#18: Word processing without purchasing software?

And you can access your documents whereever you have Internet access??

And it's free?

Yes, Web 2.0 explorers, this is the new world in which we are living and working and playing.

Listen to this podcast [2:30] -->

Web-based word processing and spreadsheet applications are readily available and powerful collaboration tools. Users can create and share documents without having to transfer or email files to others; further, users need not be concerned about what software (and version) their collaborators have installed.

Online word processing tools like this do their best to have similar tool bars to the omnipresent MS Word. So, for the most part, using these tools are practically identical to the way you create, type, and edit documents using the Word program on your computer. Plus, these tools warehouse earlier versions of your document indicating time, date, and username -- just like on a wiki!

So why not use a wiki instead, you might ask?

Users can share access to documents/pages for simultaneous use, leaving their "mark" for what changes or additions were made when; nobody needs to transfer files; access can be public or private; accessibility is centralized in a single online location. Yes, all these are features common to both wikis and to online word processing applications. However, web-based word processing allows for printed documents and for file format options for sharing or storing elsewhere. These tools simulate programs normally installed as software applications for producing tangible documents - for printing physical manifestations of work completed electronically. While wiki pages can be printed just like any html documents, the formatting options for printing are rather limited.

And at the root, the genesis of these marvels of Web 2.0 distinguish them (even as the evolving uses of them may blur these distinctions). The creative intention behind wikis centered on collaborative databases of information - virtual collections of interlinked documents residing on the Internet. The intention of web-based applications like Google Docs and Zoho Writer centers on production, with the old fashioned physical sense that implies. In fact, another term for these applications is online productivity tools.

Discovery Resources

If you are curious to see "published" documents created by web-based word processors, take a look at these:

• created using Zoho Writer
• created using Google Docs

Each of the above are html pages so you cannot really get a sense of simulated word processing until you use the applications yourself. So, on to the part of the Thing where you do your own tinkering!

Discovery Exercise
As has been my habit, I'm offering options that vary depending on you deep you like plunging in the deep muddy of Web 2.0.

Just Curious Depth

1. You already have a Google account if you created your blog using Blogger, so you're halfway there! Visit Google Docs (or from a Google search page, click more and select Documents).
2. Sign in with your gmail account name.
3. Create a document - or a spreadsheet, if you're more of an Excel aficionado.
4. Publish your document on the web or to your blog. Note: If you create a spreadsheet, you can only publish to the web.
5. If publishing to your blog, edit your post to add something about when or why you might use this instead of posting from your blog initially. If you publishing to the web, provide a link to your document in a blog post and let us know what you think of online productivity tools like this.
   

Deep End

1. Follow the above steps 1 through 4.
2. Go to Zoho Writer to sign up for an account.
3. Create the same kind of document you created at Google Docs and publish it, too.
4. Open a second window or tab so you can be logged in at both Google and Zoho at the same time. Compare views of your revisions. Similarities, differences?
   
5. Create or edit a blog entry comparing Google and Zoho for word processing or for spreadsheets. Which do you prefer? Tell us why!

Really Deep End

1. Complete the above Deep End tasks.
2. Invite 23Things (@gcmail.maricopa.edu) to collaborate on a document you've created - or invite a 23Things @ GCC buddy or any friend to collaboratively work on your document. Note: your collaborator will also need an account with the tool you use; otherwise, access will be read only (not read/write).
   

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BTW: the first draft of this blog entry was created in Zoho Writer. I "published" it to my blog (as a draft) having checked the options "With tags" and "Post as draft" - and it transformed the Zoho tags to coded links to Technorati. Amazing!

Technorati Tag: collaboration
N.B.: two-word terms don't work unless you run them together as one word -- even if you put quotation marks around a phrase, the code will only search for the first word. Fixing this is beyond my current html knowledge.

#17: Tee, hee, hee -- what wiki variety

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Wikipedia gets most of the media attention these days*, but in our explorations, we have found lots of other kinds of wikis, including the following:

• Wikibooks (a collection of open-content textbooks)


• WikiTexts (a different collection of open-content textbooks)


• The Flu Wiki and The Lostpedia (a genre of Fan wikis


• Nine Cool Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Wikipedia

GCC launched a wiki pilot last year. You can read it without an account. If you'd like to play around by editing or adding new material, let me know and I'll create an account for you. GCC's wiki uses a different piece of software, Confluence. If you explore enough different wiki sites, eventually you'll be able to recognize the different kinds of wiki software.

