Archive for January, 2005
Link to a specific clip from an MP3?
Ok, Tim Wilson has an interesting post about creativity and rewards. However, what stopped me dead in my tracks was that he has a hyperlink to a clip from the podcast that he was listening to. Not a link to the podcast in its entirety, but a link to just the clip that he’s talking about. This is one of those “things that I wish I was able to do when refering to podcasts”. In Alan’s infamous post, Yawncasting, he talks about that being one of the problems with podcasting. It’s hard to tell a reader that you’re talking about something that occurs 3:45 into the podcast. However, being able to provide a direct link to it is huge! Now apperantly, the system that IT Conversations uses for this is some sort of fancy scripting, but I’d love to discover some way to link to specific parts of mp3 files myself, especially for files that are hosted on other servers. It would be fantastic for blogging as well as show notes for podcasting! Any ideas out there?
Now I need to go back and re-read the rest of that post. Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards have always been a fascinating topic to me.
Podcast: The future of conferences
New podcast, recorded live (is there any other way to record it?) from a parking spot in front of the eye doctor’s office. I really only talked about one article today. Educause Review has a fantastic article about the future of conferences. It’s a subject of great interest to me because there are so many conferences that I wish I could attend but can’t for one reason or another. Check out the article and enjoy the podcast! I also talk a bit about David Warlick’s podcast again so you get a link to that one as well 
Take your best shot, Spammers
Loving wordpress so far. It has a feature where you can set that if a comment contains more than X links in it, it will sit in a queue until you approve of it. I thought it was just a cute little feature, but then I noticed yesterday that I had 5 posts sitting in my queue! Lo and behold, I had 5 comments with about 30 links for poker sites all awaiting moderation! They were kept off the site, and I was able to click “Delete all” and make them all go away. Brilliant feature. The “no-follow” tag will prevent spammers from getting credit for their work, but this feature prevents your visitors from seeing them at all. That’s the power of Open Source. When you have bazillions of people working on a project for the common good, someone comes up with a good idea or two.
So what’s the big deal about Rojo?
Have you heard about Rojo yet? If you haven’t, you probably will. It’s basically an aggregator with social networking features built into it. From a marketing standpoint though, they’re taking advantage of the model GMail set up. It’s in beta, and it’s by invite only. There’s a Slashdot article discussing it right now and about half the posts are people who are begging for an invite. It doesn’t really matter if the system is good or bad, if it’s by invitation only people want to be in.
I put my name on the list awhile ago (I completely forgot all about it to be honest) but today got an email from them with an invite. So I surfed over there and got myself registered. To be honest, so far I’m not hugely impressed, but I haven’t been able to take advantage of the social networking features yet.
here’s my first impressions so far though. It’s essentially a web based aggregator, like bloglines. You can import and export OPML files, so I grabbed my entire bloglines account and imported it right now. Worked fine, kept my categories, looked swell initially.
First thing I noticed though was that it didn’t tell me how many unread posts I have for a feed. That’s no good, one of the whole points to an aggregator is that I don’t want to have to click on each feed to see if there’s something new. This could just be a beta bug, because there is a button labeled “Mark channel as read”, bu it doesn’t seem to do anything. I guess it’s possible that it considers all the feeds I imported to be already read and it’s waiting for new posts, but I’ll believe it when I see some evidence of that. So that’s strike one against it. Update: Ok, last scenario is actually fact. It does correctly say how many posts are left unread. When you add a new feed, it assumes that all posts are read instead of unread. So it won’t show new messages when you first get started.
As I looked a little closer at my channel list (they have chosen to use the word “Channel” instead of feed *shrug*), I noticed that several of them didn’t resolve to the appropriate names. Turns out sites like Incsub.org and David Warlick’s blog don’t work. Click on the feed and it’s empty. Why? I have no idea. But that’s not cool. Strike two.
