DD Shift

I am hearing the song “Loose Lips” by Kimya Dawson.

Ok… I’m taking it back about Ning.  I got my issue of “Learning and Leading with Technology” yesterday in the mail.  To my surprise, there was a little advertisement for “Network on NECC Ning” on page 7.  Apparently there is a social network specifically set up to allow networking for people who attended the NECC called “NECC 2008, The Community Network“.

I wasn’t able to go this year, but I do value the opportunity to network with those folks that were there.  I checked out the groups.  I looked at some of the posts.  The topics were relevant to my instructional technology planning life.  So, I signed myself up.

The signup process was really quick.  Once you are in, it is easy to post discussions, blog, add images and video.  I haven’t tried creating groups yet.  But, I started thinking… Why was I so ready to sign up for this and not the Ning in Education site?  I suspect it is because the NECC 2008 network is more focused.  Yes, it is a network of educators, but it is a network of educators with a particular focus.  Perhaps this is telling of “satellite” social networks:

I have my own social, social network.  This is the main one where I communicate with my friends and family.  Other non-social, social networks need to be more focused on things that are directly related to what I need (although not too focused).  My hypothesis is that there is a certain level of specific-ness and general-ness needs to be present to be desirable and viable.  The ultimate question is, what is that ultimate level?

Another thought that I have is:  can I make a Ning site for my school?  How complicated would that be?  I don’t have to host it… How does it compare to Moodle?  Can we develop apps for it?  Ok, I will admit it.  I’m a little more interested in it now that I have seen the NECC 2008 site.

I am hearing the song “Hear Comes Your Man” by the Pixies.

This is my last official entry (although not my last blog entry by far).

I have enjoyed the class. I have learned alot. I wish that there were a second part of the class where I am forced to explore even more 2.0 tools. But, sadly it must come to an end.

I have made many exciting discoveries during the course. Diigo, blogging, wikis, the Academy of Discovery, articles about the advantages and disadvantages of integrating the use of Facebook into the curriculum…

My biggest suggestions (and, maybe this is the next generation of 2.0 development) is developing a sane way of managing all of these different tools in such a way that they are easily accessible, locatable and safe for our students. There are too many tools to keep track of, and I don’t have a virtual tool belt to help me organize them.

How can we make use of OpenId? If we join as educators, will that create the critical mass needed to make it a viable way of having a single sign-on for all of these tools?

Web 2.0 is fast, easy– it could be misconstrued as reflection-less. How can we build in a step of reflection before our students push that publish button? How do we promote the review of sources? How do we encourage well developed paragraphs and grammatically-sound sentences? What is the appropriate means of citing articles in a web forum? Is a link enough? Or, do we go with a standard MLA or APA way of citing works? What makes sense in this environment?

As always, I’m interested in looking at “real” studies that examine the effectiveness of using these technologies in this classroom. I have no interest in jumping on the Prensky bandwagon (nor are my administrators) without more concrete evidence first.

I am hearing the song “Dancing Queen” by Abba.

Here is a quick review of Ning. Actually, it’s not so much a review of Ning itself, but really a review of the “education” network that has been created with Ning.

As Metcalfe once said about telecommunications networks: a network is only as valuable as the number of nodes on the network. Although there are now thousands of people who participate in Ning’s educational social network, there isn’t a high enough concentration there of “my kind” to make it worth my while to join.

I am a technology coordinator, a teacher of computer science and technology. I did a quick search in the forums looking for topics that would fit the things that I do in classes, and I didn’t come up with anything. I browsed through the groups, and I didn’t find anything immediately useful for my situation.

I could join and encourage my colleagues to join, but we already have our own networks. I belong to iSkoodle which is a social network where I exchange ideas and concerns with colleagues in the same geographic area. It has been up for over two years now, and it has been quite helpful. Further, I have friends in Facebook with whom I keep in contact and exchange ideas.

