, when I tried to actually publish the post, nothing happened.




A bonus is that it automatically uploads any illustrations or images to your online photo account (in my case on Flickr).



All in all, a very positive experience, if some of the minor flaws are fixed.