Thursday’s Educause 2011 Conference Live Blog
This is a live blogging event from the 2011 Educause Conference in Philadelphia, PA. You don’t need to refresh this page. The embedded window below will refresh automatically with every new update, live! You can just leave it open and follow the stream below – latest posts will always be on the bottom of the widget below. Feel free to comment or tweet - I’ll respond as fast as I can!
Wednesday’s Live Blog From EDUCAUSE 2011
This is a live blogging event from the 2011 Educause Conference in Philadelphia, PA. You don’t need to refresh this page. The embedded window below will refresh automatically with every new update, live! You can just leave it open and follow the stream below – latest posts will always be on the bottom of the widget below. Feel free to comment or tweet - I’ll respond as fast as I can! You can also follow my live blog entries via this RSS feed – http://rss.coveritlive.com/rss.php?altcast_code=b6e1b5a1d3
RSS Feed of YouTube videos for Educause 2011 Conference
Since YouTube removed their RSS feature for search results it’s been getting harder and harder to get up-to-date videos only on topics you are interested in. Taken that I am at the 2011 Educause Conference right now, I decided to use some trickery and set up a Yahoo Pipe that will pull ONLY YouTube videos related to this year’s Educause conference and output them on my site and as an RSS feed. As a bonus, I also included a feed within this one that pulls public images from Flickr relevant to Educause. So what are you waiting for? Get the RSS feed here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=3d11e16bc720b78bde697e9837b929d5&_render=rss
or simply click on the links below. Make sure you refresh manually the feed from time to time because – since there probably won’t be too many subscribers – it won’t refresh often enough on its own. I expect there to be more content coming in as Educause progresses. Cheers!
Most recent videos/images from the feed mentioned above:
- Alan Aycock
- Six Minutes with Malcolm Brown
- Emergency PSA STOP SOPA What the heck is SOPA? Download Below
- Bryan Alexander: Emerging Learning Technologies
- Datatel @ Educause 10/20/11 - Bob Panos, American Digital
- Epic School Project: Cellphones and Education
- Videoblog
- Educause
- Best Practices for Designing Successful Blended Courses
- A blended learning course can be confusing to students
A Twitter Paper for the 2011 Educause Conference
This Twitter-based paper pulls articles, videos, and images from the #EDU11 Twitter hashtag. It is updated dynamically. Enjoy!
Blogging at the 2011 Annual EDUCAUSE Conference
This academic year I decided to attend the 2011 Annual EDUCAUSE conference instead of my usual Computers in Libraries (which I attended in Spring 2011, but won’t be attending in Spring 2012). I am very excited as I think this conference may be more applicable to my interests and the things I work with. It is also HUGE! Granted – I booked the hotel and made the reservation last minute, but I must have called over 30 different hotels in the area until I found a room (well there were a few in the “ungodly” price range).
In any case – I have decided to cover my experience on this blog and I’ll attempt to take some informative videos and images for those of you who can’t make it or who are interested in the sessions I will attend. If you check out some of the other postings I have below (such as the ones from Computers in Libraries), you’ll get the general idea of what I may do. I am not a big fan of “live tweeting” because it spams all my followers who DON’T care about the conference, so I will be live-blogging on occasion. Feel free to come here and check the blog section often after tomorrow or just subscribe to the RSS feed.
As always – feel free to chime in the comments or ask me any questions – both here and on Twitter. Cheers!
It’s Been a While!
It’s been a while since I posted something on my personal website. Mostly because I’ve never been a fan of re-posting and re-discussing things that have already been re-posted and re-discussed in thousands of other blogs and websites on the web. I think I see a trend actually where people feel like they have to keep chiming in on issues just for the sake of chiming in – not actually bringing anything new to the table or the argument. If you wanted to have a blog with new posts all the time, you can just go out there to 5-10 tech websites and just pick a paragraph from one, a paragraph from another, and there you go! You feel important. You have a blog with relevant content. And I see this happen way too much. What’s the point? Just tweet a link to the articles you found interesting – no need to re-post things if you don’t add anything new! But anyway – we all have the freedom to set up and maintain online blogs that get 50 visitors per month.
End rant.
In any case – I should probably try to share more on here to stay relevant and “build up my brand.” However, I’ve always been more keen on doing than writing about doing so I’m not sure how this will turn out 
. In any case – I’ll actually blog a bit about Educause 2011 this week. I am attending this conference for the first time and am quite excited to learn some new things and meet new people. Should be fun. Depending on my internet connection – I may or may not put up videos and pictures, but as I know myself well – I’ll try to snap a few interesting shots or videos !
Hope you stick around and I hope you find some postings informative – I’ll try to be objective with what I learn and add, what I think is, my unique perspective on things 
.
My Program for Computers in Libraries 2011 Conference
I decided to briefly post here a list of the sessions I plan to attend at Computers in Libraries 2011. As last year, I will try to cover parts of the event and include some helpful information and videos for people who can’t attend. Cheers!
Monday, March 21st
D101 – Promoting With Web 2.0
B102 – Improve Your Website Now!
