Archive for December, 2005
Video Wishlist
There’s a great little conversation going on about what sorts of things you’d include on a Video Wish List!. Hall listed some of his gear of choice, and several other people have chimed in with their own contributions.
From my days as a tech director, we found ourselves sort of reinventing the wheel, trying to figure out what we needed and where we should be ordering it from. We spent a ton of time trying to find the right equipment and often started off going about things the wrong way. This list would have been a huge resource to us.
Check it out and add a few of your own suggestions if you notice anything missing.
This will go down on your permanent record.
A friend of mine who just started blogging recently (and has been writing up a STORM) shared a post entitled Anonymity, where art thou? describing how he used the internet to track down somebody that had recently visited his wedding site. Essentially, he found the person’s IP address in his logs, used Geobytes.com to trace it to a general location, compared that to his own recollection of where a friend lived and figured out who the visitor most likely was. His point? It ain’t easy to be anonymous anymore.
It reminded me of something that Friedman wrote in The World is Flat.
Before my daughter Orly went off to college in the fall of 2003, she was telling me about some of her roommates. When I asked her how she knew some of the things she knew – had she spoken to them or received an e-mail from the? – she told me she had done neither. She just Googled them. She came up with stuff from high school newspapers, local papers, etc., and fortunately no police records.
I’m preparing to do an in-service for a few high schools next month and though that I’d share with them some examples of how secondary students are blogging right now. So I did a few quick searches on Xanga and MySpace. It occurred to me to see if I could find any students from the district that I was going to be presenting to. It took me about 30 seconds to find around 20 students. I was astounded by just how much information I could find out about them, including photos that I’m pretty sure aren’t in their family albums.
Do these students realize that their lives are a matter of public record right now? That when a college recruiter or potential employer goes to Google them, this is the sort of thing that they might find?
Principals used to threaten my friends and I with putting our childish stunts into our ‘permanent record’. We laughed because we didn’t really believe in any sort of record that follows you around throughout the rest of your life. Things got put into files and then forgotten.
But the internet doesn’t forget. It’s astounding what you can find out about somebody just by doing a Google search for their name.
My sister is definitely not much of a computer user. She uses email when she has to, but could definitely be considered a digital immigrant with an expired passport. She doesn’t have a blog, doesn’t post in message boards, and certainly never had her own web page. However, two minutes after doing a Google search of her name, I found an article she wrote about Osteoporosis, what colleges she went to, where she lives, and the results from a bazillion different races that she’s been in.
Just imagine the trail that digital natives are leaving behind them. When I interviewed at Discovery, Scott Kinney quoted a podcast of mine from a few months ago and asked me to defend it with respect to the job I was applying for. It definitely took me by surprise.
Are our students prepared for a college interviewer who might ask them to defend the comments they wrote on their blog during their sophomore year? Are college graduates ready to do the same when they apply for jobs?
Without realizing it, students today are creating a far more permanent record than anything we had when we were growing up. And they’re doing it deliberately. They may be doing irreparable damage to their reputation without even realizing it.
This really emphasizes the need for schools to adopt these tools. Educators need to teach students how to use them responsibly and to consider the long term consequences of their actions. The world is changing and if schools don’t adapt to reflect these changes, then we are doing our students a great disservice.
Wikipedia garbage?
Kate took the time to respond to my Wikipedia v. Britannica postJust be careful letting your students use Wikipedia – because it is NOT an acceptable college
resource – so perhaps it is best not to teach your students bad habits.
Want to see an example of the garbage in Wikipedia – go to the entry for the Leonard Peltier
controversy.
I say garbage in, garbage out – and Wikipedia has a wicked propensity for garbage in.
I’m not exactly sure why it’s not an acceptable college source, so long as they cite it properly. I would think that it depends on the professor, the class and the purpose. It is certainly a good place to get broad information about a topic.
The example that Kate brings up is the Leonard Peltier controversy. I’ll trust Kate that it’s absolute garbage, but I’m not really sure why. I must confess that I was ignorant of the issue, somehow I had never heard of Leonard Peltier before. However, now I have a broad idea of who he is, what happened to him, why some people feel he’s guilty and why others feel he’s innocent. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I am definitely much better informed about it than I was now. The description of the actual events sounded slightly skewed toward those who feel he must be guilty, but other than that the article maintains a neutral tone.
Interestingly, when I went to look for further information to compare this entry to, I had a great deal of difficulty finding information from an unbiased source. The vast majority of the sites I found were created by organizations who want to free Peltier, or by sites that support the FBI’s stance. I was unable to find a reasonable description of the events from a neutral standpoint without going to old AP articles.
The weakness of Wikipedia is that anybody can write an article and skew the information to serve their needs. The greatest strength of Wikipedia is that if someone sees a ‘slanted’ entry, they can go in and correct it. If it gets skewed too far the other way, someone else can come back in and correct that. Hopefully, a neutral balance will be achieved.