Discovery Activity

1. Explore the 23 Things wiki. This wiki has an editing password to reduce the amount of spam we have to deal with. It is learning2.0


2. Feel free to edit any page. That's the whole point of a wiki! You can add information, re-organize material that's there, change anything (especially if there's an error).


3. [Optional] Create a new wiki page in the 23 Things wiki.


4. Write a blog post about anything related to wikis. Share ways in which you think you could use a wiki for personal and professional activities.
   

Most wikis have some kind of notification mechanism that can alert you by email when a page has been changed. Scroll down to the bottom of the home page and click on notifications to set up an email alert. The RSS option is located on the bottom right of the page. (You know how to use that, right?)

Tags are important parts of wikis too. Use the [tiny, tiny] + sign on the bottom left of each page to add tags to each wiki page. You can add tags even when the author didn't.

* If you are interested in the controversy surrounding Wikipedia, we are building a collection of resources about Wikipedia itself in the GCC wiki. You can also read the Britannica Blog's Web 2.0 forum, although remember that they an interest in encylcopedias.

#16: Making collaboration easy with a wiki

Listen to this podcast [3:13]:

Two important features of Web 2.0 merge in this week’s thing: the read/write web and social tools. Blogs and Flickr make it possible for anyone to contribute to the web easily, and tools like tagging and social bookmarking help us leverage the wisdom of crowds, or at least winnow what we find. Now – hold on to your boots, folks – we’re going to examine a Web 2.0 application that combines all of this: the wiki. Don't be fooled by the strange, slightly silly-sounding name; this is a serious application that allows anyone to write, edit, or remove content on the web. It's quick and easy.

There are both free and buyable wikis, but all of them share four important capabilities:

• Anyone can add, edit or delete content. Sometimes you may need an account or a password in order to reduce the amount of spam.


• Tracking tools (often combined with RSS) help you keep up with changes.


• Reversion capabilities allow anyone read or return to previous versions of a page.


• Users can compose pages using simple editing tools. No HTML needed!
  

Discovery Resources
Because of their growing popularity, you can find lots of resources on the web about wikis. We've collected a few, but you can find more using any search engine.

1. Here's a video from Common Craft:

Click To Play

2. From EduCause, "7 things you should know about Wikis," a simple 2-page handout in portable document format.

3. Read Jay Rosen's statement/manifesto published a year ago, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience."

Discovery Activities

We created a wiki for 23 Things several weeks ago; some of you may have found it linked on the left side of our 23 Things blog. (This wiki uses pbwiki, a free site on the web.)

1. Take the PBWiki Tour to learn how PBWiki works.


2. Explore this PBWiki Video Gallery of PBWiki features


3. Write a blog post about what you've learned about the use of wikis.

#15: Thinking about "2.0-ness"

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I'm sure some of you are just bursting at the seams with pent-up thoughts about "Web 2.0-ness" and its implications for teaching and learning. We've seen little hints of exasperation or confusion in some of the blog posts, and we find them very exciting! Recognizing that we haven't explored some major tools yet, like wikis, podcasts, videos, and online productivity tools, maybe it's time to reflect a bit.


Discovery Activity

Thing #15 asks you to blog about one or two key issues about 2.0-ness and education. What's bugging you? You can use any of the tools we've introduced so far to find blogs on Web 2.0 or learning 2.0, but here are a couple of interesting items:

• A thread at Britannica Blog beginning in June, 2007 initiated by Michael Gorman in the Web 2.0 forum


• Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? By Bryan Alexander published in EDUCAUSE Review in April, 2006
  
• Pay Attention from TeacherTube or the more raucous Technoloy Fear Factor in Education by Vicki A. Davis (CoolCatTeacher)

Or perhaps you've used del.icio.us or Technorati to find some key discussions in your discipline. What are the Web 2.0 issues in learning in the sciences, or mathematics, or literature or for librarians? Is there a difference between Web 2.0 issues in college and in secondary schools?

Don't forget to use links in your blog post to those others who have sparked your thinking. For example, rather than just adding a comment to Alissa's post on collective intelligence or to Veronica's on School 2.0, why not buld from their ideas in a post of your own?

So much to think about . . . so little time!

#14: Separating the wheat from the chaff with Technorati

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By now, we have some very practical examples of how big (deep? wide? vast? huge?) the live web really is. We’re much more than knee-deep in the big muddy.

