Diigo

Diigo – Social Information & Research Tool

The bookmarking tool I prefer to use is Diigo and with the release of V3 it has just got better. Diigo enables you to maintain you bookmarks/favourites online in one central location. But it does more, a whole lot more. It allows you to make notes – yellow sticky notes on any page of interest to you and you can highlight text on a web page too. Not only that, you can share these comments with other Diigo users by marking as ‘Public’ or keep your comments just for yourself ‘Private’, and you can access their Public comments too. This is where the ‘Social Information’ side of bookmarking comes in, you’re sharing knowledge with others and creating a social community. And now with V3 you can gravitate to others with similar interests by joining groups about a subject, tag, or website, or create your own group.

Another new feature is a sidebar, available from the little box on the left of the Diigo toolbar. I don’t usually get on too well with sidebars, you need some page real estate after all, but this one is actually useful – the first tab has a list of your latest bookmarks and the second all the Diigo comments on that webpage.

More information about the functions of Diigo can be seen on this video.

Qik

Qik is a brilliant little piece of software for smart phones (including the Nokia N95), which lets you stream or upload video from your phone directly to the web, your Qik account in fact. From there you can configure your Qik account to stream video to your Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, etc. accounts. Your video is automatically saved to your Qik account, and you can log in and manage all your videos. The service is in Alpha release currently and accounts are by invitation.

I can envisage this service having a number of educational uses. I’ve seen how undergrads are using video to create content, develop and share knowledge, and present this to fellow learners and faculty. This tends to be using miniDV camcorders to film, transferring the files in real time to their laptop, editing the video and then uploading to YouTube. However, I have seem them with camcorders plugged via USB lead to record directly into a PC. Whatever, there seems to be a requirement to cut out many of these steps and Qik sweetly provides this. There could be applications for fieldwork, interviews, and presentations. I’ve seen video of Robert Scoble at (South by South West) SXSW using Qik, he also has some example videos on his scobleizer blog.

I’ve used the functionality of the service via broadband wireless networks and it works a treat. It’s also much cheaper than using your mobile phone contract – if you are streaming video via your contract then you need an appropriate one that allows large data upload or you could be in for a big bill.

ASUS eeePC 4GB solid state memory UMPC

This Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) has the potential to make a big impact for learners. It costs about £200 for the 2GB version and £230 for the 4GB, so is pretty affordable. It’s light at about 1kg and has a nicely readable 7″ screen and a usable mini-keyboard; with a touchpad mouse that has a useful scroll facility down the right. It comes with 3 USB and one Ethernet port and an SDHC (high capacity) slot, has a discrete webcam top-centre, two speakers, and mic/headphone jacks. This is a ‘big’ bundle for the price.

The eeePC is shipped with a flavour of Linux called Xandros, which keeps the price down, though you can install Windows XP (instructions are provided in the supplied user manual) or other versions of Linux like Ubantu. However, there could be problems with using Windows XP because of the number of writes it make to the hard disk – solid state disks are succeptable to greater wear.

But with only 4GB, which translate to 1.4GB free with the OS installed there isn’t much room for installing software. However, this is the beauty of this device from my perspective. It’s aimed squarely at utilizing the potential of Web 2.0 with useful software like Skype (though you might want to upgrade the version to the available beta with video capability), icons to Google Docs, and more.

You can change settings in XP to reduce writes, but I decided to stay with Xandros.

At home on my wireless network with WPA security, the eeePC connected straight away and worked without any problem. At uni with WPA2 on Eduroam this wasn’t the case. The OS on the eeePC doesn’t have the required code to handle WPA2 so I had to find out how to install the code myself.

That’s when I found the forums on EeeUser.com the ‘Unofficial ASUS Eee PC EeePC 701 Blog Forum Wiki Community’

After a few searches I found http://wiki.eeeuser.com/wpa_default_xandros

This told me how to setup the required wpa_supplicant file, but first I needed to know how to ‘Add Additional Software Repositories‘.

Finally, I needed to write a wpa_supplicant.conf file that worked with Eduroam. Eventually I worked out that what I needed was:

ctrl_interface=var/tmp/wpa_supplicant

network={

ssid=”eduroam”

key_mgmt=WPA-EAP

proto=WPA

pairwise=TKIP

eap=PEAP

phase2=”auth=MSCHAPV2″

identity=”username”

password=”password”

}

This file was then saved as /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE

If you copy and paste these lines to create you wpa_supplicant.conf file, you need to edit the speech marks (ie delete and then put them in again) or it won’t work.

These instructions works for the 900 (tested by a colleague) as well as the 701.

The 901 onwards has a change in hardware. I’ve tried the following and it works.

You need to change the line in your /etc/network/interfaces file

from:
up cp /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.ath0

to:
up cp /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.ra0