17.38 – Oh wait, just saw that I can click to talk, but can also click to go to a YackPack WalkieTalkie web channel page that was ‘automagically’ created.

PBwiki offers YackPack as free plug-in, no messing around with code, just click the Insert Plugin button when you Edit page. Great for working together on a wiki. You can see when your collaborators are online and yack with them. I have added a Recent visitors plug-in as well, so I can see not only how many but who’s online.

Well it turns out that not only is it educational, it is addictive. How? In a variety of ways. For instance by helping me find neat tools as today I discovered 3 new tools and Adobe AIR in the space of an hour.

This can happen directly and indirectly.

First an example of the indirect way. Will Richardson (willrich45 on Twitter) is one of my fav bloggers and so one of the people I started following on Twitter rightaway. His tweets appear in my Twitter list. And when the following 3 messages cropped up in a short time, it piqued my interest…

willrich45 (@ – W): Wow…only 27 tabs open in Firefox…slow day! 1H Ago

 

willrich45 (@ – W): @tgelston Nope…what is it? 56M Ago

 

willrich45 (@ – W): @tgelston Thanks for the link…the offline reading looks great! 15M Ago

So I decided to visit the other side of the conversation whichWill Richardson was having with tgelston. Now tgelston is not one of the people I’m following, but I can go and have a look at his tweets:

@willrich45 something between tabs and bookmarks about 1 hour ago from im in reply to willrich45

@willrich45 http://tinyurl.com/yrlqrj about 1 hour ago from im in reply to willrich45

This tinyurl led me to tool no. 1: Read It Later, a promising extension for Firefox which allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest..

A more direct route to a new tool is the imprint that most tools leave within a Tweet,  as in this Tweet from kboutelle

@ATC_tobias FYI – if you don’t already know, Moodle Meet times are CST. 8 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to ATC_tobias

From thwirl? Never heard of it. So I clicked on the link and discovered tool no.2 Thwirl which is a twitter desktop client based on the Adobe AIR platform.

And sometimes it gets even more direct, when someone simply posts a Tweet about a tool they like:

NancyWhite (@ – W): I find twits much easier to read in Snitter – love the images. They allow me to visually scan for people. 1H Ago

And that led me to tool no. 3, Snitter is “Snook’s Twitter”: an Adobe AIR-powered application for twittering. (The tag line is “I can’t believe it’s not Twitter”, har har.)

And the last two apps make mention of being Adobe AIR-powered, another thing I had not heard of until today, but which appears to approach an Apple-like desktop with widgets. This will warrant a closer look…

3 tools and Adobe Air in under an hour. Thru Twitter I’m keeping my finger on the techno-pulse…

• Group tool, where students can self-select into groups with a maximum number of slots and based on this grouping, are enrolled in the appropriate forums/chats etc.

• Replies to My Posts – in forum-based courses you are unlikely to read everything. But there are certain things you always want to read, the replies to your own posts. Having these grouped as you log in to the course is very handy. Perhaps this could sit in the My Posts tab?

It may give new online teachers confidence to try new things, if they knew that the previous version is always there to fall back on.

1. Intuitive forum handling. My fellow students struggle with the e-mail copies and the read/unread messages. The first PD session I did on Moodle had the same results – all my participants bewildered and overwhelmed at the message deluge. And you control that in your profile where the controls have some outlandish names. Read/unread messages is called Forum tracking…

2. Ability to tag a post for future reference, or as “I must come back to this.” The USQ course is very text heavy, with a combination of the wiki, the blogs and the forum posts in Moodle to track. Sometimes I read a post but am not ready to answer yet. Wouldn’t it be good if I could tag it/flag it to return at later stage?

3. Why not a drafts place for your posts, so you can start a message but let it sit in the system until you are ready to post. Most blogs offer this functionality. Does anyone know of an LMS that does? Is there a reason why LMSs wouldn’t?

Have decided to name my del.icio.us widget Flotsam. Not in the sense of junk, rather “fragments of many things.”