Monthly Archives: February 2011

Feb 10 2011

links for 2011-02-09

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
0
Feb 9 2011

Who Controls Your Tools?

It’s been over a week and this post has been bouncing around in my mind.  As I walked the dog last night, I think that I have it fleshed out in my mind.

Like many people, I am trying my best to stay on top of the events in Egypt.  It’s been all over the television but television does have its filter and editorial content to contend with.  Twitter lets the commentary shoot from the hip.  In addition to the traditional news sources, I have found that @acarvin from NPR has been a non-stop source of commentary and retweets about the situation.  One of the things that did come across was the stoppage of internet access.

There are some graphs that show the flow of information to and from Egypt illustrating the communication outage.  This article from the Huffington Post really does a nice job of illustrating it.  Given the way that I learn about current events, I just couldn’t fathom not being able to turn to my news and learning sources for just in time information.  With the flip of a switch, the citizenry of Egypt were denied information entering and leaving the country.

But, that could never happen on this side of the Atlantic, right?  Not so quick.  There are a couple of things that hit my radar as well.  The first is the concept of a "kill switch" that the US president could flip, if necessary.  This article from Security Week is a good read about this topic.  Given the recent hype about the Stuxnet virus, this may well be more than just a sensationalist story.

And here, north of the Great Lakes, we have a CRTC decision that could potentially change the way that we Canadians think about internet communications.  With a usage based billing system, you’ll have to think before you make the next online click.  Are you willing to pay for that piece of learning or entertainment?

The internet was originally just something that techno-weenies (me included) used to communicate.  For serious information, we could always turn to the Grolier or Canadian Encyclopedia in the library or on the bookshelf.  Eventually, that changed and we could get to that information on CD-ROM.  This was a passing phase because we recognized that information was changing so quickly that we needed to be able to access it online.  But, that wasn’t enough and Wikipedia allows us to document for humanity literally the moment it happens.

How many times have you resolved a bet or argument by pulling out your cell phone and doing a quick check?

These are the tools and we have come to rely on them in ways that we could never fathom years ago.  Imagine also, that it could just as quickly go away should someone flip a switch and deny access.  Too far out in the future?  Ask anyone in Egypt who needed to communicate during this time?

Or, ask a student or teacher who works on a project or lesson at home and comes to school only to find that some content filter and someone at the switch has decided that she/he should not have access.  They may feel just as removed from the tools as any of the other scenarios.  There’s just someone "in the cloud" who is controlling the tools.

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Feb 9 2011

links for 2011-02-08

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
0
Feb 8 2011

Trend Yourself

One of the most intriguing ways to find good reading and determine what’s happening in the world is to check out Twitter trends.  You’ll get a sense of what people are talking about by messages and clicks.  As I write this entry, here’s what’s trending on Twitter.

And, another client that I use does allow for localized trends.  Here’s what was trending in Canada?

Great reading and an interesting place to get started checking out the latest.  You may, in fact, be contributing to part of that conversation.  Chances are, you aren’t.  But, if you’re using Twitter, hopefully you’re sharing links to learning with the rest of the world.  How do you know if you’re being effective and your message being spread?  Is your content trending?

If you have a bit.ly account and the bit.ly extension installed, you can do it.  When you shorten a link with bit.ly, some interesting things can happen and one of them is to ask bit.ly to count the number of times that others click your link!  When the number of clicks reach a threshold, then a popup appears to let you know you’re trending!

Just set the link threshold to your desired number and let bit.ly do its thing.  For the purpose of this post, I had to generate a popup picture so that I capture it.  I didn’t have the time to wait for 100 hits so lowered it to 5 and sent out a message with a link in it.  Sure enough, within minutes I received the notification.

How cool is that?

Now, traditionally, you gauge your reach by the number of retweets of a message or the number of replies that it generates.  You may not get a great deal of satisfaction that way since many users just read your content and move on.  If you’re curious about whether people actually click through when you’re sharing a link, this is a great way to do it.  Just set a threshold and start posting.  You’ll be amazed, as I was, with how many people are actually clicking through to find out what you’re talking about!

