Digital Passports

Yikes!  In all the excitement of the National Institute in Silver Spring, and NECC approaching quickly, I almost completely forgot about the first DEN SkypeCast tonight! 

At 8:00PM CST, I will be opening up a SkypeCast for DEN members to chat.  Since this is the first one, a primary topic will be what sorts of things DEN members might like to have future chats about.  But with the National Institute going on and NECC coming next week, I’m sure some chat will naturally gravitate to those areas as well.  However, nothing is set in stone so if you have something on your mind, let me know and we’ll open it up to everyone.

I know this is pretty last minute, but I hope to see some of you online!

Click here to join at the correct time.

Tomorrow I’ll be joining the folks out in Silver Spring to share with them Second Life and some of my favorite ways to integrate Web 2.0 into unitedstreaming. Among the sites/widgets I intend to share are:

• Swivel
• YouTube
• SlideShare
• MindMeister
• Google Maps

Any favorites to add to the list? In particular, I’m looking for tasty educational sites that you can embed into other pages. If any of you have a chat box creator, I could really use a new one of those, because ChatCreator.com seems to be gone now.

Got a tip for me?

This morning during Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC, Apple officially introduced Safari 3 for Windows.  I’m pretty much married to Firefox at this point, but I can’t resist trying out a new browser so I gave it a download. 

Right off the bat, it got on my nerves.  When you first run it, it’s SUPPOSED to ask you if you want to import in your bookmarks.  While most of my bookmarks are in del.icio.us, I do have a few important ones in my browser bar which I did want to import.  Unfortunately I got the snub from Safari and it never even asked.  So I tried the "Import Bookmarks" menu item, and it asked me to browse to my bookmarks file.  Do you know where Firefox saves it’s bookmarks?  Neither do I.  I know, I know, I could have gone back into Firefox, saved them to my desktop and then loaded them in, but by then I was already irritate.

So, I went back to Safari, without my bookmarks, and started to do some surfing.  Apple claims that the browser is twice as fast as IE7 and 1.6 times faster than Firefox.  I’m not sure whether that’s true or not, but it most definitely is speedy.  Nothing to complain about there.

The tabbed browsing is solid, with close tab icons on every tab and good keyboard control.  And I really like the fact that you can drag a tab off the bar to open it in your own window.  I’d love Firefox to build that into the core application.  So there’s definitely a one-up for Safari. 

Another solid feature is the inline search.  Firefox has had that for years, and Apple’s basically provide the exact same features, but it has alot more style.  Firefox just does basic highlighting, Safari’s is slightly animated, and pops out some.  It also greys out the rest of the page so the searched term really stands out.  Huge improvement?  Not really, but a nice touch.  Oh, and for the record, it’s a WORLD better than IE7 which still doesn’t seem to have an inline search, or if it does it isn’t on by default and I haven’t found it yet.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much your standard modern browser.  If you’re an OSX user, you’ll love it, if you’re a Windows user, you can be confident that it’s better than IE7.  But if you’re a windows user on Firefox, I’m not quite sure there’s enough to make you switch. 

I’m not sailor.  I tried it once when I was a camper back in the day.  I was pretty clueless, and when somebody yelled "Boom coming through!" I stood up to see what they were talking about.  *BAM*  I swam home.

Saturday though was a completely different experience.  I spent the day with with the Wisconsin DEN aboard the s/v Denis Sullivan, the finest sailing vessel I’ve ever seen.  Joe has some photos and his own description of events, so visit his Digital Storytelling blog to read all about it. 

I loved how interactive the trip was.  We weren’t just guests, we were the crew.  I recorded a short video with my phone and uploaded it to YouTube.  Check out some STAR Discovery Educators raising the main sail!

The fun and games didn’t stop once we got off the boat though.  After a break for lunch, we met back at Discovery World (no relation) and learned how to turn our digital photos into a digital story using PhotoStory.  That lead us into a demonstration of Discovery Education Science Connection.  We watched an interesting video of the Mythbusters as they experimented with toilets and toothbrushes (no, I’m not making that up) and played with some virtual labs.

Afterwards, we journeyed back outside to do a little geocaching along the beautiful Milwaukee shoreline. I’d never done it myself before and I have to admit I had a blast!  Our group had to hike over to a kite shop about a mile away to find the cache.  It took us a little while, but eventually Joe found it stashed behind the phone booth.  Sssshhhhhh!

All in all, it was a great way to spend a day.  Sailing, sun, and fun, collaborating geocaching and learning.  Kudos to the Wisconsin DEN for putting together such a great event!

Here’s another one you really gotta see for yourself.  SpaceTime 3D is web browser that gives you a 3D representation of the internet to surf through.  It’s sort of like some of the application switching in OSX and Vista, but even cooler.  At its most basic level, you can get 3D representations of all your tabs.  This makes for a dynamic display as you switch from tab to tab.  Double click on any and it goes back to 2D and zooms in on that page.  However, it’s when you get into searching that it really starts to look fantastic.  Do a Google search and the top ten hits turn into 3D web pages.  Like Snaps Preview, but more dynamic.  Do another search and it keeps your first set of results, and makes a string of results appear next to it.  You can bounce back and forth between the two sets with ease.

Not impressed yet?  Then switch into first person mode, and use your arrow keys to walk amongst the web sites.  No, there’s not much of a point, but it’s still pretty darn cool! 

Unfortunately, it does require some pretty hefty procesing power and seems to be windows only right now.  In their own words, "SpaceTime™ is a 3D application that relies on high bandwidth and powerful graphics, not all computers will run it.
 
   
    "  Mine ran it, but once I got more than 10 windows open it started to show signs of strain.  Still, it’s another example of what the future has in store for the browser!

Here’s a demo video for it that I found on YouTube: