Nomadic desktops: What? How? Why?
Owen James
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
Professional blog
Class blogs
This presentation focuses on how to develop, use, and apply a nomadic desktop (http://okoj.suprglu.com/) to daily teacher tasks and to ongoing, personal professional development anywhere the teacher is online.
View the presentation (HTML; will open in a new window).
April 6th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Great idea! I’m really interested in the online desktops, they’ve got a lot of possiblities and there seems to be a new one every week. As a librarian, I can see a lot of potential for subject guides, and for working with faculty to set up RSS feeds for searches from library databases.
You can also be truly nomadic if you install Portable Firefox on a USB drive, so you can work even if the computer doesn’t have Firefox.
I make sure to link back to you next week when I talk about more of these tools! I didn’t include the online desktops, mostly because I haven’t found one that really works for me yet.
April 6th, 2006 at 11:07 am
BTW, the link to the “Professional Blog” is going to one of the class blogs!
April 6th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Netvibes and other online desktops
Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) is one of a growing number of Online Desktops. These services are meant to aggregate as much of your online life as possible onto one private page. You can link (and sometimes view) your email, create notes, to do li…
April 6th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
I thoughouly enjoyed your presentation!
I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now and the name “nomadic desktop” is beautifully descriptive. I teach high school math. All my classes have blogs where students collectively author “the textbook” for the course. We also aggregate links to supplemental material from across the web in a side bar box using the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool and I’m planing on incorporating the use of a wiki into the suite of tools the class makes use of.
In a few weeks we begin a spreadsheet intensive uint where I had planned to have them use the thinkfree office suite of tools and writely for their word processing needs. But I think that iRows might operate more smoothly. Thanks for the tip.
I notice your reference to the blummy bookmarklet tool. In what ways do you use it to support your teaching? How do you orchestrate your students use of that tool?
Thanks again for a wonderful presentation!
April 6th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
I would like to add my accolades, I really enjoyed the presentation Owen. Our desktops my never be the same again. I think it speaks to the power of RSS and Ajax, and the two in combination.
April 6th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
I agree with Darren on the ‘nomadic desktop’ description. Sounds so much better than ’start page’. This past semester, I have introduced my students to start pages, in our case, Protopage. It really simplifies a number of things in the my classroom as students spend far less time getting to the resources they require. And it is interesting to see how quickly students have adapted to ’saving things’ to their own nomadic desktop. Thanks for an excellent presentation.
April 6th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Dear Rebecca,
Your mention of Firefox Portable as a way to extend accessibility is particularly useful for anyone who works across any number of different machines on a daily basis- I am thinking students in particular. The portable version also appears to fully support extensions which addvery useful functionality to the example described here. You have convinced me to finally do something about student take up Firefox Portable, thank you!
I have also tried a few of the other startpages you mention at your Online Research Toolkit and I think it is the simplicity of the Suprglu/Firefox solution that has encourages me to continue devleloping it- now I cannot quite imagine working without it. Thank you kindly for the link back.
An aside- your site theme is very eye catching!
April 6th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Hi Darren,
Thank you for your thank you!
iRows does seem to work reliably- you may like to check out the beta release of Zoho sheets (http://zohosheet.com/open.do?fname=329). If you are familiar, you may already know Zoho is developing a very nice suite of online services, with quite friendly usage arrangements.
My original interest in Blummy was simply to remove the clutter from the bookmarks toolbar. Now, I value it much more as a teaching tool to support three services that Stephen Downes pointed out in his blog a) Whois- Gives you information about the owner of the domain of the current site b) linked Sites- Shows all linked Sites on new Site (also resized) c) who’s linking?- Links to current page. I do recommend trying these out, as together and seperately these services provide information critical to students’ evaluations of web sources.
Please let us know when you may publish your class site integrating the services you’ve mentioned
April 7th, 2006 at 12:30 am
Owen, you’ve just changed the way I’ll be teaching my students to select bookmarks. Thank you.
I’ve been teaching with blogs for over a year now. My first class blog was for a grade 12 precalculus class here: http://pc40s.blogspot.com
The way I use blogs in the classroom has undergone dramtic growth. I blogged about here and it continues to morph into new and interesting applications.
These are the three class blogs I ran last semester:
Grade 10 precalculus: http://pc20s.blogspot.com
Grade 11 precalculus: http://pc30s.blogspot.com
AP Calculus AB: http://apcalc.blogspot.com
That last one is a full year course and the blog is still running. This semester I’ve also added language translation tools to all my blogs (the little flags at the bottom of each post) as our school is one of, of not the, most multicultural schools in the province of Manitoba. Over 50 languages are collectively spoken by the students in my school.
The new blogs added this semester are:
High School Calculus: http://cal45s.blogspot.com
Grade 12 Applied math: http://am40s.blogspot.com
Grade 12 precalculus: http://pc4sw06.blogspot.com
The students are using del.icio.us much more now as I’ve incorporated their del.icio.us use into my assessment. You suggestions for blummy will come in handy as I encouage them to vet the sites they bookmark carefully.
Thanks for the link to Zoho — more to explore.
April 7th, 2006 at 7:46 am
Live from HigherEdBlogCon: Unchain your work from a single computer with nomadic desktops
One of the aspects of Web 2.0 I find the most interesting is the possibility to transfer my computerized life from a single machine to the Web, so it can be accessed from anywhere - at home, at work or on the road.
As most of you probably know, there…
April 7th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Owen,
Thank you for the kind remarks, and stay tuned next week.
I liked SuperGlu for the ability to aggregate so much in the original version, but didn’t really use it because I needed more functionality than just aggregating feeds. It looks like they’ve expanded the features–now I need to go back and look again and see how it compares. I’ve used Groowy (the Flash is slow for me), and Netvibes, and I had a ProtoPage set up but haven’t been back to update it since the new features came out. I’ve got demo pages set up all over the place! It’s hard to choose, but impossible to keep up with more than a couple.
April 9th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Darren, Wow, I have some exploring to do, what a rich tableau of class work! Thank you for the opportunity to learn from what you are doing- I hope I may get back in touch once the flurry of the new semester which starts tomorrow settles.
April 12th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Microsoft’s new Academic Search (like Google Scholar) will add searches to their online desktop in one click. Interesting, though Windows Live is not as fully featured yet as many of the other desktops mentioned so far. There are rumors that they will integrate with Office Live, the web version of MS Office that is supposed to be coming out.
Academic Search
Windows Live
April 13th, 2006 at 9:38 am
Good stuff. I’ve always been a Firefox fan and user, but I did not get around to installing extensions until I read this presentation. I really do have to do a quick plug for gmail manager extension. It keeps you updated on multiple gmail accounts. Since we’re discussing “nomadic desktops,” I assume that this “desktop” could be on your personal computer, work computer, lab computer, etc, so it is really, REALLY nice being able to stay “signed in” to my personal gmail and work gmail accounts simultaneously.
To be honest, I have tried out superglu and remained unimpressed; however, Firefox never ceases to impress me.