Monthly Archives: December 2009

Dec 17 2009

Getting Priorities Straight

The Ontario Meetup last night inspired a great deal of conversation.  As happens with most conversations, we wandered off the track eventually but it was a good wander.

The original focus, led by our presenter @courosa, was around the concept of internet filtering.  Alec made a comment right off the bat about social media and its use that I thought was good and tweetworthy.

We spent some time talking about the good – then it turned to the bad – then it turned to the ugly.   The general thought going through our Adobe Connect room was that we are all wrestling and dealing with the issue of internet filtering.  We ran the gamut from no filtering whatsoever to overly tight filtering (at least from the perspective of the commenter).
I find it so amazing that, in a day and age of standards and standardized curriculum, that we can be miles apart in implementation as a province.

There were a couple of comments that stuck in my mind because they resonated well with me.  @ron_mill asked the question as to why we build our policies around the outliers.

I think that @sadone summed it up when he noted that it’s our job as educators to teach the right and wrong and that we should be building a moral sense of appropriateness in internet use.

It’s difficult to argue with that logic.  I think that’s what we all like to think that we do for a living as teachers.

But, it’s those outliers.  Education has a long memory.  When you have these sorts of discussions, there’s always someone who remembers how bad it was when …  The Ontario College of Teachers has its blue pages.  There are fodder that keep being offered up when you try to have the discussion.

They are all good discussion points.  @markwcarbone and I have these discussions all the time.  From what we can see, there’s a real tightrop to be walked to reach the other side and keep the organization’s needs and the needs of the end user in balance.

It was a good session and like most good sessions generated more questions than answers.  Everyone has their priorities on this issue and getting the right answer is important.

The discussion isn’t going to end any time soon.  The key is that we had over 30 people in the conversation at one point last night.  That’s great that we have that many people willing to discuss it.

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Dec 17 2009

links for 2009-12-16

Dec 16 2009

Internet Literacy


The Guardian posted this article yesterday dealing with the need for internet literacy skills at a younger and younger age.  In this case, the suggest was that children as young as five should be educated about how advertising is presented on the internet.  The article serves to remind us that the internet is a media like no other.

With television, shows that are targeted for a younger audience had rules about the content of the show and of the type of advertising tha is allowed to air during the show.  Older shows actually have a disclaimer message indicating that the content is not appropriate for younger audiences.

Similarly, magazines and books for children have specific rules for what sort of advertising that’s available and appropriate for their audience.

The wide open internet is different though.  There’s typically no control over who goes where and who does what.  You can find the darnedest things if you look hard enough or some things just by an inadvertant click.  It’s not just young children that can be duped either. Within the past month, I had a panic call from someone who got a message that their computer was infected with a virus and that a credit card was required to buy an anti-virus to remove it.  This was a very concerned individual who wasn’t at the top of the technologically savvy continuum but just used the computer to get the job done.  In this case, it was easy for me to dismiss since the computer being used was a Macintosh and the on-screen illustration was obviously files and folders from a Windows environment.  In this case, the advertising almost worked.

It goes to illustrate how good advertisers are at catching your eye.  Advertising isn’t bad.  The bills have to be paid somehow.  Major companies make a great deal of money through advertising.  Vendors sell a lot of products because of effective advertising campaigns.  You can’t really blame a child who tries to click on the bouncing ball or whatever in an advertisement.  Well crafted advertising will seemlessly enter the flow of a webpage and may not even be seen as being somehow different from the regular content of the page.

The article from the Guardian, on the surface, may appear to be overkill but how safe is safe?  Store your credit card information on your computer and an accidental click could end up with some unwanted purchases.  The bottom line here is that internet literacy is a skill that everyone needs.  The Ministry of Education in Ontario has recently licensed “Passport to the Internet” to provide another resource to go along with “Reality Check”.  In addition, on the internet, here are a lot of good people doing good things in this area.  I’ve tagged a bunch that I’ve found with the tag “safety” in my delicious account.

Of course, nothing is better than appropriate supervision and talking about what you see on the screen.  In the classroom, it’s always a good idea to have a portal to your content on your classroom wiki so that a student can click and get to the desired resources.  At our last computer contact meeting, we talked about the difference between “funbrain” and “funbrian” and how a simple slip of the finger can make such a difference.  In a live presentation, I broke the “click on a link and don’t keyboard it yourself” rule and made an embarrassing typo going for pbworks.cm instead of pbworks.com.  Gulp.  It’s so easy to do.

