Waze, the Driver-generated GPS – Crowdsourcing Navigation – Free GPS for the iPhone

Yeah, the concept of crowdsourcing has been everyone. The wisdom of the crowd is something that has been more in evidence lately and Web 2.0 technologies allow for people to get together and collaborate on products, websites, information gathering, etc.

Now it’s the navigation systems’ turn. With Waze, drivers submit new routes, traffic updates and more on ever-evolving maps.

And it’s free for the iPhone.

From their official website:

“What are waze drivers building?

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.
100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!”

Open eLearning Collections

Here is a list from WikiEducator.org that might interest many people. It includes many websites and organizations (such as MERLOT) that offer open eLearning content on the Web.

 

http://www.wikieducator.org/Exemplary_Collection_of_Open_eLearning_Content_Repositories

Online File Storage is Evolving – Store, Use, Share Your Media Everywhere

I am a huge fan of having access to my files anywhere, anytime. On a friend’s computer, at home, on my mobile device (the iPhone), etc. Securely, of course…

I have written about file storage and sync’ing before, a lot of them are freemium (you need to pay for extra storage, more features, etc.). A few I’ve found have unlimited storage, like MediaFire.

Sometimes file storage is not enough, we need file editing capabilities on the go. Well, there is Google Docs. Zoho suite, Adobe Buzzword and many other collaborative editing tools out there.

Also, having a neat little Webtop (desktop on the cloud) can be an interesting concept as well and it is evolving little by little.

EyeOS and Cloudo seem to be the most evolved of those competing in this space.

Watch out for Tonido as well, especially for those scared of putting their files out there on a server controlled by other people, well, Tonido lets you easily share files from your computer with not need for uploads… basically unlimited storage (for as long as there is space on your hard drive)… not WebOS, but pretty close and might actually work better than “desktops on the cloud” for now.

Adobe Offers Collaborative Text Editor and Web Conferencing Tools for Free

Big news: Adobe is giving something away! Might be just while in beta, they don;t really state the latter on their website. But they do say it is FREE.

The first free Adobe product I just discovered is Acrobat Buzzword, an online collaborative text editor or word processor (think Google Docs). While way ahead of the competition in the visual aspect of it with a stunning look and feel (Adobe standards) very intuitive and attractive interface that uses many “transition” effects from screen to screen. It is way behind other products of the kind in the functionality aspect. Some basic options are still missing on Adobe Acrobat Buzzword like being able to organize documents into different folders. Also, the formatting menu doesn’t offer many paragraph edit options and the fonts to choose from aren’t many. While intuitive, like I mentioned before, the user interface doesn’t follow the standards Google Docs and Zoho Office have tried to follow: creating an interface that is as similar to desktop office suites as possible to take advantage of users’ experience in the latter.

Another tool that is available for free right now is Adobe ConnectNow a fully functioning online Web meeting or Web conferencing tool that requires no plugin install and works very smoothly (again, Adobe Standards). Very aesthetically pleasing interface. ConnectNow works seamlessly with Buzzword so you can launch meetings from within a Buzzword document and collaborate on it with meeting participants. For this product Adobe added features present separately in many other web conferencing services into one product:

• Unique meeting room URL
• Screen sharing
• Video conferencing
• Chat pod
• Whiteboard
• Several integrated audio choices
• Remote control (great for technical support, for instance).

These products are excellent opportunities for collaborative authoring, especially for online classes and telecommuters. Again these are products with Adobe’s standards but are free of charge.

Association of Virtual Worlds’ Resources

The Association of Virtual Worlds is a new initiative that focuses on Virtual Worlds research and also works like an interest group. They have created a community on Ning to facilitate interaction amongst those who share interest in MUVEs.

They have some very good material about their main object of interest, including these ebooks that are free to download:

The Green Book: A Business Guide to Virtual Worlds
The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds

These can be found in their Publishing Division website and also in their Ning community.

Long lists, so… enjoy the read/navigation…

Gliffy – an Online Alternative to Microsoft Visio for Flowcharting

Well, everyone is talking about Gliffy and I don;t want to be redundant, but I have to give my opinion about it as well. The program lets users collaborate on flowcharts and diagrams online. This is a very good and free (for public documents) alternative to desktop diagramming tools such as Microsoft Visio, OmniGraffle, FreeMind and many others, but with an advantage: besides being online with no extra plugin required, it also allows users to collaborate and co-author flowcharts and diagrams, which comes in handy when participating in some sort of creative process while geographically distant.

Even though the web application is an innovative technology that can not only compare but also outdo desktop applications and is definitely is ahead of everyone else in the online diagramming arena as far as professional look and feel is concerned, Gliffy is still a little glitchy (no pun intended) if not missing features. (I’m sure they will work on this soon.

One of the major flaws in it is the lack of immediate update without attaching a “version number to the file”. There are to bad outcomes of this:

1- If you and a colleague are collaborating AT THE SAME TIME on the same document you won’t immediately see the changes they’ve made to a document. I haven’t tested this on complex flowcharts but I wonder if there will be any conflicts between versions if both save their version simultaneously.

2- If you make any minor change to the document and decide to hit the “save” button, a new version number is attached to the document… So, a freak about saving stuff like me will have a v178 of a document after 20 minutes of editing and saving.

Another catchy thing about Gliffy (and it is part of their business plan) is how they only allow free accounts to create public documents and require users to purchase their premium account for unlimitted documents and the option of making them private.

Competitors can be:

• Bubbl.us
• MindMeister – more focused on “mind mapping”.
  
• Mindomo – same as above.
• Mind42 – Another collaborative mind mapping tool that stands out for the array of features ranging from keywords to speed up the process of creation to assigning icons to process and creating image nodes that import images from URLs.
• Comapping – not free but cost-effective and feature-rich collaborative diagramming solution.

Free Online Website Builders (WYSIWYG)

New technologies have made it easy for anyone to be a content author. The webmaster no longer has to be a highly specialized HTML coder. So, if you don’t have much experience in creating websites and need a What You See Is What You Get website creator, here is a list that might help:

 

Jimdo – great designs – no, this is not a martial art related website, it is a website builder that offers you  500MB of storage. Pretty reasonable space.        

Synthasite – you can even save your website to a folder on your computer to then upload to your student server for example.

Weebly – amazing looks!

Sampa – very easy to use.

Wix

New: SnapPages – Lets you build rich web applications.

New: Edicy

New: Websketch

New: BlinkWeb

 

and, of course, Google Pages.

Second Life Hands-free Immersive Experience

NOW we can have immersive experiences that involve our body movements in MUVEs.

This was something experienced mostly by Nintendo Wii users when playing boxing and dodging a punch. Well, Linden Labs has been doing some research on the use of 3D cameras that allow you to control your avatar throught body movements, no keyboards, no mouse.

Imagine what this can bring to educational experiences:

A.Viary Invites

So, I have been testing a.viary features. Aviary is a collection of online imaging software. Their suite is supposed to be feature-rich. The developers keep a very creative and thought-provoking blog. You can tell they are really trying to approach online production tools from a different perspective.

So far they have Phoenix (image editor, like an online “Photoshop”) and Peacock (a pattern creator) running. But they plan on implementing many other tools soon.

I have 4 invites for Aviary and would like to give them to people in the learning field so they can have a chance to try these tools while they are still in private beta.

Please leave a comment here telling me what connection you have with learning or eLearning (instructor, student) and come back to let us know what you think about the tools once you’ve used them. I think it would be really interesting to know what people in the education field think of this type of tools.

A hint, leave you email address in the comment in this format (to avoid spam): username [at] domain.com.