Justin Reeve
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Posts by Justin Reeve
Using Myspace to Teach Internet Safety?
2A police officer gave a presentation at an assembly at Windsor High School in Colorado. His objective was to teach the kids about Internet safety, and to do this he showed the students how posting pictures on Myspace can be dangerous.
Students and parents at Windsor High School are outraged after a Wyoming police officer doing a presentation on Internet safety scrutinized individual students’ MySpace pages. . . . The officer, John F. Gay III of the Cheyenne Police Department, picked out six or seven Windsor High School students’ MySpace pages and began to criticize photos, comments and other content until one student left the room crying.
The students say he made very inappropriate remarks, claimed he had sent the student’s pictures to an inmate in prison, and launched into a discussion about the crimes that result from stalkers finding photos on Myspace. The officer disputes most of the allegations made by the students, and the principal and other faculty members back up the officer, so there is still some question over what actually happened. Regardless, the officer admits to some allegations, and in my opinion, these admitted statements should have been left out.
Well-intentioned, but poorly executed. The student he humiliated DID immediately delete her Myspace profile, but how could this have been presented better, without such blatant scare tactics? Realistically, this has the potential to be a good way to show kids just how public their open Myspace profile is, but the officer was just winging it. He needed to use better judgment, and the support of more parties. We can probably learn a few things from this officer’s mistakes. A few ideas come to mind:
- This should have only been done in front of a small group of students, such as a single classroom; not the entire student body in the auditorium.
- He could have worked with the parents, and received their permission first.
- He could have selectively chosen the profiles beforehand, and found some that didn’t have compromising content. Just having an authority figure pull up the public information, even inoffensive information, and showing it in front of everyone, may have driven the point home well enough.
- In the small classroom setting, it would be appropriate to select several student profiles, and not single any one out. Incidentally, he showed about six or seven, but that seems meaningless when compared with a student body of hundreds.
- He shouldn’t have dwelled too long on any profile, extracting information like phone numbers and other personal data. If the students see someone accessing their profile, they’ll immediately start thinking about what sort of content is on there. You can’t force a student to use the web responsibly, but you can show them reasons they should. Just watching an adult looking at their profile could be good incentive.
- An officer, someone the children have never met, was not the best choice. How much better would it have been if the person was a teacher, someone the students respect?
- The presenter could have ended on a humorous note by showing his own Myspace profile, with a strategically planted “humiliating” photo from his younger days.
What do you think? Does this sort of presentation, well thought-out, have potential to explain Internet safety, or is this just a case of “scare tactics” that should be avoided altogether?
My Vision Nine Months Ago
0I was looking through some old files from last year, and found a document I’d written about my attendance at the WebBuilder 2.0 Conference in December 2007. I wasn’t blogging back then, and this was originally intended to be an email to my boss with some ideas on the future development of our web portal. I didn’t even finish writing and refining everything I was going to, and it’s a good thing, because it quickly turned from a thoughtful summary into a lengthy rambling discourse. I ended up making a simple PowerPoint to share with him instead.
The conference was actually a good kick in the pants for me, since I wasn’t as aware of the Web 2.0 world as I should have been, and what a powerful tool it was becoming. It exposed me to the importance of collaborative environments, the current trends with the web, and really shifted my mind toward embracing Web 2.0 technologies. I thought the term “Web 2.0” was kind of stupid (actually, I still do) but I can acknowledge that it represents an important shift in how we perceive interaction and collaboration. I wouldn’t attend the conference again, because I pretty much got what I needed out of it, and from the agenda it looks like the sessions haven’t changed much, but I’m grateful for the opportunity I had.
I don’t even agree with everything I wrote in the following document anymore. My knowledge has certainly grown since then. It looks like I didn’t understand OpenSocial, and I’m not entirely sure where I was going with the document storage idea. I also didn’t have a decent approach to social/learning networks — this is still an issue which is going to be difficult to tackle in our district. We had just launched our blogging system using WordPress MU, and were gearing up for deployments of our Moodle system and WeberTube. I’m anxious to see how widely these two services are used now that we’ve launched them.
