Becoming A Gmail Ninja

Recently, Gmail put out a set of tips on using Gmail optimally. We are considering it as one of the handouts for the digging deeper with Google sessions we are offering to college employees this summer. As part of that review process I found a few tricks that I started to use this afternoon.  As a result I am leaving today with a clean inbox and a compact Google Apps interface.

I hope I can defeat my opponent and earn the green belt at the next gathering.  I am worried, I hear my opponent is Ralph Macchio.

Email Inquiry – Chat Discussion – Chat History Added To Conversation

Last week, I received an inquiry from a colleague thinking through how much energy should be given to a particular piece of a larger project.  I did not get to respond to the email at that moment as I knew it would take two or three email messages to get to a decision so I left it for when I had hoped to see him face to face.  The face to face never happened so it was still sitting in my inbox this afternoon when I went for my regular afternoon email session.  I noticed my colleague was available via chat thanks to the link at the bottom of the original message. I figured that things would be more efficient as we could exchange information and clarify understand all at once and be done with it.  This was true but there was the unforeseen advantage to have the message and our chat conversation available all in the same window which also provided efficiencies (at least for me, I am not sure if google chat pulls up the message in question on to my colleague’s screen or not.  I will need to ask him).  It was very helpful not to have to toggle between my mail and IM windows to check facts of the original messsage. This is what I was looking at when I was chatting.

The integrated email and IM produced another efficiency – a log of the conversation that we had was associated with the original email message saving the step of confirming what was determined in the chat session in a follow-up email.

I also double checked there is a way to have conversations ‘off the record’ for the few conversations that would need such a feature.  I did not see a way to Reply All by Chat – nor do I know if I think such an option would be useful at this point.

Web Clips – They Ain’t Google Reader Or Advertisements

When we I got my first look at our instance of Google Apps at Allegheny I was confused at how we could have the advertisements turned off but still be getting ads across the heading of mail boxes.  It took a second to figure out that the weren’t ads but headlines from preloaded RSS feeds.  Google calls them web clips and I freely admit I don’t have much use for what was loaded by default.  I do like the option to add my own feeds and have headlines from the past week scroll through.

Directly about my inbox messages (see area within the red box – sorry those who might be using a screen reader or color blind) I receive the most current headlines for a few select sites.   I have been careful to put only certain types of news in there mainly campus news and sites related to google apps.

My Web Clips

I really like how I configured this as I very rarely go to the sites intentionally to read the news.  By having it as “intentional noise” around something I pay attention to more regularly, I am more informed about what is going on on campus.  I really hoped that we would be able to pre-populate some feeds but this does not seem possible.  (If anyone has figured out how to control this at the enterprise level it would be great to know. )  This will be something to include in our overviews of Google Apps sessions this summer.

Initial Post about My Allegheny (Allegheny’s use of Google Apps for Education)

Now that the decision has been made to pursue Google Apps here at Allegheny I have jumped right in to emerse myself in the environment and paradigm of using an integrated suite of calendar, email, tasks, documents, and start page. From a user perspective, I am finding more and more advantages of such an environment.  A few of the postitive features I have found are from labs particularly the “send and archive button” and the “multiple inboxes” both of these are key time savers for me.

1. The send and archive option allows me to send the message and clear out my inbox all in one step as opposed to the two steps it would take prior(not to mention I never did step two in my personal gmail account thus causing my inboxe to be unruly).
2. The multiple inbox allows me to pull less urgent messages out of my main inbox into sub mailboxes thank’s to the use of filters.  This allows me to focus my energy on the inbox which contains the messages that need my attention first.  It did not take a lot of time to set up initially (5 -10 minutes) and only 30 seconds or less to add new filters for messages that I want to skip my inbox and be displayed in one of my 4 sub mail boxes (Bulk News, Listservs, Help Desk Stuff, Sales).  I can go to my sub mailboxes when I have the time or interest and read those messages.  For a week now I have been able to keep up and respond to messages in my inbox before I leave for the day.