In this Thing, we will look at another search engine (like Del.icio.us) with social bookmarking features, Technorati. When this tool first appeared on the web, way back in 2002, it was unique, but now it has many competitors that do some of what it does (like Google Blog Search, PubSub, and Feedster).. Technorati attempted to establish a measure of value or quality for blog posts by tracking inbound and outbound links, not just tags. When I write a blog post and comment on your blog post by referencing it, some little meter at Technorati counts that reference; similarly, when someone else comments on my blog post and includes a link to it, another little Techno-meter clicks.

Technorati took the number of these inbound and outbound links, added some other things including frequency and volume of posts, and converted it all into a measure it called “authority.” They maintain this is more than just a measure of “popularity,” much more sophisticated than a simple hit counter or the number of subscribers to your RSS feed. Some folks disagree with their claims (why am I not surprised?) but this attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff is a significant addition to the live web.

Here’s what Tris Hussey says about authority:

Bottom line, blogs that post more and more often start to inch up the authority ranking. Posting frequency is only part of the formula though, links in factors very highly as well. Someone could write 20 posts a day every day for months and not edge up if they are rarely if ever linked to. Then how do you help improve your ranking (as my title suggests)? Post and link.

I know, I know it sounds overly simplistic, however there are only two things in this metric you can control, your posting frequency and who you link to. I've seen time and again that when I slack off posting, my traffic dips, when I pick right back up, so does my traffic. Traffic means people will have a better chance of finding you and when they find you, they can link to you. What about the linking to other people part? Part of good blogging and getting "found" is linking to other
people who are writing about the same topic.

This led to some great writing advice from Paul Chaney about how to increase your readership and thus your authority -- by writing blog posts that readers will value and want to follow:

So, dear blogger, the onus is on you. If you'd like to see your blog stand
out from the pack, post with greater frequency and hang in there for the long
run. One more thing...write posts worth linking to. Here are some tips where
that's concerned...
• Write original material rather than copy and paste what someone else says.
• State a firm opinion.
• Every once in a while, write a good "how-to" post.
• Write some "top ten" posts.
• Break news
whenever possible. A good "scoop" will go a long way toward getting link love
and Google Juice.
• Find a yet unexploited niche, or one that is marginally exploited, and go after it. Become the expert on that subject.

Pretty good advice for any writer, huh? I think I’ll share this with my students.

Discovery Activity:

1. Explore Technorati (Frankly, I find the home page a little silly, but whatever . . .)
   
2. Click on Popular to see the Top listings. On the right, see the Top Blogs and their Authority ratings. You can click on the link to see the Top 100 Blogs. At the top of each Popular screen, you can see how popularity is measured.
   
3. In the Search box, type in some tags of interest. For example, I used college teaching writing and selected English as the language.
   
4. To just search on blogs, use this fast search page: http://search.technorati.com/ I used the same search terms, but I also selected posts with “a lot” of authority. Note that you can subscribe to any search using RSS.


5. Blog about what you discover!

Extra! Extra!

In addition, Technorati’s founder Dave Sifry posts a Quarterly Report on the Blogosphere (now called the “State of the Live Web”). The latest report appeared in April, 2007. You can enlarge each graph by clicking on it. If you love data as I do, these are fascinating reports and can really spark some thought!

Obviously, there is a lot more to Technorati. You can create your own account, set up WatchLists, link to Favorites, “claim” your blog if you want it indexed by Technorati’s spiders, and much, much more. If you explore further, share what you find with the rest of us.

#13: Tagging - a del.icio.us improvement in Web 2.0

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http://www.GraffitiGen.com/

During this 23 Things trek, we've used Web 2.0 sites that make use of tags. A brief definition was provided as we explored Flickr, and we could just leave it there (tags are keywords we choose to associate with an image, a title, a Thing, etc.). But tags deserve a little more spotlight time because they hold amazing Web 2.0 potential and have already revolutionized information access.

Tags democratize (or anarchize, if you take a dimmer view) information. They disregard or embrace, as users choose, the usual labels 'the establishment' has always used. Tags give library subject headings a run for their money.

Folks, tags are the hallmark of what is known as folksonomy. And that's a fancy word making reference to taxonomy, the formal classification and hierarchical structure of a topic or area of information.

Tags are terrific! They are

• personally useful
• personally relevant
• link us to other users (social element of Web 2.0)
  
• discovery tools (find out what others' have tagged with same word)
  
• based on plain language (informal, no imposed vocabulary/subject headings)
• freeform - unstructured, without hierarchy (as in headings, subheadings, etc.)
  
