AbandoNING

I have been teaching alternatively certified first-year teachers every spring for the last four years. I have used virtual learning environments (e.g. Blackboard), wikis, and online bulletin boards to organize the hybrid course but this year I wanted to try something new: I am conducting the course using a social network. Since I needed a platform that would allow me to "close the gate" since the discussion we have in the forums is not for public consumption, I settled on Ning and have been more than pleased with the results. In fact, I was so impressed with Ning's delivery that I started a second social network to host an educational community at my school (instead of a course in one of our MOODLE sites).

But then I saw the blog post by Jason Rosenthal. Apparently Ning is closing its doors to free sites. I'm not sure of Ning's new business model. They were founded by offering free social networks that theoretically led to people choosing to opt for the paid version (due to availability of premium features). How does closing free sites help them? It looks to me like a short-term solution to a long-term cash-flow problem, because eventually I think they are going to have a hard time recruiting new social networks. They are simply removing a mechanism that drives traffic to the site in the first place. If cashflow is an issue, why isn't Ning concentrating on advertising revenue? That method has served Google pretty well.

Ning, you have a quality product, but I will not pay for something that should be ad supported. Come May 4, I'm abandoNING my social networks (even the ones I'm only a member in).

ImgBurn

Over the last few months I have been toying with VMWare's virtual machine software (OK, it started out as toying, but we're running it in production now). VMWare has a nice feature that allows you to install guest operating systems using ISO image files instead of physical DVD/CD-ROMs and Microsoft is very kind to offer ISOs through their licensing website. However, VMWare even allows you to use ISO's to install software within the guest operating system. But what if the program you need to install is on physical media and you don't have those disk image files? You can create them using ImgBurn!

ImgBurn is a free utility that allows you to read, write, build, verify, and discover DVD/CD-ROM disks. While it does a lot of things that other free programs offer (e.g., Infrarecorder), ImgBurn allows you to select the files and folders you want to turn into an ISO through a simple GUI. I had a program with four installation disks that needed to be loaded on a virtual server. Instead of having to physically move from a remote workstation to physical host server every time I needed to change disk, I simple used ImgBurn to create ISO's of each disk, and then mount each one within the VMWare client whenever I needed it. Yes, that makes it sound like I'm incredibly lazy (which may or may not be true, depending on if you are talking to my wife or not), but the reality of it is with the time saved moving from workstation to server every time I needed to change a disk allowed me to reset several student passwords and return a few emails.

While this is not a task that most people need very often, I actually have had a couple of more incidents where creating an ISO from an existing disk came in handy. ImgBurn is a program that will remain in my "technician's toolkit".