B103 – Mining Data to Learn About Libraries & Users
D104 – Innovative Marketing Tools and Strategies
D105 – Performance Measures: Illustrating Value to Your Community
Tuesday, March 22nd
A201 (Learning from Inspirational Libraries) or B201 (Community Tagging)
A202 – MetaSocial: Making Online & Mobile Interactions Rock
A203 – Teching Up Traditional Library Programs
C204 – eBooks and Their Growing Value for Libraries
C205 – eBooks and Their Growing Value for Libraries continued
Wednesday, March 23rd
D301 – Digital Preservation Strategies: Value Through Longevity
E302 – Creating 21st Century Information-Literacy Programs
D303 – Repositories: Strategies and Practices
C304 – Mobile Usability
B305 – Social Media Strategy and Goals
Computers in Libraries 2010 – An Information Feed from CIL2010
This is where any content related to Computers in Libraries 2010 will be posted at. I will have up to date videos, live streams, interviews, tweets, and short blurbs about everything that I have seen or been part of in this exciting yearly event by Information Today. Read on!
4/15/2010, 10pm
Finally got to upload a video interview of Jan Dawson from Ask Ontario. Sorry for the sloppy editing, but something went wrong with my computer and had to quickly do this on Windows Movie Maker … Enjoy!
4/14/2010, 9pm
On my way home, I was able to take some video of DC and NYC from my airplane. Watch below:
4/14/2010, 5pm
Joe Murphy joins me again, together with Jeff Wisniewski and Sarah Houghton-Jan. I think the last day of the conference was definitely the strongest. Being quite into mobile tech and development, I decided to attend all of Track B sessions and even I learnt something new !
4/13/2010, 8pm
Here is the long promised short interview with Joe Murphy. Quite the pleasant guy and definitely one of my favorite speakers in the conference!
4/13/2010, 6pm
So far the second day of CIL2010 seems much better! Only one disappointment (won’t mention which section ) caused me to walk out with nothing. Thanks to all the people who bared to talk for a few minutes with raspy me! I will post a few interviews now and several more later. Joe Murphy promised me some time tomorrow so I’ll try to get as much of him as possible -- he’s definitely one of the few speakers I thoroughly enjoyed listening to. I hope to improve keywords soon so all interviewees can find themselves! Until then -- you can find videos from me in youtube by searching for “CIL2010″. Cheers!
This one is especially for Mrs. Robinson :
Big thanks to Scott Kushner for his 3 minute interview!
Also thanks to John Blyberg for a very informative session and a two minute flash interview:
More to come! Thank you all!
4/12/2010, 8pm
Still sick, but managed to go through the day. Had some nice conversations going throughout the day. Managed to snap a quick photo with Marshall (below) and did two flash interviews with Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and Michael Sauers -- the Travelin’ Librarian. All worth checking out below. I decided to write separate blog posts summarizing everything I have been to after all this is done and I get home. I hope all this will be useful to those who wanted to come but couldn’t.
4/12/2010, 10:30am
I decided to put latest content at the top so people won’t have to scroll down. I’m quite sick, but trying to get strong! Listening to David Lee King talk about design makeover. Will post videos from today around lunch time because Internet is kind of bad. So far not that impressed by the exhibitors, but at least the actual presentations will be good!
4/11/2010, 3:30pm
Flash Interview with Marshall Breeding:
Flash Interview with Jane Dysart:
Tools and Links to Help You with Mobile Web-App Development
Check out Adelphi University’s mobile web-app, which I had the privilege to work on. It is based on iUI, but uses some features from iWebKit and custom code. It works perfectly on iPhone OS devices and Android phones! Even on some Palms …
I’ve been getting more and more into the mobile web-app dev field as of lately. As a result of this, I have attempted to use every possible little tool that is supposed to make your job easier when web-app dev-ing. Some tools have stuck, some haven’t, but at the end there have always been some that I would choose over the rest. This is a detailed list of what I love and what I use on a daily basis when it comes to web-app development. This is a list of (Point).Oh’s Faves in Web-App Dev!
There is really no “Number 1″ and “Number 10″ in this list. All these “tools” (I sometimes hate this word) are quite different from each other and none “does it all.” However, they all contribute in a greater or smaller degree to shaping up the final product – a fully functional web-app that can rival any native one. Let me start with the building blocks:
iUI – The User Interface Framework for Safari Development on iPhone
(http://code.google.com/p/iui/)
iUI has always been the basis for any web-app development I have thought of. It does seem a little unfriendly to the complete beginner (mainly due to the scarcity of documentation on it), but once you’ve looked at several frameworks and gotten the “hang” of them, you’ll start appreciating it more and more. I actually liked iUI and the people behind it and involved in it so much that I volunteered to start a documentation project aimed at helping the new users. I have to get more serious on this . As per iUI’s main site – “iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing iPhone webapps.” This just skims the surface though. You should start by checking these helpful links:
Joe Hewitt: “An Introduction to iUI” – a video by the guy who made the Facebook iPhone app and started iUI
iUI 0.13 – An Overview – an introductory tutorial from C.W. Zachary
iWebKit – the Simplest Framework to Create Your Own Web-App in Just a Few Minutes!