Moving right along, I click on Engadget’s feed. Guess what? No pictures. That’s a killer when reading something like engadget. If you can’t see the pretty pictures, it’s a pretty dull feed. I mean, these are gadgets and the pictures provide the WOW factor. That’s strike three. There’s no way I can use Rojo on a daily basis as it is right now.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good things about it or that I don’t see any potential for it. One thing that it does allow you to do is to tag posts your reading. That’s right, you can tag other people’s stories. So as you’re reading a post, you can tag it yourself so you can find it later by tags. Additionally, when you tag a post, other people can find it by that tag as well. I tagged a couple posts with podcasting. When I clicked on the podcasting tag, it pulled up a bunch of articles written that other people had tagged with the same word. Very cool, I can get into that one.
It also has two interesting buttons that didn’t seem to work for me but sound like they could be winners. If you click on the “Related Links” button, it’s supposed to pull up a list of other posts that have links to the one you’re reading or sites that the story links to. Sort of like seeing trackbacks, but accessible to anyone from the aggregator. Neat concept, but didn’t work for most posts and the ones that it worked for were kind of flaky.
One other feature that sounded fantastic but didn’t seem to work too well was the published sources button. It was sort of hidden, you had to go into the Channel Properties to find it. And when you click on it, you just get an error. In the help menu though, they describe what it should do. It’s supposed to provide you with a list of sites that the feed has linked to in their posts. I kind of like that. Would I use it all the time? Probably not, but that’s a neat feature.
Rojo does have a nice layout and the social network features that it advertises may have some real implications. You’re supposed to find or invite friends to Rojo. When you do, you add them to your network as contacts. As you’re reading your blogs, you can ‘flag’ entries by clicking on a little button. When your contacts click on you in their sidebar, they will also see your subscription list and what stories you have flagged. You can also view their contacts and subscription lists, which is appearantly the social network that they’re talking about. This idea is neat. So if I create a network of like minded people, let’s say other teachers at my school, I can just flag stories as I’m looking through. They can see immediately what I’ve found interesting lately.
There is also a Reccomended Stories link, that’s supposed to find stories that you might like. In theory though, it’s influenced by your channels and your contacts. That could be kind of interesting, in that it could be a weighting system that takes advantage of your interests as well as your contacts. If you create a network of your colleagues, then it’s possible that it could have some real merit. I like the idea of it sorting through sites like Slashdot and weighting articles just based on a group of my peers.
However, now we get to my biggest problem with the social network of Rojo. I have no contacts. Nor can I find any. In Bloglines, I can click on a feed I subscribe to and see who else is subscribing to it. Then I can check out their subscription list and see if they have anything interesting for me. There’s no way to do that so far as I can see. These are NOT open networks. Rojo seems to be by invite all around. It will only create closed networks. There’s currently no way for you to see the feeds I read, like you can do in bloglines. There’s no way for me to find out who else subscribes to a feed, no way for me to add a contact unless I invite someone in or know somebody who also uses it. In other words, you gotta know someone specific. That’s decidedly anti-social in my mind. I like the fact that Furl, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Bloglines all connect me with total strangers that I may or may not have something in common with. Rojo doesn’t seem to do that.
Anyway, like I’ve said, I haven’t had a chance to try out the social networking features of it, so it may be that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I’m missing the boat. Want to give it a shot? I currently have 5 invites for Rojo. If you’re interested in giving it a try, drop me a comment or send me an email. The only thing I ask in return is that we actively give the ‘social networking’ piece of it a try. Who knows? Maybe it makes up for the other issues I have with it.
Moving right along
Ok, still getting the hang of WordPress, but I really like what it has to offer.
And I’m seriously liking Bluehost not only because it is saving my bandwidth (and marriage), but because it has a slew of features that I didn’t even know about when I bought into it. For one thing, it keeps stats like nobody’s business. Webalizer, Analog, Awstats, plus bandwidth charts, independant stats for subdomains and so on and so on. A ton of email options, 1000 email accounts as well as three different webmail clients (NeoMail, Horde and SquirrelMail). You also have full FTP access in addition to full SSH access, which I love.
