Blog :: All

http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1334408

Jornais do dia

Medidas anunciadas por Sócrates beneficiam poucos contribuintes. Famílias de rendimentos mais baixos já não pagam IRS.

http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1334408

Jornais do dia

Medidas anunciadas por Sócrates beneficiam poucos contribuintes. Famílias de rendimentos mais baixos já não pagam IRS.

http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1334408

Jornais do dia

Medidas anunciadas por Sócrates beneficiam poucos contribuintes. Famílias de rendimentos mais baixos já não pagam IRS.

http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1334392

Opinião

Hoje de manhã acordei a pensar no Ministério da Educação. Num mundo ideal, eu seria professora de Português, consistindo a minha missão em sujeitar a exame todos os membros do Gave (Gabinete de Avaliação Educacional), da DGIDC (Direcção-Geral de Inovação e Desenvolvimento Curricular), do GEPE (Gabinete de Estatística e Planeamento da Educação), da DGRHE (Direcção-Geral dos Recursos Humanos da Educação) e da ANQ (Agência Nacional para a Qualificação) usando para o efeito uma “grelha” por mim elaborada.

http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1334392

Opinião

Hoje de manhã acordei a pensar no Ministério da Educação. Num mundo ideal, eu seria professora de Português, consistindo a minha missão em sujeitar a exame todos os membros do Gave (Gabinete de Avaliação Educacional), da DGIDC (Direcção-Geral de Inovação e Desenvolvimento Curricular), do GEPE (Gabinete de Estatística e Planeamento da Educação), da DGRHE (Direcção-Geral dos Recursos Humanos da Educação) e da ANQ (Agência Nacional para a Qualificação) usando para o efeito uma “grelha” por mim elaborada.

http://ultimahora.publico.clix.pt/noticia.aspx?id=1334392

Opinião

Hoje de manhã acordei a pensar no Ministério da Educação. Num mundo ideal, eu seria professora de Português, consistindo a minha missão em sujeitar a exame todos os membros do Gave (Gabinete de Avaliação Educacional), da DGIDC (Direcção-Geral de Inovação e Desenvolvimento Curricular), do GEPE (Gabinete de Estatística e Planeamento da Educação), da DGRHE (Direcção-Geral dos Recursos Humanos da Educação) e da ANQ (Agência Nacional para a Qualificação) usando para o efeito uma “grelha” por mim elaborada.

Ugh!! What's wrong with this account?? I just tried to post an entry a few minutes ago but I wasn't able to because I "do not have the permission yet to post on this account". Huh?? This is my account. Why do I need to ask for permission? Hehe. I hope I would be able to post this one.

Anyway, web designing is fun but most of the time I get frustrated whenever I can't figure out how to make this image appear, or that sentence move accross the screen. Hopefully, I would be able to make a decent website by the end of the sem.

Mmm.. my rizal prof just texted. She can't make it to class. I like her lectures and I can't believe I enjoy coming to her class. but stillll... having a free cut is love!

Anyway. Have to say TTFN! Tata for now! - Tigger

http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2008/06/04/introducing-the-elgg-1-query

Elgg 1 is introducing a new (to elgg at least) way of executing arbitrary database queries. Basically, SQL is abstracted away into a class that can be used to construct multiple different types of query through a defined interface.

This provides two main advantages:

The application programmer does not have to write ...

http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2008/05/07/odd-openid/

The Elgg team are out in San-Francisco this week meeting up with some of the guys out here and talking about Elgg and ODD.

I will blog a bit more about it when I can, its been a bit mad so this is the first chance I've actually had to sit ...

http://elearningcurve.blogspot.com/2008/06/exciting-new-online-comms-and.h

I had planned today to continue my series on organizational learning and e-learning ecosystems, but I have become aware of an interesting new hosted productivity and collaboration suite from Adobe called Acrobat.com, so I thought I'd discuss that today. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary is known to respond with the acronym "IMFA" (It's My Airline) when others disagree with his decisions, so in the same spirit, IMFB.

