Congratulations, y’all. We’re all the people of the year, according to Time, at least.
Hooray, us!
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Category Archives: Web/Tech
Hmm . . .
An alert reader pointed out that the calendar in the top right corner of my blog is redirecting folks to another Typepad blog.
Huh.
I haven’t a clue about why this is happening, but I have put in a request to tech support to solve the problem. For the moment, please avoid the calendar — I can’t guarantee that you’ll find me linked there.
I originally went with Typepad, in part, because I liked how well everything works. But over the last year, there have been problems. It’s beginning to get frustrating.
Typepad, I know I’m certainly not your biggest customer, but I really like your product, when it works. Problem is, that isn’t as often as it should be. I’ve noticed that you never fail to collect the payment from me each month — that system never seems to be broken.
Can you please fix the rest of your system so that I will stick with you?
UPDATE: Magically fixed. Why’d it break in the first place?
Bill Moyers on Net Neutrality
I haven’t watched it yet, and I’m not sure when/if I will, but I thought I’d pass on that Bill Moyers did a PBS special on Wednesday night about net neutrality. It’s part of a larger series on modern citizenship that looks downright interesting. All of the series, like other PBS programs, is available online for viewing via stream.
Presentation Question
I’m giving a presentation/workshop to a great group of teacher consultants of the CSUWP on Saturday. The focus/topic is "Blogging &/or Podcasting 102." Do you think they’d like to leave with their own blog, or should we work towards an online community ala Elgg? I originally had intended to go the blog route, as I’ve done with that group in the past, but a conversation with a colleague this week has me thinking that perhaps a supportive online community gathering place might be a better way to go.
What do you think?
Blazin’ a Trail
Douglas sent me a link to TrailFire, a new tool that adds a neat wrinkle to social bookmarking — annotation. From his post on the subject:
I am not usually taken in by these social bookmarking things, but I
have to admit I am finding this incarnation of 2.0 widgetty goodness
quite compelling. All the other social bookmarking tools out there
promote the individual webpage as the most important aspect of a good
find. They don’t celebrate the trail to get there.Trailfire celebrates the trail.
Invoking this quick to use plug-in for Firefox or IE I can blaze a
trail through the Internet (they call them ‘marks’, but ‘blazes’ is
more accurate in trail building lingo and has an energy that ‘marks’
and ‘marking’ just doesn’t–I’m calling their marketing guys), at each
stop recording my thoughts on a particular page–why I blazed it. Find a
page, blaze it; find the next page, blaze it; then a few more pages
till I have an entire saved and named trail for others to follow. I
send you the URL that tracks the path I just created or link to it in a
post. This new trail guides you through a particular argument I might
be trying to make or just a series of related topics I have strung
together for your pleasure. And if you happen to think that I have a
knack for trails that suit your tastes you can find them here.My first reaction is that this tool will be a great way for teachers
to organize a guided Internet curriculum for students, but the truth is
that it’s great for anyone who wants to give context to their content
or just to highlight more than one interesting page at a time. Sure,
you could blaze an extended brainfart of unrelated topics and pages,
but why would you? Out here in the real world trails go somewhere or at
the very least by something interesting. I think the natural
inclination of electronic trailblazers will be to do the same thing:
catalogue a series of pages into a contextual setting like an argument
or a tour or a lesson.
I can imagine creating TrailFire marks for lots of different reasons. Here’s one Douglas created that shows the simple power of the service. I really like that the pages this service creates are interactive — I can leave the trail at any point if I find something of interest as I go. Of course, that leads me to wonder if there are some copyright issues here, as I’m wondering if it’s okay to completely mash-up an entire web page and host it on an different server — but that’s another post.
This is definitely a tool worth some exploration.
Community Schooling
David Jakes gets it right when he writes about who should have the ultimate say in who gets to decide whether or not certain schools should have access to particular tools:
The community makes the decision.
Yes, it’s probably the only answer that makes sense-the values, the
beliefs, and the moral views that the community holds determines the
call. Schools are responsible to the communities they serve, and that
responsibility is managed by the board of education. If the school
board directs the IT coordinator or the IT staff to block such sites,
then I’m good with that. Again, it is my belief that the philosophy of
what to block/not block must come from the school board and should not
originate from a set of personal beliefs of an IT director or
coordinator.
Now, that’s not to say that the community shouldn’t have all (or at least the best possible) information and opinions from educators and parents and others when it comes time to make such decisions. Or that the community will always be right. But we’ve got mechanisms in place in our communities to ensure the rights of the minority aren’t trampled when these types of decisions get made.
Allowing the community to be involved in such decision making isn’t easy, nor does the ideal of everyone coming together to agree on what’s best for a group of students always work; nor do the mechanisms always work in our favor, if at all. Responsible and intelligent adults who have the best interests of students in mind often disagree when it comes to what’s best for schools. And losing a battle always sucks, no matter what side you’re on.
In fact, it’d be far easier if one person in an office somewhere gets to make all of the decisions about what gets into schools and what doesn’t. But it’d be wrong, even if I was the person who got to have the final word.