I do, however, still think that our portal should take a cue from customizable widget-based sites like iGoogle, Netvibes, or Pageflakes. We are creating a new MyWeber portal from the ground up, though we’ve altered our course a little and are now going with a non-Java route. One thing I don’t like about many SISs is that you can’t even see a demo of it unless you have an account set up. How is this any sort of incentive to sign up for the system, if you can’t see an idea of what it’s about? This is why I would like to have both a public face and a private face to the next MyWeber. The public face anyone could visit and create a temporary customizable view and watch WeberTube videos, read district and school news from an RSS widget, look up a specific teacher’s public course assignments, look up Google Maps-based boundary maps for their school, and anything not containing sensitive information. The private face would let appropriate users see student grades, lunch account balances, transcripts — basic stuff for an SIS — but also let them view and write blog posts or leave comments on posts, make or take Moodle quizzes, upload videos, create podcasts, make a calendar, cast votes in a class poll, or anything else we make available.
THE FOLLOWING IDEAS WERE DATED DECEMBER 11, 2007
The [WebBuilder 2.0] conference was immensely useful. There was a tremendous amount of information geared toward developers, designers, and supervisors seeking to bring their web presence into the Web 2.0 world. I wish they hadn’t scheduled so many simultaneous seminars, as I would have liked to attend more of them, but I have uploaded all the conference slides to http://www.justinreeve.com/webbuilder/agenda.html.
Following is a selective summary of my notes, with some ideas on how to best direct our future portal development.
Web 2.0 is a model for a collaborative, user-friendly, socially networked web. Ajax has largely made this possible. Any evolution that takes place in web-based applications in the coming years will be derived from the Ajax framework, services-oriented architecture, and Web 2.0 philosophy. In other words, what has been dubbed “Web 2.0” is not just a fad. It will continue to shape what the future of the web will look like.
Web users now want to be able to do more than just find information. They want to participate and help shape the web. They’ve come to expect that web sites should provide collaborative and social networking opportunities, simple interfaces which mimic desktop applications, and mashups to enhance their experience.
DASHBOARD
I’m convinced the proper setup for the next major version of MyWeber will be the customizable dashboard view, which integrates all our applications into one place. The integration would include simplified Java-based translations of the PHP applications we have in place. While the same PHP backends for WordPress, Moodle, etc. would remain, the portal will provide a simple framework to accomplish basic tasks, such as:
- Viewing assignments for a class.
- Adding a new blog entry.
- Uploading a video to WeberTube.
- Taking a Moodle quiz.
In addition, widgets would be available for all the other functions we have and then some, e.g. user searching, progress reporting, podcasting, video streaming, taking surveys, etc.
MASHUPS
We’re already adopting most of the technologies that are needed to stay up to date on the current trends, and to enable our users to have the kind of interactive experience they expect. We need to decide what goals we want to accomplish, and what applications will help us reach them. Being able to integrate the different applications together is key.
Mashups are web applications that help integrate different sites together, combining data from other sources into a single, integrated tool. For example:
- A single “Videos” widget in the portal could grab relevant videos uploaded to Moodle, WordPress, WeberTube, YouTube, TeacherTube, and even the Video Portal if we want, and display them all seamlessly in MyWeber, so the user never has to question where they come from.
- When a user hovers over the name of a school or event in the portal, a Google Map could instantly pop up, and the map could give them the location. We could even let them enter their street address, and keep a list of addresses on file for the user, so they can receive directions to the school/event from wherever they are.
- A teacher could have some photos on Flickr they want to share with their students in Moodle as part of a lesson plan. Rather than force them to manually download each photo, a Flickr mashup could connect to their account, let them select a group of photos, and automatically transfer them to Moodle, their blog, a whiteboard (mentioned below), or any other web-based service.
AJAX LIBRARY
Ideally, the user should never have to reload the page, except when they first log in. This can be accomplished through a combination of Ajax and modal windows. The recommended way to develop an Ajax application is to use an existing Ajax library, since otherwise there’s a host of issues to worry about with getting Ajax to function properly. I’m planning on using ICEfaces or Oracle’s ADF Faces since they provide all the basic functionality that I think we’ll need to accomplish this, plus they shift the load more to the server than the clients. LightWindow may be useful for popups such as progress reports, user details, transcripts, and so on, although ADF Faces has modal window support already built-in.