At this point and time I’m operating on social network overload… I think that this will continue to be a growing problem over time for everyone. It’s a bit similar to the mid-nineties when everyone had several email addresses. At some point we reduced complexity and the number of logins. I’m going through a phase where I’m trying to reduce the number of social network logins that I have to manage. Further, I’m developing criteria by which I can judge whether or not I buy into a social network. My test:

• Which social networks should I invest time in?
• How many logins can I realistically keep track of?
• Does the social network have the “right” people?
• Does it have sufficient sufficient social momentum?
• What sort of application extensions are being developed for this social network?
• What happens to my content when I move on to the next, better social network?

I am hearing the song “Whistling in the Dark” by TMBG.

So, from my NewTeeVee feed, I followed a little story about ISPs in Europe. Apparently somewhere there is proposed legislation that would require ISPs to spy on their customers to determine whether or not the customers are breaking copyright law by using P2P tools. The article refers to this as “Europe’s Fight for Net Neutrality“.

I don’t see this as a net neutrality issue as much as I see it as a privacy issue. I don’t want some network administrator sniffing my packets. Trust me, I do not (intentionally) break copyright law. In fact, I’m a teacher who teaches about this in the classroom. But, I still don’t find it ok to monitor what I send from my computer out into the internet and what I download all in the name of copyright protection. And, I don’t want to have to go through extensive encryption methods to help “ensure” my own privacy.

This concept is not new. The article makes reference to France’s 3-strikes and your out policy. This isn’t much different from Virgin Media’s new policy. Is this a trend that will sweep Europe? Does it make sense to put this legislation into practice when courts are already overwhelmed with cases over these issues? Who will enforce it? How will the additional monitoring and maintenance be funded? Does the benefits of catching copyright-law-breakers really balance out the loss of privacy, additional red-tape litigation and technological administrative overhead? Or, is it time that we rethought the structure of copyright. Where do we go from here?

I am hearing the song “Circle of Friends” by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians.

I have just reviewed a very cool tool called Ta-Da List.  Ok… This is the coolest little online tool I have seen in a while.  It does one thing– but it does it well.

Ta-da List allows you to create a checklist of things.  It could be things that you have to pick up at the grocery store.  It could also be things that students should be doing in the classroom… You can share the lists.  You can view the lists online– including mobile devices!

Think about it:  you are the yearbook teacher.  You have a student editor who “manages” the yearbook team members.  While the yearbook is hard work, there is a great deal of individual work on the part of the students; students working on different parts of the yearbook at the same time.  How do you keep track?

1. Have an overall high level plan- perhaps create the “mega”-ta-da list.
2. Then, have the student editor who breaks out that list into to miniature ta-da lists for each of the students on the team.
3. As students finish their tasks, they check-off that they are done.
4. As major components of the yearbook are completed, the editor checks those off the mega-ta-da list.
5. As time goes on, you, your student and anyone else that you invite (parents, school administrators) can see exactly how much has been contributed over the course of the semester by each student.

In the past I have had students keep track of their progess in a forum in our Moodle site.  But, this is simpler both to access and to read through.  Excellent!

For other cool online tools for the classroom and some quick reviews, see “Web 2.0 Tool Reviews“.

I am hearing the song “Die Moldau” by Smetana.

This week I listened several archive sessions from the K-12 Online Conference in 2007.  The sesson that stuck with me was one titled, “Starting from Scratch:  Framing Change for Stakeholders” by Ben Wilkoff.

I suspected, from the title, that Mr. Wilkoff would be working with the idea of cognitive frames which I have encountered in “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and I was pleasantly surprised that this was indeed the case.  Here is an interview, “Inside the Frame“,  with Lakoff where he gives an example of a cognitive frame.

What was particularly useful for me is that Wilkoff steps through the process of reframing the way we talk about technology in education so that when people discuss it, it is not in terms of “fearing” technological change or playing technological “catch-up”.  Instead, his “Academy of Discovery” instead frames the debate in such a way that if you try to contradict the frame, you are contradicting “authentic learning”.

I am currently heading up a committee that will help me redefine the direction of technology use in the school.  I have a dynamic group of people who have volunteered for this committee, and I’m continuously looking for different ways to help assimilate new ways of thinking about how we do things.  This will simply add one more tool to my tool belt.

