Following on from the Ed Technie blog. Here's my mindmap of my own PLE. It's been constructed on an application shown in the map called OmniGraffle. It's very 'Mac' centric because that's the platform that I work on 99.99999999% of the time. Still whilst trying to construct this map, I was struck by how much of the technology is platform independent as it's accessed mainly through a browser.
Here are some oddites:
- I need three word processors to do H800 because OU works with .doc or .rtf files. My preferred word processor (Mellel) is the one that works with my bibliographic dbase perfectly (Bookends), and I can output in Adobe Acrobat format perfectly, but this is not the way that OU works.
- I need four browsers. My preferred browser (OmniWeb) will not display the OU H800 pages properly. Nor does Firefox, or Safari. Camino does but doesn't work all the time to hand in TMAs or ECAs, so I have to use Firefox or Safari for that. Go figure.
The software that I've used more in doing this course that surprised me were:
- NewsNetWire - an RSS reader. Easy, clean, bomb proof.
- Adobe Acrobat - to take electronic notes on the myriad of pdf documents that I've downloaded. I've got to figure out a way to sort them more intelligently. However the note taking on the actual document is fiddly but fantastic once it's done.
- Sandvox - the software that is generating this blog.