Now read on...

Aligning with their stated aim to become a major force in so-called webtop software, Adobe released two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Product manager Erik Larson has stated that Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web.

It is [Adobe's] intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past.

Acrobat.com is a combination of three online services:

• Adobe ConnectNow (a "lite" version of Acrobat Connect 7 for web conferencing and desktop collaboration)
• Adobe Buzzword (and online word processor)
• Adobe Share (online file sharing)

In my view, this represents a serious attempt by Adobe to compete with many of Google's Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa, as well as solutions like Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting, usually associated with organizational collaboration.

Buzzword
Buzzword is the default word processor in the suite. it enables multiple collaborators to edit and comment documents. As well as providing a pretty nice WYSIWYG editor, tabs along the bottom of the UI represent the people who have accessed the document most recently, as well as their status (author, reviewer, etc.).

Uniquely for a web-based word processor, Buzzword paginates documents, supports a range of fonts, and lets you generate a pretty good equivalent to a PDF document. However, this is still in beta, so you will likely encounter some frustrations if you are used to creating documents in a desktop environment (i.e. during cut-and-paste operations) and there is no easy way to export a document to a blog or other Web publishing system other than via the previously mentioned cut-and-paste.

However, I have found this to be the case in similar apps such as Windows Live Writer (which I'm using to create this post); the software is still buggy - I'm happy to live with this in a beta app, though some might not be.

Adobe Share
This is a file-sharing application that focuses on document sharing.
You get one gigabyte of free storage, and it enables you to embed a Flash preview of your documents into any Web page (quite similar to FlashPaper). Adobe say that this enables anyone to download and print a PDF of the file (though I have yet to test this myself). I guess that you could describe this tool as 'Flickr on steroids', given Share's facility to make available a range of document types in an environment that those familiar with that tool can easily appreciate.

ConnectNow
I love ConnectNow. I've long been an advocate of online communication and collaboration tools as a powerful solution to the challenges organizations face, particularly if employees work in distributed teams, as well as for hosting training and non-formal learning interventions. I have to declare an interest here: the organization I work for relies heavily on Adobe Connect Pro (currently version 6) for training and informational purposes and I think that it's a great system, not least because it uses the Flash plug-in, so no large player downloads or quirky clients to be installed.



Even in it's cut-down form, making this functionality publicly available is going to be very popular (no more excuses not to talk to the relations in New Zealand!).
ConnectNow allows up to three people have free online meetings, with

• screen sharing
• desktop video
• voice conferencing
• IM-type chat
• white-boarding

Note that significant portions of Connect's functionality have been removed, including the recording facility, as well as the asynchronous meeting playback facility. You can also forget about hosting your on-demand e-learning content on the system, because that's been excised too, though that doesn't mean that you can't use the tool for synchronous learning, such as small-group online mentoring and so on.

Interestingly, ConnectNow (kind of) replicates Connect Pro's ability to integrate with telephone conferencing system via a fee-based toll line (currently only available in some territories like the US, UK, Germany etc). Now that the Flex-based UI uses Adobe Flash 9 rather than Flash 6, the screen looks great - a small thing, but it's attractiveness will certainly enhance users' enjoyment of the product.

Other commentators have suggested that the business model is clearly pay-for-what-you-use:

while right now the service is just a free beta, restrictions on things like file space and number of users will presumably be addressed by monthly subscriptions – moving Adobe from a licensor of desktop software to a web-based software-as-a-service company. We’ve already seen that with Photoshop Express, and with Acrobat.com, Adobe now has all of their major applications available in a Web-based version too.

I would assert that while this may be the plan at the moment, the ubiquity of other free-to-use applications (not to mention the competition in this increasingly hot marketspace) will force Adobe to either make these tools available gratis or include so many extra features to entice paying users that Acrobat.com will becomes a professional-level hosted solution, which presumably is not the consumer market that Adobe are attempting to dominate.

--