SOCIAL NETWORKS
There is one major feature we’re missing, and that’s social networking. Users have to come to expect a social networking application in the new generation of web applications. When they can shape the web sites, they have a more enjoyable experience. This means they will keep returning, and recommend the site to others. A social network can be anything from seeing a simple list of other people who are logged in, to having full-fledged forums where you can directly interact and, more importantly, collaborate with others on various projects. It also includes being able to participate in surveys, leave comments on songs or videos another user has uploaded, and anything which contributes to a shared user experience.
I don’t know if there’s an easy solution for us. We’ve addressed the issue of giving students, parents, and teachers access to a social network in varying forms before, and security concerns always seem to come up. Perhaps when employees use the forums, they could opt to be a volunteer moderator, or maybe we could put each student on a probation period once they sign up (e.g., all their posts are moderated for one month and at least 20 posts) while we make sure they aren’t using the system inappropriately. We could also require parental consent before a student can use any communication system. In other words, the parent would have to first activate an account, and then be given access to logs of their students’ correspondence.
We could have forums for users to interact with other users. Different types of groups could be set up, e.g. a teacher-students group, an administrator-administrator group, a teacher-tech group, a tech-parents group, and so on. We could convert a forum backend to a real-time RSS-based chat-style display, for simplified viewing in the portal.
Another route would be a selective user-based system. Let users talk to a select group of other users in the simplest form possible. Since this format is basically an instant messenger with a buddy list, we could set up a Jabber server for all the portal users, including parents, and develop a web-based interface. Employees could talk to their co-workers, teachers could host online parent-teacher conferences, department heads could hold online Q&A sessions, and students could talk to their friends. And none of the data need be viewable to those who aren’t allowed to see it, all of it would be logged, and anyone could set up their own unique group of portal users to communicate with.
Users could also use their cell phones to send text messages to the portal in this way, to contribute to a group discussion. We might want to also consider integrating other social networks into our interface, such as Yahoo! for Teachers using Google’s OpenSocial.
Whatever the answer may be, and if it’s not overly idealistic, creating a social network for all our users will be one of the best assets of the district.
COLLABORATION
It would be invaluable to give our staff and students access to a portal-based teaming and conferencing system, particularly something with a collaborative whiteboard and a document sharing system (e.g. Hiveboard). A couple provisions are in order:
- Others would need to be able to see exactly who’s editing the whiteboard, and
- A moderator (such as a teacher) would need to be able to prohibit access to specified users. All correspondence and collaboration should be savable and exportable to some simple form, too.
There may even be a way to tie in the online whiteboard with Smartboards, so combined with our audio streaming server, students at home can follow the lesson along with the in-class students.
BLOGS
Integrating a social network into a site is one of the best ways to get people to use the site, and our blogs are a good step toward this. The next step is to provide a blog aggregator. The portal should include a widget which aggregates all the blog RSS feeds relevant to the user by default, such as all blog feeds for a student’s teachers, or the technology blog for employees, and lets the user add any other blogs to the aggregator they want.
Our blogs should also have some easy statistical information associated with them, a simplistic version of MeasureMap, if you will. This way users can see right off how popular they are, and with any luck employees will be encouraged to use them more frequently.
Since users don’t always want to just go hunting through the content, a great way to bring all these together is to let users search through the blogs (Technorati is a good example of a blog search tool), as well as their Moodle courses, events, and so on.
CALENDAR
Every school regularly puts their events into the Groupwise calendar, and many departments do as well. There’s no reason not to include a calendar on the portal, and to provide each user a customized view of events relevant to them. A student should be able to see when the next holiday is, when the next football game is, what’s happening at the next assembly, and employees should be able to see when department meetings are being held, and so on. The calendar could also be merged with users’ birthdays for optional display, or perhaps each user could set up a list of friends and share information across calendars. What a user is able to see on the calendar should be customizable, and they should be able to import any public events they want into Groupwise, or another iCal-based scheduling system.
INTEGRATED DOCUMENT STORAGE
There should be a central filesystem for storing all staff (and possibly student) files. We have this already with the wwwstaff volume we’ve set up for the portal, but right now uploaded content for WordPress, Moodle, etc. stays on their own fileservers. The solution may be as simple as creating soft-links and mounts from our other web sites to wwwstaff, but more likely would involve some crafty filesystem manipulation and some way of identifying the type of information. An even simpler solution may be to have a process that goes out and identifies all the pertinent files on our web servers, then stores necessary linking data in XML or a database.
