Web 2.0 Applications

This is where various experiments in Web 2.0 will call their home.
Jhon's Cinephilia Glog
Jhon's De.li.ci.ous Account I've used delicious before, though I ended up switching to other services, and after a while I just stopped using this sort of thing all together. From the bit that I used it again, it reminded me why I didn't like the service: the layout made it hard for me to come back to my original home page. Also: most of the things that interest me I already know about, and anything else I probably just look at reddit or twitter anyway.
Google Docs I created this document a while ago. I just uploaded it to Google Docs/Drive for the first time. I took a chance to remove some stuff that was outdated. Basically, this is a list of all the movies I have in my possession and could reasonably watch at any one second. I have them organized by director, decade and running time. It makes it easy to decide what to watch sometimes. I've used google docs/drive for quite a while. It's a good storage facility. I've also used it to collaborate with other people on projects (simultaneous editing and whatnot). It's a very handy tool that could totally be used at the professional level at the school where I work. Sadly, it probably won't be. Too complicated for some people.

Podcasts
 
I theoretically like podcasts, though they take far too much time out of my schedule for me to really get into them. I do think they're worthwhile and interesting and useful in the long run. I listen to a lot of soccer ones while driving. I also think a lot of comedy ones are great.

As I did some research on this, it became apparent that it was actually pretty easy to produce a podcast. I downloaded the program Audacity, hooked up my microphone and simply hit record. I then read something I already had prepared, and a podcast was created. Pretty great, huh?

The one problem I would come across here is that a lot of education (the stuff we teach) has a pretty crucial visual component. So unless I also prepared a visual presentation for the podcast, I don't think it'd be worth it.

Here is the link to the podcast I made.

Wiki

I created a wiki, though once again, since it's just to show that I can actually use the material, the subject matter is completely unrelated to cinema. The wiki is here.

The premise is this. I created a fake film festival and made up a bunch of films that could potentially be in that festival. It was pretty random. I just included a ton of movies I liked. I then proceeded to make links for some of the directors of those films, and included fake filmographies on the linked pages. It's a pretty weird way, I realize, to show mastery of the concepts behind the wiki, but I have to keep it interesting for myself, I suppose.

However, the wiki idea is a great one. I'm already imagining students being able to edit documents on the fly, sharing links and information sources with each other, annotating and commenting on the work that their partners are doing. It's definitely a great resource. Also: the edit, save and link aspects of it are fairly simple and easy to grasp. I think anyone could do this.

Google Reader

Although Google will discontinue Google Reader in a few months, it's been for a long time the best RSS reader that I know of.

I've used Google Readers for many years as a way to keep up with blogs and websites that interested me. As I was searching for stuff today, I tried to look up education blogs and websites and then added some to my feed. Reader then archived all their entries and I was able to go back and read a backlog of really interesting content.

I've mostly used Google Reader for movie blogs and such, but today I made the effort to try and organize it into different sections. So I now have it organized by music, movies and education and other assorted tags. It's a pretty easy to use service, and another really interesting tool for the educator.