and if you don’t have a google wave account, here is what it looks like.  What’s nice about it is that you can customize the look with different background and font colors.  Also pretty cool, I can edit the wave from within my blog post.  I have to be logged into my wave account (either in another browser window or the same browser window if i’m using tabs).

I can definitely see the usefulness of this.  I’ve seen some conferences try to figure out ways to aggregate information.  By adding the twitter bot and other bots, I may be able to use wave as a quick and easy way to aggregate information.

A few bummers:

1. default colors are less than ideal, but luckily you can change that. so for example right now my code to embed the wave reads: wave id =”your-wave-id” bgcolor=”#FAEBD7″ (enclosed within brackets)
2. people that don’t have a wave account can’t see the wave.  here is what they see: this is kind of a big let down.  it would be useful if they could at least view the wave…but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Share/Save

Recently I’ve considered taking an in house app I’m working on and making it an open source app to share with the world. I was thinking this would help me in a couple of ways:

1. it would improve my code.  admittedly it was the first php code i wrote since taking a 2 year hiatus from writing php code.  right now i go back and think to myself: “what the heck is that?”  hopefully opening up the app to the world would help me improve the code (and the app).  i’m one of those crazy people that believe my code shouldn’t be perfect before releasing it.
2. it would help other libraries that don’t have a dedicated me to write programs that will collect statistics.  there is another app out there called libstats that does something similar, but not on the individual librarian scale.  i was even considering merging libstats with my app (of course i will need to speak to the owner of said project before actually doing anything of the kind).

All of this got me thinking about what services I should use to share the development of the app.  There are quite a few tools out there that can help me do this.  I’m actually considering doing an environmental scan of the different tools that can be used to develop apps via the cloud.  Maybe look at some of the big open source projects to see what they use while also keeping an eye out for how smaller projects do the same thing.  And just for clarifications sake, I’m not just talking about using AWS or Google App Engine to write the program.  I’m talking about BaseCamp, Google Code, github, etc.; you know, the tools that help you develop the app and organize the project.

The idea I have isn’t just born from my head (I’m not that smart).  I was reading The Tower and the Cloud and in it Ira H. Fuchs talks about the “Challenges and Opportunities of Open Source in Higher Education“.  It seems to me that the inclusion of this article in the book says that the cloud isn’t about just servers without actual hardware, but that its also about how we work together to use the different services available to build open source applications for higher education.

I’ll be sure to share more as I find time to review all the different tools out there.  Maybe one day I’ll have a “How to Develop your App in the Cloud” seminar or something (to go along with my fellowship).

Share/Save

NITLE hosts a Moodle Exchange (NME).

For faculty, technologists, and librarians at participating campuses that use or are interested in using Moodle. Participants in this collaborative user community focus on the use of Moodle at smaller, independent colleges and universities, sharing ideas and best practices and helping each other troubleshoot technical or use issues specific to liberal education and undergraduate colleges and universities. In the NME, Moodle-using or Moodle-interested campuses share strategies and ask and answer questions about implementation, evaluation, migration, customization, and other Moodle-related topics.

NME also works together to develop a Liberal Arts Edition of Moodle as well as plugins specifically focused on the needs of Liberal Arts Colleges.  So how does this get cloudy?  Well they use Google Code to distribute their developments.  This allows everyone involved in the project to access or share code that has been developed for the community.

If you’re doing something similar let me know about it.  I’m very interested in how different academic institutions are using the cloud to develop systems and applications.

Share/Save

Which was good because I found a great thing buried at the bottom: Getting Started with the Google Data PHP Client Library.  Fun!  Ok for me maybe.  I like lists and I like videos.  This minimizes my brain function and leads me to learn things quickly (which I then forget quickly).  We’re talking about moving to Google here at Wheaton for email and calendaring, so hopefully when we do I will remember these lovely PHP libraries and be able to have tons-o-fun with Google APIs.

Share/Save

1) Tasks — useful but currently I use Toodledo. Which allows you to take notes, file things, set goals, and create subtasks.  And if you go all out on Toodledo you can actually have Toodledo tell you what to do.  Good effort GMail, but I’ll stick with Toodledo (which also integrates with your calendar).

2) SMS Text Messaging from your GMail.  Wonderful!  Now I can text message without having to use my tiny little keyboard.

Interested in finding out more: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html

Share/Save

Learn More about Voice and Video Chat

Download the Plugin

Share/Save

Additionally, Google has also come out with a way to embed the viewer into your webpage. They have a developer guide and a reference guide on how to use the embedded view API; and they created a Preview Wizard which does it for you automatically, that’s how I created this page. They have also provided some samples to help you get started.

You can see how this information, in conjunction with the book data API would come in handy if say you wanted to create your own catalog or use images in your already existing catalog.

Interesting side note: The libraries participating in the Google Book project have decided to work together to create something called the HathiTrust. This trust will keep all the books that Google is scanning in case Google goes belly up (Google provides an electronic copy of each book it scans to the library it scanned it from). They too are developing APIs and what not so that you can get data out of the books, it’ll be interesting to see what they do with all of this data.

Share/Save