The benefit of doing this would be that ALL our documents would be indexable and searchable.
MOBILE DEVICES
Creating a mobile version of the portal is becoming increasingly necessary. While the portal is currently viewable on PocketPCs, it is not at the point I’d like it to be just yet, and it can be much, much better. The rate of growth of mobile web users is outpacing that of standard web users. More 16 year-olds now want an iPhone rather than a car. The next generation of phones will take their cue from the iPhone (Google Android has already started down this path) and future phones will provide full browser and full Ajax capability. I don’t think it’s necessary to focus on the iPhone just yet, but this focus should be reevaluated in a year.
We should concentrate on the older smart phones and PDAs and concurrently develop a version of the portal best suited to them. With some good development practices in place, it will be easy to make a mobile version of MyWeber v8 alongside the regular portal. We can include features like leaving text messages to a web service on the portal (such as a teacher’s blog, or on WeberTube, through an SMS message.
There are many possibilities involved in “mobilizing” the portal. A few examples follow:
- Many of our teachers give a simple assignment to “Leave a comment on my blog.” Rather than require students to log into a computer, they could simply send a text message to the teacher’s blog, and the comment would be posted. Enabling text message input could be extended to other services, too, such as a portal-based conferencing utility or social network.
- Students and employees could use the teaming and conferencing system directly from their phone or PDA.
- Teachers could send a reminder to students that a homework assignment is due. A student could set up their phone to receive notices like this.
- WordPress has a plugin that lets you support multiple template types, which would let any of our employees enable their blogs for mobile devices.
Classroom 2.0 Workshop
0I’m at the Classroom 2.0 Workshop in Salt Lake City today. I’m covering the events and sharing my thoughts below in my liveblog.
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What's the Next "Big Thing" at WSD?
2Every year for the past few years we’ve been introducing something “new” and “big” in the Weber School District. 2006 was the year of our shiny new portal, MyWeber. In 2007, the teacher blogs were the huge hit when we introduced them at our first BrainBlast conference — which itself was another “big thing.” For 2008, I believe it will be WSD Online, our system for creating online courses, and WeberTube, our new media sharing portal.
WSD Online, which is based on Moodle, will be a huge hit because it’s so convenient for teachers to create an online quiz to have their students take tests, or create a forum to facilitate a group discussion, or provide a space to let students upload their homework assignments. WSD Online can very well be the solution for paperless classrooms. What teacher wouldn’t love that? However, I do think its acceptance and gradual usage will be a little slow due to its learning curve.
This year we also launched WeberTube, our media sharing portal for the employees. I foresee it becoming an extremely valuable service to our teachers, as media can be easily uploaded and then streamed right to the classroom. WeberTube kind of happened by accident, when I stumbled upon the open source PHPmotion media sharing script. I instantly saw the possibilities for such a service in the district, and though I ended up choosing osTube as the script for WeberTube, its presence in the district makes sense. My philosophy is that when we block access to a web site that is useful for educational purposes, however good our intentions are, we have an obligation to provide an alternative. Since we are blocking YouTube, which has plenty of “good” stuff mixed in with the “bad,” we should provide something to fill that void. WeberTube is our answer. In some ways it’s actually better than YouTube, since it allows audio, pictures, and documents in addition to video. Users can rate and leave comments on media, and groups can be created to better organize the content. The interface needs some cleaning up before it can become as smooth an experience as it should be, and there’s constant ongoing development with it, but overall it’s an excellent resource.
This evening I was listening to episode 13 of the Shifting Our Schools podcast. A topic about change vs. transition came up which I thought was especially good. Change is easy. For instance, we can introduce blogs into our district with very little effort. All we have to do is allocate some server space, bandwidth, and install WordPress MU with an LDAP plugin. Voila! We’ve created change, and now all teachers have blogs. The harder part is transition. How do you get everyone to actually use the blogs? How do you address the people who resist the change? How do you make sure they know how to use the new services? People need to be allowed some time to learn the new technology, adapt to the changes, and even grieve the loss of their old methods. This is the transitioning period.
