Digital Identity Mapping

This is a really neat (and useful) "Digital Identity Map". Not only is it cool to see WHAT all of these applications are, it's also cool to see HOW they fit into the Digital Identity Map.

Here's a link to a big version of the map: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=278973402&size=o

77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better | OEDb

This is an interesting post. 77 ways to learn better. I'm not sure if I agree with all of them, but they should be food for thought.

Futurist: To fix education, think Web 2.0 | CNET News.com

Well, if it's on Cnet, it's finally here.

Ok, so that is a slightly sarcastic tone. I really like what John Seely Brown has to say, but this article is at least a couple years dated. Also, let's be honest, he's probably not the best spokesperson out there. It's not that he's a bad person to talk to. He's done some great work, but there are so many others out there on the frontlines who are actually doing these things.

If you'd like an intro into the topic, see the above linked article.

2020 Vision

This post links to a great video. I love these near future projections. The EPIC video just floored me when I first saw it. This is in the same vein (same style as well) and it is no less insightful as its predessor. What makes this one different is that this presentation focuses both on general world technologies and business, but it also positions those in reference to education. This is something that EPIC did not do.

Watch and enjoy.

GIMP - Windows installers

GIMP. No, this doesn't mean lame or walking with a limp, it is an open source image editing software :)

I haven't tested it out yet, but the reviews have been pretty good.

I'll follow up with more later.

ELGG - danielcraig's dashboard

Ok, I'm back to ELGG. I'm usually pretty good at figuring this stuff out, but ELGG is rather confusing. At first I thought that I just didn't understand the concept, but that's not the case. I understand perfectly and it's a good idea, but the design is terrible.

How does anyone figure all this out? They seem to be all over the board. It reminds me of MSN Spaces (the early design), which is not a complement.

Don't get me wrong, this space is a great idea. This is an idea that is long overdue. This is social networking on a scale that could really work well for teachers. It's somewhat protected. It allows for a great amount of customization. It allows from grouping. It's really powerful in these ways.

However, it's not what I thought that it would be. It is not a super aggregator. It's not a place where I can merge my Moodle spaces, existing blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and so forth. Not that this would be an easy task. I'm sure that it would be nearly impossible. However, this is what I want from a PLE.

PLE's should work with existing services. Students shouldn't have to create new blogs for each class that they are taking. Really, they should be able to use their personal ones if they wanted. The same goes for all these other services that we are already using. All of them have rss, they really should be quite easy to pull into a solitary system in some way or other.

PLE's should not only incorporate tags, they should make it easy to filter by tags. del.icio.us does this. I can subscribe to a particular group of tags. PLE's should facilitate this process for services that use tags, but don't filter feeds by tags. There should be an option to filter these feeds. This way users can essentially designate which posts are going to go to which classes/spaces.

In the end, PLE's need to reduce the number of places (especially NEW places) that our students have to go. These days, as the technologies change so fast, we require our students to use more and more of these simply to participate in our class. While many of these are likely beneficial and support our learning goals, it takes students a month or more to get used to these distributed systems.

This is why LMS's are so popular. The users have one place to go (with one password) and they can complete all of their assignments there. Newer LMS's and CMS's are even incorporating aspects of Web 2.0 in a sort of half-assed fashion. These changes also include personal spaces in these systems that enable users to bring in feeds and start groups. This blurs the line between a PLE and an LMS at that point.

In the end, I'll keep following ELGG, but I'm not going to use it with any of my classes in the near future. I'm not even sure if the PLE concept is worth introducing until the concept is out of Beta :)

However, if anyone reads this blog, which I kind of doubt, let me know if I'm all wrong. Convince me of all the wonders of ELGG. I've heard the hype and just can't understand why.

Online and Traditional Degrees Differ in Expectations, Not Results

Here's an article from Chief Learning Officer. There's not enough information about the research to make an informed judgement of the validity of the findings, but it is interesting none-the-less.

The main thrust of the article is that online courses and face-to-face courses produce similar results. However, they found that online courses are not the "easy" option that they have been accused of being.