At this point and time, I am a bit fuzzy about the exact frame that Wilkoff has employed and how he promoted that frame throughout his community.  There seem to be a number of intertwining frames in his presentation.  I will spend more time looking at this.  But, already I have found additional value in the supporting documentation.  Already I see that he provides links to studies to support the frame, examples of authentic learning in his own school, and documents that he used for communication.  Here is a link to the actually “Academy of Discovery” which is not linked on the main page of the conference session.

I am hearing the song “Your Ghost” by Kristin Hersh. Haven’t heard that song for a long time…

I have spent the last few days working with Diigo. I have been a user of del.icio.us (very simply– to track bookmarks). I think I’ll move on to Diigo. I like the highlight feature of Diigo. It is that note-taking feature that I have been missing on the web. I’m certain that I will continue to use Diigo– simply because it allows me to use online information more efficiently. I plan to share it with our DP Director to introduce as a research tool for our students.

There are a couple of things that I really don’t like about Diigo. I want to get them out here:

• Diigo creates a side-window where you can manage bookmarks, examine your notes on the current page and see your “friends”. Already with only 20+ bookmarks, I can see that my bookmarks are out of control. They should be organized by tag… Or, there should be tab for tags so that you can just click on one of your own tags and see your bookmarks. You can search by tag, but that means that you have to remember what you tagged various things.
• There is no easy way to export your bookmarks as citations in MLA or APA format. This is a must-have feature for academic work. Our textbook (which I don’t have in front of me) talked about a site that did this. I want this feature.
• The interface for tagging and grouping is not the most intuitive. It should be very obvious and easy to tag and group bookmarks. As it stands, you have to go through a few clicks to get to the grouping feature sometimes. It should be consistently available. Sometimes tagging is not available right at the forefront. Once again, this should be consistently available.
• It is reallly, really annoying when I click on the “Highlight” button, and it does not highlight. This is super frustrating because it does not always work. I would say that it has a 90% functioning rate, but sometimes I am relegated to commenting on the whole page and indicating in that comment where the interesting content is located.

I’m wondering how this can work with Zotero– if it is overkill to use these two tools together.

I am hearing the song “Tree Hugger” by Kimya Dawson and Antsy Pants.

There is a really interesting article from Yahoo.de today about court treatment of copyright infringement in Germany.  Basically, the judicial system will not entertain cases with damages less than 3000€.  Doing “less” than this is still breaking the law, but it will not be prosecutable.

I am hearing the song “Purple Toupee” by TMBG.

Ich habe doch! mein Slideshow eingebettet! Here is the embedded Smile slideshow:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Play some Online Games.

To embed you actually have to copy the embedding code from the website, and then use the HTML (not the visual) editor for your blog to insert the embedding code. It’s kind of a pain in the neck. It’s not very Web 2.0-ish (fast content creation).

Now that I can embed video media, I am invincible!! Excellent…

I’m hearing the song “Smile” by Lily Allen.

To satisfy a requirement for my course, and to balance out the bad karma from this song that is stuck in my head, I have put together an online image slide show of smiles. I put it together using Bubbleshare. It was pretty easy to do. It uses images that sport the creative-commons attribution+non-commercial use license.

Smile Slideshow

I have a couple of complaints, in general, about this process.

1. You can’t seem to copy the share code in Firefox from Bubbleshare. You have to use Internet Explorer. I’m not a fan of IE.
2. When I try to embed the slideshow here (or any flash-based video files) into Edublogs, Edublog makes a link to the item rather than actually displaying it. What is the point of having “Add media” buttons if they don’t actually add the media for display in your blog? I have been annoyed with this poorly managed feature for quite a few posts now. I want to EMBED not LINK. I can make my own links. I don’t need a special media/video button for this. If you have advice on how to EMBED and not LINK, please leave a comment.

At this point, I don’t actually know how I would use slideshows to support the software development process in my computer science class. If you have ideas, please feel free to post them.

Image Citation:

silkegb (2008). Have a Chicken Soup and Smile. in Flickr. Retrieved on August 2, 2008 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkegb/2697899131/. Used respectfully under the creative commons attribution+non-commercial use license.