In the Adelaide session I asked Jimmy Wales about whether we will develop good-manners conventions for personal interactions on the web, in time. His answer, “Yes”. His comprehensive and impressive answer was captured by Mike Sefang, and can be found here. (audio)
Again, it repeats his positive but disciplined view of people that has made the Wikipedia work.

I have been a great fan of Inspiration, the education focused mind mapping application, but the recently committed the mortal sin of launching version 8 which is not compatible with previous versions. It is quite expensive and does not have an online capacity.

There are now some very promising looking web based mindmapping applications that are free, at least in basic version, and have the huge advantage of allowing collaborative development of a map. A good review of three of them: bubbl.us, Mindomo, and MindMeister is found here in the Daily Web Worker.

The reviewer concludes that none of them have the full flexibility of the best tools, but are very promising. They rate MindMeister as the best, and it is still in private beta. Users can work on a map simultaneously, and can have a chat via Skype while doing it!

That looks as though these offer great educational potential. Another Web 2.0 success story in the making.

Technology Review had a powerful criticism of Vista in Feb from a professed windows fan, Erika Jonietz here. In the April edition the editors said they had their strongest reader response ever to this article, because, I guess, it was such a powerful critique.

They then invited one of their editors to respond which he does here ( rather tepid support I thought) and below, all the responses from the masses. As a Mac owner I am of course completely neutral in this debate.

The word bloated was used a lot!

Heard the great Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame today, and one of his notable principles is “accountability rather than gatekeeping”. In other words, rather than shutting the door, banning, restricting and controlling – make yourself, your use of the internet – accountable, and encourage this in others. He was largely referring to Wikipedia and online publishing.

However this principle is very appropriate for an issue that bedevils the use of the internet in SA schools, and probably in many other jurisdictions.

A constant complaint heard from ICT coordinators and principals is, “You can’t access that site because DECS [the Department] blocks (filters) internet access.” However, DECS gives control of the site blocking to the Administrator at school level, ie: the principal. It seems that many schools do not exercise that control, leaving the default setting in place. Requests can be made to the IT section for state-wide blocking to be removed, but this is a somewhat tedious process because of the inevitably conservative approach of these people.

So, gate-keeping is the general approach for the system and many schools. But it does not have to be so. Sue Toone is a principal with a different approach. She exercises a liberal approach, removing blocking when it is seen to be warranted. Staff have considerable powers to initiate the opening up of web sites because Sue believes that they are responsible people. They manage curriculum access to a wide range of resources for students as a matter of routing.

It is too easy to resort to victim behavior, blaming ‘the department’ for restrictions on web access when the power is fundamentally in the hands of the school. It means being accountable for one’s actions. But principals and and teachers and school councils are expected to be accountable, to act reasonably and to act in good faith. They manage this in relation to the purchase of books for the library, and are perfectly capable of doing this in relation to selecting web sites for access by students.

In a spot of recklessness a few months ago I subscribed to Technology Review, an apparently good quality US magazine. They had an article that looked very impressive on the one laptop per child initiative. The attraction of the magazine was not just its content, but that I could subscribe for a year for only $24US and get an exact copy online via the Zinio reader software.

Well, the content is very impressive, well over my head in terms of science, but beautifully presented and a great way, to keep up to date with innovation in technology across the broad range of science and technology.

But what about the facsimile experience? Zinio reader is very polished and presents the magazine in its exact paper format, down to the little subscription insert between pages. Navigation is either by mouse or cursor keys. The standard view is the two page spread [see image] where headlines and the general content can be read, and with one click, it zooms into wherever you click to the readable format. The trouble is that the magazine is in columns, and so you read the top of the left column , then jump down to see the lower part of the column, then jump up to see the top of column two, and so on. It is all a bit silly. A format that works well in a magazine or newspaper, where you eye readily does the ‘jumping’, is not effective on a computer screen – unless of course you can turn your laptop sideways and view the page in its ‘natural’ portrait format.

So I visited the Technology Review website, and lo and behold, the entire magazine content is there in regular web format, and I must say, I find it much easier to use. While the web format magazine lacks the cleanness and full screen display of the Zinio edition, it is a lot more ‘natural’ to the experienced web user. Navigation is simple, bookmarking is easy, and it connects naturally, that word again, to other web tools.

So my conclusion from this experience and from a short experiment with reading the New York Times in its print layout on a computer is that it is futile for web publishing to mimic print display. Each medium should stick to its own advantages.