Far From a Shining Star...

Post 333 - Over and Out

2008-06-17T13:09:00.002-05:00

This was my first blog. I started it during a conference workshop in February 2006 and now 333 posts and 2.33 years later, I'm going to close it down. More accurately, I'm going to stop posting to this blog. It's not really closing down because all of the content will remain here indefinitely.

I'm moving into a new home at Barry Dahl dot com. My intent is to have a single source for much of the information that I need to have available related to speaking engagements and various web resources that I make available to anyone who's interested.

It will also be the blog where I post things most similar to Far From a Shining Star. Things related to educational technology, about Web 2.0 uses in education, about general uses of technology, and whatever the heck else is on my mind. Bye for now.

Seeqpod Added to My List of Music Sites

2008-06-03T22:30:00.005-05:00

Thanks to Stephen for bringing my attention back to Seeqpod.com which I looked at briefly several weeks ago but them promptly forgot about.

Here is a playlist that I threw together rather quickly, but it somewhat mirrors a train of thought and discovery that I followed. I searched for a .38 Special song that I like, and from that I let the Discover button lead me to lots of other music that also fits my musical taste buds. .38 Special led me to Molly Hatchet, which led to Creedence and then Skynyrd and then James Gang and Rick Derringer and on and on. It was actually a lot of fun.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

As you can see, the playlists are embeddable in blogs and other webpages (such as your VLE). One thing I like about these services is that they are simply playing songs that otherwise exist out there on the net somewhere or another. In other words, you're not the one uploading and serving up the song - someone else is doing that for you.

Something else that is sort of fun about this is that there are a bunch of videos (mostly from YouTube) that you can find when you search. Most of these videos are home grown live concert footage made by fans. Variable quality to be sure, but there are definitely some nuggets in there.

Video of Tag Galaxy

2008-05-27T14:35:00.003-05:00

I'll be in Memphis this summer two different times, looking for some Blues and Bar-b-que. I saw a tweet this morning about Tag Galaxy and checked it out. Cool way of searching for tagged Flickr photos and creating a globe of photos from the galaxy of possible photos. You can drill down as far as you like, in any order that you like.

Here's a short (2.75 min.) video showing how Tag Galaxy works. I decided to look for Beale Street photos related to the Blues. Worked great.

BTW, I'm still a bit peeved that my own photos don't show up when doing any of these kind of Flickr photo searches. Maybe before I renew my pro membership they'll have to make that work properly for me - or no soup for you!

Here's a still shot of the Universe of Flickr photos tagged with Duluth.

And then a capture of the photo globe created of Duluth pictures.

Electronic Football Anyone?

2008-05-22T14:40:00.004-05:00

John O'Brien showing an early version of a video game (without the video). Session at the 2008 Minnesota e-Learning Summit at Normandale CC. Session title: What's Next? Next Generation Faculty & Teachers. Yes, he's a superstar.

Michael Wesch Keynote

2008-05-22T08:35:00.002-05:00

At the Minnesota e-Learning Summit.

I Love Anonymous Evals

2008-05-22T00:18:00.001-05:00

I tend to live by the mantra "put your money where your mouth is." That's one reason that I tend to have the reputation of being willing to say things in meetings that other people are thinking but are unwilling to give their voice to. I actually think that speaking your mind is a good (and healthy) thing, but as you can imagine I have a certain bias since that's the way I am.

Each administrator at my college is evaluated by the masses every two years using an online, anonymous survey instrument. When I say masses, that actually means that the masses are invited to submit the evals, but most choose not to do so. This year it was my turn again. Only about 30 people chose to submit an eval about me. I'm not going to bore you with whether the evals were overall favorable or unfavorable, because that is not my point or even remotely related to my point.

I want to take this opportunity, dear reader, to share with you the negative comments that people were willing to write in the open-ended questions at the end of the survey. For example:

For the question - This administrator could improve upon the following:

Communication with fellow staff
Could improve on communication and planning skills.
Look for opportunities to interact with staff and faculty.
He needs to make use of more of the online faculty--a select few seem to be favored for various tasks, opportunities, committees, etc. He may need to get to know the various faculty a bit better. There seems to be a fair amount of comment from people who think Barry does not like them. I think he does not know them, and doesn't work at that as a priority.
Tendency to find fault with others
Can be (mis?)perceived as arrogant.
Being more patient.
Barry is a bit too impatient with routine tasks and routine pace of some procedures and tends to favor newer, more visible and faster-moving projects over them. This can, at times, make some people worry a little about the fate of the routine tasks.
Willingness to listen.
Attending department meetings so that faculty can communicate directly with administration about curriculum and technology issues before approaching the Dean.
improve communication with their division, have division meetings, meet with departments within their division
He needs to remember what the typical teaching schedule is like, perhaps teaching an online course once in a while to stay in touch with where our students are coming from. He is gone so much it's hard to feel like he really has an idea about our issues.
Take time to listen to us more, he started something, and we were very wary of the intent. The intent seemed genuine, now please continue it. There is a potential for great growth, this is not a complaint, rather lets keep on doing this we fell valuable. One little thing when we e-mail please respond or tell us directly, passing things through the managers it isn't given to everybody and has caused some rough spots and confusion.
Somewhat arrogant to others.

In the final category of Additional Comments:

He is either the dean of online education and then in charge of the hiring and evaluation of online faculty, or he is not-the divided responsibilities between him and the deans is a problem.
Get the impression that Barry often takes advice from others just for show and already has his mind made up as to what he is going to do.
He can be distant at times, is sometimes gracious, and sometimes is almost rude in his abruptness. I am not sure that his people skills are his strongest area, and that really is hard on the staff and faculty he works with, as they are insecure about how he feels about them, and whether he knows and values their contributions and abilities.

Yes, there were positive comments, but I don't really care much about them either. In my experience it seems that people will share positive feedback with you to your face, but negative comments tend to only be served when your back is turned. It's easy to say the nice things, but it takes guts to say the more negative things and then face a possible rebuttal or at least hear what it sounds like to have those words come out of your own mouth.

This is why I find the anonymous evals to be of almost no value whatsoever.

Collaborative Toonbooking

2008-05-21T06:09:00.004-05:00

Primarily for experimental purposes, about five of my fellow MooseWorks members joined me for a live online collaboration session. We used the Vyew web conferencing service so that I could share my screen with the others while we jointly built a Toonbook using Toondoo.

The premise for the cartoon was as follows: two aliens are trying to convince a third alien that he should start using Twitter. I just totally made that up so that we would have a topic to work on. I mainly wanted to see how well it would work for the five of us to try to co-write the dialog among the characters. Here is the result. (Link to the Toonbook in case the embed below doesn't work for you.)

Now none of us are claiming to be the funniest clown at the circus, so the dialog could be better I am quite sure. However, we just ran with several of the ideas that were brought forth via the telephone conference call and through the text chat window in Vyew (more from the chat window). It took less than an hour in total and we probably would have had it done in 30 minutes except that I forgot a few things about how to make a Toonbook. Once we got on track it flowed pretty smoothly.

Mooseworks is a Ning-driven social network specially created for people working in e-learning within Minnesota. There is currently well over 100 members and growing. Live events like this is a feature that we hope members will bring to the table.

This was a fun experiment. Thanks to Pam, Jackie, Mary, and Michael for participating.

Positive Feedback

2008-05-12T06:34:00.001-05:00

I offer several workshops each year on college campuses around the country. One thing that I am hoping to get better at is following-up later to see what impact the workshop might have had on the teaching and learning for those who attended. I prefer to wait at least six months after the workshop to find out what has happened in an effort to give them sufficient time to have explored and possibly adapted some of the tools and techniques from the workshops.

Suffice it to say that there is at least occasionally a response that warms my heart. This is one response from a workshop I did in Michigan during October 2007. I think it's safe to say that she is my star student:

After the workshop, I started a personal blog to test the waters. I now have 3 blogs, one of them is professional.
I have inspired and guided two family members to begin blogs
I have several flickr accounts for my blogs
I am playing with converting our website to a wiki. It is launched, but a work in process.
I use bloglines to track 60 blogs.
I trained a teacher to use the podcasting software to incorporate audio into her online class.
I have trained my co-workers how to use flickr for sharing their digital photos and how to use picnik to edit them.
I have attended a second workshop of yours for reinforcement
There may be more examples, but that's it for now.

Most participants in the workshops don't start using as many tools right away, but several report getting started with a couple of the tools shortly after the workshop. Still many others report that they just don't have the time to start doing anything new. More about that later.

All Rise - Court in Session

2008-05-05T07:27:00.000-05:00

I'm finding All Rise (click image to enlarge) to have some possibilities for both fun and serious business. As their About page says:

AllRise was built to:

Supply a smart mechanism for people to take out their agressions toward injustices.
Build a community of people that have something to say or to protest
Fill a void for people who want to debate in a smart and comfortable way, by suppling an innovative tool for debating

Right now it is very new (for example, only 33 votes for the verdict in The People versus Google) and it is only intended for fun. Nothing wrong with fun, but I could see this platform being used for a bit more serious debates if the creators would allow it. For example, if you could create a private group of users where you could debate a serious topic facing your school or other community or group.

I heard about this first on TechCrunch and then requested an account for their private beta. I was given a free pass within a day so I'm not so sure that the private beta is all that tough to get into. The service is based in Israel and you will see some butchered English on the site, but overall I find the site design to be appealing and the concept is a good one.

Okay, now having said all that - I realize that this is not a serious website. But still, I like it. Is that a crime? For a much more serious rendition of a similar concept, visit Debatepedia.

Trying out Songza

2008-05-02T07:57:00.000-05:00

Emily Chang at eHub has once again pointed to a potentially useful tool. Songza is a little bit like iMeem, although doesn't yet seem to have as much functionality built into it. First thing I noticed is that Songza is built on the Skreemr music search engine. Apparently one way that they are solving their copyright issues is by providing mostly live versions of songs, and some of which are clearly not the "official" version such as from a live album. Still, I was able to find many songs that I liked and able to build a playlist of songs to be saved for my next visit, such as this version of Black Betty.

iMeem has a better interface, has more songs available, allows you to save more than one playlist, and allows you to embed a playlist as opposed to a single song as shown above from Songza. As of this writing, I very definitely still prefer iMeem, but I'll be keeping my eye on Songza.

Going Nutty with Ning

2008-04-30T06:33:00.000-05:00

How many social networks is too many? I'm pretty sure that I'm on my way to finding out the answer to this question. My first exposure to Ning.com was over a year ago when I signed up for the EdubloggerWorld network and shortly after that I signed up for the Stop Cyberbullying network. I'm not very active in either one of those networks, and until recently I really didn't pay that much attention to the Ning platform that was driving either of those networks.

About a month ago I decided to start my own Ning network just to see if it might work as kind of an aggregator for all my different blogs and such. I'm thinking that it probably won't do what I want it to, especially since the free version won't support some of the functionality that I'm looking for. Here is that first effort, which will likely abandoned since I don't think it will do what I want it to. It is public, although it is not really ready for public consumption: Desire2Blog Ning Network

Within a couple of days of creating my first Ning network, I received an invite from Ken G. to join Moose Works which is a newly created community of Minnesota e-learning professionals. This is currently a private network. Just so you know the difference, this is what you see when you try to view a private network. Moose Works Ning Network. (There is a chance that this network might be made public before you click that link.)

I subscribe to Jane Hart's blog titled "Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day" where I learned about a Ning network that she created called 25 Tools. As a contributor to her Top Learning Tools lists I decided that I should join her network. This is currently the largest network that I am actively engaged in. 25 Tools Ning Network.

Visit 25Tools

This weekend I created a private network for administrators to interact in. This one is too new to know whether it will be an effective platform or not. I'm also thinking about replacing our online faculty lounge within Desire2Learn with a Ning network - at least for a while on an experimental basis. I'm also thinking that a Ning network might be a good platform for our online students to interact within, although maybe Facebook is a better choice for that crowd.

