Teach42

I’m a big fan of things like QRCodes and Semacodes.  I love the idea of using the camera in your phone as a direct link to information on the internet.  So I thought I was going to love Mytago, which sounds very similar.  However, as you can see from the flowchart above, Mytago hardly seems to make things less complicated at all.

The idea is that you snap a picture of a bar code and get rewarded with information about it.  Well, that’s the idea.  WIth Mytago though, you snap a picture, transfer it to your computer (or email it) and then go to a computer and navigate to the Mytago website, and then you finally get to see information about it.  If you have to go to a desktop to see the info, then what’s the point of the bar code?  Why not just memorize the website?  Or if you can’t remember it, just take a photo of the URL! 

I think people sometimes forgot that technology needs to be more than just ‘cool’, it needs to really fulfill a purpose. 

Now, if you could snap the photo, email it to Mytago and it sends back an SMS message with more information or a direct link to a wap site, THEN I would be jumping on board.  All the fun of Semacodes/QR Codes without the need to install software. 

Via Dan Mitchell
 
NY Times

At the University of California at Los Angeles, a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in. At the journalism school at San Jose State University, students were caught using spell check on their laptops when part of the exam was designed to test their ability to spell.

And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.

Yes, it’s cheating.  I know it is and it’s wrong.  But let’s look beyond that for a minute and abandon our stranglehood on traditional means of testing. 

Let’s take an alternate look at the UofNevada students.  Pretend that they’re in a world history class.  One of the questions is "Who won the war of 1812?"  They message the question to a friend, and a friend messages the answer back.  Problem solved.  I know that the intent was to get the student to memorize the answer, but is memorizing a fact really more important than being able to find the necessary answers under adverse conditions?  Let’s say the quesiton was, "Why was the War of 1812 inevitiable?"  That requires much more than a simple one word answer.  Nobody is going to text in that one.  They could text in a couple of conditions, but the student is still going to have to synthesize the information and compse an answer.  And isn’t that what we want them to do?

When I was working on my B.A. at UofIowa, there were more than a few times that I had open book tests.  I hated them.  Why?  Because without fail they were always much harder than ‘close book’ tests.  They rarely asked easy questions.  They required you to really think critically and prove your ideas with facts.

I’d love to see professors make more tests open book, open PDA, open Wikipedia and open cell phone.  Let students use every resource available, but still make them prove that they understand what they’re talking about.

 Which prepares them more realistically for the world they’re going to encounter when they leave school?

I gave it a try.  I really wanted to like it.  I like just about everything that Google releases, but I just can’t get into Google Reader. 

After a friend reccomended it highly, I exported my blog list from Bloglines and imported it into Google Reader to give it the ol’ college try.  I’ve used it for about a week now, and I have to admit that there’s very little I like about it.

On the positive side, it’s a very sleek interface and I love the use of AJAX (or whatever they’re using to make things slide around smoothly).  It’s slick, it’s smooth, it’s as shiny as anything else that Google has released.

However, it just doesn’t have the features that I’ve come to expect from an aggregator.  There doesn’t seem to be any easy way for me to just browse the posts from a single blog.  It insists on blending all unread posts together.  I can seperate things out by tags, but do I really need to tag every single one of my feeds with a seperate tag?  I do like the fact that I can hide posts that I’ve read.  But there doesn’t seem to be any way to mark ALL posts as read if I just want to clear things out!  So I have to go through them all individually, which is a royal pain. 

It may be that there’s ways to accomplish these things and I just didn’t see them, but that brings me to another problem: a severe lack of documentation.  It’s not simple and intuitive, which I’ve come to expect from Google.  And because of that, I’ve spent a ton of time looking for features that don’t seem to exist. 

So I bid thee farewell, Google Reader.  Time to move back in with Bloglines!

This one is pretty sweet for anybody who’s trying to incorporate images into a website nowadays.  AllYouCanUpload is a site brought to you by CNet that does one thing and does it well. It hosts your images for you.  That’s it!

There’s no organization, no tags, no labels, no nothing.  You upload an image, it gives you the code to put in your web page or blog or wiki or whatever.  And that’s all.  It hosts the image for you.  Great for eBay, great for MySpace, great for blogs.  Couldn’t be simpler!  Normally I upload my images into flickr and use that to host my images, but depending on the image it could be against the user agreement.  Methinks I’m going to switch to using this.

The only possible negative is that if you upload an image and lose the URL, you’re out of luck.  Gotta upload the image again.  Heh, and that’s it for the ngatives!  Not so bad, eh?

UPDATE: In answer to Aaron’s comment, no there’s no bandwidth cap nor is there an upload limit!  Can’t beat that, eh?

Found via TechCrunch

Found two similar sites this morning that are pretty interesting, but I’m not sure they quite hit the mark dead on yet.  I found out about them through the Mobilgu newsletter.

The first is Rrove, a social pushpin site that essentially allows you to bookmark and share map locations.  Amongst the things being commonly shared are museums, bars, eateries and of course, locations with free wifi!  However, the service won’t allow you to add locations from your mobile phone, just from your desktop through a bookmarklet.  MobileGlu will let you retrieve your saved locations on the fly, but without a way to add them away from the computer I think the service is only halfway there.

The second service that Mobileglu added support for is called Flagr.  The concept is pretty darn similar, but you can add locations via sms text message and even attach photos.  It’s pretty slick and seems to work smoothly.  Once again, Mobileglu allows you to access your locations on the fly, which is nice, but support native to Flagr would be even better. 