I’m not exactly sure why Kate thinks that the Peltier entry is garbage, but I hope that she either explains to me why or even better, goes in and corrects the entry herself. Both should take about the same amount of effort.
I’m not going to say that the Wikipedia is the greatest source of information in the world. However, I do believe that it’s considerably better than many web sites on the internet. In the coming years, the definition of an ‘expert’ is being completely rewritten. I hope that colleges are evolving to accommodate the changes in how information is created, modified and distributed.
The problem isn’t sites like Wikipedia, it’s how we teach students to use them. I would admonish any student who solely uses Wikipedia as their only source of information about a topic just as strongly as I would a student who only uses the encyclopedia as their only source. The source isn’t the problem, it’s the critical thinking skills that guide how we use it.
PodcasterCon
Looks like I’m going to be heading out to PodcasterCon in January! I love the idea. It’s a totally free, Open Space conference. Want to discuss something specific? Then set it up! Right now I’m looking forward to hanging out at Warlick’s session: Podcasting as a Teaching/Learning Strategy, but there’s a few other ideas percolating that I’d love to discuss with other people.
Anybody else in the EduPodoSphere planning on coming by? If so, let me know so we can try to meet up there!
WordPress 2: Let the tweaking begin
WordPress 2 was released yesterday. I still haven’t gotten my current template to work right in WordPress 1.5 yet! Guess that means there’s no reason not to give it a whirl, eh?
Measure twice, cut once when moving to a new OS
Via The EduBlog: Savings With Open Source in Schools
Also, I watched our network administrator try to install Linux on a new Dell. The linux distro was sent to our district by Novell as a demo. The install went very smooth. I then asked if he could install a program for my students to edit photos or movies like Windows or OS X has. Well, that was a challenge. I think the linux version would not allow root access so, the software I wanted to use could not be added. As a classroom teacher with all kinds of lessons and thousands of dollars of digital camcorders, and digital cameras, I was not impressed with that Linux distro. They can keep it for all I care.
John has quickly gotten straight to the point of contention regarding Open Source software. It may save the school a ton of money, but if you’re replacing software that teachers are used to using you darn well better have a plan for supporting them. It’s situations like this that give Open Source a bad name.
This really has nothing to do with Open Source versus commercial operating systems, it’s really about planning well and considering the needs of the people you’re serving. It’s so easy for IT folks (myself included) to get so wrapped up in the backend details, like savings, features, expandability and so on, that you forget about the people you’re doing all this for.
At the end of the day, if you aren’t making the teachers’ lives easier and improving the quality of education that you can provide to students, then what are you really accomplishing? Sure, saving money is important. But not at the expense of the services you provide to your school.
Personally, I think that Open Source has incredible implications for schools and every school should be considering it. However, I would also impore that people don’t rush the process. Make sure you know what the needs of your teachers are and have a transition plan in place for the people as well as the software.
The Rasterbator
It might be the worst name for a web service in history, buy it’s a pretty darn cool little piece of code. The Rasterbator is a service that allows you to input an image (photo, graphic, illustration, etc…) and it will create a giant new rasterized image from it. “The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size.”
Remember those old dot matrix printers? The ones that had the sheets of paper attached via perforation? Print Shop and other programs used to be great at creating banners that would span 10 or 20 sheets of paper. I know that every time someone came home from camp or from a trip, we’d print out a huge “Welcome Home” banner on one of those and hang it outside the garage. Well, this is pretty similar to that.
If you have 4×6 picture that you want to be 2′ by 3′, it’ll spread your picture over 12 or so pieces of paper that you can then staple or glue together. It’s perfect for creating a poster of that map that you only have a small image of and the school won’t buy you the full size version of. Or for creating your own poster of the vocabulary for the week. Perhaps you might want to print out in wall size the KWL that you created in Inspiration. I’m sure every teacher can think of a few uses for such a tool. There’s a standalone version that you can download or you can always use the web based version.
All I ask is that when your IT guy starts breathing down your neck for printing 300 pages on the color laser printer so you can cover your ceiling with a larger than life image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, don’t come running to me!
A quick starter kit of blogs
The entire DEN team recently got together in Maryland for a series of team building activites, meetings and trainings. I did a whirlwind tour of the blogging world and got everybody started up in Bloglines. I just realized that the list I pulled together for them might have some value to other Ed-Tech folks so I changed a few features to make it public.
Basically, it’s a brief list of Education blogs that would provide people with a good starting point in the EduBlogosphere. These aren’t necessarily the best edublogs, or my favorite edublogs, but they are a decent sample of the many types that are out there. Some are written by Technology folks, others are by teachers and others are classroom blogs. At least one is anonymous, and a couple are organizational. Some generate huge amounts of traffic, others only post a few times per month. On the whole I think it’s a pretty decent list representing the diverse world of edublogs.