There is a great deal of value for people getting online.  We need to muster all of our skills to make sure that we do it intelligently and safely.

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Dec 16 2009

links for 2009-12-15

Dec 15 2009

Can a Search Track the Flu?

I was at the Google.org Philanthropy website and just stumbled into this section dealing with the flu in real time.  The logic behind the resource is that people with the flu are searching for information about it.

It’s an interesting concept.

The map is interactive and you can mouse over various parts to get a sense as to how much flu searching activity is happening for various countries.

What do you think? Is this a true depiction of world trends?  Read more about the logic behind the website.  If nothing else, it would serve for an incredible discussion about social awareness issues.

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Dec 15 2009

links for 2009-12-14

Dec 14 2009

Documenting Symposium 2009

I thought that I would spend today’s post showing how Symposium 2009 was documented in words and pictures.  The technology here was very portable.  All of the images come from my iPhone.  It’s much more versatile that carrying around my bigger camera with its flash and programmable settings.

It wouldn’t be Symposium if we didn’t talk about the weather.  London weather was great although very windy.  I should have really checked the weather from Huron and Perth Counties, and Waterloo Region though…

We stuff the registration bags the night before and hire a couple of guards from the front lobby to keep them secure.

Unique to the Lamplighter Inn is the Pointsettia tree.  There were two on display this year; one in the atrium and the other in the lobby.

According to David Jakes’ website, he cannon balled into the pool.  I hope that he also went down the water slide.

The Crystal Ballroom is home for the event.  The stage is flanked by a couple of Christmas trees to set the festive feeling for the day.

And then it’s time for the opening keynote.  David Jakes talks about what really matters when you get past the Web 2.0 Hype.

After lunch, Leslie Fisher helped us with Christmas shopping with her presentation on Gadgets.

James Cowper and Amanda Mundy talked about first time blogging and their project to get all of the classrooms in their schools online and communicating.

My friend Rodd Lucier takes a standing room only audience on a search and understanding of Creative Commons licensing and how it applies to educators.  I had just brought in the two empty chairs you see in the foreground.

In addition to the pictures, the crowd helped document the day by using the hash tag #RCAC09.  I used a free web resource called Twapper Keeper to document the Twitter messages from the day.  Rodd complained about the order and the developer of the resource gave us another link to see the messages in reverse order.  So, you can play it in both directions.  You can even download the entire session and analyse it further if you want.

What a day.  I learned so much and are so appreciative that Western Ontario continues to support this annual event.  The Lamplighter is booked for Symposium 2010 already so circle December 9 in your calendars.

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Dec 14 2009

links for 2009-12-13

Dec 13 2009

Just Keep Communicating

One of the things that I think we all get when we introduce Twitter to people is the comment “I don’t get it”.  “I’ve created a Twitter account and nothing happens”.

Well, if that’s all that people do, then they are correct.  Nothing happens.

Like most good things, you have to work at it to get results.  It can be work to find just the right people to follow and it can be work to get people to follow you.  You have to be interesting; you have to contribute.  As I’ve noted to a new person recently, there is no half-way when you elect to use Twitter.  You’re either in or you’re not.  If you’re not, chances are you will still not get it.

Good, and helpful people are there and ready to assist.  I had it happen to me last night.

I’ve been tinkering with Google Chrome for a while now and, if you read my post recently, I decided to give it a go as my main browser.  The tipping point for me was the formal support for extensions.  So, I threw out a Twitter message indicating so.  Within moments, I had a response from someone asking what ones that I was using.  That impressed me.  Someone I wasn’t following cared enough to reply.

The conversation is illustrated below.

So, that’s pretty cool.  I always find it intriguing when someone responds to my messages.  It’s nice to know that you’re not talking to a wilderness.

But, then another response came along.

Now, I’m sure that this account just runs a continuous search for the term “shareaholic”, which is an incredible resource that I’ve used on Firefox and Flock for a long time now.  It’s now available for Chrome and is very actively supported.  So, not only did I get some advice from this exchange, I got another person to follow.  Thanks, shareaholic.

The bottom line here…if you’re communicating, there are good things that can happen.

Don’t just say “I don’t get it” and give up.

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Dec 13 2009

links for 2009-12-12