I'm still trying to figure out how much I like Ning and how effective it is for this type of social networking. I think it is safe to say that I'm somewhat intrigued with the possibilities since I am currently involved with 6 Ning networks with more on the way. Kinda nutty, I know.

Zoho Rocks

2008-04-28T09:52:00.003-05:00

Wow, Zoho scores again. Today they are releasing another update to their spreadsheet product called Zoho Sheet. This is no ordinary update, IMO. They are adding functionality for both Macros and Pivot Tables with this upgrade. They continue to leave Google Docs and Spreadsheets in their dust with added functionality. Google gets more eyeballs, but Zoho is just better! This is a 5 minute video released by Zoho demonstrating some of these new features.

The amazing part is that they have figured out how to execute Visual Basic without using a Microsoft back-end, which should lead to some other pretty interesting possibilities for future functionality. It is great to be able to see those services develop right before your eyes.

A few other new features that make Sheet more Excel-like include:

a) You can double click on the column and row separators to set the optimal width and height. (I use this all the time in Excel)
b) Many new keyboard shortcuts are available.
c) There is now a Set as Text icon on the toolbar for when you want a number to not be a number (such as to display leading zeroes, etc.)
d) you can now add names to ranges or cells.

I Agree - You Are What You Read

2008-04-27T13:05:00.007-05:00

Jay made a post with an intriguing title: You are what you read. I agree completely. I have been reading more books over the past two years than in any other two year period in my life, maybe even when I was a student (I know, we're all still students). As other learning professionals talk about the books they are reading I find it too enticing not to get them and read them myself.

Jay mentions the Cluetrain Manifesto. I have referred to this book in many of my presentations because I still think that it should be required reading for anyone working in education. Even though it is now nine years old, the message still applies today as well as it did in 1999. Actually, it was probably a bit ahead of its time in '99, but definitely still very timely. I have re-read it twice in the past couple of years. Its a quick read and I'm trying to make their principles ingrained into my everyday thinking. In the true spirit of the net, you can read the entire book online for free. Still, they've sold millions of hard copies as well (there's a message there people!).

I just purchased three books. I have only read ten pages so far of Sir Ken Robinson's new book titled "Out of Our Minds, Learning to Be Creative." I have watched his fabulous Ted Talk about five times and find him to be very inspiring (in fact I'm listening to it right now as I write this). I've tried to encourage creativity in my elementary school technology club by having them make comic strips and music videos and design a new bedroom, etc., rather than learn how to keyboard better which is what they THOUGHT they wanted to do in the club.

The book-in-waiting (on deck) is Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations." Here's Will's review of it. He has also created a Here Comes Everybody blog, designed to both chronicle and extend the themes of the book.

In the hole (and when did that get changed from "in the hold?") is Jonathan Zittrain's new book, "The Future of the Internet, and how to stop it." Quoting from his website: "With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation — and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control."

Two books that I've read most recently are 1) The Big Switch and 2) The Starfish and the Spider. Both of these books were recommended to me by Myk Garn. Good call Myk.

"The Big Switch - The Wiring of the World from Edison to Google," by Nicholas Carr was a fascinating read. It is a pretty controversial book and you can find plenty of people who have reviewed the book that are taking shots at both the book contents as well as Carr himself. I really enjoyed the more historical part of the book dealing with Edison, Henry Burden, and Samuel Insull. The electrification of America is something that I really didn't know that much about. There's some good stories in there. I do buy into his basic premise about current day computing moving from locally installed software to software as a service/utility. In this interview, his first answer pretty much sums it up: Q) What is this big switch you see coming? A) "I think we’re at the early stages of a fundamental shift in the nature of computing, which is going from something that people and businesses had to supply locally, through their own machines and their own installed software, to much more of a utility model where a lot of the computer functions we depend on are supplied from big, central stations, big central utilities over the Internet."

"The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations," by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. To give you the gist of their idea, I'll quote from their wiki: "How can Toyota leverage starfish principles to crush their spider-like rivals, GM and Ford? How did tiny Napster cripple the global music industry? Why is free, community based Wikipedia crushing Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is tiny Craigslist crippling the global newspaper industry? Why is Al Quaeda flourishing and even growing stronger? In today's world to answer this it is essential to understand the potential strength of a starfish organization." I'm not quite sure how much of this applied to higher education where there will most likely always be leaders with concentrated powers within the organizations, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

The basic premise of Jay's statement that you are what you read (not sure if he coined the phrase or not, well, most probably not) is that our thinking is heavily influenced by what we read. I buy that, and besides the books listed above, these are the other books that have had the most impact on my thinking over the past couple of years:

Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink
The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson
The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig
The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida
Getting Things Done, by David Allen

There are several other books that I'm not going to list because they didn't have as much of an effect on my thinking as those above. However, there's not one of the books that I've read in the past couple of years that felt like a complete waste of time. That's the advantage of getting your book recommendations from your network comprised of the people that you know are doing great things. In closing, I've probably also learned as much from the blogs that I read regularly as I have from all of these great books.

Email Sucks

2008-04-25T04:30:00.004-05:00

It's official, e-mail as a communication tool has now become more trouble than it is worth. I believe that it now has negative value, which is worse than the zero value that I thought it had until recently.

Much of the e-mail that I send out gets marked as SPAM, and many of those messages are never discovered and released from the SPAM catcher by the supposed recipient. This first started to become apparent to me about a year ago when some members of the ITC Board were not receiving the messages that I sent to the board e-mail group. Then, the fact that my e-mail messages were not being received almost led to the loss of two speaking engagements at other colleges. They thought I was ignoring their e-mail messages when in fact they just weren't receiving my replies.

It's amazing to me that e-mails coming from my official college address (@lsc.edu) continually get marked as SPAM by other .edu e-mail systems. The most recent (and saddest) example came earlier this week when I sent a message to the MnSCU CIO list asking for donations for a cash gift that we were giving to a colleague at the ITS conference earlier this week. It appears that many of the messages were never received, except for those who diligently checked their SPAM filters and released the message. Isn't there a certain irony there - that many of my messages sent to fellow CIOs in the same state system of colleges and universities are never actually delivered to the addressees? How valuable is that? How sad is that?

This particular message turned out to be the coup de grâce for me. There are about 40 people on the CIO list who receive these messages (in theory, at least) and that of course includes me. So, when I am sending a message to this list, I am also sending a message to myself. Yep, you guessed it. The message sent from my @lsc.edu address was marked as SPAM when sent to the same @lsc.edu address. Apparently I have been blacklisted by myself.

Part of the problem has to do with the inadequacy of SPAM filters that are being used. However, another part of the problem is something that I don't have much control over. My e-mail address has definitely been used by spoofers, and apparently more than just once. E-mail spoofing is a growing problem which can easily cause a legitimate e-mail address (like mine) to get blacklisted by people who are victimized by the spoofer.

The bottom line for me is that I now have to spend an inordinate amount of time following up behind my e-mails to see if they have been received. If I don't hear back from someone I need to call them on the phone, or send an IM, or send another e-mail to their personal e-mail address if I know it. This constant game of "did you receive my email?" is a huge productivity drain and is really all you need to know about why I believe that e-mail now has negative value.

MnSCU ITS Conference

2008-04-21T17:21:00.002-05:00

Here is part of the LSC crew of volunteers for the MnSCU ITS annual conference at Cragun's on Gull Lake outside of Brainerd, MN. Registration and setup today followed by 1.5 days of concurrent sessions, networking, and fun (oops, that's right, no fun allowed!)

Loving Guitar Hero

2008-04-20T23:00:00.003-05:00

So my son had a birthday and got a gift of Guitar Hero for the Wii. He'd previously played it several times with his friends, but now we have our own CD and plastic guitar in the house. I wasn't too sure that I would be interested in it. I've never had much talent with real musical instruments and that appears to cross over to fake instruments as well. However, there is one very cool redeeming feature about Guitar Hero.

The best thing about Guitar Hero is that my kids are absolutely loving some of the music from my era, which hasn't really been the case until now. When I hear them singing and strumming to some of these songs, I just head on over to the den to join in or sit back and watch them in action:

Paint it Black (Stones, one of my all-time favorites)
La Grange (ZZ Top, the one song that they have liked from my CD collection)
Mississippi Queen (Mountain)
School's Out (AC)
Paranoid (BS)
Pride and Joy (SRV)

There are some newer songs on there as well, which they like but I don't seem to know much at all. Still, this is a good way of bringing the generations together.

Day One at Higher Learning Commission

2008-04-13T17:30:00.001-05:00

Wow, what a day. What a crappy, lousy, frustrating day. Apparently I have become the most cynical person on the planet. I have an incredibly difficult time sitting through presentations where the presenters are either a) superfluous, b) clueless, c) close-minded, d) totally self-absorbed, e) a corporate salesperson, or f) not me (just guessing at this last one).

a) This first session would have been the best one of the day if the presenters would have simply talked about the video learning objects that they have created and how they are using them. But NO, they had to go too far. They went too far in claiming that their stuff was innovative (it was good, but nothing innovative in the world of technology). The other problem is that they were trying to tell the audience that their video learning objects are somehow interactive. OMG!! I will write a completely separate rant about that one (some of you know that this is a pet peeve of mine).

b) The second session was worse than the first. This whole presentation was about teaching students to make really lousy PowerPoint slide shows with all the goofy animations (spinning pictures) and typewriter sounds for text entering the screen), and saying that this is somehow what we should be doing with students in the digital age. Ice pick in my forehead on this one.

c) The third session was one of those where they tell you what they did and tell you that soon you will all being doing it - but they never once gave any evidence of a real problem that they were trying to solve. They are the best example of someone who will try to show you all sorts of data or student feedback without having any data in the first place to prove that there was a problem looking for a solution. More about this one later.

d) I attended a session this afternoon by a presenter that I have seen about 4-5 times previously. I always liked his style and his method, although I thought that his material was getting pretty stale over the years. In February I had the chance to see him deliver a keynote and was totally disappointed to see how this gentleman had completely turned into an egomaniac during the past few years. He is all about self-promotion, which I have a really hard time watching. After the debacle in February I decided to go see him again in hopes that the February gig was just a one off for him. The other reason that I went again was because he had a different title for this presentation and even the description sounded like I was going to see some new material from this former great speaker. WRONG!!! On both counts. It turns out that he really is a self-absorbed self promoter and his new session title and description was just sheep's clothing for the same old material and PPT slides. Total disappointment.

e) The corporate guy was talking about a website where students create their online profile so that colleges can hear about the student before they choose where to enroll, and then the colleges contact the students who fit the profiles that they are interested in recruiting. This session was called "Powertapping the Web 2.0 for Unique Students." Very funny. There was not one thing about the system that had anything to do with "THE" Web 2.0.
Maybe it got better after I left, but I'll never know - because I LEFT!

Not the best way for me to spend a Sunday - all day long! What will tomorrow bring? I shudder to think. (Sorry - apparently I'm in a mood today.)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Chinese Ceramic Mural

2008-04-08T07:30:00.000-05:00

Lake Superior College has recently been adorned with a new mural by famous Chinese artist Wenzhi Zhang from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Wenzhi has also taught here at LSC a couple of semesters during the past few years and she will return again this summer with many Chinese students in tow for another great learning community here in Duluth.

This montage of pictures (created at bighugelabs) shows the completed mural in the center, with one shot of the mural during assembly, and several close-ups showing some of the details. (Click to enlarge.) The 15' wide by 25' high relief sculpture, named “Stele,” is located near the front entrance to the new two-story academic and student services building that opened in Fall 2007. There are 120 individual stoneware ceramic tiles that comprising the mural. They are attached to an underlying steel framework. The tiles feature several Duluth landmarks including the Aerial Lift Bridge, boats on Lake Superior, the Depot, and the old Central High School clock tower.

Trying to BeFunky

2008-04-07T07:21:00.000-05:00

I took one photo montage from my Flickr account and made four sample cartoon renderings from it using BeFunky, which is a rather funky site for creating cartoon panels out of photos. You'll see a few of the options in the slideshow below. Finally I made another of just the center picture from the montage and put a border/frame around it at BeFunky. Just trying it out.

Using geoTwitterous

2008-04-04T10:42:00.003-05:00

I saw a tweet, followed the link, and 60 seconds later I had this map of Twitter Tweets on my blog. Pretty cool use of Pipes. Thanks Britt.

Creative Commons SlideShare

2008-03-25T02:07:00.002-05:00

For some time now I have been wanting to put together a self-directed presentation that explains the use of Creative Commons licensing for various educational resources. But why should I do that when Mark Woolley has already done such a great job and of course, he licensed this content using CC-Attribution, Non-commercial? Therefore, here it is embedded below for your learning pleasure.

| View | Upload your own

Off the Grid

2008-03-14T20:46:00.003-05:00

I plan to be totally disconnected for the next 9 or ten days. I suppose I'll have cell phone coverage for the first day or two and the last day or two, but no Internet access at all. A few thoughts and predictions:

1) I expect to have about 820 emails waiting for me in my college email account when I return. About 50% will be spam or spam-like (look what's on sale today!) and another 30% won't require any sort of reply. That leaves the other 20% which will be a real pain. Then there will be another 100-150 personal emails in different accounts.

2) I expect to have about 1,500 unread items in my Bloglines account.

3) I expect to have only a few blog comments waiting moderation, about 6-8 new Twitter followers to check out to see if I want to follow them as well, about 10 YouTube comments to check out to make sure that they are appropriate and don't need to be deleted (yes, I censor those comments - my kids look at those), only a couple of friend requests for Facebook or new contacts for LinkedIn, and about 10 new items sent to me by people in my del.icio.us network.

4) Maybe most important is that I will have a chance to see if 10 days away from the keyboard makes any difference on heading off the carpal tunnel that seems to be starting in my right arm. One can hope. At any rate - I'll be back the week of March 24.

Students Using Wireless

2008-03-10T20:57:00.003-05:00

Here are more results from our beginning of semester Student Technology Survey that was completed by over 800 students here at LSC. I think it is surprising that only 28% report never using wireless networks. I would have predicted more like 50% use wireless networks either at home, schools, or other places. (Click to enlarge)

Even more surprising, I think, is that nearly two-thirds say they have a wireless network in their house. I guess that shows how cheap and easy it is to install a wireless network these days.

And finally, less than 1% say they pay to use wireless in public places. I'm with them. I'll gladly buy some coffee, or a beer, or a sandwich, or maybe all three - but I'm not going to pay to use your network to check my email (I mean Twitter page).

CC-By photo by dana~2

Article on Second Life

2008-03-09T20:35:00.002-05:00

The Second Life article ran Sunday in the Duluth News Tribune. They are notorious for disappearing links on their website, but hopefully this article will still be available for a while.

The following lines were taken from my interview with the reporter.

"Using it for educational purposes can have downfalls, said Barry Dahl, vice president of technology and the virtual campus at Lake Superior College."

"Powerful technology is needed to run the program, and while the college has accommodated this, not everyone has that at home. Behavior “in-world” as it’s called, can also be a problem, he said. Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, has taken steps to end illegal gambling. But a large amount of sexual activity and “griefing” takes place on Second Life, he said."

"Griefing is when someone causes harm to another avatar or disrupts others."

"If a student were to complain about something done to an avatar on Second Life, Dahl said, the college couldn’t treat it as a serious offense because it didn’t really happen."

I have no qualms with any of this except for the last sentence. That is not what I said. In fact, I've never said that we "couldn't treat is as a serious offense." In fact I'm concerned about whether our existing policies and procedures are applicable to some of the things that could happen in SL, and I'm not exactly sure how we would handle something that is a serious offense. I believe that the potential for a serious offense is actually quite high.

All in all, I wasn't painted as the extremely negative SL-guy - which is probably a fairly accurate portrayal. I do however, have many more questions than answers about using SL for serious academic pursuits.

Second Opinion on Second Life

2008-03-07T15:57:00.004-06:00

I'm becoming known as the anti-SecondLife guy around these parts. It's a badge that I wear proudly even though I don't think it's entirely accurate. I'm not the anti-SL guy, but I am the somewhat-less-than-enamored-with-SL-guy.

Most people think that I would be the first one in line for the virtual world experience. Sure, I have spent some time in there, but so far it just hasn't floated my boat to a level where I'm ready to give up several other pursuits in favor of SL. My experience so far tells me that I really would have to immerse myself in SL in order to "get it" on the same level of those SL evangelists. As far as I can tell, that would mean giving up my time spent a) blogging, b) using my personal learning environment, c) keeping on top of Web 2.0 technologies for presentations and workshops, and probably d) some of my non-technology personal time.

You don't get much out of SL by spending an hour or two per week in there. I do read many items about the ways that SL is being used in education, or at least trying to be used. Right now it's a bit more fun to sit back and watch others go through the trial and error process that is inevitable with something like this. Yep, I laughed right along with many others as some of the early efforts of building an educational setting within world was to build a virtual classroom that looks basically like a traditional (i.e. old-fashioned) classroom - with students sitting in rows and the professor standing in front delivering a lecture. However, I am intrigued as I see (or at least read about) others who are now thinking outside the virtual box a bit and trying to come up with some novel uses of SL for educational purposes.

Today I attended a classroom session of a hyrbid Sociology class at LSC where SL is being used for part of the instruction. Marlise is teaching this class which is a good thing because she is absolutely one of the hardest working and most engaging instructors on campus. It was fun to see all of the student avatars and some of the places they are visiting, including this Sociology research library in SL (photo below).

At the same time it was strange to see all these students in the same classroom but interacting with each other using their avatars. Many of the issues that we have encountered this semester are related to this unusual use of SL. It was never intended to have many people all in the same location, using the same bandwidth (etc.) but interacting within world. It is obviously intended of bringing together people (or at least their avatars) from various distributed places. There is a reason that the class is being taught in this unusual way, and from what I witnessed today I would say that it is paying off. Most importantly I think, is that Marlise is able to pilot this approach with real students in a real educational setting. I think she is learning even more than her students about how this tool can be used effectively for educational purposes. It would probably be harder for her to assess what the students can do and can't do in world if they truly were distributed over various locations.

The local paper is doing a story about all this which will probably be published in the next couple of days. I'll wait to say more until after that comes out. Chances are good that I will be painted as the anti-SL guy, mainly because I am the only one (at least that I know of) who is asking some of the tough questions related to school policies and how we will deal with the problems that will surely pop up further down the road. I'm also questioning whether Second Life is the correct choice for a virtual world for educational purposes. More about that later.

Me and My MoGo

2008-02-28T05:02:00.001-06:00

I have a new little gadget that I really like. I saw someone using a MoGo BT (mouse on the go, I'm guessing) and I just had to have one. Go to Amazon - click, click, click and one shows up at my door. Really simple to get started.

I have used various laptop mice over the past few years, but always had problems with a) knowing where they are (they hide a lot), b) batteries needing to be replaced at inopportune times, and c) just not being very cool. MoGo solves all three of those problems.

a) You always know where it is because when you aren't using it, it lives in your PC card slot which you probably have no use for whatsoever anyway. b) You don't need to replace any batteries because it charges while it is docked in the PC card slot. c) It is definitely cool.

Since my laptop has built-in Bluetooth (most newer ones have it) I have no need for the included USB receiver - which is good because that would just be one more thing to keep track of. As luck would have it, I probably bought too quickly. Now they have a new model (X54) that is the same as my MoGo but has the added functionality of also being a presentation remote. The basic model sells for about $50 and the presenter model sells for about $70. Shop around and I'm sure you'll find even better prices.

Turning Point Response Systems

2008-02-25T15:39:00.005-06:00

For my keynote address at the e-Learning 2008 Conference last week I used the Turning Point Audience Response System from Turning Technologies for getting audience participation related to the myths and realities of online learning.

Most of the info about this presentation will be over at Desire2Blog since most of it is specific to online learning. However, the use of the response systems belongs in this forum and I will write a bit more about using these systems.

First: Turning Technologies has been wonderful to work with. Any of you who know me probably know that I am not a guy who gushes about vendors very often. In fact, I am usually the devil's advocate (or just the devil himself) who is constantly harping on how they can be better and what they need to do to be worthy of our scarce higher ed dollars. So, for me to say that the Turning Point people have been great to work with is somewhat notable in itself. But that is exactly what my experience has been so far. I've dealt with three different people to one extent or another and they all have been great and easy to work with. And very responsive.

Second: the technology itself is very easy to learn and you can quickly get up to speed. I attended one 45-minute live webinar which was very well done; and the next thing I knew I had all 21 of my audience response questions built, tested, and ready-to-go. The software itself is just a plug-in to PowerPoint, so for anyone who uses PowerPoint there is a very small learning curve.

Third: The reporting capabilities are pretty strong. I have generated a few different user reports from the data gathered at the conference, and am finding more and more ways of using the information. Below is an example of one of the pie charts that I edited. This was the audience response to the statement that I threw in near the end of the presentation. So many people seem to think that Second Life is going to be such a big deal - I wanted to see if this tech-savvy audience had all drank the Koolaid. Apparently not (although I admit that the question was somewhat heavily loaded with the whole "Second Coming" reference - still, it was fun for me and that's what matters).

Overall, the use of the response systems added a lot to the conference in general (we used them four times) as well as my particular presentation. I understand that Turning Technologies is working on another new system that will be web-based rather than PPT-based. I very much look forward to that development. There is at least one of those web-based services available that I am aware of, but I prefer the idea of an experienced provider of the technology and one that has proven to me that they are good to work with.

Memo to Turning Technologies management: DON'T LET BLACKBOARD BUY YOU OUT - or all bets are off!!

UStream Becoming MainStream

2008-02-11T09:49:00.005-06:00

Ustream.tv appears to be finding a significant audience, at least among many of the technology-enabled educators that I know and follow. More and more things are being broadcast live from conference presentations, to classroom activities, to special events at the school.

To that end, I will be livecasting my upcoming keynote address via UStream.tv. The keynote is scheduled for Saturday, February 16 at 5:30 Eastern time from the e-Learning 2008 conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. The topic is "E-Learning Mythbusters - Is Conventional Wisdom Wrong?"

For this presentation the audience members will be using clicker technology to vote on whether they think something is a myth or reality. I'm not sure how well that will all come through over UStream, but I'm hoping for the best. Apparently, there is a way that you can also have remote viewers vote in polls as well, but I don't think I'll have time to get that figured out by tomorrow night. That does sound very cool though.

At any rate, UStream is being used more and more all the time by educators to broadcast live events such as lectures, conference presentations, classroom projects and students speeches, and in any other way that you might think of using your own little private TV channel.

The UStream window can be embedded in any web page, including inside your VLE such as D2L, Blackboard, Angel, etc. I'm thinking that this will continue to grow. It is free. It is extremely easy. It allows for both live and archived video. Sounds pretty good to me.

Last Vista Rant - Maybe

2008-01-24T13:11:00.001-06:00

My Vista trials and tribulations continue. I'm borrowing a laptop for the next three weeks that has a nice clean copy of Windows XP so that I can prepare for the ITC conference in St. Pete. I am making several presentations there and absolutely don't feel that I can rely on making Vista do what I need it to do during these presentations.

Tom Hoffman has given me even more reason to consider ditching Vista altogether and retreating to XP for the foreseeable future. If Windows XP is going to be supported until 2014, maybe I'll take the opportunity to completely skip the hell that is Vista - except of course for the past two months of increased gray hair and blood pressure.

Some day maybe I'll be brave enough to make the move off of Windows altogether. However, I do use several programs that currently do not have alternatives in the Linux world, but not many.

In closing, I'm hoping to make this my last Vista rant. Even I have no interest in reading this blog if it becomes just another one of the "Vista Sucks Out Loud" diatribes that are scattered all over the net - even though those are the truest words I've ever spoken.

Microsoft Windows Vista SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS!!! There, now I'm done.

More Vista Angst

2008-01-14T09:39:00.000-06:00

So I'm shooting some personal video over the weekend (here's the result). Just messing around but using the same techniques that I would if I were making a video for work or some other serious project.

I shoot the video using my Sony DV camcorder and then try to transfer the video to my Vista-"powered" (quotes intentional) laptop for editing purposes. Well guess what? Vista doesn't recognize this very popular (and not-too-old) camcorder. So I try to find an appropriate driver at the Sony website. There isn't one.

I spend the next two hours reading various websites about how I might possibly get the camera and computer to talk to each other - but the end result is a no-go. Just another example of something that worked flawlessly (well, almost) with my previous XP-driven laptop, yet there seems to be no chance of getting it to work on this new one. Apparently the only solution is for me to buy a new digital video camera. Keep this in mind when you get stuck with Vista - you will pay for all kinds of things because software and hardware will no longer work for you the way you expect them to.

In the end I used my four-year old home computer to transfer the video, edit it in Windows Movie Maker, and upload it to YouTube. My new laptop sat in the corner with a dunce cap while I got my tasks done without it.

Vista is pathetic.

My First Vista Rant

2008-01-10T08:06:00.000-06:00

This is Bill Gates thinking about the hundreds of thousands of suckers who spend good money on lousy operating systems. I have a new notebook computer and I decided to go ahead with Vista since I wanted to get a good feel for what issues we would face when our whole campus goes to it (IF we do).

There are a few things that I like about it, and many other things that I am just starting to figure out. However, the painful things are easy to spot and quick to frustrate.

The first thing that really ticked me off was this. After using a flash drive to transfer some files, the OS could no longer locate the optical drive (CD/DVD burner) which had previously been drive letter E. Apparently the flash drive stole that letter and then didn't give it back, or something along those lines.

Turns out that this (or other things very similar to it) has been happening all along with Vista. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have probably been affected by it. The Microsoft website advised that I install the proper driver for the DVD drive. Buggar off!! The driver is installed and always has been!! I had to get my advice for a fix from a user's website. Since that time I have found several other sites where the fix is also explained - but never by Microsoft. The site that I used currently has 451 comments in the thread of people who have had similar problems, dating back to April, 2007. The solution is to do a regedit and delete some lines of code from Vista. There's a great idea, let's expect the common people to go in edit their registry - because nothing could possibly go wrong with that - right???

This problem has been around since Vista was introduced and Microsoft has done nothing about it! Can't wait to see what I find next. Ick!!!!! (Double ick, actually)

CC Flickr photo by Domain Barnyard

Blog Recap for 2007

2008-01-01T20:01:00.000-06:00

During the past year, I made 154 posts to this blog. Blog visitors mainly arrived here via Internet Explorer (59%) and Firefox (33%). The busiest month of the year was October with 1,567 unique visitors.

Many people find the blog via search engines. The Google search engine was used 96% of the time. The three most commonly used search phrases that people used to find my blog include:

Stupid signs (or funny signs) = 1,007 times
Club Penguin (or club peng) = 876
Turnitin sucks (and similar) = 320

Three most visited single posts were:

My favorite five posts:

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 1

2007-12-31T16:36:00.000-06:00

PBwiki climbs to the top of the heap this year and is the odds-on favorite to be inducted into the hall of fame next year. One year ago I didn't even have a wiki in my list of Top 12 Tools. They seemed so 2005, so irrelevant in a sea of more flash and more cash. I've been a wiki user since I was first introduced to them, but they just didn't seem to be keeping pace with so many of the other tools that seemed to be the movers and shakers.

Rapid advancements in the functionality of the wiki has moved it back into the status of a must-have tool for me. A couple of years ago you needed to use the goofy wiki language coding to do basic formatting such as bold text, numbered lists, and other such trivial pursuits. Now PBwiki (and other wikis as well) have much more editing functionality with WYSIWIG editors and familiar formatting buttons that allow you to do so much more with any wiki page.

PBwiki was the first wiki I ever used and it is still my first choice in a wiki. The basic wiki service is still free, they are very educator-friendly, and the advancements that they have added to their wiki are totally useful and powerful.

Their tagline is that making a PBwiki is easier than making a peanut butter sandwich (yes, but what about the jelly?). They publish a blog called The Daily Peanut which is a great place to keep up with new developments. They offer premium wikis at a cost somewhat above zero, but the free wikis have been sufficient for all my purposes so far.

Wikis allow for multiple authors and therefore are great collaborative tools. Whether used for group projects, committee work, presentations materials, or simply as an archive of your deepest darkest thoughts; a wiki can be a great way of organizing and keeping things on the web. Any educator trying to maintain a work-related website would be well served to use a wiki rather than trying to manage multiple pages using standard html editor such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, unless maybe you happen to be an expert in those platforms. Even then, if you want collaborators, a wiki is still the way to go.

The following embedded video is titled Getting Started and features Ramit Sethi of PBwiki:

There are other videos available at You Tube about PBwiki. You can also get good help in their FAQ section or their active Users Forums.

Some of the things they're currently working on include:

Easier picture / file insertion.
Better inline discussions
Spell checker
Wiki redirects
Single-signon from alternate services (Flickr, Facebook, etc)
Alternate file upload venues (FTP, SMB, email)
Whitelabel/subdomaining w/admin: *.yourwikis.com, *.wiki.somewhere.edu

I have created several different PBwikis over the past couple of years for various different purposes. Here are a few of the examples:

presentation materials site: people attending the presentation have continued access to the presentation resources, and those who missed the presentation can surf around on their own.
Committee work and archive: We used a PBwiki for a short-term task force looking at suggestions for changing the navigation of the LSC website. Committee members posted their thoughts and feedback and then I was able to respond for all to read. The task force completed the work that was expected and now the wiki lives on as an archive of what was done and why.
I don't teach classes any more, but here is one of the PBwiki case studies from Bentley College illustrating how the wiki is used in a college class and here is a Camtasia video from the instructor showing how the wiki is used.
When my son was in the second grade we used a PBwiki to chronicle the adventures of Flat Stanley as he went around the world.

My latest creation is one that is not quite finished yet (you can make a case for them never quite being finished). It is a demonstration wiki that shows all (or most) of the possible plug-ins available when using a PBwiki. Some of the plug-ins that you'll see on this wiki include:

FrontPage: attaching a document (link to uploaded document), embedding a YouTube video, embedding a Slide.com slideshow, embedding a live TV player (mine shows the Baseball Channel)
Productivity_Plug-ins: any Google Gadget (the Weather Channel is shown, but there are thousands to choose from), a discussion board, any RSS feed that you want to display, a calendar from 30Boxes, a live and active spreadsheet, and a stock chart.
PBwikiMagic_Plugins: an equation editor for mathematics, embedding any html code (the example shows an embedded slideshow from SlideShare), recent wiki changes, recent wiki visitors, a table of contents.
Chat_plugins: a live chat room (text) or a YackPack walkie-talkie button (live voice chat with anyone else viewing that page.
Photos_plugins: a BubbleShare embedded slideshow, an mp3 player from Odeo, another Slide.com slideshow.

These are the types of things that have brought the wiki back into my web life and the main reason that it has risen to the top of the class for my 2007 list of web tools that are most useful to me.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 2

2007-12-28T12:56:00.000-06:00

Picnik quickly became my web-based photo editor of choice this year. I first tried it on February 1 and found it to be very useful and very user-friendly. In March they added more functionality and they have continued to do so since then.

Picnik would not be the best photo editor for some people, such as professional photographers and the handful of power Photoshop users that are out there. However, for the other 98% of the people out there who take digital photos it is an excellent option (among hundreds of photo editing options) for doing all of the basic things as well as some advanced editing techniques. To illustrate some of the different tools, I created the slideshow below in my free Picnik account using photos stored in my Flickr account. In each case you will see the original unedited photo and then one or more edited versions of that original.

As you can tell from the slideshow above, some of the basic functions available include crop, straighten, resize, rotate, color enhancement, red-eye removal, exposure and contrast control, and a fairly useful Auto-fix option. Some of the tools you'll find under the Create tab that are not available in all editing programs include effects such as sepia, black-and-white, soften, boost, vignette, matte, and doodle (write with mouse or PC pen). You can add text of different fonts, colors, and sizes. You can add many different pre-drawn shapes including text bubbles, thought bubbles, copyright symbols (including Creative Commons), and you can add frames or borders to your photos, wither single or double borders and of any color and width you choose, with or without rounded corners.

All of the items listed above can be done with a free account - in fact you can do these things without any account at all. Anyone can upload a photo and edit it and save it back to their computer. I found it to be a much better option to create my own account so that Picnik integrates better with my Flickr account. In addition to Flickr, Picnik integrates nicely with Photobucket, Picasa, Webshots, and Facebook, and probably more that I haven't even noticed yet.

Picnik also offers a premium service level for $24.95 per year. So far I have not felt the need to pay for the premium service since I can do pretty much everything I need to do with the basic tools. Even though I don't "need" the premium services, I am much more likely to pay the twenty-five bucks a year just because I love what they're doing over there and certainly don't want them to go away any time soon. So far the only premium account that I have paid for is for Flickr, and this will likely be the second one.

One of the things I liked best about Picnik when I first started with it was that it hooked up with my Flickr account and I could edit any of my stored photos and then replace the old one or keep the old one and save a new one as well. Managing my Flickr photos from inside Picnik worked very well for me. In early December, the relationship between the two services became more formal and more functional when Flick added editing services using the Picnik interface.

PC Mag chose it recently as their site of the week.
Kevin Kelly has a nice write-up in his Cool Tools.
Picnik has some useful tools with extensions for Firefox and Internt Exploerer, bookmarklets, and more.
The Picnik Blog is a good place to keep up with new things.
Picnik was one of three Eddy winners for websites according to MacWorld

As a final testimonial, here is a basic photo ...

... and here it is again after it has been on a picnik.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 3

2007-12-26T16:13:00.001-06:00

Zoho Notebook makes the year-end list even though the Zoho suite is already in my hall of fame based on being my #1 tool of 2006 and also based on being a group of tools that I use on an almost daily basis. However, Notebook was not released last year at the time I published my list, and it's a good enough app to stand on it's own. Having said that, it is not a perfect app, still just a little bit buggy, but overall I find it to be a groundbreaking service that definitely pushes the envelope.

As the screenshot below shows (partially), you can combine various different kinds of content on a single webpage just by dragging and dropping separate windows for each bit of content. The example shown below is from my bio page, which doesn't yet include all of the different types of media available with Notebook. Click the second tab on the right sidebar to get past the cover page.

Here is the Zoho Blog post announcing Zoho Notebook back in January 2007, although it didn't go to public beta until May. Since that time they have added enhancements in June, July, August, September, November, and December. Those enhancements included the following, plus more:

Auto-save on a frequent basis
Saves every time you navigate from page to page
Undo/Redo
Reordering of pages
Support for Opera and Safari
Collaborative writers will see changes made by others almost immediately
Books and individual pages can be exported
More shapes in the drawing toolbar
Integration with most other Zoho apps
Skins have been added
Keyboard shortcuts have been added
Text objects can now be linked (URLs etc).

Here is a video by Zoho showing the early features of Zoho Notebook. Keep in mind that much more functionality has been included since the time of this video in early 2007. Here are all the posts about Notebook at the Zoho Blogs.

The next screenshot shows the various items that can be added to a Notebook page, in any combination that you choose, at any sizes that you choose, and with any placement that you choose. A notebook can have as many pages as you choose (unlimited? I'm not sure), and those pages can be single stand-alone items such as a webpage, word processing (Zoho Writer) page, spreadsheet (Zoho Sheet) page, or a mashup of any of the items shown on the left-side panel below. For audio and video you can either upload completed files, link to files stored elsewhere (YouTube, etc.), or record on the fly.

The final screenshot below shows one of the uses of Zoho Notebook that I think offers great utility. This is a Notebook page being delivered within our VLE (Desire2Learn) for displaying content as a sort of mashup that otherwise would take some pretty high level HTML coding skills. Basically, I think that the value of this service is limited only by your own imagination. No bull.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 4

2007-12-22T20:02:00.000-06:00

Toondoo allows users to create 1-panel, 2-panel, or 3-panel comic strips. Saying something with limited space and with humor is a creative skill that can be nurtured in all people, no matter what the discipline or program. You can also create ToonBooks, which is a flip book of as many panels as you choose. Here is a ToonBook telling you how to make a ToonBook.

I put together this little toonbook as a recap of my top web tools, numbers 6 through 12. It's embedded below and here it is at the Toondoo site.

barrydahl	From my list of Top Web Tools of 2007 - numbers 6 through 12.

Using a cartoon building exercise is a good way to stretch students' creative muscles while giving them a project that they will enjoy and learn from. One suggestion is to assign a group project to 3-5 students. Have them create a storyboard together that depicts a cartoon on a particular topic that is germane to the course material being taught. Keep in mind that comic strips can be funny, but they don't have to be. Have them work together to create a storyboard that they all agree on as a way of making their point with the cartoon. Then have each of them create their own rendition of that storyboard using Toondoo. They will choose different backgrounds, different characters, etc., but they will be aiming toward the same basic idea for the cartoon.

My main complaint about the Toondoo site is that it is not safe for children. You will most likely see some unsavory language in some of the Doos as well as the comments, and possibly some images as well. Although college students can probably handle that, you have to question whether they should be put in that position in the first place. I wanted to use Toondoo with my Tech Club at the elementary school, but just couldn't do it due to the adult content. I used a different site that is very safe, but also only has a small amount of the functionality of Toondoo. That other site is makebeliefscomix.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 5

2007-12-21T07:46:00.000-06:00

imeem is now my (free) music provider of choice. I still like Pandora which was on my 2006 list, but imeem has gone a long way toward making it legal for me to listen to almost any full-length track that I want to, in the order that I want to, as often as I want to. You can create playlists using any music that you can find on the site, such as the one embedded below with a selection of holiday music. Here is the link to this playlist at imeem.

The fact that you can embed a playlist like that on any webpage also makes it extremely useful. I like the fact that I can put it on any blog I choose, but I can also put it on any other webpage where I have writing permissions, such as on a page inside a VLE (virtual learning environment such as D2L or Blackboard) for an online class.

Notice that not all the songs in that playlist are full-length. When I am logged in to my imeem account and using the playlist at their site, they are all full-length. By embedding the playlist, some songs are shortened to 30 seconds depending upon licensing agreements between imeem and the music company in question. Songs on imeem will be only a 30-second preview if the artist or record label has not signed an agreement with imeem giving approval for full-length streaming. Their interpretation of copyright fair use principles indicates that a 30-second preview is acceptable. When you search for a song on imeem you'll see right away whether it is a preview or full-length.

For songs that you already have on your computer, you can upload them to your imeem account and listen to them full-length, regardless of whether imeem otherwise has permission for that song.

Here's a quote from an article on TechCrunch near the end of October: "Ad-supported music just won another convert. Music-sharing social network imeem struck a deal with EMI Music so that starting today its members can legally stream songs from Radiohead, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Interpol, Daft Punk, the Beastie Boys, and every other EMI artist. EMI joins Warner Music and Sony-BMG as the third major label to strike a deal with imeem. That only leaves Universal Music Group among the majors to sign a deal." That last big deal was inked with Universal in early December. Looking for a little imeem trivia? Check out Wikipedia to learn what the name imeem means, what their connection is to Led Zeppelin, and other such useless stuff.

You can use your imeem account to store and play audio and videos, and also to store and display photos. It can easily be used for podcasting, as explained here in their FAQ section. Although I haven't done it, it would be easy to embed the player inside your VLE, then each time a new podcast is uploaded it will appear in the player for students or other subscribers to listen to. For video files, imeem supports many different file types, but recommends .MPEG, .MOV, .FLV, and .AVI for optimum results. The suggested video size is 400x300, but other sizes will work as well. For music files, imeem supports mp3s only, with a recommended sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. At this time there are no maximum file size limitations for uploading video or other file types.

imeem certainly has it's critics since some people don't like anything that is ad-supported. But come on, they're doing all the heavy lifting by dealing directly with the a-hole record companies, they're helping make it legal to access your music from any Internet connection, and they're enabling you to legally share the music of other account holders. In my book, that's a pretty good deal. Did I mention that it's free?

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 6

2007-12-20T06:38:00.001-06:00

iGoogle was on my 2006 list at #10. At the time I wrote that I had been using it for 6 months and liked it. Now I can say that I've been using it as my browser start page for 18 months and I like it even more than before.

WikiHow has a short tutorial on using iGoogle.

NCAS has a nice series of screenshots and explanations.

Here's a little screencast embedded below. This is a case of using Tool #7 (and CamStudio) to show Tool #6. You can click on the video below to play it on this page, or go to the page at Blip.tv where the video displays at a larger size and where you also have a full screen viewing option.

Click To Play

I'm going to also embed another video. From Google Channel Japan comes this video from their YouTube account .Yes, it is in Japanese, but think you'll be able to follow along anyway. It's fun and well done.

Other popular alternatives include Pageflakes and Netvibes. I've used them both, but like iGoogle better.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 7

2007-12-19T07:04:00.000-06:00

Blip.tv makes it on my list, even though I have more videos uploaded and have had more views and comments at YouTube than at Blip. So why Blip.tv? Mainly because of the quality. YouTube has more videos, more users, and more buzz; but the quality of the viewing experience with Blip far surpasses that of YouTube. Check out this embedded video of an LSC advertisement that is stored at Blip.tv.

Click To Play

Another reason that I like Blip is because you can more easily get different sizes of the embedded player, and you can link to the page itself at Blip where viewers have a full screen option - something you can't get at YouTube.

Their online support is good, their FAQ page is helpful, and they also have a useful step-by-step tutorial on their website. For example, here is the page for video production. Other pages (chapters) include Concept, Tools, Export, Distribute, Community, and Advertising.

For embedding videos in blogs, or inside your VLE (IMS/LMS/CMS), or on any other webpage, I recommend Blip over YouTube. If you want to get more eyes watching your video at the video hosting site, then YouTube is probably the way to go. I will continue to use YouTube as well, but Blip is where I can get better embedded video quality.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 8

2007-12-18T07:53:00.000-06:00

Twitter makes an appearance on my year-end list even though I am not (yet) a heavy user. I continue to be drawn to it as a potentially powerful communications tool, and also as a very interesting experiment in how people connect and communicate in ways that didn't exist until fairly recently.

Explaining Twitter to newbies is often an exercise in futility. Try calling it "microblogging" and see how far that gets you. To my mind (others will disagree, perhaps vociferously), Twitter is much like cell phone text messaging, but on the computer (or other connected device) rather than the phone (actually, you can also use a phone, except for T-Mobile customers) and one-to-many rather than one-to-one (or one-to-few). You are limited to 140 characters per message, so you learn to be brief and to the point.

You (or at least the experienced Twits) can tell that I am not a power user in a couple of ways: 1) I've only sent 53 messages (tweets) from my account so far which is a normal afternoon for many people, and 2) the lists of people following me (13) and that I am following (17) are quite short. So far this has been more of a way to keep up with what some others are doing since I am mainly following people I respect who work in educational technology and most of my Twitter screen time is spent reading the messages of others rather than writing my own. I have no doubt that my use of Twitter will increase as I continue to get more of my co-workers using it as well.

So, how is it being used? a) some people ask questions of their network seeking advice, resources, links, or ideas, b) some tell people what flavor of coffee they just ordered or some other complete waste of trivia such as that, c) some talk about what they're working on, such as what their latest blog post is about or what question they are researching, d) and some use it for very specialized purposes that are related to their jobs or personal lives. In one example that I found today (via Twitter no less) for younger kids, Mr. Mayo has them writing a story from around the globe, 140 characters at a a time. Here is the Google doc where their tweets are being pieced together into a story.

Twitter has also burst onto the political scene. John Edwards currently has 4,011 followers on Twitter. Probably not enough votes to win the nomination. Barack Obama has 5,945 followers (remember these numbers chance constantly, much like poll numbers do). Joe Biden has 106 followers, so maybe that's a message in and of itself that he should be hearing loud and clear. Hillary is apparently trying hard not to be a twit (no Twitter account) - maybe that is why she is falling in the polls.

Richard MacManus of the ReadWriteWeb has a good post detailing why they chose Twitter as their Best Web LittleCo (small company) of 2007.

Alan Lew has a very nice blog post with some ideas and links for using Twitter in higher ed, so I'll just defer to his expertise and call it a day. See, having a good network can really be a time saver.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 9

2007-12-17T07:13:00.000-06:00

SlideShare was my #11 tool on the 2006 list. It made the list again this year in spite of the fact that I find myself using PowerPoint (and PPT-like) slides less and less all the time. One reason that SlideShare again made the list this year is because of the improvements they made to it during the past year as well as the fact that I still have lots of old PPT slide shows sitting on my hard drive just begging to get out and greet the world. They do have a blog that occasionally has something interesting on it.

The most important enhancement during the past year is "Slidecasting." From their FAQ page:

"Slidecasting is a new multimedia format from SlideShare - you can play any slidedeck synchronized with an audio file. To create a slidecast, you need to upload slides to SlideShare. Your audio file, however, can be hosted anywhere on the web- any server, file storage, or podcasting service. You link the slides & audio together using our synchronization tool. Now every time you play the Slidecast, the audio is streamed from its location and plays with the slides. And yes, Slidecasting is completely free. For more FAQs on slidecasting, please see this page."

Here are some of the features:

You can upload four different file types: PowerPoint (ppt, pps), OpenOffice (odp), Keynote (Mac) and PDF format.
You and viewers can leave a comment on a particular slide, or about the slideshow in general.
You and viewers can link direclty to a particular slide, or to the slideshow in general.
You control how public or private your slideshow is.
Transcripts are automatically created from the text in your slides.
After you have uploaded a slideshow, you can either keep 'All Rights Reserved' or choose from one of the various Creative Commons licenses. To learn more about Creative Commons, go to their website.
you can subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular user's slideshows. or for all slideshows that have a certain tag, or in various other ways.
Your slideshows will be found by the search engines, with the following items being indexed: slide transcripts, slide title, description, and tags.

Here are some shortcomings:

They do not support embedded audio and video inside presentations.
You will find some viewers who want to leave inappropriate comments.
Once in a while, pages seem to load slowly - at least for me.
There is not much that you can do to change the size of the presentation to be viewed. This is fine for embedding in a blog post, but for other types of web pages, including the SlideShare site, it would be better if there was an option to view in a larger size.

Below I'll embed two different examples from SlideShare. The first is a standard SlideShare (no audio) called Death by PowerPoint (seemed fitting) by thecroaker (yes, you can embed or download the presentations of other people if they let you).

| View | Upload your own

The second example is a SlideCast (with audio) that was prepared by SlideShare to show how Slidecasts work.

| View | Upload your own

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 10

2007-12-14T07:29:00.001-06:00

Slide.com has an extremely easy-to-use interface and gives you many options for how a slideshow of digital photos will be displayed. You can change various different factors, including the overall theme, what the player looks like, whether or not there is music included, etc. etc.