I’ve also included a few non-educational feeds to reinforce the idea that it doesn’t need to be all about work. Hopefully people will find blogs that provide value related to their own personal interests. Of course, since I put this together for the DEN regional managers, their own blogs are all listed there as well. If you don’t see your own there, don’t take it personally. I really wanted it to be a small sample of many different styles which caused me to cut some of my own personal favorites from the list. Heck, there are several blogs in the list that I don’t even subscribe to! Regardless, if you’re sharing some Kool-Aid with your fellow educators and are looking for a decent starter set of blogs for them to subscribe to, feel free to use it.
Oh, one other thing. Aaron Smith, known to the blogging and podcasting world as the Academic Aesthetic, has started putting together a great wiki for getting started in EduBlogging. He’s done a fantastic job on it already and I used it in my presentation. Stop by, check it out, and add a few resources of your own if you feel so inclined!
It’s a smaller world after all.
I’m in Iowa City for the holidays, visiting the in-laws. There’s just a few things that are still hanging over my head so I figured I’d try to get just a little bit of work done in the mornign so I could enjoy the rest of the day. However, several seperate events have really got my mind a churning.
I’m in the middle of reading The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, so my thoughts have already been driving towards globalization, workflow, outsourcing, and all sorts of other related topics. But regardless of that, I these few events all happening around the same time roughly would really have stood out to me.
Yesterday I stopped off at a cafe to get a little work done. It advertised a high speed wireless connection, but I didn’t have much luck. However, when I looked around the cafe to see if anybody else was having problems, I noticed that I was an obvious minority. There seven people working on laptops in the cafe, and I was the only person on a Windows computer. I would simply attribute this to the fact that this is a college town and Macs typically do well in education, but only 3 of the people seemed to be students. I know that the lion’s share of the computer market is in the business sector, but if people are starting to switch to Mac’s in their own homes, perhaps that could be an impetus to start switching things around.
Right now I’m sitting in the library. I just overheard somebody saying that they’ve added self checkout lines to help people move along just a little faster. The interesting thing is the technology that they’ve chosen to use. Instead of just using a bar code scanner, it sounds as if they’ve incorporated RFID. After scanning in your library card you just pass the books over this plate that looks like a scale and it recognizes what they are. I’m tempted to check the status of my libarary card here just to play with it. Assuming that I’m correct in understanding how it works, this could very easily lead to people being able to just load up on books and walk out the door. As you pass over or through a sensor, it will just recognize what books you have and check them out to you. No scanning, no waiting, no lines. Just load up and leave. It’s all about the workflow and eliminating bottlenecks. And that would free up librarians to doing more important things, like podcasting what authors will be visiting the library soon to do readings!
Finally, once I sat down and connected to their free wireless network (which is fantastic I must add), I logged into my WordPress admin module only to see that Yahoo is going to begin offering WordPress hosting in their Small Business department. Did Yahoo change their management around? Did they recently have a big summit where they revised their business plan or something? All of a sudden, I’m hearing about new acquisitions and associations that Yahoo is making on virtually a daily basis. From Flickr, to del.icio.us and Moveable Type to WordPress, Yahoo is standing on top of the hill and challenging anyone who thinks they can do more with Web 2.0 to swing by and try to knock them off. So far I haven’t seen any takers.
Here’s the interesting thing: I still like google maps better than yahoo maps, and I still like GMail better than Yahoo Mail, and I still like Google Search better than Yahoo search, but despite all that right now I’d have to say I’m a bigger fan of Yahoo than Google. Google’s got some great things going on, don’t get me wrong, but Yahoo is really drawing a line in the sand at Web 2.0 and taking some serious action.
Competition really brings out the best in everyone, don’t it?
UPDATE:
Just found the following email in my inbox
Dear Sir,
We are a web based Application Development Company in India, We specialise in PHP/MySQL, ASP/MSSQL, ASP.NET/MSSQL, VB.NET, C# etc. based Development.
Our rates are $10 per Hour of Customised development.
Please do get in touch should you require any assistance.
I don’t believe in supporting spammers in any way, but $10 an hour for that sort of work certainly makes you think about how flat the world is getting. I know people who pay more than that for babysitting!
Wikipedia vs. Britannica at the OK Corral
When I’ve recommended that students use Wikipedia as a resource, I’ve always told them that they can’t trust what they’re reading 100% and that they should always verify their facts with a second source. But do people do the same with the Encyclopedia Britannica?
In case you didn’t see it, The Journal Nature compared 42 entries in Wikipedia to the same 42 entries in Britannica and found the each had four major mistakes, and that on average Britannica had three minor errors in each entry compared to four in Wikipedia.
So can someone explain to me what’s different? Believe me, I’m not saying that the Wikipedia is the greatest resource in the world, but I do believe that students need to apply the same critical thinking skills to print resources that they do to online resources.