Monthly Archives: April 2011

Apr 21 2011

OTR Links for 04/21/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Apr 20 2011

Election Bitstrips

Ontario Teachers – you need to run to your BitstripsforSchools account!  Just in time for the Canadian Federal Elections, the Bitstrips for Schools team have put together a couple of template to let students create a comic letting candidates state their case!

 

bs1

and

 

bs2

 

The second strip, in particular, is of interest.  The four major party candidates are very nicely done.

Read more about this at the BitstripsforSchools blog.

Apr 20 2011

A Tale of Two Press Releases

It was earlier this month that the Ontario College of Teachers released an advisory entitled "Advisory on the Use of Electronic Communication and Social Media" accompanied by a YouTube video that delved into some of the issues.  The main stream media was all over it immediately with headlines like:

  • Teachers told not to "friend" students on Facebook
  • Ontario teachers advised to avoid students on Net
  • Report advises Ontario teachers not to interact with their students on Facebook

The media just couldn’t get these stories out quickly enough.  While the advisory was full of good advice, the reports elected to focus on things that might go wrong.  I had more than one person who felt their profession marginalized by the news reports.  As I blogged at the time, this didn’t come out of the blue.  Technology conferences like the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s annual event and the Ontario Teachers’ Federation’s Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century have very actively been working with members to get the best use of the available technologies.

In fact, with the exception of preparing and writing standardized tests, teachers are encouraged and supported in their efforts to differentiate instruction for students and to use the best possible tools available.  For many teachers, research, writing, publishing, problem solving, critical thinking, editing, and so much more can be enhanced with the appropriate use of technology in safe ways.  Unfortunately, these types of things didn’t make the report.

Today, the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario issued a press release of its own.  "ECOO Encourages Responsible Use of Social Media".  This release doesn’t talk about the "other side" of the story.  It explains, just like the OCT advisory, that social media can be used very powerfully.  In the news release, ECOO’s president, Bill MacKenzie speaks on behalf of his organization:

ECOO believes that students need help learning how to navigate, evaluate, and effectively use technologies safely and appropriately. “Not all students are ‘digital natives’ with the innate ability to navigate these new technologies effortlessly,” says MacKenzie. “Our teachers have a responsibility to lead by example, demonstrating and teaching the appropriate use of technology and social media.” 

So, I went about looking for media coverage of the ECOO News Release.  I couldn’t find a thing as of the time of this writing.  If anyone does find reference to it, please let me know in the comments below.

Fortunately, the Ontario Curriculum does include Media Literacy as a topic.  What a great comparison of what makes it to the media and what doesn’t.  Fortunately, we do have paper.li for web publishing.  It may end up there.

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Apr 20 2011

OTR Links for 04/20/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Apr 19 2011

Debating

Every afternoon, I get a chance to see what the mind of Stephen Downes is up to.  I subscribed to his OLDaily and I admit to reading it daily.  There are a couple of reasons – first Stephen periodically drops by this blog and rather than comment here, he comments in the Daily – secondly, it’s just darned interesting material.  If you’re an educator, you owe it to yourself to check it out and see if it fits your needs.

This afternoon, there was an article that really piqued my interest.

Feature Article
Should OER favour commercial use?
Stephen Downes, April 18, 2011.

I have begun engagement in an 11-day long pseudo-Oxford style debate at the WSIS-UNESCO online community. The question at hand is "Should OER favour commercial use?" and I – not surprisingly – have weighed in on the contrary. The protagonist is David Wiley, who has been well known for his support of commercial licensing of OERs over the years. Wayne Mackintosh of WikiEducator is moderating. The debate site is here

There were actually two things here that drew me into the article. First, I am very interested in Open Educational Resources.  I do think that some form of this will be required to sustain courses as we move more and more online and secondly, I sense that commercial producers will be challenged to keep up.  In Ontario, you’ll see example of both.  For example, in Computer Science, you’ll see entire class loads freely available on the web.  But, I also know that there are Computer Science courses written by eLearning Ontario securely sitting behind a login/password.

Secondly, I was interested in the concept of an online debate.  Of all of the activities that we did in English at High School, debating was the one thing that I did reasonably well at.  I’m interested in the debate proper, of course, but also to see if the logistics would work in the classroom.  From what I’ve seen so far, this could be replicated nicely with PBWorks.

So, I clicked over to the WSIS Platform of Communities to see what this was all about.  The debate appears to be scheduled for 11 days.  Once into the debate area, the moderator Wayne Makintosh has given his opening statement as has David Wiley in favour of the resolution and Stephen Downes speaking against.  Since the debate is just getting underway, participants appear to be weighing in with their thoughts entering the debate – FOR-62%; AGAINST-38%.  Stephen has his work cut out for him.

