Tools

02
May
2016

The right tool for the job: my first 750words.com story

160502_toolbox

I am fascinated by online tools. Tools in the proper sense, of technologies fitting the job. It never ceases to amaze me how clients often think that “anything goes” when digital tools are concerned. Everybody would agree that a carpenter needs a whole toolbox full of different hammers, drills, and screwdrivers. Yet, when discussing the digital platforms they need for often very complex collaborative networks and communities, managers often say: “but we already have a website/blog/Sharepoint/Facebook-page…” This will not do. Online collaboration takes places in very complex socio-technical ecosystems. Task-tool fit is not trivial at all. On the contrary, developing the right set of tools for the community often takes a long time of trial-and-error, tinkering, and continuous re-adjustment as and when the community evolves.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
12
Mar
2014

Happy 25th birthday, World Wide Web!

World Wide WebToday, the Web’s been around for 25 years, hip hip hurray! In this excellent interview, founder Tim Berners-Lee makes some remarks that should be particularly close to the hearts of fellow community informatics researchers and practitioners, e.g.:

– “I’ve been very satisfied with the international spirit. It’s wonderful how the Web has taken off as non-national thing. I don’t think of it as international, because that’s nations getting
together.”

– “The control thing — we’ve got big companies and big governments. Now in some countries the corporations and the governments are very hard to tell apart. I’m concerned about that.”

– “what I want to see that I haven’t seen is the Web being used to bridge cultural divides. Every day we get people falling for the temptation to be xenophobic and to throw themselves against other cultures.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Ideas, Tools, 0 comments
25
Feb
2013

My first MOOC: diary of 1 of 24,000 students following a truly “Massive Open Online Course”

130225_MOOCMassive Open Online Courses are all the rage. A truly exciting and massive one (over 24,000 students enrolled!) is the Learn Creative Learning MOOC organized by MIT Media Lab, which will run from February- May 2013 . Since MOOCs are so new, still much ground needs to be broken about what they are, what they mean, and how to organize them. Having enrolled in this course which is so close to my heart, I decided to keep a diary of observations as “an average MOOC student”. I hope they help myself and others make better sense of what this phenomenon means, what deep impact it could have on learning in a globalizing society, but also how to practically organize and “tinker” such courses to realize the vision.
… Read more...
Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
14
Jun
2012

LinkedIn Maps: art or science?

LinkedIn is a great resource for exploring professional profiles. However, when your personal social network starts to grow into the hundreds of contacts, it becomes very hard to – quite literally – still see the bigger picture. One feature that can help you visualize your network is LinkedIn Maps. It both shows the links between your connections and color-codes major clusters that are rough approximations of the various professional and personal worlds you move around in. You can zoom in and out, and select individual contacts to see which persons you know they are also connected to.

Of course, it makes for pretty art. However, the maps can also be useful. First, they give you a quick sense of the roles you play in your social world, through the colored sub-networks.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
01
Jan
2009

Yes We Can 2.0

It’s amazing what transformative power Web 2.0 services are increasingly making available to everybody at (almost) no cost. Using Animoto “The End of Slideshows” I just made a professional looking video supported by (Creative Commons)-music out of my collection of 1993 Clayoquot Sound uprising-pics for only US$ 3,- (30 sec videos are even free):

Compare this to the static slideshows “of old”.

Of course, such “fast and furious” MTV-style videos are not always the best choice, but they could play an important role in energizing, for example, youth to participate in community-building campaigns.

Happy Change Year!

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
03
Aug
2008

Tag clouds on the move

Yesterday, I discussed Wordle. Today, I came across a related tool, TagCrowd:

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

  • as topic summaries for speeches and written works
  • for visual analysis of survey data
  • as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
  • for data mining a text corpus
  • for helping writers and students reflect on their work
  • as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
  • as resumes in a single glance
  • as visual poetry

Interestingly, both tools seem to indicate the growing realization that tag clouds have many more uses than their original, narrow application for indicating blog topic frequencies.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
02
Aug
2008

Word (art) clouds

A friend pointed out Wordle to me, which “is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

I tried it out with the text on the CommunitySense home page:

Apart from truly being a piece of art and aesthetically pleasing, such “tag clouds ++” should have real business applications. It would be interesting to see how, say, a 100 page report would look like and whether its visualization could help in quickly grasping some of its essential meaning.

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
02
Aug
2008

Installing MediaWiki

Wikis are great not only to co-author documents, but also to implement private or public knowledge bases.  For CommunitySense, I wanted to install a number of wikis. Two issues arose: which wiki and to have it hosted somewhere else or host it myself?

The quest for the right wiki took me quite a while. A good starting point for comparing the features of the many wikis around is the WikiMatrix.  I tried quite a few of the wikis listed, but none of them served all the purposes I intend to use the range of wikis for (co-authoring, file management, personal information management, etc).  One option would have been to use different wikis for different purposes, but the learning curves and maddening variations in syntax caused me to make the principled decision to focus on one wiki only and master it well. … Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
11
Apr
2008

Digital storytelling tools

I am currently attending an interesting session at the E-Campaigning Forum on digital storytelling. Stories are very powerful ways of motivating people to take action, to reflect on the implications of policies, to make abstract concepts concrete and so on.

In this age of Web 2.0 and user-created multimedia content, the old linear textual technologies for supporting storytelling like discussion forums are being complemented by a multitude of innovtive tools supporting new forms of content, interactivity and user involvement. Here are some telling examples of this new wave of tools. They still need to find their niche in the Internet landscape, but it is already becoming very clear that they provide powerful incentives for people to become more (inter)active and engaged.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Conferences, Tools, 0 comments
04
Apr
2008

Semi-mobile technology

Aldo being semi-mobileMobile technology is great, but it’s very hard to find _the_ right mobile tool. I now have two mobile phones, an HP Ipaq PDA, my Asus EEE 7″ subnotebook, a Dell X200 12.1″ (sub)notebook, an Acer Aspire 3610 15.4 ” notebook, and counting. Frankly, this is getting ridiculous. None of these tools suits even close to all my needs, and by now I would need a suitcase to lug them all around!

Of course, I could always try to choose one of these tools, and stick to it. Well, this is what happens then: here I am, using Skype on my Asus to call my good friend Mark Aakhus in the US via the Tilburg University wifi campus network. It works, but somehow it doesn’t quite seem the optimal mobile solution 🙂

Funnily enough, Mark who just happened to be online when I demonstrated my Asus, co-edited this book: Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments