Information in the Personal Cloud (Part 2)

There are a number of plug computing devices on the market, some specifically do this kind of function commercially. These small form factor devices are Linux server computers running on ARM processor architecture, and consequently only draw between 4W and 13W of power. They have an Ethernet socket and from 1 to 4 USB sockets. Once you couple an external USB HDD and plug into an Ethernet socket you have a Network-attached storage (NAS). This can then provide secure cloud backup, remote access and collaboration services, and allow sharing and synchronize of files on your local network.

The options include:

• Pogoplug v2 Pink
• Tonido Plug
• Seagate Dockstar (based on Pogoplug software)
• Iomega iConnect WDS
• CTERA CloudPlug

I’ve gone out and got a Pogoplug v2 cos it was the easiest and cheapest route for me at the time. I coupled a Western Digital 1TB HDD to it and plugged it into an ethernet socket. The setup was relatively straight forward, and didn’t take very long at all.

There are three options for access with the Pogoplug:

1. Web access via the security  https://my.pogoplug.com login
2. Download a small desktop client for Windows, Mac OS or Linux
3. Install a mobile app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Palm.

You can manage, access, upload and download content from anywhere. You can view your images, even as a slideshow, and stream video (you need to have the videos transcoded first or you’ll only see the first 10 sec by default).

Here’s a video of me streaming a video from the external HDD via Pogoplug simultaneously to a laptop and an Android mobile:

You can backup and synch folder.

You can share your content with other people by allowing access to specific folders and inviting them using the email invite option. Alternatively you can open the content of a folder completely and have a URL allocated. From your logged in access side it might look something like:

Then from the open web side using the supplied URL you’d see:

(This folder isn’t open any longer, so the URL doesn’t work.)

By default security isn’t set, but you can optionally enable SSL, though this will slow down access.

I must admit that for about the first three days following setup I did experience some difficulties. Uploading files wasn’t working successfully; they would hang or bomb out. I resorted to plugging the HDD directly into my PCs to transfer files across. Then accessing these files was a little slow via the Pogoplug interface. However, following this initial period, things have gone much more smoothly.

Interestingly, the Seagate Dockstar also uses the Pogoplug service.

If you have any worries about the longevity of Pogoplug, they have said that if the company does dissolve then the code will be made available via SourceForge so you’d be able to continue using your Pogoplug.

I think the Tonido Plug runs all open source so that might be an area to consider further.

I intent to write another part in this Personal Cloud series of posts soon.

Additional information:

1. Tonido – Run your own personal cloud – http://www.tonido.com/
2. Tonidoplug – TonidoPlug is a tiny, low-power, low-cost personal home server and NAS device powered by Tonido software that allows you to access your files, music and media from anywhere for just $99 – http://www.tonidoplug.com/
3. Pogoplug – http://www.pogoplug.com/home-en.html?
4. Seagate Dockstar – http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/network_storage/freeagent_dockstar/
5. Comparison of hardware specs http://plugapps.com/index.php5?title=Portal:Hardware

British Library Sound Map – Sheffield

The British Library has a project just started where the general public can record short soundscapes to be kept and archived for posterity. The pilot phase is happening right in the gorgeous city of Sheffield.

There was an article about it on BBC Radio 4′s World Tonight yesterday (listen via iPlayer from 39min42sec to 44mins) plus an article in the Sheffield Telegraph.

I spent my lunchtime recording some soundscapes in town, geo tagging and uploading them. By the time I got back to my desk they had already made it onto the British Library Sound Map.

Here’s my tweet about it. Follow the #uksm on Twitter.

Application of this concept has some great potential for education. It also shows what a multi-tool the smart phone has become.

So if you want to be a little part of history, get recording sounds to Audioboo. More details are on my previous blog post about Audioboo.

Quizlet ™ Flashcard based memory testing

Quizlet™ is a rather good flashcard based learning tools.

You can create your own set of flashcards or use the large library created by others and made public.

The flashcards allow you to learn subject terms in a number of ways, and test yourself or your students also in a number of ways, including quiz questions and a couple of game based tests.

I personally particularly enjoyed the scatter game, where you have to drag terms onto their definitions, or vice versa, against the clock. You can then repeat the game and try to beat your best time.

This demo screencast explains Quizlet™ nicely.

Existing flashcards you can use to learn with are categorized into:

• Arts & Literature
  • Literature
  • Authors
  • Books
  • Music
  • Visual Arts
  • Performing Arts
  • Others
• Languages & Vocabulary
  • Parts of Speech
  • English and European Languages
  • Asian & Pacific Languages
  • Chinese Languages
  • Japanese Languages
  • Indian Languages
  • Middle Eastern Languages
  • Slavic Languages
  • Others
• Maths & Science
  • Chemistry
  • Earth Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Health Sciences
  • Life Sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Physics
• History & Geography
  • Anthropology
  • Civics
  • History
  • Religion
  • Countries
  • Regions
  • Cities
• Standardized Tests
• Professional & Careers
  • Business & Financial
  • Computers & Engineering
  • Healthcare & Medicine
  • Law
  • Others

Digital Storytelling – Bubblr

I’ve started to become interested in digital storytelling. So when I found Bubblr by Pimpampum recently I was very interested at the possibilities. Bubblr is a comic strip based services that uses the Flickr API to allow you to search for and pull in Creative Commons licensed images to tell a story. The interface is pretty intuitive; do a search via the text box, choose images you like from the returned results and drag them onto the strip. Add an additional image by simply dragging another and dropping it to the right of the last image, and so on. (You can also add them before the last image by clicking the appropriate option.)

Once your strip is in place, you can add comic strip like speech bubbles, thought bubbles and narrative bubbles. When you’re happy, you can publish your strip to the archive. You just then need to put a title to your composition and add your name. (There’s an interesting warning – your boss might see your composition so be careful.)

Writing this post, I have realised some similarities between Bubblr and Vuvox Collage. So Bubblr not only has a digital storytelling use, but could be a presentation tool as well.

I’ve quickly created a Bubblr strip, Shots of Sheffield UK by Markuos.

There’s an archive to look through other people’s creations using a useful search facility.

Block Posters

I was immediately impressed with Block Posters.

You can take any of your images and then decide how you’d like it sliced up. Download the pdf file and each of these slices can now be printed out and put together to create a great big poster.

This can be used to create artworks around your home, blow ups of your favourite photos at a fraction of the price, etc. Also, it can be used in the classroom for displaying material to students, or by students to display their ideas and emphasis their points. Extending that idea, when university students have to produce posters this could be an alternative to expensive production via professional printers; I’m all for reducing the cost of education. But for an alternative approach remember Glogster.

Infographics via Spectives

I’ve been looking at infographics; graphic representations of statistical information. I recently came across one of the tools on Smashing Magazine titled Data Visualization and Infographics Resources. Here there’s a list of links to some great infographics sites.

Then today I found Spectives.

What Spectives does is create visual galleries aggregated from other websites of your deciding. Once registered it is relatively simple to create a ‘collection’, adding additional feeds. Note: to add the feed you simply paste in the required site URL and Spectives identifies the feed. If there are multiple available feeds on a page then you are offer the alternatives and just click on the one you want to use; I tend to choose the RSS 2.0 and that always seem to work fine.

I like the way Spectives works, and the way it displays the information. Hover over an image and if there is associated text it is displayed. Clicking on the image loads up the appropriate page. It’s an interesting way of finding information. It’s a nice way for those who tap into visual cues, (I know that isn’t for everyone). Then you can squirt out the feed of your aggregated collection using the RSS link on the right of your page.

Infographics are by definition very visual. What a perfect subject for a Spectives collection. So I thought I’d combine the two and use some of the links from the Data Visualization and Infographics Resources list and put them into the Spectives feeds to create an ‘infographics images’ collection.

Diigo link: My infographic bookmarks

Follow that conference – Twitterfall – following Twitter with hashtags #

Hashtags are commonly used within Twitter tweets when a comment relates to a specific subject that other people might want to follow or participate in the discussion. It is often used at conferences; to follow the conference generally, or particular sessions within the conference. This practice allows people outside the actual ‘physical’ location of the conference to participart in some way with the delegates and sometimes the presenters, especially if the tweets are projected real time within the session, or questions from those using Twitter are being taken by the speaker.

Perhaps the best know service to allow this to take place is called Twitterfall.

A quick rundown of Twitterfall is presented in this video:

Flat Structures vs. hierarchy via XtraNormal – Text to Video

I’ve had the text of a script produced for some weeks (or months) about flat structures versus folder hierarchies. I’ve been wanting to put it up as a video, but haven’t had the time to produce it. Then, recently, a colleague Paul Wigfield told me about a text-to-video service he’d come across called Xtranormal. I was interested in the idea and wanted to give it a try. The text for my video came to hand and I pasted it in.

Xtranormal is very easy to use. You just drag the icons onto the script to change camera angle, place pauses, change expressions of your chosen character, or make the character move. I also decided on an English Male voice. A 3D movie is the end product.

