Excellent blog article from internet consultant and trainer Phil Bradley on using Twitter in a library situation. Should be relevant for most school and public libraries.
UPDATE: Don’t rely on this for a full backup of your GMail, as Google are apparently using “intelligent guesses” about which emails to synchronise (more details here).
Over the past couple of years we have started using and recommending Google’s webmail service GMail (or GoogleMail in some areas outside the USA). Its threaded conversations, labels, spam filter and ready availability from anywhere with an internet connection make it hugely attractive when compared with other e-mail options. But if you use a desktop e-mail client, such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook or Outlook Express, web-based e-mail can be frustrating when you do not have access to an internet connection.
GMail has now solved this problem: Offline GMail now downloads your GMail messages to your computer, keeping them in sync with your online account. If you write a message when you are offline, it will be delivered as soon as you go online to GMail again.
At the moment the offline option is under test in Google’s public “Labs” facility. To enable it, go to Settings > Labs > Offline: Enable. Google Gears, a system designed specifically to allow offline access to material usually held online, asks for confirmation, then GMail provides a message about how many messages have been downloaded, including the exceptionally user-friendly information “If you disconnect now, you will have access to mail back to 15 January 2009″ (that date gets progressively earlier as Gears downloads older messages).
Google’s promotional video provides an overview of the process:
Intexta is now on Twitter, having recommended the microblogging site/application to several clients recently.
Once much maligned (usually by those who weren’t using it) for the banality of its messages (”I’m having lunch”), Twitter is increasingly being used as a communication tool among friends and acquaintances, and in the worlds of education, information management and business. Its immediacy and flexibility have been mentioned frequently in the media recently, particularly in the light of its use in reporting the Hudson River plane crash.Twitter users can follow Intexta on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/intexta
For anyone who hasn’t yet embraced the wonders of reading RSS feeds via dedicated online feed readers such as Bloglines and Google Reader, a service called RSSFWD sends updates directly from one or more selected RSS feeds into your inbox.
The system is very easy to set up - you tell it your RSS feed address and your e-mail address (ideally a throwaway one, though RSSFWD is at pains to reassure users that their details will not be passed on to spammers) and then any new posts to that feed are e-mailed to you. We tried it with our dedicated feed for the SLA blog and it seems to be working well, though updates often come through up to twelve hours after the blog is published (possibly a time zone issue), so it may not be ideal for feeds with fast breaking news.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Robert Burns, To a Louse
A useful way of changing the size of the browser window on-the-fly, and thus seeing your site as other users (those with lower screen resolutions) see it:
Go to your website by typing its address (e.g. http://www.intexta.com/) in the address bar of your browser and pressing Enter.
Then type (all on one line, with no spaces) javascript:resizeTo(800,600) in the address bar and press Enter.
Your screen should be resized to the dimensions you have chosen (in this case 800 by 600 pixels, the generally-accepted minimum resolution for browsing the web using a desktop computer). Other common resolutions include 1024 by 768 and 1280 by 1024.
To return your browser to its “normal” state, click the Restore button (far top right of the window, the middle button, between Minimise and Close) then click the Maximise button. On a Macintosh, just drag the window back to the size you want using the drag bar at the bottom right hand corner of the window.
Coming soon to the site are a fully hierarchical menu structure, which will make the home page less text-heavy, and a configurable domain name availability checker. Watch this space (or this space!) for details.
As promised when this blog was launched, the blog will gradually adopt the look and feel of the main website and will eventually be merged into it.
To mark European Day of Languages today, a quick look at some Web 2.0-style sites to support language learning.
Mango recently launched its beta service, with an impressive range of 11 languages containing 100 lessons in each. Educationally the approach is instructional, with traditional dialogues and testing making good use of Flash-based interaction. Linguistically the coverage is almost purely geared towards everyday conversational phrases and vocabulary learning, with useful matters such as grammar quietly sidestepped.
Livemocha takes a different approach, presenting itself as an online language-learning community and clearly trying to take advantage of the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook. The design looks good, and the use of the concept of “adding friends” to your network updates the penfriend concept very effectively for the modern world. Members can “tutor” others by correcting their mistakes, though of course this is a peer-based system - no trained, experienced language teachers are apparently needed. The idea that members can upload work (written or spoken) and have others comment on it, free of charge, may be an enticing one, but the uploaded spoken work I listened to was badly recorded and hard to make out.
Longer established sites include SpanishSense and ChinesePod (the subject of this article in the Economist), both making innovative use of podcasting and the iPod to deliver both audio and text-based lessons.
All these sites (and similar ones) seem to be based on the conception that if only we could memorise a large phrasebook and have plenty of flashcards to hand, we could master any language of our choice, with no need for such annoying stuff as grammar, semantic subtlety or Sprachgefühl. Where they do shine is in their use of lots of audio and interactive content - and in the opportunities offered to communicate with real native speakers.
For anyone who hasn’t yet fully embraced the Web 2.0 phenomenon and feels that their grasp of such topics as RSS, wikis and social networking is a little shaky, the CommonCraft Show provides a series of short explanatory online videos in plain (American) English. Using an innovative paper-pen-whiteboard technique they call Paperworks, videos are currently available on RSS feeds, social bookmarking (e.g. del.icio.us), wikis, social networking and Google Docs. Some subtitled versions in other languages are available via the innovative dotSUB subtitling service (on which more another time).