I believe we are doing the right things to help our users transition. BrainBlast has been a key player. Teachers can come and learn about cool new technologies we’re offering and be given a push to making the transition. Yet you can’t push a teacher through that door — they have to walk through themselves. Cliche but true. This is why it’s important to identify the key technical teachers, the ones who are willing to shift to new methods, new ideas, and embrace the changes we are making in our instructional technology. They can be the ones who help us guide the other teachers through the transition.
E-volve, which we introduced this year, will help the transition as well. Administrators can sign up their staff and faculty for specialized training sessions, headed by an elite team of school techs: Justin McFarland, Casey Dalpias, Jeff Pfister, and Trent Bills. Each tech will organize their schedule and train small groups of employees on the technology available to them.
So what’s the next big change for Weber School District? What will be the next “big thing” for 2009? There are a couple things I would like to see. One is increased podcasting. Another is social networks.
I am hoping to see more and more podcasting projects as we go on. Jennifer Boyer-Thurgood, for example, has been an advocate of podcasting for quite awhile, and uses them with her third grade class. She has found they increase reading and fluency in students, and foster self-direction and self-reflection. Moreover, class podcasting is a fun project, with generally positive parent support.
I’d like to see more podcasting projects that involve “roundtable discussions,” where two or more employees or students talk about a topic. I’d like to see more live streamed podcasts, where the podcasters set up a schedule of when they’ll do the podcast, and use ooVoo or Skype to converse. Then EdCast could stream the podcast to a Shoutcast or Icecast server and relay it over the web, while simultaneously archiving it for later playback. Imagine how amazing it would be if groups of school administrators got together and held monthly podcasts to talk about the directions they wanted to take their schools, or if department heads podcasted about their goals for the year, or even if board meetings were all live-streamed and podcasted.
WeberTube may very well become the center for podcast activity. We could add the ability to organize audio into podcasts, and add subscription services and RSS feeds. I would also like to see Weber School District generating enough content to warrant a presence on the new iTunes K-12, which just launched in July.
As for social networking, this is something we typically block in our school districts (and as with media sharing, when we block something useful I believe we have an obligation to provide an alternative). Often, at best social networks just encourage aimless online meandering among students, idly chitchatting with their online peers when they should be working. At worst students can get mixed up with wholly inappropriate content on social networks.
According to the 2008 Horizon Report, the adoption of social networks in education is imminent. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug anymore. But we need to stray from our preconceptions of social networks for a minute, and figure out what our goals are. How can we create better learners with a social network?
Actually, I don’t even like the term “social network” because it doesn’t convey what we’re trying to accomplish. “Social” implies little or no direction, as if we’re just using it to chat with our friends or upload personal photos. This is why I prefer the term learning network. A learning network has clear goals in mind: engaging the students in a way that’s familiar to them and creating learning opportunities for them around every corner.
Here’s an example of how a learning network could be useful. In social studies, a teacher wants to teach her 6th grade class about Japanese culture. Instead of simply making the students read from a dusty old textbook or showing a boring video from the 1970s, she contacts a teacher from Japan, and sets up a learning network for the classes. Armed with parental waivers 🙂 , these two classrooms then engage each other, and collaborate on a joint project together. They are given the assignment to work in groups of two — one American student and one Japanese student — and take photos of simple objects from their respective hometowns, such as: mailbox, car, mall, clothing, girl, boy, school, bus, house, restaurant, etc., then create an Animoto video showcasing the objects. The videos are then embedded on a forum, and the learning network becomes the central point of activity for this collaborative project. The project could then be further extended to where the two students on opposite sides of the ocean interview each other and create a media-rich PowerPoint presentation about their partner, which they then present to their class.
How much more exciting is this learning opportunity for a young student than learning the traditional textbook-in-hand way? The students shift from the simple role of student to collaborator, explorer, and teacher. What other projects can you think of that could benefit from a learning network?
Why Teachers Should Encourage Students to Blog
3For: Teachers
Type: Technology Ideas for the Classroom
Many teachers don’t realize the benefits that can come from student blogging. These teachers may even have blogs themselves, use them in creative ways, such as communicating with other staff members and parents, delivering interactive content for students, and so on. So why wouldn’t we want to extend these same benefits to students?