In an abrupt possible topic change, and perhaps the first openly political statement I’ve made on this blog (I try to be very careful with those, as I’m not a politician), DOPA is a bad piece of legislation that is being debated and decided largely by people who have no interest in dialoguing with those of us in the education community. It’s the perfect example of how a "representative" body (i.e. the U.S. House of Representatives) has mistakenly identified a "problem" that isn’t and is attempting to craft a solution that ignores the needs and voices of the community that it will affect. Do we need to help children be safe on the Internet? Certainly. Does DOPA help? Nope.
I hope the U.S. Senate does a better job of listening to the voices of our communities and realizes that this is strongly misguided legislation that will solve no problems and will actually create more problems, as "social networks" will move into the underground and we won’t be able to help students and parents and families, the communities that we serve, to successfully and safely navigate them.
Whew. It felt good to get that off my chest. So ends the political soapboxing.
Hitching a Conference Ride
I’m sitting in a lonely ol’ room here at Copper Mountain preparing for my first TIE Conference in the morning. I’m looking forward to a few days of spending time with other technology-minded folks.
David Warlick, who attends far more conferences than I do, has put together a new resource that I hope will help to create some order out of all the great information coming out of the multitude of conferences out there. The resource, called Hitchhikr is:
a conference aggregator for lack of a better phrase. You’ll see
two lists of conferences in the panel to the right. The top list
includes conferences that will be happening in the next month (in red),
conferences that have already happened in the last month (gray), and
any conferences that are currently going on (blue). The longer list
beneath includes all of the conferences that have been registered on
hitchhikr. They are sorted by popularity.You can click any conference to receive its report. Reports include
a brief description, submitted by the person who registered the event
(any registered hitchhikr can add a conference), a logo, a link to the
conference web site, dates and suggested tags. Only the person who
registered the conference can edit it.Beneath this area is the aggregator. There is a primary default tag
that it searches on initially, displaying thumbnails of any tagged
flickr images and a list of the latest blog articles. There’s also a
link to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite
aggregator. Other suggested tags are listed, and will be search when
you click them.Any logged user can add a tag, by clicking the plus (+) symbol. Any logged user can also delete a tag. The suggested tag for NECC is NECC06.
It would also be a good idea to also tag blogs with just NECC as well.
It may also be useful for presenter to add tags with their names. For
instance, I’m doing several sessions and might suggest that bloggers in
the audience tag any entries about my sessions with necc06warlick. I could then add that tag to hitchhikr so that they can be aggregated there.
Lots of functionality here, if folks will use it. David’s built it — now I’m hoping others will use it. I’m tagging this post "coTIE06" as that’s the current tag for this conference. I hope I’m not the only one using the tag, and that I’ll learn a great deal from other conference attendees.
If you’re here at TIE, make sure to tag your posts "coTIE06" so that we can test out David’s aggregator. Also, please look me up — I’d love to get together to share ideas or conversation.
When It’s Not For School Anymore
Mr. Evil Eyes’s Othello video has really taken off. I recorded several thousand page viewings just yesterday — which is a major jump in traffic for our little newspaper. The feedback is pretty positive — and the grades on the project were turned in months ago. This is so not about school anymore. All I did in the classroom was teach the Shakespeare. This is about flexing one’s creative muscles. This is about the power of audience.
Of course, Mr. Evil Eyes wasn’t creating for the world — he was creating for his teachers. But I wonder what this positive attention will do for him for future projects. I have a hunch that it’ll be a good thing.
Good stuff rises on the Internet. Students are not students — they’re participants in a community of creation and consumption where they are judged on their work — that’s all. And the Internet, it seems, is big enough to embrace most everyones’ interests. I think everybody can find an audience here.
Interestingly, I learned a lot following the postings about the video around the ‘net. For example, did you know that there’s live theater in Second Life? I sure didn’t. Lots of potential here.
What Name Should We Use Now?
If it’s the case that O’Reilly owns the name "Web 2.0," and it seems that they just might, then what shall we call this strange network of people and tools?
And how much are we going to owe the O’Reilly people for infringement if we’ve been misusing the term?
Let’s have some fun with this one — what’s your cute and/or clever name for the sphere of tools and people and network-ability that is formerly known as "Web 2.0"?
(Thanks to Dave Winer for the tip.)
Space? I went there this morning.
Ben, or one of his commenters, recently pointed his readers to Celestia, a free space exploration program. Since I happen to be one of them (his readers, not space exploration programs), I took the opportunity to download the software. I didn’t do much with it, but I thought it was a neat piece of software for space simulation.
Our science teacher today asked me if I could help her put together something for a look at astronomy that she’s doing next quarter. I recommended Celestia and proceeded to figure out if we could get it onto our school computers. We can.
Then I tried to figure out some of the more useful student features. It didn’t take me long to find out that Celestia is a BIG DEAL. This site is a ginormous collection of resources, all free, that you can use to customize Celestia. More better (Yeah, I said "more better." And I’m an English teacher. But it really is that good.), some really smart folks have created some really handy educational tours for free consumption and use with students. Very, very cool. There are geographical tours as well as lessons on terraforming and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Amazing and really well done stuff.
One note — if you do want to use the educational resources for Celestia (and if you take a peek, you will), make sure that you download the educational version of the program from the Motherlode website. You need it to make everything work.