Tool Catch-up: TiddlyBackpack, Clipmarks, Goosh, MokaFive
So most of what I'm covering here has probably already been covered by the indefatigable Jane Knight, but I'll risk redundancy and give it a shot.
TiddlyBackPack: I've been a fan of TiddlyWiki for a while and guess I just didn't make the leap to thinking about putting it on a USB drive. My issue though revolves around updates. Say I use this send out a manual, a great use for a wiki, then I have static copies of a wiki...I guess it'd be good for organically growing a collection of information but it really does pull out the collaboration aspect of wiki-dom doesn't it?
Clipmarks: I'm starting to feel the outlines of this class of tools that includes Zotero, Evernote and Clipmarks among others. I do like the clip-to-blog feature in that it seems to allow some more overt attribution for sources and data. I also think that the ClipCast feature is pretty interesting. The metadata and functionality embedded in this app is fairly impressive.
goosh:This one goes out to all my homies who remember the Mighty Command Prompt. C> goosh is the "unofficial google shell". Just try it. ;-) Click here for an article on this from Emily Chang.
MokaFive: I've talked before about USB-based solutions like Mojopac, U3 and Ceedo; now with all of these solutions maturing and all converging toward a more robust virtualization set of products - we seem to have an entry coming the other way - from virtualization to the USB. MokaFive has even gone a step further and created the iPhone Sentinel which allows you to "run LivePC™ virtual machines off your iPhone! iPhone Sentinel makes your iPhone appear as a disk drive on your computer, allowing you to install any software you want on it." I am impressed. I still think that we have gone past the mark in terms of how we are thinking about "mobile learning" (whatever the hell that means). I think and I have said before that we have started down that road from a hardware point and not from a user experience point. Can you technically make a course run on a cell phone? Sure. Will I kill you if you try to make me take that course on the cell phone? Yes. These are the same mistakes that we made with e-learning - we horribly neglected the new and different affordances of first computer-based training and now Web-based training and finally mobile training. We thought "we know ISD and we can use this authoring tool, therefore we can make good e-learning" neglecting all the while to give any thought to the fact that adding "E" wasn't just a semantic exercise but was a liminal moment that should have caused us to stop and examine our design principles. Anyway, I digress - I think these mobile products offer the ability to for learners to take their data and applications with them and do have much more satisfactory experiences than typical m-learning interactions.
An iPhone app for managing your delicious bookmarks. Great. Normally I'd yawn but I might give this one a try for the simple reason that as I talk to more enterprise people about 2.0 tools, delicious is one that they consistently seem to be able to understand quickly.