The rendering can take a little while, and you need to register to save and publish your final video. That done and you’re supplied with a URL and embed code. Also, put in your YouTube account details to enable a one click upload to YouTube. (My first video is just processing in YouTube right now.)

The text of my script:

Flat structure vs folders

Tying in with my tagging video, I’ll now present the argument for adopting a flat structure approach as opposed to nested folders within uSpace. To illustrate this, I’ll be drawing on examples from Clay Shirkey and Michael Wesch.

Clay is an author of and speaker on social and economic effects of internet technologies.

Michael is a lecturer in anthropology investigating the impact of new media on culture and society. He lectures about YouTube and has made several influential videos available from there. He was announced US professor of the year 2008 last November, and has been nicknamed The Explainer.

When considering how to store and categorize information many people immediately think of using a structure of folders to compartmentalize the information. However, information specialists are concluding that there are better ways of doing this, and that we’re locked into old, outdated ways that are a poor fit for the electronic world of today. If we just consider for a few seconds some of the terminology we are using; we have “files” that we put into “folders” on our “desktop“, these hark back to how we dealt with paper.

Perhaps the simplest way of demonstrating this point is by considering your own bookmarks or favorites in a web browser. You bookmark stuff until your list gets too long, then you start categorizing into folders, but does this thing go in this folder or that folder, it can’t be both. Now you have a tidy set of folders. You start bookmarking new stuff and end up with a list of links that aren’t in folders again. Eventually you think I’ll put these in my folders. But what do those folders mean, and where does this thing go? Inevitably things get stuffed into inappropriate folders never to be found or used again. Information locked away. Then along came social bookmarking and freed us from this inappropriate system of saving our links; but that’s a different story for a different video.

So how we should categorize information on the web is by using a radical break from traditional approaches, rather than an extension of them.

People are beginning to realise that tagging offers a better way than pre-categorizing information into folders, as tagging metaphorically allows the information to be located in multiple places, which using folders does not. It’s only recently, in the passed 2 or 3 years, that this has started to become clear. This is the way Google Mail and Google Docs allow you to categorize things so they effectively ‘reside in multiple places’ at the same time.

Because of the explosion of available information on the web it’s more difficult to locate the information of interest to you, and for others to access the information you provide. You don’t want to restrict access to your information, you want to open access out. I’m still not sure enough people are currently getting this concept, even though Google Search has shown us that we don’t need categories or hierarchies; after all most research now starts with a search. So by predefining that information sits in one place, a pre-created folder, and using a categorization system that may not be appropriate for our potential information consumers we’re actually restricting access. Indeed, by leaving that information “out in the open”, giving it keywords by tagging it, and letting other people tag it, you allow more access to that information. This is what people who are handling lots of digital information are concluding. And this is the way that many web2.0 services are designed to operate. Also adopting this approach means that the consumer can group and categorize information in a way that makes sense to them, by using tag groups for example. They can pull out streams of information tagged in a specific way, so if they were interested in “supernovae” for example they could have anything with related tags delivered straight to them as soon as it is published.

So a flat structure with appropriate tagging is a more organic way of organizing information that presents the content consumer with more control to access and manage that information.

Integrated Presentation

So you’re doing a presentation and you think that it’d be useful to make the content available afterwards. Well you can put the slides online. Job done. But does that give attendees at the presentation enough? What about people who come upon it in the future?

Well we’ve got technology available now that allows us to record more. (In fact we’ve had that capability for a long time; pre-digital and pre-web, it was just harder to do for most people.) But now it’s easy to do. Surely having your dialogue will make the content of that presentation a whole lot more useful, immediately and into the future. Therefore when you get up to speak record it with some kind of digital recorder; be that an mp3 player with a mic, a phone, an ipod, whatever gives a decent quality recording. Now you can tie the two together. The easiest way is at Slideshare. There you can host your slides and add your mp3 file (with position markers) to re-marry the slides with the audio commentary.

But we can go further. Set up a video camcorder somewhere nearby or have a colleague in the audience with one. By the end you’ve got a video record of the presentation. Now you can put that up on a video hosting site, YouTube being the best known, but there are others which might suit your needs better. That’s okay as it goes, but what about the slides. We’ll there are free online facilities that enable you to put the video and slides together, a good example being VCASMO.

Your video plays alongside your slides, which is rather useful for a demonstration.

Of course, there are other presentation alternatives, some of which I’ve previously written about here. And another one I need to do some work on being Prezi.

The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas

Just found this video example of using Twitter for backchanel in class. It ties into one of my detailed posts on Never Mind the Pedagogy.

more about “Kesmit-ing: The Twitter Experiment – …“, posted with vodpod