Here a three examples using the same set of pictures from the war memorials in Washington D.C.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 11

2007-12-13T06:13:00.000-06:00

The Flickr profile shown above is one of about 25 free tools and toys that are available at BigHugeLabs. One nice thing about this site is that you can synchronize with your Flickr account to use your stored photos very easily and to upload your new creations from BigHugeLabs to Flickr without needing to download to your computer first, although you can do that too, if you want to.

There is no doubt that I use this site more for fun than for serious business, but some of the tools can definitely be used for some more serious academic pursuits such as storytelling or other creative endeavors. I'll just show a few examples below and leave it at that.

Top Web Tools of 2007 - Number 12

2007-12-12T07:03:00.001-06:00

Coming in at the bottom of the list for 2007, but still list-worthy is Zamzar. Here are just a few of the things you can do with this free service:

Download any flash-based video such as from YouTube, Google Video, Blip.tv, and many others. Here's how. Of course, you'll only do that when it is legal to do so.
Convert a Word .doc into html, pdf, or any of 5 other file types.
Convert a .pdf document into a Word (.doc), html, text (.txt), rtf, or several other formats.
Convert a .jpg into a .gif, .png, .bmp, tiff, etc. etc.
Convert .wma audio into mp3, ogg, .wav, or several others.
This list would go on forever if I tried to list all the possible conversions, but they've done it for you.

The free version is limited to 100 mb files sizes. There is a pay version if you need to convert really large files or if you want online file storage.

They have a blog that they post to once in a while. Overall, I find Zamzar to be incredibly useful. I've even used it a few times when I already had a program on my computer to convert a file (such as a .wav audio file into an .pm3) because it was just faster and easier than opening my own program and all that jazz.

Honorable Mention - Just off the 2007 List

2007-12-11T06:45:00.000-06:00

These free web tools just missed making my Top 12 Tool list for 2007. I use all of them, but not enough (or not seriously enough) for them to work their way into the top 12.

Zentation: allows for a combination of video and PowerPoint, running side-by-side and synchronized by the creator. I think there are good applications for this, but using a boring talking head in the video screen is not my idea of a good application. However, watching a good presenter, such as Guy Kawasaki, can be effective because he has a great stage presence. Embedded below is an attempt I made several months ago to combine a screencast video of Club Penguin with my son as the tour director, combined with some PPT slides and web pages screenshots (link to Zentation site).

Splashcast: allows for a combination of various media in a single screen. Using Splashcast you can mix together any combination of video, music, photos, narration, text, RSS feeds, PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents. You can create a "channel" which will basically create a table of contents of all your presentations that can be easily embedded and played on any web site, blog, or social network page. The most recent Splashcast will be at the top of the list ready for play, but a viewer can easily begin playing one of the older episodes, if desired.

Scribd: is a document sharing site that allows comments, ratings, and the like. Upload a doument and you can then convert it to many different formats, including Word, PDF, plain text, HTML, JPEG, PowerPoint, Excel, Postscript, LIT, and even convert text into an mp3 for audio playback. They use a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. My use of this service seems to go in spurts. Maybe 2008 will be their year. Here is a link to the document of mine on Scribd that has been most viewed (almost 4000 views): New Editing Tools in Picnik Photo Editor

Protopage: I've used this as a presentation tool and liked it. Just haven't been able to spend enough quality time with this to put it on the list (yet).

Animoto: This site let's you mix together your photos and their music to create a free 30-second music video, or pay $3 for a longer one. Here is one of my free efforts.

Vyew: this is a free web conferencing tool that I have used a couple of times and it seemed to work well. I haven;t used it extensively enough to know for sure how well it scales as the number of participants increases.

Web Tools Hall of Fame

2007-12-09T21:32:00.000-06:00

Of the 12 free web tools that were list on my 2006 year-end list, 6 of them are being moved into my hall of fame. They have earned these spots because they have continued to grow in usefulness for me and have all become a major part of how I work, how I play, and how I use technology. In other words, they don't need to be listed on a year-end list again, they've earned a permanent place.

These are the first six inductees into the hall of fame, listed along with their placement on the 2006 Top 12 Tools listing.

Top Web Tools for 2007

2007-12-07T17:30:00.001-06:00

This will be the second year where I name my Top Free Web Tools. Last year I named my My Top 12 Web Tools of 2006 with a series of posts at the end of the year. I was going to repeat that effort with 12 new tools for 2007 but for some reason that just didn't feel right because I still use so many of the tools from the previous list. It also didn't feel right to include most of the tools again on the list because many of my top tools are the usual suspects and would just be a repeat of the 2006 list.

Therefore, I've decided to move some of the tools from the 2006 list into Barry's Free Web Tool Hall of Fame (coming soon) and then add 10-12 new nominees for the Hall of Fame, with their potential induction to be determined at the end of 2008 after I have enough time to see whether they rise to the top or not.

To recap: Here are the Top 12 Web Tools for 2006:

Zoho Suite - (my 2006 Zoho review)
Flickr - (my 2006 Flickr review)
Skype - (my 2006 Skype review)
Meebo - (my 2006 Meebo review)
del.icio.us - (my 2006 delicious review)
Odeo - (my 2006 Odeo review)
Audacity - (my 2006 Audacity review)
Google Earth - (my 2006 Google Earth review)
Bloglines - (my 2006 Bloglines review)
Google IG - (my 2006 Google IG review)
SlideShare - (my 2006 SlideShare review)
Pandora - (my 2006 Pandora review)

Only some of the tools listed above will be in the new Hall of Fame. Others might be on the year-end list and still others will fall off the list altogether. Several new tools will make their debut.

Tech Club Hits the News

2007-12-06T07:26:00.001-06:00

The elementary school Tech Club that I am volunteering for received a little local press a few days ago. The story ran in the Superior Daily Telegram after a reporter visited the school during our third after-school meeting of the club.

For this second club project, each person designed their own floorplan of a bedroom or even a whole house. I was planning to use Gliffy for this exercise, but their limit on the number of saved designs made that not a good choice for a group of 30 students. I really don't want to create an account for each kid, so we are using a single mother account whenever possible. That was possible using the free drawing tools at draw.labs.autodesk.com

Here is an example created by Josh. Others can be seen at the blog created for the club.

Click on the floorplan to view full size.

Top photo by Anna Kurth of Daily Telegram.

Amazing Quotes from EQ Article

2007-12-04T12:52:00.000-06:00

The latest edition of Educause Quarterly (Volume 30, Number 4, 2007) just came out and has a few interesting articles. The one that particularly grabbed my attention was titled “Use and Users of Digital Resources” by Diane Harley. In the table of contents it says the following about the article: “A survey explored scholars’ attitudes about educational technology environments in the humanities.”

Harley and her research associates asked faculty why they do not use digital resources in their teaching. 75% of the 831 faculty respondents said basically that digital resources do not sync with the teaching approaches that they use. STOP THE PRESSES!! Apparently the faculty members who are using the same techniques as they did 20-30 years ago see the digital resources as THE problem, not their teaching techniques.

Reading some of the quotes from faculty in this article is a very fun way to spend ten minutes. For example:

“I think there is a real danger of students’ becoming too computer literate and “connected” in ways that undermine, or at least compete with, other crucial skills: argumentative writing, careful and critical reading of long texts, and oral argument.” –Political science instructor, UC (University of California)
“There is evidence that PowerPoint and those other displays with bells and whistles etc. rot the mind. My students need to learn how to THINK and READ BOOKS and, in the case of foreign languages, talk to real people. Their attention span is being annihilated enough with the huge number of “technical events” on television." –Foreign language and literature instructor, UC
“Frankly, I just don’t really want to use digital resources. What’s wrong with books anyway?” –History instructor, UC

When citing the barriers to their uses of digital resources, 44% said that “there are too many resources out there for me to take advantage of – I am overwhelmed.” I continue to be amused by this line of thought. Keep in mind that these are educated people!! Can you imagine them saying any of the following?

“I went to the restaurant last night. The menu was ten pages long. I was totally overwhelmed so I decided not to eat at all.”
“I'm in the market for a new car. Did you realize that today there are a whole bunch of choices for this? All I wanted was a black model-T, but now I have to consider all these other choices. I guess I’ll just take the bus.” (Yes, but which one?!)
“I walked into a bookstore the other day. OMG!! I had no idea that there were so many choices. Why don’t they just sell the one book that I really want/need to read?”

In closing, one more quote from the Educause article: “Listen up you bunch of yay-hoos! I’m an educator, dammit! The last thing I wanna do is try to keep pace with advances in technology and the way that people learn. I went to college 30 years ago and having some old man talk AT me for 50 minutes was the only way we knew how to learn. It worked for me and there’s no reason it won’t continue to work that way until the end of time, if not longer. About the time that crappy teaching techniques are no longer acceptable in higher education is the day that I turn in my resignation to the university.” (I admit that I totally made up this last “quote,” but it is exactly what I thought about as I was reading the entire article.)

NOTE: Educause Quarterly is a fine publication and I have no intention of demeaning the quality of the magazine. Diane Harley was simply reporting what she heard from the faculty responses to the survey. My rant here is in no way intended to reflect poorly on either the publisher or the author. In fact, I thank both of them for bringing this information to light about the Neo-luddites who continue to fight against uses of technology in education.

Flickr Notes on Other Webpages

2007-11-30T11:34:00.000-06:00

A big tip goes out to Alan Levine for this one.

Embedding notes in Flickr is a very cool thing. Until today, I thought that you had to be viewing the photo on the Flickr page to see the notes. He directed me to this resource, and now it looks like notes can be seen anywhere that scripts are allowed.

This photo is from a restaurant window in Kowloon, across the bay from Hong Kong. Here is the Flickr page.

Free Software - Maybe!

2007-11-26T21:58:00.000-06:00

The education blogosphere was all abuzz on Monday because of some apparently free downloads available for SnagIt and Camtasia from TechSmith.

Going to the download links I see a different story than most were reporting. The normal story was that TechSmith is giving away copies of their older versions of these products as a way to get more people to try the software and possibly upgrade to the newer versions. Maybe that's true, but I'm sure not seeing anything to that effect on their website. What I do see is text saying "Welcome to this exclusive offering for PC Plus Magazine readers from the United Kingdom" for Camtasia and other text that says "Welcome to UK .Net Magazine's SnagIt site!" for SnagIt. Neither one of those applies to me, but maybe nobody really cares.

So what I'm driving at is that maybe these downloads have been spread around in ways that were never intended by TechSmith - but maybe not. Maybe these free download pages will be taken down before you even read this -maybe not.

To help stroke my curiosity, I downloaded each of the products and requested the keys to unlock them. The free SnagIt download (note: this is a .exe file) is version 7.2.5 and here is that SnagIt registration key (current version is 8.2).

The free Camtasia download (another .exe file here) is version 3.1.3 and here is the Camtasia registration key (current version is 5.0). It appears that everything is installing without any problems.

From the company website:

SnagIt Screen Capture and Image Editor lets you capture, edit, and share exactly what you see on your screen - fast
Camtasia Studio 5 is the smart, friendly screen recorder and more. Imagine being able to show exactly what's on your screen to anyone, anywhere. Imagine that it's easy. Now you've imagined Camtasia Studio. With the smartest screen recording tools on the planet, Camtasia Studio makes everything from training videos to PowerPoint presentations to lectures look better, reach more people, and pack more punch. Which makes you look even smarter, too. (however, the free version is less full-featured)

Flashphone Computer Calling

2007-11-26T06:51:00.001-06:00

I've been looking for a web-based alternative to Skype for phone-like calling over the Internet. Apparently Flashphone is attempting to fill that void. I tested it a little bit this weekend and found the sound quality to be pretty good on calls to a couple of different cell phones. You do have to create an account (free) but there is nothing to download and install on your computer. Whenever possible (if other things are equal), I would prefer to use a web-based tool rather than a local install.