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Feb 8 2011

links for 2011-02-07

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
1
Feb 7 2011

Coolest RSS Reader

Sometimes, things are just so cool.  In the past, I’ve talked about a couple of utilities for the iPad that let you bring in RSS feeds for reading.  Nothing is as plain out cool as this reader – especially if you’re a fan of Star Trek.

Remember the screens that you’d see?  Remember the people walking around with their iPads?  Now, you can do the same thing with the LCARS RSS Reader.  On the show, it was the way things are done – although I don’t recall them using it to read or search Twitter.

But, that’s one of the feeds that you can bring into this reader!  So powerful, forget the old term RSS reader and welcome the Internet Media Reader.

But, look at all that’s available!

But, it doesn’t stop at Twitter.  Bring in your news feeds or even check out yours or anyone else’s blog.

Pick a title and do the reading…

It’s just so cool with all of its sound effects and the high contrast colours really make reading easy.

There is lots of room for enhancements like being able to respond or create Twitter posts but for now, it’s just about the coolest way to read your content.

Feb 7 2011

links for 2011-02-06

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
0
Feb 6 2011

Time for a Renaissance?

There’s a great song that’s worth listening to or reading the lyrics.  It’s from Aaron Tippin and entitled

“You’ve Got to Stand for Something” and is based upon the famous quote “You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything”.

One of the things that I’ve always encouraged in my classroom is a moment of reflection on virtually everything that we do.  Whether it’s a program that’s written, a test that’s been taken, an action (good or bad), a presentation given or a lesson taught.

Personally, all of my lesson plans had a spot at the bottom entitled reflections where I would jot down my own thoughts after a lesson.  It was based on the premise that if I got the chance to teach this lesson again, I would do it better.  Better resources; better timing; better engagement; better …

As you wait for the pre-pre-pre-pre-game show before today’s Super Bowl, I would challenge all bloggers to spend a moment on their own blogs.  Do you have an “about me” or “mission statement” for your blog?  Take a moment to read it and then go back in time to your very first entry.  What did your mission look like with your first blog post?  What does your mission look like with your most recent post?  Pick something in the middle.  Were you true to your mission?

I probably should have said your first “real” post.  Most first posts are “I hope this works…”.

I would suspect that most blog ambitions are about changing the world one blog post at a time as you “muse” or “ramble” or “think” or “comment” about the issue de jour.

Is it time for some action or realignment?

  • Did you originally promise your readers that you would blog regularly?
  • Did you promise to reflect upon your experiences in the Grade 5 classroom and now you’re in Grade 1?
  • Did you promise to review the latest and greatest of software or pedagogy for your followers?
  • Did you get into blogging because it was a course requirement?

Are you keeping your promises?  If not, why not?

  • If you promised to blog regularly, are you? Or is your blog dead with a last post date months ago?
  • Is your present reality the same as the original or have things changed?
  • Is your original mandate now just a fond memory?
  • Is your course over and you’ve moved on?

Things do change and your priorities do shift.  Can you revisit the purpose of blogging in the first place and re-write your original mission to reflect your current reality?  Was your original purpose too restrictive or unrealistic?  Go ahead and fix it.

Have you abandoned the blog?  How about one final entry to that effect?  You’ll make many visitors happy knowing that they don’t need to waste time waiting for the next post.  Or, better yet, delete the blog and remove some dead wood.

If not, and I really hope this is the case, how about revisiting your “About Me” or “Mission” page and spending a few moments to tighten the language?  I know that when I visit a blog for the first time, the latest entry sets the stage for me.  If I’m going to add you to my RSS feed, I will read the “About Me” page to get a sense about who the author is and the goal of the blog.  That’s very important to me.  But, I would submit that it’s even more important to the author.  Take some time to be reflective.  Who are you?  What’s is your mission?  What do you stand for?

Is it time for a renaissance in your own personal blog?

Feb 6 2011

links for 2011-02-05

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
0
Feb 5 2011

Faceoff

Yesterday, I took part in a presentation that had every opportunity to fail.  There were 11 educators and all kinds of technology that had to fall into place in order for success.  The presentation was the "Great OSLA Faceoff" at the OLA Superconference in Toronto.  The session was offered as the OSLA Spotlight first thing in the morning on Friday.