But here’s my favorite part so far: they use Fantastico to provide a bundle of ‘modules’ that you can add to your site with one click. What types of modules? Glad you asked. Blog Engines (B2Evolution, Nucleus, pMachine free and WordPress), Content Management Systems (Drupal, GeekLog, PHP-Nuke, Xoops, etc…), Discussion Boards, E Commerce Solutions, Guestbooks, FAQ makers, Image Galleries, Mailing Lists, Polls, Surveys, Sitebuilders, heck, they even have Moodle! And all of them are autoinstall options for your site. I tried a few and they all worked perfectly. So many options, so little time. I’m still trying to figure out what else BlueHost offers. I just discovered earlier today that they have a cron job manager in their control panels. Full support for subdomains as well. Since they give you a free domain name when you sign up, I registered a new domain and have Teach42 as a subdomain of it. Works perfectly.
Anyway, it’s funny. Yesterday I didn’t blog anything at all. One day. But for some reason, it feels like I haven’t blogged forever. I actually had to scroll back through to check when the last time I posted was. Go figure, eh? It didn’t take long for it to become an integral part of my life. I actually have a queue of things to blog about. Tomorrow my wife is going to be heading to the eye doctor and I have to sit and wait for her. Maybe I’ll bluetooth into the ol’ cell phone and get some blogging done there.
Teach42.com is moving!
Welps, I’ve done gone invested in Bluehost.com. It will provide me with way more bandwidth as well as some other functionality as well. I’m looking forward to the switch. So long as I’m moving, i’ve decided that I’m also going to move to WordPress as well. I’ve gotten a head start on the move and i don’t think much should be interrupted, but don’t be surprised if some links don’t work. If everything goes well, ya’all shouldn’t notice too much being different. Feeds should update automatically if you’re subscribed to the Feedburner feed, you should be all set. If you aren’t, make sure you subscribe to that one instead.
Other than that, try to be understanding for the next few days. Things may be a bit funky but I hope by Monday to have everything all set and in place. Take care and see you on the other side!
New Podcast: Edupodcasters on the march!
New podcast recorded and uploaded. In this one, I discuss how EduPodcasters seem to be coming out of the woodwork. This is a *good* thing. Also, I play a quote from IT Conversations on Syndication Nation. Enjoy the show!
Show Notes:
OneBigHead: Jeff Moore’s podcast during a snow day. Fantastic first show.
Exactly 2 Cents Worth: David Warlick just posted his 3rd podcast. He’s got a very unique style of producing his, weaving his voice in and out of music. Oh yeah, the content is fascinating as well.
Open Stacks: Greg, a librarian, tries his hand at podcasting. Haven’t listened to it yet, but it’s on the top of my queue right now.
Girl on Tech: An podcaster from just over the Indiana border. She’s doing a workshop today that’s going to involve teaching other educators about podcasting. Can you say "new recruits"?
IT Conversations: Syndication Nation, the source for the quote that I played on the show.
The Internet is NOT an excuse for allowing students to cheat.
Bah. Articles like this one really tick me off. The Seattle Times has an article entitle Educators blame Internet for rise in student cheating. I’m sorry, but what a cop out. The article talks about two distinctly different issues but lumps them together; copying selections from web sites without crediting the original author and downloading an entire paper and turning it in as your own work.
First of all, the biggest problem here is the same problem that many teachers have as well. They use clip art without permission, they could care less about software licensing, they download music from the internet without paying for it and they use lesson plans from other teachers without giving credit to the original author. Need I go on? Teachers aren’t so different from students. It’s a nationwide problem. We’ve been led to believe that if we’re using someone else’s ideas, that we’re doing something wrong. There is nothing wrong with copying a section of a website and pasting it into a research paper. So long as they put quotes around it and cite where they got it. Tools like Furl make that a breeze. In fact, I think we should be ENCOURAGING students to be doing that. When you get right down to it, it’s called research! Let’s say the assignment is “Identify what it is about the Great Gatsby that’s so great.” There may be thousands of people who have done the exact same assignment. From a students’ perspective, if people have already done the exact same assignment and the information is readily available, shouldn’t they just research some possible answers and base their paper on that? The problem is that teachers are discouraging their students from researching the topic if it wasn’t supposed to be a research paper! Why on earth would we be training our students to equate research with plagarism? I hope someone will explain to me just how different an aritcle in an Educational Journal is from an essay written by a student somewhere else that thoroughly covers his topic and cites his sources.