Other features are just a part of how an integrated suite works

1. For instance take a look at this email invitation to a meeting I received this morning.
   Two things not seen in this image but worth noting is that the meeting was made on the department’s common calendar that can be a layer on my personal calendar. Also, should there be documents necessary for the meeting they can be uploaded and shared along with the meeting time.
2. I am still struggling a little with the conversation mode a bit, perhaps more because it seems like magic to me how Google strings the threads together but the fact that when I archive (not delete) prior threads are brought back when new messages arrive.
3. I have also given up on the need to organize messages beyond what it takes to direct messages to the 5 mail boxes because the search is so good.  All I need to remember is something, anything about the message I want to find and plug that into the search box.  In the last week I have been able to find every message I want quicker than when I was organizing into folders in my desktop client.  Archive and Search is the way to go!

The biggest struggle that I have found to this point is the paradigm shift of how email calendar and document sharing was done to how it needs to be done within this suite.  I believe this will be a common experience from the community, especially those that have pushed the edges of the what our current client can do.

Library of Congress Photos on Flickr (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress)

ELI’s 7 Things this month is on flickr in the document I learned that the Library of Congress has partnered with flickr.

Library of Congress Photos on Flickr (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress)

The project sounds interesting what caught my attention was the invitation to participate…

” We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying informationâ??many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions! …

What participatory history? I concentrated on Social Studies (history really) as an education major at SUNY Fredonia (go Blue Devils). And loved the courses where we engaged in the primary resources of the time period being studied. Looking at pictures, letters, dress, etc… of the day some how drew me back to the day I could get lost in the mess for hours on end. History is about people and the pilot the LOC is doing with flickr makes history accessible to people. What an interesting mesh of structured Library stuff with user-produced content of Web 2.0 this is a fantastic mash-up of culture if you ask me.

A funny aside is that I was listening to Gardner Campbell’s talk from this year’s ELI where he references the concept of simple tools loosely joined (Jim didn’t you give a talk last year on this? If so, a link would be helpful…) as being a model of teaching and learning technologies. This use of flickr would be an example of that. I wonder how the success of this pilot impacts the need for tools such as Luna. Is a Luna like tool necessary for the back-end and a flickr like tool best used for interaction and engagement?

Any who back to my thoughts on LOC on Flickr.

The level of access that this gives people like me – who with small kids won’t get to DC in the near future and then when I do get there wouldn’t have the time to do more than notice the pictures as I ran past reminding the kids that daddy is almost done and there are chicken nuggets in it for them if I can have just a few more minutes to look at the cool stuff. – a chance to

• look at the pictures and absorb the content
• share reflections using the comments or notes tools
• help organize by adding my tag
• identify the image with place via the map tool
• respond to the image in my blog using flickr’s Blog This tool.
• see the changing collection as new images are posted (God Bless RSS)

For added reference here are a few screen shots from my few minutes on the site.

I took this one to show that Flickr users can embed notes about the picture. I wanted to share this one because note added to the value of the picture by making it a picture of pattern as much as it was a picture of industry or trains.

I wanted to share this one as it allows for humor-

And this note shows correction of the the humor…

I hope that they add more to the map. I really am interested as to where the images were taken from. I think it helps place the image in a better context.

I look forward to watching this grow and change.  I hope that this is brought into the visual literacy workshop.

Changing Help Desk Trends – Mobile Computing Is Not Just on the Horizion for Learning.

