Del.icio.us

www.delicious.com/schwat

Facebook

The next technology I looked at was Facebook, a social networking site. Essentially, Facebook allows you to interact with your peers, sending messages, sharing pictures, and creating events. Facebook's popularity has grown that now there are multiple applications that work along with Facebook allowing futher interaction with others.

Creating an account is easy, with a form to fill out right on the home page. After thats done, Facebook will send a confirmation email to you with a link to click on for activation. From there, Facebook can connect to your email account to find possible friends that also have accounts for you. You can also connect to different networks that will suggest other possible friends you may have.

I have created my own Facebook here.

Thinkature

The technology I am exploring is "Thinkature," an online concept mapping technology. At first, it may seem like a glorified flow chart creator, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Thinkature allows for real-time collaboration. This means that if you decide to share your workspace with a friend, you can both edit the workspace at the same time from different computers. Thinkature takes the collaboration idea a step further by allowing users with headsets to use voice communication. A chat box is also provided for users without headsets to still be able to actively communicate.

The interface is also extremely easy to understand. When creating a new account, a tutorial workspace is provided, but this is hardly necessary since clicking around for a minute or two in a new workspace quickly allows the user to gain an almost complete understanding of the interface. Almost all editing can be done in the workspace with your mouse, which I found to be incredibly user-friendly. Want to create a new text box? Double click in the open space. Want to edit that text box? Hold your mouse over the box and the editing options appear around it. There are only 8 buttons that are not part of the workspace, and each has an optional keyboard shortcut for even faster access.

This is an amazing new website with a lot of potential for easy use in class collaboration, group projects, and even just a new way for a professor to give a lecture and notes. I've created my own (somewhat boring) workspace here.

First Post

Just made my blog. It went pretty swimmingly since I've had a blog on Blogger before (it fell through due to my lack of ever knowing what to say.) For those of you who have never used this before, welcome! The only real tip I have for you is to not let yourself think your creativity is limited. Blogger has an outstanding amount of flexibility in all categories. If you thought the available templates when you first created the page was a bit limited, well it was only a small selection of the pre-made templates that are available if you look under the layout tab. You can also change the various colors of your blog under layout, too. If you know how to write HTML and have been thinking "I could create a much better layout than this," well, you can! Again, this can be done under the layout tab. Or, if you just wanted to make 1 specific post stand out, there is also an option to edit the post HTML as well. Don't like the position of your gadgets? Move them! Just click and drag any of the gadgets you want to move and you can move them up, down, and all around your blog.

Oh, and here's a link to my almost award winning essay on Assistive Technologies:
http://lukeallard.pbworks.com/Assistive-Technologies