This would be no surprise for those of us who teach online courses and it would probably be no surprise for our students either. I've often heard complaints that my course required too much time. In all honesty, it probably does for people without a comfort with the technologies and the basic theories of language learning (teaching). The latter is an issue in all courses at this level.

E-Mail is for Old People

Interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Essentially, this looks at how universities communicate with students and the changing role of traditional email.

They refer to results from a 2005 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicating the teens use technologies like IM or text messenging to talk to friends and email to talk to "old people." Unfortunately, you can't generalize these results and say that teens don't use email. That's ridiculous. Of course they use email. What they don't do is use email to chat the way that many of us "old folks" where socialized into through the last 10 or so years.

However, I do agree that universities should start looking at other modes of communication to get important information to students. In reality, this doesn't mean the loads of departmental or schools emails advertising the latest speaker. Those I can do without (being 7,500 miles from campus). I think that this is most important when facilitating communication between students and professors as well as students and students. This is where the real gap exists.

The problem is coming up with a system that either gets every student using one system (highly unlikely) or developing a system that can monitor multiple systems. Trillian is one example of this. Trillian enables one to monitor multiple IM clients from one interface. Very useful. Now, how about something that sends text messages and monitors accounts in multiple online social networking accounts. I know that I'm likely dreaming.

One possibility that the article discusses is a rather old approach but still around and being reinvented all the time is the portal. For those of us who remember the old portals, this sounds stupid. It's as difficult to get someone to a portal as it is to get them to a Web page. However, newer portals are incorporating a lot of neat features that just may draw users in. Not to mention that many universities have online spaces for each class that a student takes. If these spaces are utilized and students have to access them through the portal, now you have a space that people will visit.

Can't wait to see what happens with this in the next couple years.

WikiMapia - My Visit to the North

I had two purposes for this. The first is to demonstrate how WikiMapia works. The second is to show you where I took my last vacation.

WikiMapia is a cool, cool application. It uses a combination of Google Earth (with overlays) and wikis to geotag the world. This is not only a great learning tool, but a great toy as well :)

Click on the link above to see my entry for my last vacation. It's amazing the amount of detail that you can see. It's also nice to have these in lieu of the pictures I wasn't allowed to take on the way there (check it out, you'll see why).

Communicative 2.0 -- Foreign Language Education Learning with Video Games and Live Web Media from Authentic Youth Culture | Lingual Gamers

This is an exceptional look at the present/future of language learning with a focus on popular media.

There is so much here, I've had to tackle it in chunks. The author really makes a great case for a number of issues. He's definately one to follow.

This is the same author who presented on using Sims2 for language learning, which I think is a very strong piece.

Check it out

PLE's from Alt-C Conference in Edinburgh

One of the great benefits of blogs is that people can report back to the public on events that wouldn't likely be published elsewhere.

Thanks to Terry Anderson for this post on the PLE (Personal Learning Environment) at the Alt-C Conference.

As I am just getting into PLE's and thirst for more and more information on what apps are out there and how they are being implemented, I love posts like this. It will take be a while to look through it all, but I appreciate the figures (as well as the links to others.

Realistic face sketch

This blog points to an interesting Flash application. It is a face sketcher that really requires no drawing skill.

This is a fun tool, but it could be more than that. It could encourage students to create their portraits or for characters in student created literature.

Check it out. I spent way too much time on this one, but it was really fun :)

My wife wasn't very impressed with my sketch, but I got a kick out of it.

Unfortunately, it was really difficult to get the image this far. The designers did not intend for you to be able to save these images, so they might not be happy if I'm doing so (I apologize to them if they'd rather I not do this). I had to hit "Ctrl PrtSc", open my image editor, open a new image (should default to size of your screen), paste (Edit >> Paste), then crop out everything you don't want, then save.

Have fun

Changing My Name

Superone's Musings on Life was a cute name when I began this experimental blog a couple years ago. I never really intended for this to be an ongoing project, little did I know :)

I began to hesitate when giving out the URL to this blog because the name was slightly (understatement?) self-aggrandizing. What's the use of a blog when you're afraid to let people see it. Therefore, it was time for a name change.

I didn't go very far from the original. The new name is "Musings on Language and Technology". This better represents what I do here and there is less of a god complex in the name :)

I don't think that anything else has changed. The feed is the same and obviously so is the URL.