The concept seemed very simple when @AnitaBK and I talked about it initially.  The intent was to provide those in attendance an exposure to as many Web 2.0 applications as possible.  It took the simple concept of a Smackdown and put a Canadian spin on it as we presented it in hockey format with two periods and a Power Play.  With two teams competing with each other, it promised to be simple and straight forward.  Do a competition and then use some of those clicking devices to have random people vote for their favourites. 

From the original premise, we made some changes.  First, we lost the clicking things.  It’s a technology that’s really difficult to ensure success and you couldn’t give every participant one so we quickly agreed that it wasn’t a good idea.  Those of us who enjoy hockey convinced Anita that it wasn’t really a Power Play but more of a shootout for the third period so that was changed.  The hope was that the audience could be tweeting to a backchannel while we were on stage but, alas, there was no affordable wireless internet access in sight. 

There was a plan though as the play by play would be tweeted by our own announcer, @rebrouse so a third screen was ordered to let her efforts be displayed live.

Our two teams had been planning/scheming for about a month already.  Captain @zbpipe and I had organized our teams online electronically.  My other two team members were from Waterloo and hers were from Toronto and Peterborough.  There would be a lot of travel to pull this off, face to face, but collaborative documents through Google Docs and SpringNote actually made the planning pretty easy.  Zoe and I had also been in communication to make sure that we could get the logistics all worked out.  For the audience, we wanted to make a nice visual presentation, a resource that they could turn to after the fact, and most of all to keep it moving – there’s nothing like being in a Web 2.0 session and sit there saying "Been there, done that, got the t-shirt". 

Zoe and I agreed that all of the participants did need to meet the night before to make sure that all would be right and so all finally got to meet at 8 the night before.  Amazingly, all of the planning that we had done online seemed to fall into place and it was just a nice opportunity to fine tune the details and check out the location.

OSLA spotlight session - the setup
Thanks, WindsorDI – CC – Attribution, Non-Commercial

We agreed that it would be nice to get there a little early for setup.  Oh, say 7:30am.  An early bird, I figured that I could do a bunch of other things and then head over.  That’s a big hall to be in alone!  Thankfully, my friend WindsorDI who would be managing the audio showed up a little while later and the details could be attended to.

And, there were a number of things that had to be addressed.  The third screen was scheduled to arrive at 1:00pm.  One of the data projectors needed re-aligning.  There was an annoying flickering light that we thought we would physically break so that nobody would get a headache.  There were no comfy chairs for the commentators and not enough chairs for the presenters.  The list went on and on and we, along with the excellent technical crew, set about knocking them down, one by one.  The setup was certainly non-standard for a conference – usually you just need a microphone and a data projector, right?

With time, everyone was there and we went about the reality of getting our computers setup and ready to go.  All of us have been to presentations where we’ve seen the presenter struggle with the internet live and all agreed that we would have everything that we wanted to talk about open and preloaded in tabs.  There was so much to cover and we wanted it to stay moving.  It sounded like a great concept until we filled the screen with tabs to the point that only the Favicon was left to identify each!  In hindsight, there would have been a much better way of doing this than "random" and trying to shuffle tabs after the fact but hey…

Before long, it was 9 and the setup done whether we were ready or not.  In retrospect, we could have started at 6:30!  And, in a heartbeat, it was 10:30 and we were done.  The whistles for line changes and the horn at the end of the periods kept us on track.  The intermissions had the experts commenting on the content and our abilities as presenters to tie the resources to an educational rationale for the use of the technologies.  During the intermissions, the audience had their 30 seconds of fame at the remote microphones to share their stories.  Even without the internet for the audience, there was a great show of technology that did come off incredibly seamlessly.  It just worked.  The comfy chairs perhaps weren’t as comfy as they might have been but nobody from the hotel came to complain about anything missing from the lobby…

The goal was to get resources out to the floor with an awareness and quick overview of each.  The resources will remain in perpetuity at the Google Site that we, as a group, created for the day.  Twitter was very active and the comments are all tagged with #oslafaceoff.  Apparently, the session was recorded and will be added to their professional library.  It will be interesting to view when that happens.

I think we met the goal, judging by the Twitter comments and the conversations that we had afterwards.  Zoe and I debriefed over lunch and we both agreed that it was a great experience.  A couple of other library associations have approached and want to be able to replicate the format.  I can’t think of a better confirmation that the presentation and the hard work was well worth it.

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