Emerging Technologies Consulting

Once again a rather random assortment of applications and we’re sticking with the number theme, a theme that was popular among Web 2.0 projects a couple of years ago.

• 16Bugs is a bug tracking site.  Believe it or not, just the other day, my husband asked me if I knew of a bug-tracking site that didn’t require software installation.  Well, I do now.  This site allows you to set up a project or company with multiple projects and track the progress.  Although it has some of the qualities of a project management site, it’s geared specifically toward software development and coding.  Also, the site follows the Web 2.0 style of using bright colors and large, friendly icons.  It’s pleasing to look at, as well as practical, a big plus in my mind.  In fact, their motto is “We make bugs pretty.”  To get the most use out of it will cost you, however.  There is a free version, but you can get almost all the features for just $8/month, very reasonable.  Obviously, the use of this in education would be primarily for computer science or for other on-site programmers.
• 1Time is project management/billing software.  I’m sure we’ll be running into more of these as there’s a huge demand for finding ways to track employee and project time.  Like 14dayz that I reviewed on Friday, the benefit of this software is to centralize the management of project and employee time.  It touts the benefit of reducing unbilled time.  They offer several different reports and the ability for clients to see how much time has been put into their project.  There is a free option, but to get the most out of it, you’ll need to pay up.  Like 16Bugs, the cost is on a per month basis and for US buyers, depends on the Euro exchange rate, but starts around $18/month.  Again, this might be useful in some way on the administrative side, but probably not for academic purposes.
• The final application is 22Books.  The name of the site comes from the number of books by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which makes the site endearing already.  It’s a simple site compared to something like Library Thing, the go-to site for online book collecting and sharing.  All you do is make a list of books and give it a title, kind of like Listmania on Amazon. But I did see a school that was using it to list new books in the library.  Lists can be embedded in web sites or linked to directly.  Although the lists show who created them, you can’t click on the user and see other lists they created or anything else about them.  One of the tenets of social software is connecting people and this site doesn’t appear to have any way to do that.  However, this might be a simple way to create a reading list and embed it in a web site.

I’ll continue looking at sites tomorrow and on Friday, I promise a roundup of all the sites, with some picks of sites that I think are keepers.

I managed to look at three social software sites/applications this morning.  As I suspected, some of the sites are just not that useful or are defunct.  Of the sites that I looked at, at least one seems like it would be useful, but not for education.  The other two inspired some ideas for assignments using social media, proving that even not so useful sites can be inspiring.  Here’s the lowdown:

1. The first site I looked at was 1000 Words, a site where users can post pictures along with 1000 word essay about the significance of the picture.  There are some interesting photos there and some of the essays are quite moving.  I read one about the death of a son that was quite poignant.  Nothing has been posted to the site since December of 2008 so I think it’s safe to say it’s essentially defunct, but the idea behind the site is really interesting.  I could definitely imagine an assignment where students are required to take a photograph (or use an older photo) and then write a corresponding essay, create a story around that.  If the site is still around over the years, it would certainly serve as a good model.
2. Next up is 12 Seconds, a video sharing site for videos that are, you guessed it, 12 seconds long.  A perusal of some of the videos, however, leads me to the idea that this is where most of the bad stuff on the Internet goes to die.  12 seconds isn’t a lot of time and unfortunately, most people don’t quite know what to do with that constraint.  Again, constraining students to 12 seconds of video might make an interesting assignment, but please have them do some editing first.
3. Finally, there’s 14 Days, a time-tracking/project management site.  This site looks quite useful for tracking the amount of time spent on a project and by multiple individuals.  There’s even a real-time timer so that as you start working on something, say a section of programming, you can see automatically how much time you’ve spent.  No more guess work!  The project manager can see all time spent on a project by several different people and doesn’t have to manually calculate anything.  The site offers both free and paid versions of the product, depending on the number of projects you need to manage.  It looks like a really slick application, but except at the administrative level, it has very little use in education.

Three down, 1997 to go!

There are so many social software applications out there, it’s almost impossible to keep up.  Even me, social software guru that I call myself, have trouble keeping up with what’s out there.  Worse, it’s hard to tell what will be useful, what will stick around for the long haul, and especially, what might be effectively leveraged for either teaching or research.  Many of these applications are built not with education but business in mind.  So, I’m officially challenging myself to try out as many applications as possible and review them here.  I’m going to start with Emily Chang’s list at Ehub, which is huge.  There are, I believe, over 2000 items on that list.  Let’s see, 3 months of summer, that’s roughly 90 days, um, yeah, not going to get through them all.  I’m counting on a few being gone, a few being obviously not useful, too cumbersome to get going with, etc.  If there’s something you’ve been wanting to try, let me know, and I’ll try it out.  Or something you are using that you love and I’m not using it, let me know that too and I’ll try it out myself.

All this testing is in an effort to build up a good toolbox for creating a personal learning network/environment and for helping faculty do so as well.  More on that soon!

This is the first-ever episode of my weekly podcast.  Today’s episode covers iPhone applications that help you stay in touch and stay productive while on the road.

The applications covered are:

BlogPress

Mobile Fotos

iResolve

I will also talk about other ways I use my phone to keep organized.

 

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