Primary Flavors

S o that the sweet tooths of the house (my own included) would stop gnashing at me about how little we have on hand to please (and also to rot) them, I boiled together three half-batches of rock candy early this afternoon: peppermint, anise, and cinnamon. Can you tell from the photo that I've never made rock candy before?

Five Minutes?

I f you can spare five or ten minutes, Ph. is working on a school project for his Government class. He has been asked to develop an argument concerned with public policy, and he has been thinking about a focus on smoking in public places: specifically about recent changes in smoking bans in public spaces, indoor and out. This afternoon we spent some time together getting his questions set up on Survey Monkey.

Basically, I'm just trying to help him get word out on the survey, which you can complete here. If you can spare five or ten minutes.

EtherPad

O ver at ReadWriteWeb today, I caught this entry about EtherPad, a collaborative text-authoring web app. One conspicuous difference between EtherPad and the other word processing web apps (Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword, Zoho Writer, etc.) is that the changes to the text are nearer to synchronous. Contributors see each other's writing almost immediately. Even better: EtherPad does not require an account; no sign-up is necessary. The site provides this demo.

It's easy to imagine using EtherPad for drafting a conference proposal or something, although Google Docs has proven adequate for that sort of thing. Where I see EtherPad's greatest immediate use (in my world, anyway) is in the online consultation appointments we've been offering lately in the Writing Center. Right now I use any number of chat clients (AIM, iChat, and Google Talk), but EtherPad features a chat module. I log on to the chat client, invite the student to a session, and we begin chatting about the work at hand. Usually it takes five minutes to gain access to a draft. Because the built-in file transfer processes get hung up far too often (resulting in further delays), I also have the students email their drafts to drop.io, where I can easily access the file. Even with all of this, commenting the text in real time can be a pain. Absent voice options and desktop sharing I still find it fairly difficult to identify the places in the text where I am focusing. Why not copy/paste the document (or a portion of it) into EtherPad and use the built-in chat module to discuss the passage?

EtherPad does not provide voice or video options, but it would serve as a terrific complement to Adobe Connect Now, which does offer voice, video, chat, and desktop sharing. For the WC technology audit I'm working on this semester, I've been thinking a lot about recommending two-app mash-ups as a kind of low-cost writing consultation-ware. EtherPad's usability threshold is so low (i.e., it's free to use, requires no sign up, and presents its options in a simple layout), it seems to me a strong choice for use alongside one of the other audio-video-chat applications. I would think Writing Centers would be all over this sort of web app for synchronous online consulting.

On the short list of drawbacks, there is the small matter of its ethereal quality. You can save the text, but you need to keep track of the URL because there is no other way to track down the saved file. As I was checking out the save function, I found that the chat transcript is not logged. When a saved version of the text is loaded, the chat transcript starts from scratch. It would be nice, however, if there were options for saving (and, thus, resuming) the chat transcript or for outputting the text file and the chat transcript (for my purposes, I'd even like to see a one-click option for saving these to a single file). Might also be nice to see a "scrub" option so that the document and chat transcript are cleared from the server following a session. But these are relatively minor concerns for what appears otherwise to be a promising new application.

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