verso.co.nz

I’ve been keen to use Twitter with devices such as my mobile phone – it’s not that I’m a Twitter addict, but I do need to demo this to participants in my professional development courses as part of a broader discussion of learning technology. But until recently this hasn’t been properly supported by Telecom, my provider here in New Zealand. What was most disturbing was that there was no mention of web 2.0 tools such as Twitter on the Telecom website, and no prospect that it would be supported in future.

So I was pleased recently to see that a local number to access Twitter was now available in New Zealand. But the local number has made no difference – it seems Telecom support for Twitter is still not available for the majority of customers. And although I was pleasantly surprised to see a simple help sheet on the Telecom site on how to set up Twitter access, it’s unclear who can and who can’t access Twitter.

The New Zealand government recently announced major spending on broadband infrastructure to enable high-speed access. But how will education be able to plan for effective use of emerging technologies if network providers are slow to acknowledge these technologies exist, provide patchy support and fail to communicate with customers? If we are to implement sustainable changes in using technology in education, we need reliable, open and consistent access to networks.

The beta version of bing. com, Microsoft’s new search engine, looks fast but it does seem to have a bug in handling language settings in the preferences.

When I first went to the bing site, it quite naturally provided radio buttons to either search the whole web or just in New Zealand. Very sensible.

However, when I went into my preferences and chose to search only in English and Greek, it seems to have decided I’m in Greece and forgotten I’m in New Zealand:

I fixed this by deleting the two bing cookies _FS and _FP in my Safari preferences. So far the faulty setting has not reappeared, so perhaps it only happens when creating a new set of preferences. I’ve since found when I change the search settings this also rewrites the cookies so it is easy to correct.

Another sign that there is some slight confusion between location and language comes when you set the search for Greece and the interface language changes to Greek. You can then change the interface language back to English but this is not properly handled – eg clicking on ‘Help’ or ‘Legal’ results in a page of Greek text and no option to view it in English.