Teachers should be showing students how to find other students’ essays. Then they should be teaching them how to critically analyze them, quote them, cite them and use them in their own paper.
At the end of the article, they finally address this a bit.
Van Belle typically introduces his students to Internet sites that offer canned essays. He uses it as an opportunity to critique bad writing and to let students know that he knows about these sites. He’s had bright students who find perverse pleasure in trying to beat the system. He’s had struggling students who turn to plagiarism out of desperation.
But as an academic, he’s also aware that scholarship is built on other people’s words and ideas. The challenge for teachers, he said, is to help students distinguish between scholarship and cheating.
Did you hear that? The difference between scholarship and cheating. What’s wrong with drawing up the ideas of those who came before you? We all do it on a daily basis. It’s just a matter of making sure you give credit where it’s due.
Now let’s consider students who copy an entire eassy and turn it in as their own. There are hundreds of thousands of teachers out there. And yes, many of them use the same books for class. And yes, many of them assign the exact same topics for papers. If teachers aren’t able to take the time to come up with original assignments, why do we expect students to come up with original answers? The easiest way to prevent a student from turning in a paper that they downlaoded off the internet is to assign them topics that aren’t out there! Compare the Great Gatsby to a character in a movie that came out recently. Or ask them to think about about what aspects of “Big Brother” they see in their own school. I remember a speaker once told me that if you assign a second grader to find 5 facts about cheetahs, they’ll do a google search on the subject and copy and paste their answers. If you tell them to pretend that they’re a cheetah and to write about what they’re morning would be like, then they have to take those 5 facts, think about them and put them into their own words.
Saying that the internet is responsible for students cheating is a cop out. Teachers creating situations that almost encourage students to cheat is the greater problem. In the real world, when you have a problem you find ways to solve it. Sounds to me like that’s what many students are doing. They just need to learn that they need to give credit where credit is due, and that it’s OK for them to do so.
Over the past four years, McCabe has surveyed more than 70,000 students at 120 high schools and colleges. He found that 95 percent of high-school and college students admit to some form of academic cheating. About 60 percent of high-school students said on an anonymous questionnaire that they’d copied material from other sources into their own work. Forty-five percent of college students who responded to an Internet survey said they’d copied material.
The question that I haven’t heard an answer to is, “Why didn’t you just cite your source instead of taking credit for the work as your own?” How many of those students think that it would have been acceptable to give credit to the original author for those passages? It’s a sad situation we’ve created for ourselves.
Podcasting: Active listening vs. Passive
Jack was emailing me back and forth a few times after the BlogWalk, and brought an interesting idea to my attention. He pointed out that I didn’t have a direct link to my last podcast so he couldn’t listen to it. The reailty is, the number of people with pdocatching software is still pretty minimal. For people who want a ‘taste’ of podcasting, or to sample a show, I really need to make sure I keep including direct links. After updating the show notes with a link, he gave my ‘cast a listen and sent me the following email…
There are zillions of bloggers. You can find a plethora of information about your very small niche of information. i.e. Rodeo Clowns. (quick search – Dream Job description. No blogs dedicated to the job, though there seem to be
more that are Rodeo-centric.)
* most attendees were business (value to the company; worth of the blogging activity)
* Steve is looking at education
* “education” doesn’t think about value – wasting time isn’t the same as dollars down the drain for the school (but then it is too). Maybe educators should be thinking about this.
* i.e. “bad blogging” could translate into lots of wasted dollars for a company
* what kind of expectations should we have for teachers who blog? communication, resource for students, communicate with parents?idea that testing doesn’t have value
* schools that scored low at the start are looking like they are improving
* riff on why testing isn’t helpful – hard to test “do they know how to find out how to solve a problem” when they don’t know how
* How do we teach kids how to learn. This is the most critical aspect. Personal example of learning about technology in Steve’s job.
* Can we show “the government” that we have a better way to achieve (teaching how to learn), but how do we measure and compare this capability?
