Chris Betcher

Many people I know struggle with technology. They bumble by, more-or-less managing to make their computer do what they want it to do, but often without that real sense of confidence that comes from feeling fluent with the software they are interacting with. And let's face it, when we talk about "technology", we mostly mean "software". Sure, there are some hard-to-use hardware devices but by and large when I watch someone struggling to feel comfortable using "technology", it's usually because they are out of their depth with the software they are trying to use, not the hardware. It might not seem like it when you're so frustrated you just want to throw your laptop out the nearest window, but companies who build software try really hard to make their tools easy to use. Of course, not all software is actually easy to use, but I do believe that all software designers really do try to make their software as easy to use as possible. It's not eas...

Sometimes it's good to stop and take stock. To think about getting rid of some of the clutter that we allow to build up. You may recall that I was thinking about shifting my blog to a new server and running a self hosted Wordpress blog. Well, I had intended to think about it a little before I did anything drastic (I think that's called procrastination), but once you get started on these things it all begins to snowball so you may as well just get on with it.  So here we are... the new online home for Betchablog. If you're reading this in an RSS reader then you probably won't even notice a change (at least I hope not! Moving the old RSS feeds across to a new server was something that always put me off making the move, but I think I worked it out). I used Google Forms to ask for some feedback about the old blog and 41 people took the time to respond with some really useful comments. (That Google Forms is just so darn useful!)  It's good to occasionally stop and take...

For a few years now, this blog has been an important place for me to do my "thinking out loud", and in the process it's been extremely rewarding to have been able to share some of that public pondering with others.  I've learned a great deal from the whole blogging experience and although the frequency of posting has sometimes varied with life's little circumstances, on the whole it's been wonderful to evolve this blog as my own little place in cyberspace. I have absolutely no intention of changing the role of this blog as a place to think about, share and discuss ideas that interest me.  Despite the rise of Twitter and other microblogging services, there's a lot I can't say in 140 characters so I plan to be writing here for quite a while yet. The theme for this blog has been pretty much the same since I started it here on Edublogs .  Almost from day one, I chose the Andreas theme, a Wordpress theme designed by the incredible Andreas Viklund because ...

Every so often I stumble across a new piece of software that just does its thing exceptionally well. In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don't, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve. Voicethread is a great example of such an interface. It's really exciting to see so many of these well crafted apps starting to appear on the Internet as web apps, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. RIAs, when done well, can give the impression of behaving like a desktop app but with all the added advantages of being in the cloud... advantages such as ubiquitous access, remote storage of data and the ability to collaborate across time and place. Google Docs uses this model and is a fine way to create online docume...

The regularity of my blogging has dropped off a bit lately, mainly because I'm in the middle of writing a book about the use of interactive whiteboard technology for teachers. Although I've got almost 20,000 words written so far, I am way behind deadline and really need to get the first draft finished so it can be submitted to the publishers in a few weeks. Until I get that done, every time I feel the urge to blog I have to remind myself that there is a (new) deadline looming and direct my writing efforts to the book instead of the blog. I feel bad that my blogging has been suffering lately, but I really need to get this done. So there you have the reason I've not been updating lately. However, I simply had to take a few minutes to share this wonderful new tool I've found called Scrivener . It's an incredible tool for anyone taking on a large writing task and I really can't believe I've never tried it before. I had heard the name mentioned but assumed ...

Until fairly recently, most of my computing was done locally using "real apps". By this, I mean they are cllient-side applications installed on the hard drive of my own computer. I guess I've always liked the speed and convenience of having my applications - tools like Office, email, calendar, feedreader, etc - right there on my hard drive where I could get to them running at full local speed. Once you've been spoilt by the responsiveness of locally-run apps, web apps that run from the Internet just aren't as snappy. Of course, many will say that locally installed apps are old skool; that if you really think with a Web 2.0 mindset, then running your key software directly from the Internet makes more sense. The world is certainly trending that way, with a proliferation of Web 2.0 apps that now run directly from "the cloud" and computing devices designed to work this way, such as the Macbook Air . Computing in the cloud started with obvious appl...