As the name suggests, this service is flash based. Currently there are limitations on using the service as you are only allowed to call 3 times a day and for a maximum of 3 minutes per call. I'm sure that this is because the service is still in beta testing. Apparently you will able to call for free for longer times after the beta testing has ended. Free calling is supported to most but not all of the different countries, but I have read that it will soon work world-wide. This comes from a Russian company which explains the .ru web address.

This is clearly not yet ready for prime time - but it holds some promise for the future. A couple of other current drawbacks (besides the 3 minute thing) include a) no video/webcam support and b) no conference calling, or anything else similar to Skypecasts.

Sending Large Files

2007-11-21T07:58:00.001-06:00

I'm always looking for ways to send large files to people. Okay, maybe not "always," but definitely more than just once in a while. I've tried a few different solutions with varying success, but I like the looks of two alternatives that I stumbled across yesterday.

The first one came from Emily Chang at eHub and is called FileURLS. It seems to be really simple and apparently anonymous. I would caution sending any kind of sensitive (private) information in this manner, but that's probably true about any of these solutions.

After seeing the first one I snooped around a bit more and found a review by Michael Horowitz at cNet about a service called SendThisFile which has both free and paid (premium) accounts.

All in all, these appear worthy of further exploration. If anyone has any experience with either of them I'd love to hear about it.

Holiday Shopping List

2007-11-20T22:06:00.000-06:00

Looking for a Christmas gift for the geek or near-geek in your life? These would be some of the things that I think will be popular – in the not-too-damn-pricey category.

Chumby (David Winer’s review)

Eye-fi Wireless Memory Card (SD cards only)

MoGo Mouse for laptops (Read a review)

InstantMusic Vinyl & Cassette Ripper

Wi-Fi Detector Shirt

USB Digital Microscope

Go Green – Solio Solar Charger for cell phones, iPods, PDAs, etc.

Books – these are on my list or bedside table

Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, by Ken Robinson

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold

National Center for Higher Ed

2007-11-19T07:13:00.000-06:00

Much of my time in D.C. was spent at 1 Dupont Circle where the National Center for Higher Education is located. Many different offices are housed there, including the AACC (American Association of Community Colleges) and the AACC-affiliated Instructional Technology Council (ITC).

I also had three hours Saturday morning for a self-guided walking tour of the National Mall and surrounding area including George Washington University and many of the memorials. Although I've seen pictures of all of these places several times, nothing quite matches being there. Since my father served during World War II, I was especially intrigued by the WWII Memorial. The full inscription on the flagpole shown on the left is "AMERICANS CAME TO LIBERATE, NOT TO CONQUER, TO RESTORE FREEDOM AND TO END TYRANNY." My, how things have changed. Do a Google search for "Americans came to liberate" and you will see many posts about the Iraqi conflict, most of which are not very flattering to our home country.

I was able to see part of the march on Washington to end racial profiling on Friday afternoon and also joined a huge number of people walking on Saturday morning to raise awareness and money for the homeless, especially the homeless children. Watching tens of thousands people walk by the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument is a rather stirring site.

Having traveled to both Korea and Vietnam, those two memorials took on special significance for me. I know (and knew) many Americans who served in both conflicts and I have also now met many people in each of those other countries. To continue jabbering at this point would run the risk of turning this into a political blog - something that I have no interest in doing.

So, suffice it to say the following. If you ever need a good dose of U.S. patriotism, spend a couple of days around the National Mall in Washington D.C. Things most definitely are not perfect, but our past, our present, and our future are all on display.

Tripping in DC

2007-11-16T21:23:00.000-06:00

I've been in D.C. for the past three days attending board meetings for the ITC. We've had some good conversations and made some excellent plans for the future. The board members seem to have a genuine desire to work on some of the ideas that are designed to add value to the ITC membership.

This is my first real trip to DC, or at least the first time that I actually had some time to see some of the sights. Today I had a couple of spare hours to walk around the White House area, and tomorrow before flying out I'll have a few hours to visit some of the memorials and other sights around The Mall and the U.S. Capitol.

During this year there have been 60 new members for the ITC, while 30 past members have ended their relationship with the Council. The ITC Board members are committed to ensuring that all member institutions see good value in their membership dollars. I'm proud to be associated with such a fine group of professionals.

PostGrads Only - NOT

2007-11-15T19:47:00.001-06:00

Somebody thinks that this blog speaks to an educated audience. What is the readability level of your blog? I ran into this fun (stupid?) little thing thanks to Tim Stahmer (and his blog aggregator). Take the The Blog Readability Test for your site.

For the record: Desire2Blog = college undergrad, Free Web-based Tools = high school, Online Student Satisfaction = high school, Sign Language = junior high school. Apparently I appeal to all levels in one way or another.

My Free Dylan Clip

2007-11-12T11:07:00.000-06:00

You can create your own Dylan video at this promotional site for his album of greatest songs.

A Day at Schoolcraft

2007-11-08T20:40:00.000-06:00

What a great day. Spent another day in Michigan (looking for house --- jk!!). Today I facilitated a 5-hour hands-on Web 2.0 workshop at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, MI. I met about 20 great people as we created wikis, blogs, podcasts, rss feed readers, delicious accounts, and much, much, more.

My ITC buddy Ronda brought me back to Michigan for more interaction with faculty and staff members at various schools of the MCCVLC. I do believe that many people left the workshop today with several ideas of new ways that they can engage their students and work more efficiently.

Tomorrow it will be a repeat performance at Delta College in the Bay City area. On the way from Livonia to Bay City we stopped for dinner at Zehnder's in Frankenmuth. What a fantastic experience. This place has been around for well over 100 years and serves excellent German food with a great facility and attentive employees. I'm not easily impressed by restaurants, but this one ranks right up there. The neon sign below is a bit of a national icon (who knew?). I had the duck, not the chicken.

Grade School Tech Club

2007-11-07T07:38:00.001-06:00

I've started an after-school Tech Club at a local elementary school. Yesterday was our second meeting and our first time to actually have some fun in the computer lab. About 30 kids were totally engaged in adapting some CC-attribution photos using the Captioner tool and the Motivator tool at fd's Flickr Toys.

I've started a blog to post their work throughout the year.

This is my favorite creation of the day. I think the speech bubble in the upper right corner is brilliant.

Next up, they'll make music videos of their classrooms using Animoto.

Trying out Protopage

2007-11-06T08:00:00.000-06:00

I've spent a little time this week using Protopage, an easy to manage widget-driven website. Totally free, you can create as many protopages as you like (apparently). I'm playing around a little by creating one to be used to deliver some of the content for some day-long Web 2.0 workshops later this week and also another one for use inside Desire2Learn.

You can load your own background graphic, although the one shown above is one of their stock backgrounds. You can change the color scheme. You can make it private, semi-private, or public. Anyone can move the widgets around but only someone logged in with editing rights can make permanent changes. This has good possibilities. My first effort.

Vietnam Idol - Bill from Saigon

2007-10-31T18:03:00.000-05:00

"Bill" (real name Tran Son Hung) has become a bit of a celebrity in his home country of Vietnam. The original video that I made of him and posted on YouTube has been viewed over 70,000 times on that site, plus at least that many more times on all the sites where it has been reposted by Vietnamese bloggers.

I went back to talk with Bill again in early October while in Saigon with the AACC recruiting tour. I also met Chau, a wonderful young lady from Vietnam who is studying mass communications in Singapore. She was home from college for a few weeks and we met to talk about Bill and about her interest in interviewing him as a journalism project for her program at the university. It looked like we weren't going to be able to see Bill since he had gone home to his home province for a few days. We talked a while and I shot this video of Chau.

We got lucky when Bill answered a phone call from Chau and decided to come back to Saigon earlier than originally planned. The next day we met him at Ben Thanh market in his normal spot and talked with him some more. I shot a lot of video and have posted two responses ( number one, and number two) and am just tonight posting the third video response (embedded below) to the original video interview with Bill. There will be one more video posted from the last part of our conversation together.

For Chau's part, she successfully got an article published about Bill in both the Vietnamese version and the English version of the Saigon newspaper Thanh Nien Daily. (Here is my cached copy in case that link rots.)

20 minute PD

2007-10-26T07:56:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the cool things that I learned recently from my blog aggregator. In total, I spent about 20 minutes learning about these things from several people that I consider to be my teachers.

1. via Nancy White: this very cool flash video - Animator vs. Animation

2. via Mental Floss: a video contest winner (and losers) -String Theory explained in 2 min.

3. From 463 Communications: another poll about the Internet (many people like it!)

4. via Jane Hart: a very interesting publishing tool - Springnote

5. via Inside Higher Ed: Apollo Group (think U of Phoenix) is going global

6. via Scott McLeod: two posts from Doug Johnson (and about Nancy Willard) dealing with fear mongering (post 1) and sticky messages (post 2) related to kids' uses of the Internet.

Having all this useful information delivered directly to me is just one example of how communications in the world are changing.

GoodBarry

2007-10-21T11:51:00.000-05:00

Ran across a news article on TechCrunch about GoodBarry. Obviously I just couldn't resist finding out more about good ole Barry. I like this part. "As CEO, software developer and customer support rep you can imagine that "Barry" had the powers to grant a lot of our customers' wishes. As the resident online business genie, Barry quickly become loved and known for his quick responses and willingness to help." From the GoodBarry/About page.

I'm not making this up. Apparently, when I'm good, I'm very, very good!

I spent some time this weekend updating the design of this blog as well as Desire2Blog. I used a photo of a Red Sea starfish from Flickr member JennyHuang to create the new header. The header is a bit large (tall), but I didn't want to lose too much of the photo. Jenny is one of the many photographers sharing their work through the Creative Commons licensing (Attribution) option built into Flickr. Almost all of my photos are similarly licensed.

I resized, cropped, and added the text elements using my favorite free online photo editor, Picnik. I just heard that Flickr and Picnik have signed an agreement that will likely lead to the Picnik tools being integrated into Flickr in some way. That should help make Flickr a one stop shop for digital photo needs. Already it is very easy to access your Flickr photos in Picnik, so I mainly hope that they don't muck it up.

Random Thoughts

2007-10-18T08:07:00.000-05:00

Seeing how AT&T has changed their terms of service to potentially dump customers who criticize them, I'm expecting any day now to receive a letter from Northwest Airlines thanking me for all the money over the years, but telling me that my kind of business is no longer welcome at NWA. Not only have I ranted about them in this blog from time to time, but I also sent a formal complaint to the airline about the way I was treated on my return trip from Asia. That complaint was filed over a week ago. I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting for a reply because I firmly believe that they just don't care. "Elite" customer? Hah, that's pretty funny.

Better yet, just wait until the RIAA tries to get their hands around my neck. I've sent a "Reader's View" letter to the Duluth News Tribune about the travesty of justice served up by a jury right here in Duluth. If they publish the letter (no earlier than next week, if at all I'm told), I expect that the RIAA will move my name near the top of the list of people whose lives they would like to squash. I'm guessing that they won't like being called a terrorist organization, even though it's true. Everybody is concerned about cyberbullying among youngsters, but who is looking into the cyberbullying going on in corporate America? Nobody.

Latest Michael Wesch Video

2007-10-15T04:36:00.000-05:00

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University has again collaborated with his students to produce a video that is certain to be very widely viewed. On the heels of The Machine is Us/ing Us, comes along A Vision of Students Today, embedded below or use this YouTube link. Since seeing the first one I've wondered if he and I might be distantly related. My mother was a Wesch and about a third of my cousins have the Wesch surname as well. More importantly, here's the video:

The original post on Michael's blog explains how it was made and how the students provided the input.

2 minutes in Seoul

2007-10-13T19:41:00.000-05:00

Just a quick little video of some of the non-business time while I was in Seoul last week. The Major League Baseball store was a flurry of activity. Who knew that so many young Koreans are crazy about U.S. baseball, or at least about the hats? None of the current Korean players are exactly tearing it up - so I'm not sure what the attraction is.