Here are a few reasons why your students should blog:
1. Paperless Classrooms!
If for no other reason, set up blogs for your students to get rid of some of your overflowing file folders and save a few trees. It seems rather silly to make students go home, type up an assignment in a word processor, then print out that report and hand it in. The report is already in digital form, so why are we moving a step backward and making them print this out? Post that assignment on a blog! Then rather than shuffling through papers later, you can just view their assignment on their web site. With RSS readers, it becomes a fairly simple process to aggregate all the student’s blogs and instantly receive the latest student posts without having to go hunt for them.-
2. Students Enjoy Having Their Own Space
77% of students age 16 to 18 have a profile on a social networking site, such as Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, or Xanga. One reason they are popular is because students have the ability to create their own space on the web, and customize it how they want. They can upload their own photos and videos to share with others, communicate with others, and post updates about their own lives.
3. Interacting with the World
You could actually just have your students email their assignments to you, and achieve a paperless classroom this way. But then they’d be missing out on an important part of blogging: the global community.
Imagine you are the recipient of an award, but there are only two people there to see you win it: you and the award-giver. How much more exhilarating would it be to have a large audience watching and cheering you on? So why is our system:
- Teacher gives assignment.
- Student goes home, completes assignment.
- Student hands assignment to teacher.
- Teacher grades assignment.
- Teacher gives assignment back to student.
How many people have seen the student’s assignment? Exactly two, the teacher and student. How rewarding is it for a student to know that the only person who will ever see the project they worked so hard on is their teacher?
Now consider the possible wider level of interaction using a student blog:
- Teacher gives assignment on the Civil War.
- Student posts assignment on the blog.
- Classmates leave comments on the assignment, ask questions, offer insights, and link to their assignments for cross-commenting.
- Parents see and proudly enjoy the work their kids have done.
- Students from 500 miles away find the assignment, post encouraging remarks, and share a similar project they did in class.
- Teacher leaves comments on the assignment.
- Teachers from other schools across the country find the assignment, leave insightful comments, and perhaps a helpful video that complements the assignment.
- Friends of the student find the assignment, and post their own remarks.
- Civil War history buffs find the assignment, share links to supplemental material, and mention an upcoming Civil War exhibit that will be showcased near the student’s hometown.
- A museum curator finds the assignments, and posts a link to the class blog on her own web site, driving more visitors to the student’s blog.
Count the number of readers the student’s assignment has passed on to now, noting the plurals. This one student now may have an audience of hundreds. The student’s blog has stimulated an entire topical discussion. They have started a conversation with an online community, and a larger audience. Better rewards.
Students LOVE getting feedback from their peers. A huge chunk of their lives revolves around this social interaction, and blogs can encourage this. When you encourage students to blog, you are giving them a voice, and encouraging them to share that voice with the world. It’s a great way to motivate them to finish their homework! So break down the walls of the classroom and connect them to like-minded individuals around the world.
Links
A Virtual Attendee of NECC 2008
2
I never expected to take part in NECC 2008. It was good fortune that a few months ago I came across a K12 Online Conference presentation from 2007, where Jeff Utecht was spontaneously contacting educators on Twitter and using Skype to interview them as part of his webcast. I’d learned about Twitter in 2007, but didn’t think much of it until I saw Jeff so casually use it to connect to a wide network of education professionals. That’s when the light bulb flicked on in my head, and since then my personal learning network (PLN) has grown as I’ve added educators from all across the world.
I was able to follow the online activity when the other Twitterers were talking about the Google Teacher Academy and TIE 2008, but the community excitement reached a peak when NECC was approaching. What a great opportunity this proved to be! Never before has there been the means to such an extensive and easily-accessible network that created numerous learning opportunities. Amid the swarm of tweeting, liveblogs, and chat sessions, I enjoyed conversations with other educators, whether they were present at NECC or not. NECC itself was the catalyst for the flow of online discussions in liveblogs and backchannels while presentations were being streamed, and my PLN more than doubled during the conference. I was introduced to many interesting, insightful, and innovative teachers. I’m a newcomer to the online educational community, and have only been actively using Twitter a few months, but at no time did I feel out of place. I connected with people who shared similar goals.