Education/Technology - Tim Lauer

Thanks to Web-logged News for this link.

This post is an interesting description of how one school is planning to use Drupal as a it's...well...everything.

I tried out Drupal a couple years ago and found it very similar to PHPnuke. At the time, I remember preferring PHPnuke. However, I don't a posting like this makes me reconsider that.

First, Drupal is a content management system (CMS). This should not be confused with a course management system (CMS) or learning management system (LMS), though they have many commonalities.

These commonalities include the partitioning of and delivery of information to users based on permissions, taxonomies, and so forth. A system like Drupal also has "the community" developing "modules" that can be plugged in. These modules can then turn the content management system into a course management system and even an LMS with a little concerted effort.

Maybe this is what Drupal has evolved to and maybe this is a reason to check it out again.

Don Norman's jnd.org / Why doing user observations first is wrong

Thanks to elearning post for bringing this article to me attention.

I'm a fan of Don Norman, in general. I think that he's really got some good ideas about design work and he's been expousing those ideas for quite a while now (there's something to be said of longevity in our field).

I also think that this article has some solid assertions. Usability testing should catch design flaws (he saids "bugs", but I think you have to look beyond that somewhat). Usability testing shouldn't be considered part of the design process. It's quality assurance (QA).

However, if I understand his stance correctly, I don't agree that design is best left to design teams with subject matter experts. A good needs analysis coupled with a representative sample of users (hopefully this is what he means by "subject matter experts") doesn't quite fulfill the design task. Design and design in use are two very different things.

What we learn from analyses and subject matter experts is a reflection of the work as it is. Or a reflection of the work as carried out with current tools. A new tool (design) can change the very work that we tried so hard to "discover".

Therefore, if he is saying that design teams can bring a design to implementation without seeing how it works in context...he's dead wrong.

That's why I indicate that it's not just bugs that usability testing finds, it's also design flaws.

Qumana blog editor and blogging tools

The Qumana blog editor was recommended by someone in my subscriptions (sorry, poor form not to remember).

This was about the same time that I heard about Microsoft's Live Writer. I have been looking for a good application to make my blogging easier. Although nothing is easier than the Blogger button on the Google toolbar, I wanted something that would add images and maybe even audio, video, and Flash to posts without me having to do a lot of uploading, moving, and shaking. Blogger is terrible about uploading and linking files.

Therefore I decided to try out both Live Writer and Qumana. To begin with, Qumana made the process much easier to set up accounts (though both are pretty easy). It looked at all of my blogs in Blogger (under the same account) and simply asked me to check the ones that I wanted Qumana to work with. Live Writer required that I set up a separate account for each.

I hate to admit it, but after that...Live Writer wins hands down. The interface was easier for me to work with. I like how Live Writer downloads the blog template (style) so that it is really WYSIWYG. Editing on Live Writer is just like editing the actual blog page. This is even a huge improvement over the Blogger interface.

This is really just my first impression of the two applications, but first impressions are everything. I uninstalled Qumana. I just don't have time test both long term. Who knows. Live Writer could severely disappoint me soon and maybe I'll give Qumana another look then.

Also, I have to add that I only tested out Blogger sites. Other blogging apps may benefit more from one or the other.

Test of MS LiveWriter

This is a post from Microsoft's LiveWriter. The interface is obviously easy to use (MS-standard), but I'm not sure about how it will function overall.

Link: DanielCraig.com

Image:

This is much easier than editing in Blogger. Let's see how it uploads.

------------------------------------------------------

Ok, here is my entire overview (using the Blogger editor)

Live Writer was very easy to set up, create a new entry, and publish.

The creation/editing process is really easy. It's similar to a standard MS interface. Familiar to most users. It takes hitting buttons here and there to get used to the features though. Publishing is much easier here than in FrontPage.

It obviously doesn't play nice with Blogger's image upload because I had to set it up to upload images to my FTP (my Blogger account is host on my own server). However, I had this problem with accounts that are hosted by Blogger too. Kudos to MS (never thought I'd say that) for making the process relatively seemless after than. I add pictures, Live Writer automatically uploads the images to my server and maps them correctly on the posting. Regardless, I hope that they figure out a work around for this issue. Otherwise, I won't be able to recommend it fully to my students.