With the pending release of the Horizion Report, I have seen a few posts about what will be in this year’s report and how it compares to last year’s document. From the very little I’ve seen, I expect this year’s report will be mostly a fine tuning of the trends reported in the last report. I am excited to see how the hairs are split and if there is a new topic on the 5 year horizion. As I wait for that report I found this post today, Support for Mobile Devices is Changing Help Desk Trends, which reminds me that not only do I need to consider how to support more mobile computing for teaching and learning but also for those that work outside the classroom. The development officers, student affairs professionals, admission counselors, coaches, etc.. will also find ways to incorporate mobile devices into their work practices.

test post from flock

I am trying to find out if Flock is more than this week’s shiny object.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock

A Typical Web 2.0 Response

During the conversation that spurred this post…

Thoughts and Experiments » Google Apps at a Small School

Folks got to talking about the details of how a folder structure of organizing messages plays with a tagging structure.  Questions, hypothesis, and more questions were shared across the discussion a fairly typical IT brainstorming session.  Then the discussion became interesting when someone threw in something like.

It doesn’t matter because hierarchical organization is pointless with the rise of tagging and live search.

Totally true (or almost totally true).  This brings me back to the NetDay Podcast from Educause.  We as digital immigrants (you’re welcome susan) are making decisions based on a paradigm that is loosing footing.  We need to start embracing the emerging tools to attempt to think more like our future customers.  That being said, this weekend I resolved to remove my many filters and folders from my mail program.  But this morning I could not bring myself to it.  Not sure why but I can’t just yet.  Perhaps when I need to procrastinate a little.

Benefits of Google Reader as a News Aggregator

Until recently I used Bloglines exclusively to read updates from around the web. Two weeks ago, I was introduced to Google Reader which has been improved from when I looked at it before settling on Bloglines.

At first, I was not happy with the speed as it was noticeably slower that Bloglines but as time progressed, I found many benefits of Google Reader including…

• Tags – The ability to organize posts by keywords seemed silly at first because to this point I was thinking of the posts like newspaper articles where I read once and moved on. If I really cared about the post I would tag it to delicious which was nice but an extra step of having to surf out to the site and then do the delicious thing. Now I can apply tags within google reader which takes less time and allows quicker retrieval.
• Share – For each post you are able to easily share the post with others simply by clicking an icon (unshare is just as simple). By default you have a ‘Reading List‘ that is made public automatically with the first post you choose to share. This list can be shared as a web page, rss feed, email, or widget.
  
• Reading Lists based on tags – Through the manage subscriptions link on the Tags tab I found this handy option if you have a need to share resources you find with others. (What I really like is the ‘others’ need little knowledge of social software and related technologies to take advantage of this feature.) If you are already tagging your posts then you are half way there.
  
  As you can see you can make all posts with a given tag public and then share those posts via web page, email link or widget on one of your web pages.
• Views – not nearly as cool as the features mentioned about but depending on personal preference you can choose to read incoming posts through the Expanded View or select List View to only see the headlines. I have been switching back and forth between these views based on the other things going on that day.

Add to Google Homepage

Second Life Voice Beta

I registered to help test Second Life’s voice beta. It is at noon today(eastern time). To prepare I went into the grid and found others there trying to make sure the technology worked before the real experience.

The voice component made the exchanges more natural than with type chat. People’s voices would even soften with distance from you. It was unnatural at first trying to take part in a conversation starring at the back of my avatar’s head but moving to mouse view quickly solved that problem.

This test was not without difficulty…

• It is not easily noticeable if your voice is working. You are supposed to have a sound wave over your head as you talk but at points the wave was a barely noticeable green cloud. I many of us there were impersonating the verizon wireless guy. Just because you can hear others does not mean they can hear you. So that was not a good test.
• I and others in the group had to log off and log back on to get the voice and hearing to work.
• I found that after logging in once with it working does not ensure that the voice will work the next time you log in. But repeatedly going into preferences and enabling voice chat and applying the change would eventually work. It took three times through this process but only twice for others.

In the end the I would say the pretest was successful as it was a great leap forward from text chat but I would rate it a D in experience. Hopefully the actual test will go much smoother.

As a post script the folks that I met during my pretest were from larger institutions developing islands in SL. A few of them commented that the outcomes of such a island are unclear. That is fascinating! Investing in something just to see what comes of it.