On the downside, I wasn’t able to participate in the other group meetings at NECC. I couldn’t attend EduBloggerCon, or sit in the Bloggers’ Cafe and enjoy thoughtful conversations. Honestly, I probably would have been too starstruck and googoo-eyed from meeting, in a single place, all the bloggers and educational professionals from the web that I’ve come to respect — everyone would have wondered, just who WAS that weird guy drooling over himself in the corner? But it would have been nice to be at the Twitter/EduBlogger dinner, sharing stories and making friends.
I missed out on plenty of the people I could have met. I missed the synergy that comes from face-to-face social networking. The face-to-face aspect is as much a part of the professional connecting as anything. And I missed meeting those who might not have blogs, don’t use Twitter, and don’t connect online. This alone would have made NECC worthwhile. At the same time, I hope that after this conference these same people I missed will be inspired to use these technologies more, and with any luck I’ll see them online soon enough.
I feel my takeaways were significant. The backchannels were a great asset. They were swarming with links, and links are inherently easier to share online than in a face-to-face presentation. I can simply click the link as its presented by a liveblogger or tweeter. If I were sitting in the classroom, I’d have to manually type in the link to view it on my laptop, assuming the laptop’s battery hadn’t died for the day.
What improvements could be made? One problem I see is that the educators who would benefit from an online conference experience are the very ones who may be clueless about how to participate in it. I’m not really prepared to explain to teachers that to virtually attend a conference they should follow this wiki or that wiki, use Summize to find the #necc or #necc2008 hash tags, follow these Twitter users, go to this Ustream or Mogulus feed, follow such-and-such liveblog, and so on. It’s exhausting! I deduced that the NECC Live wikispace was kind of the central hub for all online NECC information, but often I wouldn’t see live streams mentioned until they had already begun and were several minutes into the presentation. Although my Twitter network exploded during the conference, I sometimes simply missed tweets to the live streams. I usually retweeted stream links in case others were having the same problem.
Ideally (and perhaps unrealistically), here’s what I would like to see in the future.
- I should be able to give educators a single web site, be it a wiki or whatever, at least one week in advance, listing the URL to every:
- live stream
- live chat
- archived stream and chat
- The site should also contain links to users who will be liveblogging about the conference. Granted, many livebloggers may not plan on doing a liveblog ahead of time, but when they do the site should automatically update with this information, preferably without any extra effort on the part of the liveblogger.
- The site should be organized in an orderly fashion, so users aren’t hunting through links and don’t have to guess what to click on next.
I have yet to figure out how all this would be accomplished.
TwitterLocal in Coralville
1As I demonstrated earlier, TwitterLocal is a great tool to receive updates on events happening around the world. The recent flood in Coralville, Iowa shows another example of how people can stay connected and receive ground-level news from the people affected. One Coralville resident used Twitter to start up a group Flickr album for the Coralville floods.
Encouraging Collaborative Digital Learning
0A great voice thread with educators discussing the growing importance of digital media literacy in our schools.
Presenting Pictures with PicLens
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PicLens is a great eye candy tool for web browsers, and can turn any collection of videos and pictures on a site into an engaging, dynamic presentation. It comes in two flavors: the non-browser plugin version and the browser plugin version. It also lets you search for videos and pictures on YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, and more. Weber School District’s own WeberTube has PicLens support built-in (click on “Slideshow”).
If you do not download the browser plugin for either Internet Explorer or Firefox, you will be treated to a slideshow format of your media. It’s pretty, to say the least. But download the plugin and you get an immersive 3d viewing experience.
Use PicLens on your interactive whiteboard when you want to show a video or photo to your students, and watch their eyes and ears perk right up.
[flv]http://www.webertube.com/media/video/188.flv[/flv]
Utah State University Joins OpenCourseWare Project
2More and more universities are joining up to offer a variety of course materials through the OpenCourseWare project, and Utah State University is now one of the partner institutions involved in this laudable venture. This site is made possible by funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and visitors will be delighted to learn that they can make their way through course materials from over a dozen departments, such as anthropology, economics, electrical and computer engineering, and wildland resources. Within each department, visitors will also note that there are tabs that allow them to email a friend about the course and also link up to an RSS feed. There are some great course materials here, including those from “Introduction to Writing” and the “History of Utah”.
From The Scout Report