A few posts ago I mentioned that both Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom had been nominated for Eddies, or Edublog Awards . As the voting processes started for the awards, there was apparently quite a bit of blog-love being shown for certain nominees in the form of multiple votes, automated voting, group voting, etc. It got to the point where the organisers had to first of all manually delete suspicious voting activity such as in the form of huge numbers of votes all coming from the same network address in a short period of time, and eventually had to completely limit the voting system to a single vote per IP address. No doubt this was the result of some very enthusiastic voting by students in class ("OK kids, your teacher has been nominated for an award so go to this url and click the button for me"). Finally, the opportunity to see the progress of the results was shut off completely as well. It's a shame the voting had to be nobbled in this way as it really rui...

For a bit of voyeuristic fun, you might like to take a peek at one, or all, of these sites... Twittervision , Flickrvision and Wikipediavision . There is a strange fascination watching them do their thing. All of these sites tap into the Google Maps API . I mentioned in a previous post about Twitter how an API (Application Programming Interface) can be used to give programmers backdoor access to a particular web app, enabling them to connect into them with another service or application that may or may not have ever been deigned to do so. Think of apps which have open APIs as Lego blocks that can be easily joined together, where the output of one app can be seamlessly plugged into the input of another, so that they talk to each and share data very nicely. Google Maps in particular have had plenty of interesting uses made of their very open API, and these three examples show you that in action. By using the data coming out of Twitter (the Tweets being made by people), or Flickr (th...

During the second plenary session at the AIS conference today, I was looking forward to hearing Pia Waugh speak. Pia is co-owner of Waugh Partners , vice-president of Linux Australia , and a huge advocate for both Linux and the Open Source Software movement generally. I met Pia last month at the CSTA meeting where we were both speaking, and I had a great chat to her over dinner about all sorts of things that any normal person would probably consider geeky in the extreme. Pia is a super smart lady and very passionate about the whole Open Source movement, so I really enjoyed talking with her that night. When I saw her in the auditorium today before her session I went to say hi, and was pretty surprised to see her holding a little green and white plastic device in her hands... after the initial g'days were exchanged, I said "Is that what I think it is?" She gave me a big grin, and said "yep!" Pia had managed to get herself one of the "$100 laptops" t...

For a while now, ever since I've been producing The Virtual Staffroom podcast, I've been meaning to blog about the workflow I've developed for producing it. After a lot of trial and error, and making plenty of mistakes, I'd started getting a system happening on the best way to put the podcast together. Then along comes the new GarageBand as part of iLife '08 and all that changed. Normally I don't like it when my systems get disrupted, but in this case I am thrilled about the changes as it reduces the steps needed to make a podcast considerably. Added to that are some configuration changes I made to the way I capture the audio, and I reckon I can now do better quality recordings at much smaller filesizes with far less effort, so it's win-win all round. For anyone that might be interested, here are the tools and the workflow I plan on using from now on to create podcasts. I've got another podcast interview lined up for tomorrow night so I'm excit...

I've been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately... not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It's a pretty cool site and it's easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff. I was really interested to find that Apple's totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too... as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the 'Tube. It's very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it. As a test, I edited together this little production last night using...

The web is a really bizarre place sometimes. But this story proves that real life can always be more bizarre... In case you have been living under a rock lately, Apple is about to release a fairly major product called the iPhone . It's a mobile phone of course, but it also does email, voicemail, web browsing as well as being a pretty darn amazing video iPod as well. Although many other phones from companies like Nokia and Sony Ericsson offer similar features, the iPhone seems to have a much greater emphasis on design and usability, as only Apple seems to be able to do. Obviously the tech world thinks the iPhone will be a big deal because since the announcement of the device back at MacWorld last year, Apple's share price has gone through the roof, rising from about $70 per share to the $125 price it is sitting on at the moment. Whatever Apple is doing with the iPhone, it seems to be attracting the right kind of attention. There is a ridiculous amount of commentary on the i...

I had a little spare time tonight so I decided to do a job that I've been meaning to do for a while... cleaning up my bookmarks collection. (What's up with that? I can live in a house that's messy, my desk at work looks like a bomb has hit it, but my hard drive is really well organised... go figure!) I mentioned recently that I've been using Flock as my main browser these days... mainly because it has a bunch of wonderful built-in features that seem really sensible, but I can't help wondering why the bookmark organisation is set up like it is. One of the many nice things about Firefox, or even IE for that matter, is that you can arrange your collection of bookmarks/favourites into folders and subfolders. This is largely a very good thing, although I did notice I tended to get just a little over-organised at times and I had a large number of folders that had only one item in them, which is perhaps getting just a tad granular. But I did have a lot of top-level f...