Also, I'm assuming that there is no mac version. This is really a killer for educational uses. Suck it up and dev one for Mac OS.

Good Shooting Guide: the basic principles - Online course details

Here's an interesting guide on how to shoot film. Really it's more than that. Lots of tips on how to prepare, get into the mindset of the shoot, and shoot.

This is really beyond the beginner with a new digital camera, but I'd say that it's an interesting insight into what the expert either thinks about or has internalized. Worth a look even for you teachers thinking about doing video projects.

Teachers sell their original work online - Jun 28, 2006

Do you do any development work? Good enough to sell? It might be now.

I've seen sites like this in the past and the quality has been terrible. However, TeachersPayTeachers.com seems to have a slightly better model, due to the implementation of a social rating system. Like the news site, Digg, this site allows users to rate materials.

Something like this would be an impetus for me to do more original development work. I find that I get lazy if give the opportunity. The ability to make a little coin on my work would be welcomed.

Unfortunately, I don't think that I'd ever sell enough to recoop my the yearly fee. Teachers are a cheap bunch. I don't think this is by choice, it's by necessity. We don't get paid much. How many of you would go out and buy a lesson with your own money? Not many of you.

If the schools bought subscriptions for their faculties, that would be something that you could sell. I'm not sure how people would get paid on a subscription model, but it's worth a look.

digg

digg

Wow! I dig Digg.

The first time I went to this site I just thought, "big deal another news aggregator." Today, however, I got lost for the first time in it and I've fallen in love.

Google really does a great job at aggregating the news, but this site goes way beyond and pushes news based on user submissions and feedback. How cool.

MySpace to Add Restrictions to Protect Younger Teenagers - New York Times

MySpace to Add Restrictions to Protect Younger Teenagers - New York Times

Will it make a difference? Won't predators just sign up as a 13 year old? I don't get it. Either get serious about confirming the identities of your users or just let it be. This band aid approach will just make some people complacent.

Approaches like those implemented by Korean mega-service, Cyworld, require identity confirmation. This, combined with MySpace's new policy, would go a long way in "protecting" children on these sites. Hopefully, Cyworld's U.S. debut will continue this very effective approach and then MySpace might have to follow suit.

The Korea Times : Children Driven to Learn English

The Korea Times : Children Driven to Learn English

Some people say that teaching privates is easy money in Korea. From articles like this one, I would assume that test materials and test prep development is the way to go.

Just another example of the testing culture gone crazy.

CNN.com - Student�suspended for viewing MySpace posting - Mar 2, 2006

CNN.com - Student�suspended for viewing MySpace posting - Mar 2, 2006

Sniff, Sniff...I smell a Supreme Court case (if it makes it that far).

1 student posted threats against another student on his/her blog. Student gets expelled. Good. He/she deserves it and there is a clear case of this act, outside of the schools walls, will impede the educational process. Case closed.

However, 20 students were suspended for VIEWING the posting (outside of the school on private computers, over private networks, etc). The school is seriously over-stepping their bounds. There's no way that this will hold up to any judicial scrutiny.

With the school's reasoning, someone could send me (student) a letter, with the same content as the blog posting, and as soon as I open the letter, I am guilty.

I'm all for schools regulating what is created or accessed at the school or using school resources. I'm even somewhat ok with schools holding students to a code of conduct when they are participating in extracurricular activities. But I have to draw the line when a school can restrict what a student reads at home.

CNN.com - Huge gaps in state, federal test scores - Mar 3, 2006

CNN.com - Huge gaps in state, federal test scores - Mar 3, 2006

Duuuhhhh!

That's just about my only response. What do you expect when you tell states that "all students have to pass these tests....but you can create the tests yourselves"?

Of course there are other reasons that should not be ignored for the descrepancies in federal and state test scores.

(1) Most schools spend a great deal of time preparing students for the state tests. This means that the students are familiar with both the layout of the test and its contents before taking the test. There was likely zero preparation for the federal test.

