Moving at the Speed of Creativity

This podcast is a screencast featuring an explanation of how Macintosh users can keep their iTunes folder on an external hard drive, and periodically update iTunes podcasts. This technique can be helpful if you are using a laptop and do not have enough free hard drive space for all the files in your iTunes library. Be careful, however! Make sure to have iTunes CLOSED when you are renaming the iTunes library folder / directory as explained in this screencast. The use of PodNova to maintain a OPML list of podcasts is also described along with a site for accessing podcasts “live” online with an iPhone or iPod Touch without syncing iTunes. QuickTime player or iTunes is required to play this podcast, links are available in the podcast shownotes.

 

 Podcast271: Podcatching Tips for Mac Users - Using PodNova with iTunes and an External HD for an iTunes Library [13:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (4297)

Show Notes:

1. iTunes
2. QuickTime Player
3. OPML defined on WikiPedia
4. PodNova
5. My PodNova OPML
6. Podcaster iPhone/iTouch web application by Soprotech
7. Wesley’s iPhone Applications
8. Wesley’s Macintosh Applications
9. Screenflow by Vara Software

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Technorati Tags: podcast, itunes, podnova, podcatcher, screenflow, iphone, ipod, itouch, tips, tutorial, screencast

I had a conversation last week with one of our support technicians here at the OHA, and he shared several things with me about mini-notebooks that I hadn’t heard previously. He saw I have an XO laptop so he thought I might be interested.

First of all, he said Intel’s Atom processor is really having a big impact on the mini-laptop market that will continue to be felt in the months ahead. It’s low cost, low power consumption, and high performance are making mini-notebooks much smaller, efficient, and affordable than ever before. He has a Fujuitsu Lifebook U810, an amazingly small laptop with full performance capabilities you’d expect from a computer with a much larger footprint. He bought it for about $1000, which is less than many other mini-notebooks sell for today. I had to include my own hand in the following photo I took of it with my iPhone, because otherwise I didn’t think my kids would believe how small it is!

The Vulcan Flipstart was another mini-notebook he considered but didn’t buy. Engaget reviewed it back in March of 2007. Apparently the company which manufactures the Flipstart has discontinued sales of the device, however, as the official website reports “The stock of FlipStart has been sold out” and does not indicate plans to sell new models.

Other laptops he considered but did not buy include the OQO Model 02 laptop, the Sony VAIO UX390, and the HP Mini-Note PC. He recommended the blog jkOnTheRun as a great place to stay up to speed on new developments with mobile computing and specifically mini-laptop technologies. I’ve added it to my feeds on Google Reader.

We discussed Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which I’ve been considering for personal backup use, and he told me about Mozy. In addition to offering commercial/for pay backup services, Mozy also offers “MozyHome Free…for personal, non-commercial use.” Anyone can get 2 GB of free online backup storage with this service. Wow. I am going to have to check that out, and recommend it to my mom who’s been needing an online backup storage option. I actually think I need more than 2 GB of storage backup for DVD media we have at home, but I may just back up our photos and then put DVD backups of our family movies in a bank safety deposit box. The tornado warning we had in Edmond, Oklahoma this past summer was a wake-up call for me: We had time to grab some things before we headed to our church to seek shelter in the basement there. What did I grab on my way out of the house in addition to my Macbook laptop? My two firewire external hard drives, of course, which have our family’s digital life on them. What would happen if those hard drives crashed, burned in a housefire, or were destroyed by a tornado? I hate to consider those possibilities. With my media backed up online, however, such an event might be much less psychologically catastrophic in terms of a personal digital data loss.

On the topic of external hard drives and backups, I was amazed to see the following Maxtor 1 terabyte (that’s right, 1 TB = 1000 GB = 100,000 MB approximately) at our local Office Depot this weekend for just $200. Wow.

The last topic I discussed with this knowledgeable support tech was the lawsuit Apple has filed against Psystar who offered Mac clone computers for sale this past spring for $399. For more about this case, check out David Chartier’s July 15th post on ars tecnica “Apple finally sues unlicensed Macintosh cloner Psystar.”

Gary Stager tweeted me a question this past weekend about how I decide to blog about different topics. In this case, the reason is I want to remember these nuggets about technology and be able to refer to them in the future, if needed. I have a hand-scrawled page of notes with the information from this post which I can now throw into the circular file since those facts have entered my personal content management and knowledge management system, my blog!

Technorati Tags:
laptop, apple, psystar, notebook, mininotebook, atom, intel, amazon, mozy, s3, backup, storage

Last year in our statewide Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling project, we had a “teachable moment” arise concerning student profile pictures and avatars. According to Wiktionary, an avatar in a computing context is:

A digital representation of a person or being.

The situation in our COV project last spring involved a high school student who joined our learning community at the invitation of her librarian as well as our project coordinators, and chose to use a photo of herself on her Ning personal profile page which was not appropriate for the context of our project. I contacted her librarian about this, she had a conversation with the student, and the student changed her photo to an uncontroversial avatar image. This situation was not a bad one– I think it was good, in fact, because it provided an opportunity for an important discussion relating to digital citizenship to take place. It also pointed to the fact that we needed social networking guidelines for our project. The student in question along a friend of hers were apparently viewing our COV learning community as they would a MySpace or Facebook personal page. That was not the right “frame” to use in this situation. As a result of these conversations, our project coordinators decided that students needed to use an avatar rather than a photograph on their personal profile pages. Adult educators could use either one. At the time project coordinators posted the following clarification in our learning community forum as “Guidelines for using this social networking site:”

Student Members:
All members under the age of 18 will be categorized as students and should use a computer generated avatar as their member image. We strongly encourage students to remove their date of birth and location from their profile. This can be accomplished by going to the My Settings link on the site. Please make sure you have parental permission to join this social networking site.

All Members:
Blog postings, submitted videos and all content should be related to digital storytelling. Please keep your dialog and discussion appropriate for all audience members. We encourage everyone to join ALL appropriate learning communities realted to your profile. This can be accomplished using the icons on the right hand side of the site.
Thank you for participating.

This situation highlights the importance of discussing what constitutes an appropriate avatar or other profile image, both in a collaborative project space as well as on personal social networking websites. When visiting the Wordpress.org support forums recently, I found the website Gravatar. It explains:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

After I setup my own free account on gravatar, I was asked to “rate” my avatar on the following scale, similar to the Motion Picture rating system for commercially published movies.

“Hard drug use?” Are the gravatar creators talking about “illegal drug use” with that phrase? I would argue that all student avatars should be “G” rated, particularly if the student is participating in an online learning community or collaborative project for school.

This is an important discussion to have with students of all ages who are participating in social networking activities at school and away from school. Because students already have background knowledge / schema for motion picture ratings, it could be good to use the ratings framework to discuss appropriate profile pictures and avatars. It might be good to explore the question:

Would it EVER be appropriate to use an avatar or profile picture which is not rated “G?” What are some possible consequences of using a “non-G-rated” avatar on a website which is tied / affiliated / linked to you and your online identity?

The PBS special from January 2008, “Growing Up Online” (individual chapters of the show are viewable online) is a good resource to utilize in a discussion like this with students. I have additional links and resources related to social networking available, as well as Internet Safety resources for parents. The Digital Dialog Ning is a learning community for educators, parents, and others interested in exploring and discussing issues like these.

Technorati Tags:
avatar, profile, picture, internet, safety, technology, parenting