Ok, I must admit I'm impressed by Microsoft's new table-like project called Surface, which Bill G has been showing off lately. It's a multitouch capable computer that works in a table form factor. There are some obvious uses of it, like restaurants, casinos, etc where transactions take place largely on a table. I don't know how commercially successful it will be but I think it's a pretty cool technology! Watch the video and check it out for yourself...  I particularly like the way it interacts with devices like digital cameras and PDAs.  I presume those devices would have to have some form of wireless interconnectivity such as Bluetooth or Wifi?  Very cool though! [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5yJ3x9XNFK8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

You probably know about Single-touch screens.  If you have ever used a SmartBoard, Tablet PC or any other sort of touch sensitive device you will probably have noticed that you can only have a single point of contact.  If you try and draw on a SmartBoard in two places at once, it takes an average of the two locations and draws the line halfway between the two contact points.  Getting used to writing on a SmartBoard without touching the screen is a bit disconcerting at first but most people pretty quickly adapt. Likewise, the reason that you can't write on a Tablet PC with just your finger and why it requires a stylus pen is that it's really the only way to give the screen a single contact point, allowing you to interact with the panel using the stylus tip while having it ignore the rest of your hand resting on the screen while you write.  Basically, most of the touch devices we are familiar with will tolerate a single point of contact only. So what we really need to move forwar...

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office.  As a teacher, I think it's hard to avoid.  Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids.  I even have a few "qualifications" in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence , and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program.  I mean, if you're going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right? I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007 .  Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite.  The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them.  Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them.  I even had a...

In the cult classic radio play, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams talked about a fictitious technology company called the Sirius Cybernetics Coorporation, a company who products were so bad that… "O ne is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all. In other words, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. " Does that sound familiar?  Ever tried to do battle with a substandard software application?  Or a fundamentally flawed Operating System? Or some new gadget that was designed by geeky engineers but is incomprehensibly difficult to operate for the average user?  And yet why do we just accept these devices and this software? …"One is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all".  Such a poignant statement! By the way, it's quite astoun...

Ah, I love this stuff... Edublogs just keeps getting better and better, thanks to the efforts of James Farmer. First we had a server upgrade a few weeks back and we got all sorts of extra goodies included for adding media files to posts - stuff like Youtube, Flash, Flickr and even video players. We also got a bunch of cool extras like the synthetic voice podcasting plugin from Talkr, and a new backend interface with many more options. The static pages can now be nested to form a hierarchical site structure as well as the regular blog structure, which could be very useful. Then 2 weeks ago James added a bunch of new CSS templates to the list of possible look'n'feel options, all with much tighter integration for the new plugins. Now, I log on to find yet more new goodies in here... a poll option! I've been having a play with the poll tool - appropriately called Democracy - and as you can see on the left, it works just fine. It's a pretty naff question right now, but ...

I've always been a great believer in the Pareto Principle , sometimes more commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. This principle basically suggests that in any group or organisation there will usually be 20% of the people who produce 80% of the results. This observation generally holds quite true, be it a club, a group, a classroom or even a family... there is always a minority of the people who produce a majority of the results. It may not always be exactly an 80/20 split, but you can pretty much guarantee that the work done by any group will almost never be spread evenly among the workers. Once you understand and accept this fact, a lot of the frustration and annoyance of life starts to go away as you stop worrying about how you're going to get the majority of the people to do more than the minimal amount that the Pareto Principle says they will do. The fact is, they never will. Those people will never do more than the miminum, no matter how we cajole, threaten, or in...

As a power user on the Windows platform and a quick learner on the Mac platform, there is something about the difference between the two that has always intriuged me. I've noticed it in many forms over the years, but I was reminded of it when I read this rather silly report on the TUAW site... I'm sure the fellow who wrote it had his tongue firmly in his cheek, but if you browse through the comments under the main article you'll find a very interesting thread of discussion has emerged relating to the Mac's little green zoom button. Seems the zoom button is not without its fair share of controversy and a rather passionate, yet civil, debate is raging there about the differences between the way windows (with a small 'w') behave on Windows (with a big 'W') versus the way they behave on the Mac. The basic gist of the discussion is about the subtle difference between the user interfaces of both platforms and the author tries to draw an assertion that the U...