Twitter includes a 140 character limit on each twit. Sounds like an ideal constraint to me. Challenge to students: summarise today’s lesson in one twit. Provide a copy of the blank above to each student…

Paul Constant has written a review of twitter as a series of twitter posts (via daringfireball.net). Now, what I want to get going is a short story told by 5 to 7 twitterers taking turns…

...as anyone who has looked at my twitter page will have guessed, I’m using twitter simply as a way of saying where I am each day. I’ll try a bit of the location specific writing over the holiday. Photos on flickr.

t-mobile 3G above…

3G coverage.

No brainer, if you live in Scotland, you need a wired connection. What surprised me was the fractal holes in the Birmingham conurbation area on t-mobile (my current web’n’walk modem) and the contrast with 3G, the best provider nationally.

The Register chronicles the difficult process by which these large scale maps were made public. I want a Web site I can pop a postcode in and get coverage maps down to antenna level. I want an efficient market.

I find it really quaint that I can use a modem dial script with a USB modem in a minimal linux install on a flea powered web book. AT Hayes codes in a terminal window… bosting.

Computers should be like toasters, they should just work for years and then when they stop working, you should be able to pop out and buy a new one. Toasters don’t need backups, and a major cause of problems with computers is loosing data (which may include family pictures and purchased music as well as College work).

Google’s Chrome OS looks like it might be a solution to both failing PCs and the need to back up data. It will be the second branded operating system built on top of an open source kernel and tool chain. Mac OS ‘just works’ and looks nice, has full desktop functionality, local storage and a huge range of software. By contrast (BBC report, Google) Chrome OS may not be able to run applications that require an API richer than the browser. The obvious questions that spring to mind include “Where do I keep my music/photos/videos?” and “What happens if my Internet connection fails?” and “How do I install real programs?”. Local storage with cheap online backup could be a very popular combination. The gOS operating system had direct links to Google Apps integrated into a nice desktop, but used local storage and had OpenOffice installed.

Google mention working with hardware manufacturers. My toaster PC in the photo above is the Aleutia E2, a low power fanless PC that has enough processing power to view Web pages, do e-mail, write Maths worksheets and presentations, but does not quite make it through a YouTube video. That runs Debian Squeeze, but there is a spare partition, and I’ll be trying the Chrome OS when it arrives in public beta form.

The Google blog carries an interesting post written just after the Chrome OS announcement that describes SMS based access to Google services in Uganda. The mobile phone may be a mass platform in many countries.

Added 11th July: A Daringfireball article has some ideas and links about Chrome OS. I think this article makes valid points. Disclaimer: I use Ubuntu and therefore according to Gruber I’m not a real person. Help, I’m fading away!

The English Summer is upon us and I’ve been caught in thunderstorms twice. All the classes finish soon and I’m ramping up the staff development. I’ve been thinking about how people will interact with the Internet over the next few years.

I hate to admit it, but the future is probably with small portable devices rather than Web Books. I think there may be a ‘student’ use-case (see comments on the article linked in this paragraph) where a decent screen and day long battery life make a Web book attractive, but people who are not in full time education will be sticking to an enhanced phone for mobile Web. We have enabled the mobile theme for the College Moodle, so that smart phone users can use their small screens to see lesson content and use forums.

Another factor: the laptop manufacturers are moving towards larger screens and heavier machines with higher price tags. The 7 inch Asus EeePC has now been discontinued as has the Elonex One £99 laptop. The difference in cost between some of the fancier Web books and ‘proper’ (larger, heavier) laptops is now quite small.

I’m migrating the BODMAS theme over to something that will serve both the mobile needs and look OK on larger devices (this is a work in progress!). I’m also hoping to be able to get a sim card for the tytn phone that I have been lent to use over the summer that allows mobile Internet. The aim is to publish to this Web site, upload photos (the English Summer image at the top of this article was taken on the tytn’s camera), do sound and short video clips from the phone. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll need to rethink navigation for the site theme, not just use liquid layout and plainer page designs. There is an argument for a very simple landing page for mobile devices that shows the most recent updates, and provides a link to a page with more content and search functions.

Just a way of looking at Moodle courses that Alan Staley described during a Moodle User Group meeting some time ago. I’ll be working this one up for next year’s technology supported learning course.

Blogs, Twitter and wikis are ways of communicating or providing information.

A blog is a Web page where short articles or ‘posts’ can be added so that the most recent addition appears first on the page. Many blog publishing systems allow other people to comment on the article, and some systems exist for automatically finding other blog posts that mention the current post (‘trackbacks’). In this way, ‘full hypertext’ linking is possible and debates can be carried on over several Web sites.

A wiki is a collection of Web pages that can be edited by anyone or a selected group of people. When you edit a page, you can use a special format (often CamelCase) to create the name of a new page. When you save the change to the Wiki page that you edited, you can then edit the new page and add new content. If there is a large community organised around a wiki, then as people develop new ideas and break long pages down into shorter pages, coining new page names, they will produce and define a pattern language about the topic of the Wiki. In many wiki systems, the title of a page acts as a link to a search query that will list all the pages that point to that page.

Twitter is a specific Web site and mobile phone based communication system that allows members to publish short (140 characters) messages or ‘twits’. In the US, you can receive twits from people you follow on your phone or you can visit the Twitter page for that person. You can also send ‘twits’ yourself and these appear on your Twitter page. In the UK, you can send an sms message to a special mobile number and your twit will appear on your twitter page, and your followers will see your twit on their Web page profile. However, publication to phones is only available to Vodaphone customers as yet.

Google Wave is likely to provide new and interesting ways of communicating.

“The crux of the problem lies in the assumption that any program executing on a system on the user’s behalf should have the exact same abilities and permissions as any other program executing on behalf of the same user.”
OLPC wiki entry for bitfrost

Nice page on the security model built into sugar, the operating system for the OLPC. Explains security concepts well. Via Daringfireball.

A colleague of mine wanted a forum for his students to ask questions and to ‘talk back’ and Vanilla has the right level of functionality. The big forums like phpBB are just overkill for about 30 people, and I was not looking forward to explaining the administration of a large forum to my colleague. Vanilla has simple administration, and provides ‘linear’ discussions (‘turns taking’), there is no discussion threading. It is a flat model, you have categories which contain discussions. There are no subcategories. You can make the whole forum readable by members only, so my colleagues’ students won’t be overshadowed by worries that all and sundry can read their questions or answers.

Vanilla was coded by Mark O’Sullivan who is hard at work on Vanilla 2.