OII SDP recap – Cool widgets

It was almost three weeks ago when I dragged myself, reluctantly, out of the awesome Austin Hall at Harvard for an all-too-early flight. But I still feel somewhat immersed in the information-intensive OII SDP boot camp. Though I have read a lot of SDP friends’ own final reports of OII SDP on their blogs, I still feel the urge to dig into my tons of notes and write a series of stuff about the very interesting and inspiring two weeks I had at Berkman Center. Starting from today I will try to put on a section every day.

Let me start with the widgets I used or was introduced to during the two weeks. As a new media scholar I have to consciously keep track of the never ending development of new gadgets, a task that sometimes gets a bit overwhelming. Since OII is about Internet I am not surprised how tech-savvy our faculty and fellow participants were. The following is a list of the widgets that impressed me the most (Ismael published a similar list here):

• Wiki: it is the site for a two week peer intellectual production. we are on the wiki 24/7 during the two weeks. No exaggeration.
• Mindmapping applications: some speakers used them to illustrate sophisticated relations between nodes (if you think our brain works as a network…). Freemind seems to be the most popular and I am going to try it myself.
• The Live Question Tool: used to publish questions while listening to the speaker. But I found it a bit distracting.
• H2O Playlists, to broadcast a master list of refernces mentioned during the two weeks.
• OII/Berkman 2007 Summer Doctoral Programme planet aggregator: get all the buzz in one click.
• Dopplr: a site for traveling friends to keep in touch. A good way for the new generation of academic-wanderers.
• Couchsurfing: a site for traveles to make connections and stay on each other’s couch. (Great for students without enough conference budget)
• Facebook: I was not using it actively till SDP. This is the way to be in the loop.