Will Richardson writes glowingly about the new beta release of the web browser, Flock"

I’ll agree with Clarence…Flock is my new browser of choice, and that just after a few hours of playing.

When Will likes something this much, it must be good. He likes Flock because it is an all-in-one tool: browser, blog editor, uploader to del.icio.us and flickr, news aggregator, and more.

I tried out the blogging and RSS functions. What's nice about the set-up is that you can choose to see the RSS feeds as either one column or two, as headlines alone, headlines with excerpts, or in full. And for blogging, with a single click, you can open the entire article up into a post. This is quite useful if you want to keep it in sight as you write about it and also you indent areas you want as quotes and delete the rest. (Hmm. One problem here might be with students who who neglect to indicate sources.) One other nice thing is that it comes with the graphics in the article. You can see how this works in my blog for my students. I tried it out there with Flock because I use Tinderbox for this blog. I could use Flock, but the new post wouldn't come back to my Tinderbox file on my computer, so it would erased the next time I use Tinderbox.

As good as all-in-oneness is for a professional technophile, it's even better for students who are just being introduced to blogging and other social applications. Rather than having to go to one website to blog and others to read and to respond to--along with having social bookmarking, photo sharing, and drop & drag capability--they can do it all from one place. Having everything together not only reduces the "confusion" and the "hassle," as some of my students have complained, but also makes it easier for students to see the connections between their writing and their reading, and to read their classmates' writings and others, because they're right in front of them as they begin to blog. The juxtaposition of many readings, along with one's writing, can help to facilitate elements of critical thinking, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Although Will is considering leaving Bloglines for Flock, that may not work with our students (despite what I just said above). Will has a laptop, so he carries his browser settings with him everywhere. Students who only have a desktop at home (or no computer at all) wouldn't be able to use Flock's capabilities on school computers without letting others have access to their settings, that is, if the school granted them access to do so. That may change if Flock becames a portable app like Firefox. (See this page for a suite of portable apps.) In the future, perhaps no one will have a computer, only a portable drive. For now, however, I think I'll play a little more with Flock.