Facts, questions and link-love

» No such thing as a stupid question? Contemporary Learning

in the age of Google, what value is there in teaching a fact? It seems now more than ever there is a need to address critical literacy. We need to learn how to dig deeper, not only find out what the facts are but which ones are significant and worth knowing.

This topic is near and dear to me but more importantly gives me a chance to spread a bit of link-love with "my man" Paul. Can you feel it?
Of course facts matter. Always have. Always will. Point is whether explicit "fact giving" has a place in the contemporary classroom. If all educators do is deliver facts that can be easily found with a search engine and delivered in a variety of modalities we are in grave danger of being outsourced. Automated even.
Personally I'm trying to outsource as much of this stuff as possible and focus on the things that only I can deliver. Tim Ferris and Daniel Pink style.
I had Let Me Google That For You unblocked for us last week. I use it daily...

Roboform2Go

I've mentioned Keepass before which is a handy open source application for managing passwords and other private data. Roboform is in the same vein. It's not open source but there is a "lite" version and more importantly a mobile version which is super sweet. The paid version is well recommended by many in the tech industry and isn't too expensive but if you're needs aren't great Roboform Lite will do just fine. I'm going to try on Roboform2Go for size and compare to Keepass. Windows only so if you're on OSX your out of luck. Check out the video for more info.

YouTube - GC Season 2 - Ep. 6 - Roboform2Go

GC2 - Tech Look - Ep. 6 - Seg. 11 Get Connected host Mike Agerbo takes a look at Roboform2Go, a way to bring all your secret passwords with you on a single USB device.

iMovie 09 projects

Unlocking iMovie '09: What to Expect in iMovie '09

In iMovie '08, your projects had to live on your startup drive, and moving them somewhere else manually would keep iMovie from recognizing them. Now you can save projects onto external drives. You can even pick a project and tell iMovie to gather all the event footage to one place, which makes it incredibly easy to move to other computers.

This is way good news. We partition the hard drives on our machines, have a generic "student user" login and any big projects (typically iMovie 06) are stored locally in secure folders. They're just too big to push around the network, especially over wireless. Well iMovie 08 made things difficult by storing all imported media in the user "movies" folder making organisation and security impossible and backing up difficult. The ability to gather event footage and project fies together in the one place is a welcome return and could see us finally leave iMovie 06 behind.
Depends on the upgrade cost...

Webspiration now embeds!

Publishing | myWebspiration

To embed the document in a web page, blog or wiki, click the Copy Embedding Code link at the bottom of your published document.

Great news!
I have been using Webspiration since it the beta started and sent a feedback email early on requesting the embed feature. I was obviously not alone and now four months later it arrives. You have to first "publish" the document which generates a URL you can direct people to if you wish. If you go to the published document there is a button at the bottom to copy the embed code to the clipboard. It's not the most elegant implementation but it's a start. "Republishing" is required to update the document but (thank goodness!) the URL doesn't change.
I'm hoping it will improve with age. Example below.

A lesson for us all

iWork '09 Torrent Carrying OS X Trojan [Updated] - Mac Rumors

A security alert posted this morning by antivirus vendor Intego reveals that the company has discovered a new Trojan horse that is being carried by pirated copies of iWork '09 circulating on a number of torrent sites.

Largest security vulnerability when using your computer regardless of operating system is user behaviour. In this case you could call it karma. If you're using torrents to download stuff especially if it's movies, music or pirated software you're risk profile increases significantly. You better know what you're doing (i.e. have a quarantine machine or similar.)