Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Amazing Add-on for Blogs: Apture

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Thanks to a short post from Lawrence Lessig (now on his regularly scheduled month long blog hiatus, btw) I’m using Apture for the first time to demo what I think is a powerful new potential for blogging. (Click on Lessig’s name above to get a sense.) In an amazingly easy way, I’m now able to add all sorts of multimedia context to whatever I am writing about, in a way that transcends just “regular old” linking. It’s one of those tools that immediately made me want to be back in a classroom with students, learning with them the ways in which writing and hypertext continue to evolve.

Apture allows you to easily add video, audio, text and almost anything else from Web sources or even local files as a pop-up to whatever word or phrase you designate in your post. So, as I write this, I’m thinking about what I can come back and add context to after I publish it. (That’s how Apture works, post publication.) If for instance, I was writing about the latest education news here in Brisbane or in Australia, it’s exceedingly easy for me to provide all sorts of relevant content that pops up right here on the page (as I’m sure you’ve noticed already.) What’s interesting me right now is how this makes me think very differently about the process, and how I wish, actually, that I could do this before I publish. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

While I think this is an amazing new tool, I’m sure it could just be added noise on some level. But regardless, I love these added pieces to play with and to experiment with. It should push all of us to think further about how writing and reading literacies in online, read/write Web environments might differ from traditional paper.

Comments

  2. Dan Callahan says

    Put me in the “added noise” category on this one. I hate mouseover pop-ups, as it takes control away from me and what I’m doing. I will give this one points for at least waiting a moment before the popup, but sometimes I just hover over a link for a second and don’t want something appearing.

    Unfortunately, since this kind of tech was first used by advertising for evil, I have a hard time getting past it. I could be convinced, and I still might play with it to see what I can do with it, but I need to get over this first.

  3. Jonathan Orr says

    Will,

    You are right about using this as an educational tool. I am really looking forward to using this in my AP Biology Blog. I think the embedded media and and links away can distract from the post. This way the viewer can see what you want to show them and then get it out of the way without ever leaving the post. This tool will allow teachers and students to create posts that keep the focus on the page instead of sending the reader through a series of hyperlinks. (not that wandering through hyperlinks is bad) But in times when the writer wants to keep the reader, this tool will be very useful. Apture could also bring the reader focus by allowing them to view several types of media on one page instead of sending them to various pages.

    I am not sure if this is possible, but for a class blog it would be cool if multiple users can add the link. It would be a collaborative effort for multiple students to add content to the post.

    Jon

    • Gary Stager says

      Tom,

      Thanks for beating me to the punch! I was struggling to figure out why this is new or so exciting.

      I was using HyperCard earlier than that 🙂 By 1992 I was running workshops on using Voyager’s Expanded Book Toolkit which allowed an author to create their own dynamic media-rich books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Books Voyager’s work was either way ahead of its time or insignificant.

      Way back then there was an expectation that you would actually write something and then add media or pop-up information for purposes of clarification or annotation. Today’s mash-up tools (and the examples often cited by educators as exemplary) are better suited for collage than writing or serious expression. (I realize that accomplished artists may create exquisite collage. I am referring to the magazine photo collages we find on K-12 bulletin boards)

      -=Gary
      http://www.constructingmodernknowledge.com

      PS: I remember reading in Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard manual how he was influenced by Logo.

  7. Nigel Robertson says

    Not working here either 🙁 Have checked out Apture on another site tonight and working there so not a browser config.

  8. Jeff Utecht says

    Good find! Installed and using!

    Will have to rethink the way I post

    Will have to rethink the way I link

    Will have to rethink user experience

    🙂

  9. Paul Williams says

    This looks really interesting, but I think it needs to be used judiciously to be suitable for educational purposes.

    There is always a possibility of TMI (Too Much Information!), and this tools needs to be used appropriately. I will install on my blog and give it a whirl!

  10. rossisen says

    I get a little worried about allowing a third party to run code on my site. What is their business model? Are they going to be putting ads on it? What kind of tracking do they do? I will have to think about why this is better than linking or embedding. In a funny way, it takes away the learners’ exploration of a term or person that they are not familiar with and replaces it with the author’s.

  11. Gayle Keresey says

    Well, I think I figured out why it didn’t work for some people because I thought it wasn’t working, either. When I got to the photo of Tess and Tucker poster on Flickr, I found out why I was seeing mostly white space. The school filter was blocking sites. I can see the Wikipedia one, but not all of the Flickr ones. Good ole’ Websense strikes again. 🙁

    Gayle Keresey

  13. lhuff says

    Oops–here’s the link: <a href=”http://justread.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/tagged-what-a-way-to-discover-other-bloggers” title=”meme”

  14. Lucy Gray says

    Oohhhh, I love this and I agree that it’s much better than Snapshots. I use Typepad for my blog, and so all I had to do click a button to add this widget. When I went to my blog, a video tutorial popped up and I started linking like crazy. What a find!

  15. Claire Thompson says

    If more folks start using this, please mention somewhere in your post that you are using it. There’s no indication when reading the post from a feed reader that there are Apture links (at least not in my reader) and in this case the links only appear on the Weblogg-ed home page, not the individual post page.