Both sites use Google for their maps, which is plenty robust for the aplication.  In fact, many people have noted that the one thing Google really needs is a way to save your pushpins.  These services provide a means to doing that.

What I’d really like to see is a service that will allow you to geocode your bookmarks either with a GPS unit or based on your cell phone tower and tag them that way.  We’re so close to being at that point, that it just  feels clunky to have to text in a full address in order to bookmark where you are.  I’m looking for the software that will let me just click ‘save’ and type in a name on my mobile phone, and it takes care of the rest.  And I don’t think we’re very far away from that.

Neat stuff!

CNet has an interesting article about how students are using internet proxies to get around school filtering systems and access banned sites like MySpace.

Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this. 

That’s what I thought.  A filter is a wondeful thing to prevent students from randomly accessing some internet sites.  Or to deter students from getting access to specific sites easily.  However, there are so many ways to get around filters, that they will hardly to more than present an interesting challenge to enterprising students.  Additionally, they do little to ‘protect’ students when they access the internet from the library, Starbucks or home. 

I don’t have a beef with internet filters.  I advocate using them.  What I do have issues with is when that is the only step that a school takes when it comes to internet safety.  A filter is woefully inadequate.  The best ‘filter’ is actually good judgement, which only comes about through education. 

To be honest, I’m pretty impressed with ‘Ryan’, the featured student in the article.  He set up his own proxy server on his home computer to get free reign of the internet from school.  I’ve done that before for other reasons, and it requires some decent knowledge of how internet traffic functions.  Obviously the IT department will be keeping an eye on him, but I’d bet that he could get around the school filters again without breaking a sweat.  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he already has another solution in place.  So what’s to stop him from doing it?  Nothing, except fear of getting caught.  And that’s what we’re teaching many of our students.  It’s fine to do, so long as you don’t get caught.

I think we can do better.

This one is a little weird. Anybody who knows me personally knows that I’m not a big fan of mass email forwards.  I usually don’t even read them.  However, there are two categories of email that get under my skin more than any other; the ones that are chain letters disguised as antivirus warnings, and scam emails that claim foreign dignitaries want to give me money.

As I said, I rarely read emails that aren’t sent to me personally, but those fake virus warnings bug the heck out of me, so I always wind up debunking them.  I pop over to Symantec’s hoax page, do a quick keyword search and let the person who emailed me know that there is no "Gift from Microsoft" eamil virus.  They’re just perpetuating a chain letter.

The second category are those people  who claim that they’re royalty in some foreign country and have millions of dollars that they’re willing to share with me if I can just help them break through some red tape.  How can I help?  Oh, just by sending them a few thousand via Western Union.  Not a bad deal, considering I’ll be getting millions in return.

However, my ire at such emails disappeared completely when I found out that one of my own relatives must be in the exact same situation!  I have an RSS feed that searches for the name Dembo (I like to stay informed with regards to what Dembo’s are doing around the world), I came across what must be a relative in dire straits. 

Dear..

I am prince Dembo,Son of late General Antonio Dembo the former Vice  president
of UNITA rebels in Angola.My father was the Chairman of Angolan  Petroleum
Monitoring Committee (APMC) 1992 to 2002. Sadly, he died after an injury
sustained during the ambush on The UNITA rebel on 27th February 2002  where
the President of UNITA,Dr. Jonas Savimbi was killed. As you might have  known,
Petroleum is the major revenue source in Angola (Southern Africa). My  father
made a lot of money through the job but could not invest the money immediately
to avoid probe by the military government. He was able to save the sum of$45m(fourty
five Million United States Dollars). He deposited this sum with a security
firm in Johannesburg in South Africa.The documents used in these depositions,together
with the key of the safe,are with my mother.In my father’s will, he instructed
that this money must be invested overseas with the help of a foreigner who
is reliable and trustworthy. So as to avoid probe by the federal government
of Angola, since he was a general in the warm torn Angola, and could not
have amassed such wealth legally. My mother and I have agreed to give 25%
of the total sum to you while 70% will be for us then, the remaining 3%
will be used to offset the bills incurred in the Course of the transfer
while 2% will be for charity.The most important thing is to assist us to
relocate to your country to live.However you are advised to reply me immediately
and when I receive all your favorable reply you will be given all
necessary details and documents and also send me your phone and fax number for
easy communications.

Regards,

Prince T.Dembo

Can you believe it?  There’s a Prince Dembo who needs my help!  And in exchange for helping him come to America, I’d get over ten million dollars!  What a bargain.  Now if I could just find my checkbook….

Thanks to the Podcast Academy crew, I’ve got audio to share from the keynote I did in Michicagan, The New Permanent Record.  That link will take you to both the audio and powerpoint slides, if you just want the audio you can get it here. 

Big thanks to Jeff Flynn and the Podcast Academy team for webcasting it.  I’m not sure how many people could see the chat on the big screen, but it was a pretty cool thing to throw in at the proverbial last second.  If you haven’t visited the site, this would be a good weekend to do so.  They’re doing a massive three day Webcastathon to celebrate their 1 year anniversery!

Love this idea from the Shifted Librarian.  It’s exactly what it sounds like, a sixty minute presentation that covers 60 sites that people might not have heard of but should probably be exposed to.  I went through the list of sites that she used for her presentation, and there were plenty that were new to me.  Lots to explore there.  Sort of like going through del.icio.us/popular, but it’s tailored to librarians/educators.  Worth exploring when you have a few minutes.