• current and timely
  

Tags are Web 2.0 loud and proud. And they figure prominently in this Thing's featured tool: Del.icio.us. Yes, those 'dots' belong there (no keyboard spasms creating staccato typos). Type it in as http://del.icio.us/, and don't stick a .com at the end.

Del.icio.us is basically an online bookmarking manager, but so much more. Because of tagging, del.icio.us stands out on the social Web's phenomena of collective collections.

The site houses your bookmarks on the go. Find yourself moving from computer to computer - and annoyed that you have to Google to get that url you've forgotten or must visit a site's main page and click five times to get the page you actually want? Bookmark using del.icio.us, and you have those pages just a click away wherever you are! While you're at it, take a look at how others have tagged the same link - and use those tags to discover more sites that interest you.

Discovery Resources

• The Otter Group webcast tutorial for del.icio.us
• Take a look at what del.icio.us has to say about itself

Discovery Exercise - lite

1. Take a look around Del.icio.us using the account created for this exercise: GCC23Things. Many of the sites we've explored on our trek so far are bookmarked here.
   
2. Explore the clickable stuff on this page! Click on the pinkish "saved by # of people" link - then look at the right for common tags used to label this site. Do any of the other tags lead you to good stuff to share? Blog about it!
   
3. Back on our account page, look at the gray box to the right: explore different display options and take a look at bundles. Bundles take a step toward taxonomy - do you think this is a good feature or not?
   
4. Feeling just a little bold? Log in to our account (learn2.0) to add tags or new bookmarks.
   

Discovery Exercise - commit

1. Create a del.icio.us account. You might consider this tutorial (text-based, self-paced) for getting started (from the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Xavier University)
2. Import bookmarks from your browser and add more tags.
3. From your account list, click on the pinkish "saved by # of people" link - follow some of the common tags used to label sites you value. Do any of the other tags lead you to good stuff you bookmark and tag yourself? What potential does del.icio.us hold for you as a discovery tool (for finding more sites of interest to you)? Blog about it!

#12: Rollin', rollin', ROLLYO!

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ROLOS? No, but a few of those would be yummy. RollYO. Roll Your Own search engine.

Do you have sites you tend to search frequently? The "usual suspects" when you're looking for updated information on a certain topic? Do you find it a little tedious to go from bookmarked site to bookmarked site looking for similar information from similar organizations/institutions/companies/entities? Well, Rollyo is worth checking out. It enables you to create a search tool for your own selection of web sites; this is called a Searchroll. You can create private ones or public ones to share. Take a look at some of the Searchrolls others have created:

• Food and Dining
• Phoenix News
• Triathlon Junkie
  

The first one above is considered a "High Roller." This moniker is bestowed upon celebrity-created Searchrolls or very popular Searchrolls. My attempts at rolling are: higher ed and ed tech.

If in surveying your search results you are impatient to see what a particular site from the Searchroll has yielded, you can click on that site's name (at the left on the results page) to narrow your search to results from just that site.

You will have noticed that Rollyo does generate sponsored links at the top and amidst search results; however, no obnoxious ads nor graphics litter your screen. These oh-so-brief (and clearly labeled) advert interruptions are certainly worth tolerating given such a useful free tool!

Now, we all know Google basically dominates the search world. But even Google knows that the breadth it covers cannot touch the depth that niche, specialty searching can provide users. Rollyo really has something going here. It is making available to all of us what sites like Travelocity and BizRate make money doing. So not to be outdone by this little start-up venture, the Big G, along with Yahoo! and Microsoft, have their own customizable search engine tools if you are interested in comparing:

Google Custom Search Engine - in beta from the Google Co-op. You must have a Google ID to create (which you already have, if you set up your blog through Blogger!). Google will host a search page for you, or you can paste the code into your own site/page.

Yahoo! Search Builder - tool provides for free (without requiring a Yahoo! ID) the code for providing a Yahoo! search box of your own site. That means Yahoo! does not provide a webpage to host your customized search. [Did any of you notice that Rollyo is powered by Yahoo! Search?]

Microsoft Live Search Macros - Macro Creator ID is linked to your Windows Live ID. This tool creates a webpage for you to bookmark.

Discovery Exercise

1. Roll Your Own! Create a Rollyo account of your own.
   
2. Create your very own customized search engine. It can be based on someone else's if you don't want to start from scratch.
3. Blog about what you think of having this personalized power searching at your fingertips. Can you see some amazing potential here? Or are you satisfied and accustomed to "feeling lucky" with Google's searching?