Ok, this was just a sample, but I have to tell you it sparked quite a few fireworks going off in my head. Whenever someone thinks about podcasting and education, the first thing most people say is, “Wow, we could record every class and the students could download the lectures!” This is true, and it might be a good idea for students who are absent, or want to be able to concentrate on content first and take notes later. But most podcasts don’t fall into this category. The reality is that most podcasts are closer to radio shows. When I record my podcast, I assume that people are listening to it in the car, on the bus or while walking. However, there could be just as many people listening in front of their computers.
Jack was an active listener. He was trying to absorb everything that I was saying, taking notes, even following up on some of the comments i made by doing a few searchs (appearantly rodeo clowns are out of luck in the bloggosphere right now). I generally think of my audience as passive listeners. I’d like to think that at some point they might take some of the things I talk about and put them into practice, but I don’t think about people actually taking notes during my ‘cast.
It’s something I need to think a bit more about. There’s a seed of an idea germinating inside right now, and I’m having trouble pinning it down. But there’s an innovative way to harness active listening and podcasting. I’m just not sure how yet. Thoughts?
Blogwalk 6.0 wrapup: Blog edition part 1
Jack has been dropping some not so subtle hints that I should post some reflections about Blogwalk beyond just the Podcast. I’ve been intending to, it’s just a matter of finding the time (an oh so precious commoditity). But he’s absolutely right, if I don’t get some of these thoughts down now, I probably never will.
First of all, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It was a distinct pleasure to be able to engage such thought provoking discussions with people face to face. There really is such a different dynamic when you’re having a conversation with people, versus reading a blog post and commenting on it. Like I said in my closing remarks at the ‘walk, oftentimes we forgot that as social an activity blogging is, there’s no substitute for authentic real world interaction.
AKMA has a couple of posts with some details, so I’m not going to bother with a full recap. Check out his summaries, they’re pretty solid.
One conversation I really got into revolved around what exactly we mean by Social Software (fairly topical since Social Software in the Organizational Setting was the theme of the Blogwalk!). I was suprised to find out that most people thought of social software as things like Discussion Boards, Skype, Instant Messaging, IRC, even Email. It’s funny because even though those are truly social tools, I never really considered them to fall in that same category. I guess I just thought of those as communication tools. When I think of social software, I think of tools like del.icio.us, 43 Things, and even Bloglines. Interestingly enough, the way I think of social software requires almost no social interaction at all. So perhaps I really am way off base. I think of social software as tools that connect people to other like minded people. For example, if I subscribe to Weblogg-ed on Bloglines and I enjoy reading it, I can click on a link to see who else subscribes to it. Now, if those people are interested in reading about Educational Technology, it stands to reason that they may be subscribing to other blogs that may be interesting to me. Additionally, by visiting Will’s site, I can check out his blogroll and see whose pages he happens to be reading. Coincidently, Will has a post about this aspect today.
So, we’ve established (haven’t we?) that reading what people write is now only half of the fun on the Read/Write Web. Even more importantly, it’s only half of the learning. The other half is reading what people read.
If I like what you write, it stands to reason that I might like what you read. This is the ‘social’ piece that I was thinking about it. Through things like blogrolls, subscriber lists and listings of who else bookmarked a specific page, I am able to be connected with other like minded people.
This discussion brought up an interesting division amongst people about whether they liked people having blogrolls or not. Tom pointed out that Blogrolls oftentimes get out of control. “What I’d like to see is blogrolls that are specifically relevant to context; in other words, category-specific blogrolls.” I agree with this wholeheartedly, and should probalby work on reorganizing my subscriptions. I try to just post blogs to my blogroll that i think my readers will enjoy, but I know there is some dead weight in there. Also, if I break the categories down a bit further, I can make sure that what people choose to click on is more pertinent to them. Definitely something to keep in mind and stay on top of. I really like the iidea of having the categories for the blogroll match the categories for the blog. If someone is only interested in my podcasting posts, they can check out my podcasting blogroll. It’s a neat idea. The funny thing is that I don’t even use categories right now. pMachine only lets you put posts in a single category, and my mind doesn’t work like that.
Ok, this was just looking back upon one piece of one small part of a discussion. There was so much more good stuff to write about. I’ll keep revisiting the discussions throughout the week as I reflect more upon them.