(2) Regional differences. I'm going to guess that there are both conceptual and linguistic regional differences that are accounted for in the state tests, but not in the federal tests. This is really the same complaint that I have for the state test (doesn't account for local differences).

(3) State tests often use state norm groups. Federal tests, likely, use national norm groups.

These are just a few possibilities, but in the end we are arguing over 2 useless forms of assessment. Both are a waste of time and money. The testing mentality has serious hurt teachers, students, and communities. This mindset is causing us to de-evolve into industrial mentalities, which will eventually lead to us slipping even more in the international "rankings" that this focus on testing was supposed to address in the first place. Accountability can be achieved without large-scale testing.

Teach with Tech

Teach with Tech

This blog is the sounding board for the Instructional Consulting office in the School of Education at Indiana University in Bloomington.

They do a really good job at addressing some of the newer technologies and are emphasizing Blogging and Podcasting in Education at this time.

They offer some Podcasts that are available through iTunes or via a link on the blog. These are high quality and getting better each time.

I recommend that you check them out.

My Teacher Took My iPod

Technology must be appreciated on a higher level when it takes on the role of muse (My Teacher Took My iPod).

I have to laugh as a technologist, a teacher, and teacher trainer. This speaks to me on so many levels :)

CNN.com - Exam measures students' 'information literacy' - Feb 3, 2006

CNN.com - Exam measures students' 'information literacy' - Feb 3, 2006

Great! I think that this is a good "assessment" for schools to have.....wait..... "the nonprofit Educational Testing Service..."

Forget it.

ETS = money-maker. I put no faith in this. I wouldn't mind checking it out though.

----------------------
update:

Here is the ETS informational site for the ICT Assessment (http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy). If the demo is any indication this assessment simply sucks. What is this really measuring? When are people going to learn that some abilities should not be measured through standardized assessments.

I have no doubt that there are abilities that "information literate" people possess. There are likely even concepts that they have mastered that they can apply across contexts (represented mostly by different softwares). However, these concepts are inextricably linked to the interface (software) being used. Though, information literate people may be able to move from one software to another with very little effort, it really depends on how standardized the interfaces are. That is where this assessment drops the ball.

ETS has equated information literacy, in this regard, to the ability to use standardized interfaces (see the "search" example). It seems to assume that information literacy exists independantly from information sources (media).

Now, I will, reluctantly, report on the positives. ETS is great at getting at concepts and they are getting better at developing scenarios to get at these concepts. These scenarios do help to assess some of the abilities and concepts that information literate people do possess. In the very same "search" example, the test does throw in some hurdles that test the ability of test-takers to adjust their search strategy in order to find relevant information. This is key.

I could write forever on this topic, but I should probably get back to work....processing information.

englishdroid.com

englishdroid.com

I don't remember who suggested this site, but thank you, thank you, thank you! (they are probably in the blogroll to the right) It has enough content that I'll probably spend months going to it now and again.

If you are defensive about the English teaching profession or your own teaching, don't click on that link above. Please don't do it. Go to Dave's ESL Cafe and laugh at how bad other teachers' lesson plans are :)

Whoever runs this site is a genious and I bow down to you :) Sir or Madam, you are funny and have a unique insight into the profession.

Frappr! - My Frappr

Frappr! - My Frappr

I'm still trying to figure out how to utilize Frappr. The maps are neat, but I'm getting really sick of seeing them everywhere. I've seen them used for online conferences...good use. I've also seen them used for a local discussion forum....bad use. It's better with a geographically distributed group.

I'm not sure what else to do with it. I could upload photos, but why? I've got Gigs of photos on my own gallery site. It would be nice if I could add URLs to that gallery to populate these sites. It would make my life so much easier.

Main Page - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

Main Page - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

This is an interesting step in the utilization of Wikis. Wiki Books is a site that allows people to "build" books collectively (ideally). It is also available in a number of languages (I'm sure that translations are not far off, if they don't already exist).

I have to admit that I haven't found any "books" that have been significantly developed yet. However, if Wikipedia is any indication, they are not far off.

APA is going to have to figure out a better way to cite these kind of sources. Maybe instead of author, they could indicate "consensus"?

