A Few of My Favorite (Digital) Things

As a little Christmas present - I offer a few of my favorite digital things for 2013. I chose these things because they represent an interesting approach to digital literacies and composing for the brave new digital world in which we live. Or maybe just because I thought they were cool. Anyway - enjoy!

• The best new interactive web thingy is Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" multi-channel music video. Oh, yeah they did that - and it's pretty cool. It's the coolest provocation to digital creativity since Arcade Fire's interactive "Wilderness Downtown," (which I still use in my intro to Digital Literacies class.)
• My favorite (though sometimes frustrating) socially-connected app is WAZE. You probably heard about it this year when Google bought the app from its developer for about a billion dollars. It's like Google Maps meets Twitter - a free navigation app that allows users (er, uh, their passengers,) to share info with other travelers such as traffic jams, accidents, weather, and, ahem - location of police. (Admittedly, I started using this last year I think.)
• For me, and I suspect millions of others, TripAdvisor has stolen time and attention from my other travel and dining apps like Yelp and UrbanSpoon. It's desktop website and smartphone apps work well together to provide friendly, useful and comprehensive collection of user-reviews on dining spots, hotels, attractions, etc.
• Did you know you can use video backgrounds for PowerPoint? I just started using this really cool feature this year. Formerly, you'd have to shell out big bucks to get this effect - or use hinky 3rd-party apps that never failed to, uh... fail.
• And, though it is hardware, I just gotta say - I love the Jambox by Jawbone. I use it around the house for the worlds most portable best music, but its easy-synching with my smartphone and laptop means I can have awesome sound for any presentation, regardless of the available equipment at the venue.

What will 2014 bring? I don't know - but I figure that, whatever it is, it will be delivered by my Amazon Prime drone.

ThingLink: Connecting Internet Materials Visually!

Below is a photo of me.
Not a particularly flattering photo.
Not a particularly interesting photo.
Not a particularly useful photo.

But... with a little application called ThingLink, it can become a gateway to a plethora of resources! For example - look at the photo and see the difference an app can make. Notice how clicking on the 35mm camera takes you to a world of legal-use, free photography you can utilize in your classes? See how clicking on the video camera links you to digital video clips you can incorporate in your video editing projects? Observe how clicking on the headphones leads you to lots of usable audio, including music, sound effects, etc.? (Even clicking on the goofy-looking guy will reveal his website.) And clicking the bulletin board will take you to the program that makes this visual connectivity possible: ThingLink!




Try out this free app to spice up your blog or enhance your web site with a fresh new way to link students to web materials visually. You can find it at https://www.thinglink.com/

Ain't Nobody Got Time For That!

Some people call me tech-savvy. Some call me digitally-connected. (No one calls me Maurice.)

But some make the mistake that I engage in technology for technology's sake. I don't. I can't. As the eminent 21st-century philosopher, Sweet Brown says, "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

I do invest time in learning about technology, true. And not all technology I research will be useful to me, also true. But the technologies I consistently engage are those which bear some usefulness to me - aside from being cool gadgetry. (Even if sometimes the purpose is entertainment.)

For example, blogs like this one. I don't blog just to be blogging. I blog to record ideas for teaching or research to which I can return later. I blog to share ideas with my colleagues. I blog to provide resources for students' projects and assignments. In fact, the main audience for my blogging is me. I don't have the illusion that millions of people are waiting to see what I might write. (And if I had such and illusion, I could just look at the blogger stats and be disabused of such notions.) But if I DO become famous for my blog, then so be it.

So, let me share a few ways I use technology for my own benefit - and to share ideas with others. These are not all the tech tools I use, but a sample to show that your tech usage can actually be a time-saver rather than a time waster.

First, I use Delicious to archive all my bookmarks. I categorize my bookmarks with "tags" so I can retrieve internet resources easily for my own research, or to share with students or colleagues. For example, if my students ask where they can find "legal use" images for their presentations, I just send them a link to the Delicious Links I tagged "Images for Multimodal Composition" and voila! they have access to thousands upon thousands of copyright-free images! Do you have an unruly set of bookmarks? Try Delicious.com.

Second, I use ScoopIt! to help me handle all the articles that I have read, and need to read again - or use in class or research. Someone recently asked me how I knew about a certain digital tool, and I said, "Well, I read a lot." And I try - but reading in my field can be overwhelming - so i use ScoopIt! to help me handle all the articles from magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc. I save articles related to Digital technology in a "topic" category called "From Chalkboards to Smartphones." Then, all those articles are in one place for me when I want to return to them for research. Maybe this tool will be helpful to you as well.


Lastly, I let an "aggregation app" called Pulse organize my news for me so I can quickly skim articles so I can stay current in various topics (like news, tech, sports, travel, etc.) from selected publications (like the NY Times, Smithsonian , The Atlantic, ESPN, WIRED, CNET, Gizmodo, Boing boing, or the Food Network.)  And, because I have the app on my phone, I can skim the day's news while having a cup of coffee or eating lunch. Here's what my Pulse feed - for tech sources I selected - looks like on my desktop: