I had the opportunity to present a workshop today on the Google Art Project.  If you are not familiar with it, drop everything and pay attention.  This could change your life. The Google Art Project is a gathering of art collections from around the world; 151 institutions, over 9,000 artists, and over 43,000 art works, and counting.  The art works are presented in high definition photography, and many in gigapixel resolution.  To see the Art Project for yourself, go to www.googleartproject.com. The first thing that you will notice is that this is site looks VERY un-google-like.  A lot of thought has...

Yesterday I had occasion to deliver a brief workshop on Google Search Tips & Tricks.  Many of the concepts covered in my post of last week were covered, though by no means all.  To make sure the attendees had a chance to practice the concepts covered I set up a Search Contest Quiz in our workshop Blackboard component, and made it available for all workshop attendees for six hours only, from 6pm to 11:59pm January 29.  This morning I have had two of the attendees say they simply could not find the time to do the quiz and could I open it up again.  I will do so in the Blackboard workshop area, but...

I am going to be doing a Google Search Tips workshop next week (Tuesday at noon in room LL-109).  For those who will not be able to attend, here is what we will be covering. Google Search Basics 1. Every word you put in the search box counts.  Don’t use too many words, but the right word and word order matter. Don’t ask a natural language question that a human would understand. Don’t worry about spelling, Google will correct it. The search algorithm understands only terms you give it, so express your search in the terms that might appear on the page(s) you are looking for. Stop words (the, and, a,...

Chris and I watched the iPad mini event today on our departmental Apple TV.  It only occurred to us belatedly that we should have made it an open event for anyone wishing to attend in room LL-111.  But then, you never know.  Sometimes the events are chock full of meaningful new products and insights into Apple’s ongoing strategies, and other times they are a lot of noise about not much.  Today’s event was more the former.  The big news was the iPad Mini—about which more below—but there were significant announcements related to the iBook app and store, Macbook, iMac, and a surprise...

Google Docs is a service offered by Google that offers the ability to create, edit, manage, and share documents online. It is possible to make text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and forms. Google Docs can be compared to software suites such as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice but is housed online so that it can be accessed from almost any computer or device with an internet connection. Assuming that you have a compatible device with access to the internet, the only other requirement is that you have a Google Account. After signing in to Google Docs, the Docs list is displayed. The...