The audience, in addition to voting, have the opportunity to comment on the statements and it’s interesting reading.  So, I figure, I need to be part of this and the instructions are to log in to vote.  Where to login?  Where to login?  I can’t find that at all so decide to back off to the root of the site and there are indeed instructions about registering.  It’s done the old fashioned way by sending an email.  So, I’ve done that and am waiting.

Who knows?  Maybe they have standards and I won’t get an account.  The only thing that I appear to be missing is the ability to vote.  All of the other materials appear to be wide open.  I can’t wait to see where this takes me.

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Apr 19 2011

OTR Links for 04/19/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Apr 18 2011

Putting Things in Order

Yesterday, I shared a quick and simple way to read the tweets from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic‘s Twitter event when they tweeted out the conversations with the Titanic from its first calls for assistance until there were no more calls.  Even though they used the hashtag #ns_mma, following it could be frustrating because of the "noise" of others that were also using the same hashtag.

It was a relatively simple solution and you get to read the tweets as they happened, only in reverse order.  My goal was just to get the job done, and get it done easily.

Now, if you know about Twitter and what goes into a message (read "What’s in a Tweet"), you know that each individual message is an entity unto itself.  As such, you can go through and pull out each individual message and manipulate it.  It requires some reading and understanding about how messages are labelled and goes beyond the scope of this post.

So, having established that, one of the problems with the messages from the Maritime Museum is that they are in reverse order.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could spin them around?  In fact, with a little (lot) of dragging and dropping, it can be done using the Storify web service.

Storify lets you create stories based upon social media.  You have access to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, RSS, other Storify sources, and of course, Twitter.  So, I decided to give it a shot with the tweets that were part of this project.

Just like from before, I performed the search #ns_mma from:ns_museum to give me the hashtag messages without the noise.

The results are return in a similar fashion.  Completely in reverse order.  Only this time, if you look to the left of each message, there is a ribbed area.  From this area, you can pick a tweet and drag it to the timeline on the right.

To make sure that it’s in the desired chronological order, it’s just a matter of navigating to the bottom of the list of tweets on the left and drag them to the timeline on the right.

Quite frankly, that did take a while but I wanted to do this enormous job from the museum justice.  The final step is, of course, proofreading and then you publish it for the world to see.

You can see the results of my efforts at:  http://storify.com/dougpete/titanic-tweet-event.  You’ve got your standard sharing options from the finished products.  What a great way to pull together media from your various social media sources to publish a story.

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Apr 18 2011

OTR Links for 04/18/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Apr 17 2011

A Twitter Reenactment

99 years ago, the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean.  On April 15, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic commemorated the event by sending the wireless messages to Twitter using the same time timeline, starting at 11:55pm Atlantic Time.  If you were following the museum and the hashtag for the event, you could have experienced it.  Chances are you didn’t but with a little effort, you can now.

I recall reading about the Titanic and, of course, went and watched the movie when it was released.  The movie was rich in the details to show what a luxury liner the ship was and left very little to the imagination.  Reading about the Titanic as in the Wikipedia link above leaves more to the imagination as you try to mentally put the pieces together.  But whether you watch the movie or read an article, it’s over relatively quickly.  Can you imagine what the process would be like to hear the messages as they happened from the original until its final message?  Could you imagine the agony listening and waiting for the next update?  That was what was added to and captured during this Twitter event.

The hashtag #ns_mma details the event from the userid @ns_museum.  Like most hashtagged events, you can follow the hashtag and relive the surrounding conversation.  If you try it, you’ll also see the "noise" that surrounded the event.  People were reporting the experience, others were retweeting it, some were just saying "cool", and others were giving rightful kudos to the museum for this event.

It would be nice to remove the noise and you can do so with a refined search.  Instead of searching the hashtag and viewing the results, view the hashtag but only show the tweets from the museum.  You can do so by searching for "@ns_mma from:ns_museum"  Such as search will get you just the tweets from the reenactment.

Even refined in this way, there’s still an annoying problem.  The messages are in reverse order (as they should be since we’re searching a timeline here) and the Twitter search is limited by default to 20 a page.  You can extend that to 50 but it still takes more than a page to catch them all.  Unfortunately, it breaks the flow.

So, instead of searching using Twitter search, I would encourage you to fire up your Twitter client on your portable device.  They all have search capabilities there but are not limited to pages as on the internet.  Here, you’ll get the messages in one long stream and you can get at least some parts of the technology out of the road while you read.

On Twittelator, it looks like this…

 

On the Twitter client, it will look like this.

Quickly fling your way to the bottom and you’re now looking at the very first message of the event.  Then, at your own pace, read the messages as you work your way upward through them all.  Take the navigation browsing out of the event and experience it as close to it happening as possible.

This is one of the more powerful ways that I’ve seen Twitter reach out and provide an educational experience.  Like the many, I think that the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic needs to be commended for the innovation shown from this event.  What a powerful way to reenact the event.

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Apr 17 2011

OTR Links for 04/17/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.