ARE YOU READY TO "MOODLE"?

LLT Vol9Num2: ARE YOU READY TO "MOODLE"?

I like this review of Moodle. Brandl touches upon a number of the reasons that I like the system. Not only is it open source, it is somewhat easy to install and manage on the admin side and it is easy to learn and use on the instrutor/student side.

I have used it for 3 classes now (one fully in Moodle and 2 using the Moodle Wiki). I have only had one problem with it over the last year and that was really an issue with my hosting service. They updated to a new version of PHP that made my installation of Moodle barf (technical term :) All I had to do was spend about an hour in the Moodle discussion forums and I had everything fixed and ready to go. Gotta love that community.

Indiana Univesity is current using Sakai 2.0 as the basis for its OncourseCL CMS. This system has improved greatly in the last year and I'm sure it will continue to improve in the future. That is not the point, however.

The point is that this system is FAR inferior to Moodle with a vastly bloated administration and development team. It is confusing to use as both an instructor and student. It puts far too much control in the hands of administrators and much too little control in the hands of instructors and students. The model is short-sighted and doomed to failure.

I was once told that anything could be added/fixed in OncourseCL. All I had to do was contact a developer in Michigan who would determine whether it was worthy or not. If it was determined to be worthy, it would be put in a que and addressed in due time. At that pace, I'll be collecting Social Security before my issues are addressed.

Oops, a posting on Moodle became a rant against OncourseCL...go figure :)

The iPod Took My Seat - Los Angeles Times

The iPod Took My Seat - Los Angeles Times

These articles drive me crazy. They say that students don't come to class, because they are getting what they need online. Do they even hear themselves? If the students are getting what they need online, who cares if they come to class.

GOOD professors should either ask what they can do to add value to face-to-face interactions OR whether they can just move their entire class online. Why waste valuable classroom space if it's not necessary?

These are the most dangerous professors. Those who either have the technological savvy to put materials online or have tech support to do so. They fool themselves and others into believing that cutting edge technology is synonymous with cutting edge teaching. They then represent themselves as "in the know" and crusade again these very same technologies when they "don't work."

It's their methods that don't work. The technology works fine. None of those students in the article complained about the technology. However, more than a few complained about their instructors.

I would love it if once, just once, a news article like this one would try to get a balanced perspective.

Yawcam update

Well, I guess you get what you pay for. Yawcam seems to have quite a few errors. I can't pin down what is causing these errors, because they are so seemingly random.

Sometimes, it seems like the uploads (FTP) just stop. That is usually when there is an error message saying that the destination folder doesn't exist. Those are actually the most rare and, really, are best errors. The picture on the site remains the same and I can tell by the time stamp that the uploads ceased at a particular time.

The most common error is the strangest. I get no error message on my computer, but the programs seems to freeze, or is at least unresponsive. There is some kind of upload happening though. The image on the site remains the same, but the time stamp continues to update. That is the worst. I'm trying to use this to let people know when I'm in my office, but with this error that get's confusing. I'm not worried about the picture freezing when I'm not there. I'm worried about the picture freezing when I'm there and then I leave. It makes it seem like I'm at my desk and ignoring people who try to contact me.

It looks like I'm off to shop for alternatives. I'll let you all know if/when I find anything.

Yawcam

Yawcam stands for Yet Another Webcam and it is a nice freeware for Webcam functions.

It's a nice, simple application that I have set up to upload an image (FTP) to my server every 20 seconds. While it's not streaming video, it puts a pretty small load on my server and, therefore, my wallet :)

I was able to find a script that refreshes the pictures every 20 seconds. Initially, I was refreshing the entire page using a Metatag. That was not a good solution because the page would reset (to the top of the page) each time it reloaded. On a page that scrolls, that is really annoying. On my phone, it made it impossible to view the image.

I'm considering using this as a sort of "in office" indicator for my students. Obviously, I can use MSN Messenger (or other brand) to do this, but this is nice because I can use it any place that I can use a picture. Or, at least, any place where I can point to the URL of a picture.

I'm looking for other ways of using my Webcam in-between video conferences (which don't happen too often). Anyone have any ideas? :)