How to organize your cluttered desktop and regain your sanity at LifeClever

Picked this up a few weeks ago.  Set it up on my Mac and have just let things come together.  So far, so good.  I’ve been keeping the desktop clean and everything is where it belongs.  Easy to find.  Now, I’m not as busy as I would be if I had a job.  I’m certain my work desktop (remembering those few short months ago) would be much busier and harder to keep clean.  As it stands, I’ll keep rolling with this and see where it leads me.

Unwired View / Replace the PC with your cellphone and Sony Ericsson Multimedia Cradle

I’ve said, for several years now, that the cellphone will eventually develop into the center of our digital life.  Once processors develop into tiny powerhouses, drives go flash based with 100 gigs or so (enough for video editing and metaverse development, something which will remain very difficulty from servers for some time to come) and wireless peripheral connectivity (bluetooth, wireless usb) develops, there will be little reason for big boxes except for servers.

Just plug your phone into a location which offers a monitor, keyboard and a few other niceties and you’re ready to go.  Include an extra processor and your phone’s OS can get a boost in a multiple processing environment.  Suddenly you are truly portable with gigs of space to work from.

While business will go to this first, education will feel the biggest boon.  Students can keep one device and move their operating environment (including special settings they may benefit from) from location to location, seemlessly.  This device is on the right path.  Now it just needs a massive monitor, maybe even one buried behind a mirror.

Access and save Zoho Office documents in Microsoft Office - Lifehacker

Well, as I posted yesterday about Zoho making moves, today Lifehacker puts out into about a new plugin which enables Word and Excel to open/save devices from/to Zoho online.  Pretty nifty.  I’ve always wanted an online space to which I could save through a network link (not on campus, but my own space) without the whole FTP setup.  This is moving in the right direction.

The question is, how many of these online office or storage repositories will follow suit (or may have and I haven’t seen them).

UPDATE: Had a faculty member stop by at the end of lunch, so I took a moment, after they left, to download and test this puppy.  I’m thinking it could be very useful for faculty/students writing as a group.  I’m wondering what the options are for versioning and check-out for individual documents.

Pretty simple.  Downloaded the plugin.  Created a Zoho account (it is free).  Had to quit Outlook so that it could install.  The plugin adds a new toolbar to Word (haven’t tested Excel yet).  I selected Settings and entered my new login info.   Selected Remember me and clicked Save.

The one non-intuitive aspect was logging into Zoho in Word.  You click the Zoho Writer dropdown and select  login.  Zoho shows a little bar and takes about 15 seconds to login (different network speeds may effect this).

I entered some text and selected Save in Zoho Writer.  A window came up requiring me to save the file locally.  I saved it to the desktop and tried again.  Got a request: This document si not available in Zoho Writer.  Do you want to add it?  I clicked Yes and up it loaded.

Now for the real test.  What does it look like?  So, I opened up Zoho and ws already logged in.  I clicked on Zoho Writer and it took about 40 seconds for the app to load.  Once it did, there was my new document in the left My Docs panel.  I clicked on the title and Zoho opened it in a new tabbed document (next to the original blank document) with all of the toolbars for working on the device.

Pretty nifty.  Don’t have time to test this with groups, but it may be worth looking into as time permits.

Goal Setting Toolkit | Success Begins Today

This little printout gets two checks: as a tickler (make certain to fill it out if nothing more than as an exercise) and as a great little GTD effort.  If you have specific goals, it makes getting there easier.

NMC Virtual Worlds

A Second Live, you attractive vixen you.  If only I had more time.  But, I get in there every so often.  And I have to commend the NMC for setting up a service.  So often, good support, even just someone to answer some newbie questions, can be so important.  So, starting a support service to help institutions grow an Second Life presence to assist with instruction (if I’m reading this correctly) is just wonderful.

Can’t wait to see what they develop over time.

Tutorom

Setting up some students with VTC accounts this morning.  Up in the right hand corner I saw a little bit of text that said VTC Network : Tutorom.  There was an arrow link after it, so I clicked to see what it could be.

Looks like VTC is launching “a free site for elearning creation and delivery.”  I signed up for the beta, which is expected to launch on March 1st.

Not a lot of content, or information, at this point.  Just five links at the bottom.  Among them is included Home: a landing page with channels of elearning; Learn: search for courses/lessons; Create: wikis, forums, web pages, links and quizzes; collaborate: project management tools to manage workflow and chat features; and admin: manage your profile, add groups and users, also a customizable personal website.

I’m looking forward to March.

David Seah : Emergent Task Planner 2007 Updates

You know, sometimes its the simple stuff that does a mind good.  A planner for the stuff you should do today.  Print a set out, write down your plans and go to work.

Download of the Day: Midnight Inbox 1.0 Preview (Mac) - Lifehacker

Nice looking bit of software.  Wish I could find something this powerful to install on my server.  So far, the wiki is fine, but most other apps are too complex or limiting in what they provide for GTD.

Kicked off a new project with two faculty today.  Both are new to blogging and will have their students multi-blogging.  And, it includes the entire range of blog support (not podcasting or vblogging, mind you) from setting up the blogs to teaching faculty and students to blog and use RSS readers to track entries.

This will also be my first time teaching faculty to use Google Reader.  I’ve mentioned it before, but not to this level.  One of the faculty has Gmail, so it makes sense to put both into Google Reader to maintain consistency so they can share ideas between each other.

Overall, I’m really looking forward to the project.  Will post when the blogs go online.

BrainMeld - Bridging The Gap Between Gaming and Education

As we prepare a further experiment with gaming in education, someone announced a new resource on the NMC list today. A quick glance shows some depth and breadth, so it may have some success. And, it always helps to have a good quote on any site:

Video games aren’t for us.
They’re here to entertain the television.
-Mel Brooks