(http://iwebkit.net/)
iWebKit was my first love. With their new “5″ release, they might come back swiftly and shake iUI’s pedestal in my heart . iWebKit is the easiest and most user-friendly way to start developing web-applications! From the plethora of frameworks around there – nothing really beats it in usability. With their new release they have improved so much by reducing bloat and respective load times, introducing more CSS3, better UI, and loads more. For a newbie at all this – iWebKit should be the first thing to see. They also have one big advantage (especially over iUI) – a very good start-up guide that details all the basics and a great support community. Go check it out and be sure to download the user guide – here.
Now when it comes to web-app frameworks – there is lots of choice! And more and more people opt to develop “their own”. I don’t think this approach really helps anybody – we just end up introducing more and more similar products that give us little new stuff and lots of “same features”. I am big on supporting what’s already there and developing a community around it. If you haven’t heard – your IQ doesn’t mean much anymore – its the community IQ that matters . Where I’m going with this is that whatever you can’t do with iUI – you probably can figure out a way to do it with iWebKit! Or better – combine features from both in a way that you contribute something back to them. A patch, a suggestion – everything is welcome in those two development communities! And talking about communities brings me to the next three links.
iPhoneWebDev – a great community of humble app developers.
(http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev)
PhoneGap – a great place to discuss questions about PhoneGap (will mention it in a bit), but also general app dev.
(http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap?lnk=)
iWebKit Community – another place for web-app dev questions.
(http://community.iwebkit.net/)
Don’t be agraid to post any questions you might have to these groups – especially the first one. They are a great start when you are trying to figure out if someone else has run in the same problem you have.
PhoneGap – the cross-platform solution to getting your web-app in the App Store
(http://phonegap.com/)
I should have mentioned PhoneGap at a much later stage, but I decided this might be an appropriate spot for the plug. PhoneGap is a development tool in itself that can take the spot of iUI and iWebKit, but its main aim is to actually port your web-app to a native app. With PhoneGap you are able to use your current knowledge of web-design and JavaScript to build native applications that can install on your iPhone or Android device. It is really a versatile framework that, albeit requiring you to have some programming knowledge of the iPhone SDK, makes it very easy to “go native” and start making money out of your amazing web-app idea !
MockApp – iPhone App Design for The Rest of Us
(http://mockapp.com/)
Before you delve in the actual programming part of your web-app development, you should spend a good deal of time laying out your idea in a mock environment. This way, you can spot right away weaknesses in your design or even an idea that might be great, but can turn into a development nightmare or impossibility. This is where MockApp comes in to help. It is a very simple mock-up tool that will let you easily create interactive and usable previews of your apps (or at least their UI and navigation). It runs in PowerPoint and Keynote. Yes – PowerPoint and Keynote can be used to create quite feature-rich mock-ups! Best of it all – you can actually test your app mock-up on your iPhone! For free! To really feel the power of mockapp – take a look at the video below, which showcases a mock-up of a Google Wave app.
For the people who still need something more robust, there is a solution.
Fireworks iPhone UI Toolkit by the creators of Notespark
(http://blog.metaspark.com/2009/02/fireworks-toolkit-for-creating-iphone-ui-mockups/)
Pretty self explanatory – go check it out! They have a nice collection of buttons and other UI elements to create your own mock-ups for easy printing and distribution.
Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa by Jonathan Stark
(http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/)
The title may be a mouthful, but believe me – this is the book to read when starting in the web-app development field ! Its a great introduction to pretty much everything you need to know to make a pretty good app and EVEN distribute it in the App Store (via PhoneGap). Best of all? It is completely free and available online at the address provided. Check it out – its worth every penny you did not spend …
Safari Web Content Guide
(http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/Introduction/Introduction.html)
A nice little official guide from Apple that will give you an idea how Safari operates in iPhone OS and how you can optimize your web-apps… Now I know I have been stressing a lot on the iPhone OS, but honestly – all the web-apps you make with the iPhone in mind will work 99.99% perfectly on an Android device. You might just have to make a few adjustments.
IconFinder
(http://www.iconfinder.net/)
You will undoubtedly need icons for your app. Whether it is stuff you want to use inside the app or for the main icon on the iPhone’s dashboard. IconFinder is a good place to search for any type of icons you might need. The resource below is also a great start.
iPhoneized Icon Set
(http://iphoneized.com/icons/)
Great place for free icons and some inspiration. Listed below are two links you should always consult when you are deciding on colors and/or looking for some other images you can use in your web-app.
Colour Lovers
(http://www.colourlovers.com/)
Deviant Art
(http://www.deviantart.com/)
There are a lot more tools and links you can use, but these should give you a pretty solid start. The most important thing is to get involved in the community and not be afraid to ask questions! You will be surprised by how quickly you can sometimes get answers. I will update this page as I go, but feel free to chime in the comments with some of your favorite tools and links for Mobile Web-App Development!
Check out Adelphi University’s mobile web-app, which I had the privilege to work on. It is based on iUI, but uses some features from iWebKit and custom code. It works perfectly on iPhone OS devices and Android phones! Even on some Palms …