Images from Day in Macau

2007-10-12T05:44:00.001-05:00

The AACC recruiting tour delegation spent about 12 hours going to and from Macau for an international student "mini-fair." Here are some of the images from that day.

Community College Fair in Vietnam

2007-10-04T02:17:00.000-05:00

I shot some video footage to give you an idea what one of the AACC recruiting fairs looks like. This was shot near the end of a grueling 3.5 hours where almost 800 students attended with their families to learn about community colleges in America. There aren't very many students seen in the video since it was at the end, but it was a madhouse earlier in the afternoon. This was the first chance I had that day to step away from the table and shoot some video. Link to video at Blip.tv.

Click To Play

Dinner with the VACC

2007-10-02T19:48:00.000-05:00

I'm trying another Animoto, this time with a voice narration rather than music. Might not be very effective, especially with the 30-second (or 25 in this case) short version. Looks like it would work better with the $3 long version of an Animoto.

Surabaya Recruitment Fair

2007-10-01T20:29:00.001-05:00

A quick look at the international student recruitment fair in Surabaya, Indonesia.

Jakarta Recrutiment Fair

2007-10-01T20:08:00.001-05:00

A few sights and sounds from the AACC recruitment fair in Jakarta, Indonesia. Free 30-second short made at Animoto.com

YouTube-ilicious

2007-09-28T18:11:00.000-05:00

My Mr. Bill video (not the SNL guy) continues to amaze me.

1st 10,000 views = 22 weeks
2nd 10,000 views = 4 weeks
3rd 10,000 views = 9 days

I'll be arriving in Saigon in two days and certainly hope that I can track him down in the market.

Here's my latest video. It's ten minutes long and comprised of several snippets from the entertainers at the Sampau Matsuda Sentra Indonesian Traditional Theatre and Seafood Restaurant here in Jakarta. Here is the link directly to YouTube, if needed.

Second Impressions of Indonesia

2007-09-27T16:27:00.000-05:00

Day two in Indonesia was much different and much better than day one. First thing in the morning the AACC delegation members gathered in the hotel lobby prior to boarding the bus to go to the EducationUSA offices here in Jakarta. There were a few familiar faces from last year and many new people to get to know. So far it seems like a pretty easy group to travel with, but of course it is only day one of our time together.

We spent about 6 hours earlier today at the EducationUSA offices here in Jakarta. This picture shows some of our student helpers lined up against the wall learning about the AACC and the colleges in attendance for the recruiting fair. These students will be helping us at the recruitment fair on Saturday at the hotel. My interpreter is the tallest one along the wall, second from right. These students spoke English very well and were very interested and engaged in learning about American community colleges.

EducationUSA is sponsoring the AACC trip to both Jakarta and Surabaya, as well as the last stop of our trip in Seoul.

I thought it was a little bit embarrassing for them to serve us a fabulous lunch at the offices since this is during Ramadhan in the heavily Islamic country. That means that they don't eat between sunrise and sundown every day for 30 days. Almost 86% of Indonesians claimed the Muslim faith during the 2000 census. (source: Wikipedia). Everyone at the offices was very pleasant but somehow I couldn't help but think that we could have easily done without lunch in observance (temporarily I'm sure) of their beliefs. I, of course, felt obligated to try a little bit of everything since they went to such lengths to provide us with a wonderful lunch.

The day ended when we accompanied our hosts from EducationUSA to the Sampau Matsuda Sentra Indonesian Traditional Theatre and Seafood Restaurant. What an experience. Great food with about 60-90 minutes of traditional Indonesian dance and music from at least 14 entertainers.

This was an excellent audience participation (which usually makes me gag) performance where they really made you feel welcome and were clearly proud to be showing their Indonesian traditions to the audience. This is a small place so there was one table of about 8 men from Japan and our two tables of about 20 people from America. There was approximately a 1-to-1 ratio of employees to customers. I also shot a great deal of video which will hopefully be edited soon and posted.

First Impressions of Indonesia

2007-09-26T07:23:00.000-05:00

I arrived at the Jakarta airport very early morning Wednesday. This is my first time in Indonesia. I'm south of the equator for the first time in my life. I had high hopes for this first leg of the journey with the American Association of Community Colleges. After all, the island of Java has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

The visit here got off to a good start. They have a nice little airport that I will get to see a couple more times later this week. It is very convenient to be able to pay $10 US at the airport to get a 7-day visa, so that was good. It was cool to walk through customs and see my name on an electronic sign (where was my camera on that one?) where they were prepared to take me to the hotel. So yes, my first 20 minutes in Jakarta were just fine.

However, the overall first impressions are not that favorable. On the trip to the hotel I started to see how bad the traffic is here. Don't be in a hurry to go anywhere. Interesting how the road had lines painted indicating two lanes of traffic but at no time was there less than three lanes of traffic. For some reason the traffic here feels different than the crazy traffic in other Asian countries. Maybe it's because there are many more individual cars and fewer scooters, bikes, and the like. We get to the hotel and the taxi (taksi) is searched by guards with electronic scanning devices and assault rifles before they open the huge iron gate to let us in to the hotel drop-off area. I also have to walk through electronic airport-like security to get into the hotel lobby. So far this doesn't feel like a very safe place. I've never felt that way in Vietnam or China. The broadband Internet connection here is anything but broad. Slow to do anything and very choppy for Skype calls back home to the family. This place has a very different feel than everywhere else that I have traveled in Asia. I've only been here 12 hours, so I'm hoping that I have a different impression by the time I leave at the end of the week. Today was mainly a day of rest after about 32 hours in travel status. AACC events start bright and early tomorrow morning.

Free Web Tools Blog

2007-09-21T08:52:00.000-05:00

For my ITC audioconference, I created a new presentation tool using most of the information from other presentations and blog posts. The site is called Free Web-based Tools and it is free for anyone to use.

It will continue to develop as I add new tools to the site and as I continue to add some audio files for some narration of each page.

There were as many as 45 people viewing (or at least 45 computers) the blog pages during the audioconference, so that was a success in my eyes.

You Tube Connections

2007-09-18T23:12:00.000-05:00

Less than four weeks ago I blogged about how I finally had a video on YouTube that reached 10,000 views. It took 22 weeks for that to happen. Now it has garnered an additional 10,000 views in a little less than four weeks. Still not exactly viral, but an impressive ramping up of the views per day.

It seems that many people in Vietnam and others of Vietnamese heritage have been linking to the video and recommending it to others. Still the ratings and comments are very favorable. Kinda fun.

Online Docs in Plain English

2007-09-18T07:24:00.001-05:00

Common Craft has posted another useful video, this one is Google Docs in Plain English. I personally prefer Zoho Writer and Sheet over Google Docs and Spreadsheets, but that is irrelevant to learning something from this video. The main points are related to the advantages of sharing online docs rather than trying to pass around an off-line (MS Word, for example) document.

Click To Play

Scriblink - Whiteboard and more

2007-09-14T07:25:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Jane Hart for introducing me to a new whiteboard (sketching, scribbling, whatever you like) tool. Scriblink is totally free and also allows for text chat and long-distance telephone conference calling for yourself and up to five additional people who can view or contribute to your whiteboard drawing.

There are a few other features worth checking out, although this is NOT a fully tricked-out electronic whiteboard with all the imaginable bells and whistles. From what I've seen so far, I would say that this is a very useful, very free service that could be especially helpful for a teacher to demonstrate something to a student, for example during electronic office hours.

End of the World?

2007-09-12T19:02:00.000-05:00

Yep, last night we got a Wii. Or more accurately, last night, at about 7:45, we finally hooked up the Wii that I bought a couple of months ago thanks to a little help from one of my friends. This could be the end of life as we know it.

After sitting in hiding for the past two months (mainly to not upset their summer activities at the lake home ("I want to go home!" (to play the Wii!!))), we (wii?) finally set the thing loose from the box that has been keeping us from enjoying hours of family fun together.

Actually, the early reports are pretty good. I insisted that one of the first games we bought was Big Brain Academy in hopes that this could lead to some learning as well as some family fun. So far we have had a lot of family fun.

This was going to be a family Christmas present, but when the kids finally decided to follow my advice and save their money for something "significant," they collectively decided that the something significant would be a Wii. Little did they know that I had already purchased one, but still I was impressed with their stick-to-it-iveness in saving their money to come up with $250 dollars total. I told them that if they bought the system that I would buy the extra controllers, games, and other crappola. Needless to say, their $250 came in handy for that part of the deal.

For the record. I am currently the king of our little world in ping-pong and skeet shooting. However, those are the only games that I've so far been able to weasel my way into. Just wait until wii play tennis - I'll crush them like the grade-schoolers that they are!! Boo-hah-hah.

(Why did I red-out their eyes? Because somewhere, sometime, somehow, somefreak would take me to task for putting my precious kids at risk by putting their photos on the Internet. But apparently it was OK for their photo to be on the front page of the local paper last week even though 25 registered sex offenders live within a one-mile radius of our house, with most of them probably subscribing to the local newspaper. Whatever.)

Weekend Learning

2007-09-09T22:43:00.001-05:00

Just a few of the things I've learned about over the weekend from my Bloglines feeds:

From Andy at Blaze New Media: A new social networking platform based on the Wordpress MU called BuddyPress.
From Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day: another survey tool, this one called SurveyGizmo
From Tim Stahmer I learned about the latest in Net Neutrality (or the lack thereof) from Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge
Stephen Downes pointed me to Skreemr (about a week ago) which is an amazing way to find mp3 files that someone, somewhere has available on the Internet (both legally and illegally posted, I'm sure). Still, an interesting search tool.
And then all the rest of these came from Emily Chang at eHub:

Create free webpages with integrated multimedia at Jimdo
Now Jott can connect with several new apps including Twitter
vcasmo looks a lot like Zentation for synching video with PowerPoint
xmgimage will host your photos and provides editing and sharing tools as well

Follow-up for Norfolk

2007-09-04T16:09:00.000-05:00

I received an e-mail today from my friend Harry at Norfolk State University. Seems one of the websites that we used during the Web 2.0 workshops isn't playing nicely. I've verified what Harry says about Odeo not saving recorded audio. They'll probably get that fixed within a couple of days, but you never know for sure.

In the meantime, I'll recommend another possible service and embed the player below. This comes from WildVoice. There are two differences that I'll mention. 1) You can embed the player that has a whole series of posts in it and they will play in the order that you specify, and 2) in my limited usage I've found the WildVoice team to be very responsive to their users (me, for example) and concerned about things working correctly. In my book, that makes them worth a try.

Are you ready to be heard?

Hear me at WildVoice.com

Eliminating Chinglish

2007-09-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

Please, say it isn't so! Apparently the Chinese are trying to clean up the Chinglish in prominent places prior to the arrival of tourists for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Looking for good examples of Chinglish is absolutely some of the most fun to be had while traveling over there.

This fire exting atsher box is a good example, but only one of many that can amuse for hours on end. BTW - I'm not poking fun at the Chinese people who have been wonderful in all of my experiences over there, but I would just hate to see this actually go away over time. I guarantee you that I would fail miserably if I tried to put Mandarin characters on my signs, but I bet they'd have fun with it if I tried to.

Here are a few other good examples: Hair salon, Keep off grass, Bump head, Mate swapping?

More Insanity from NWA

2007-08-31T14:52:00.000-05:00

I continue to be baffled by Northwest Airlines. I'm not surprised that they are still struggling to survive because basically they suck, but I am surprised that they make it so obvious just how stupid they are. I have been planning two trips from Duluth to Michigan (either Detroit or Flint, most likely).

Detroit is one of their hubs, as is Minneapolis. When you fly out of Duluth (on NWA) you will be flying to one of those two cities; there are no other choices. So for my first trip I was planning to fly to Flint in October. I was surprised to find a relatively low fare of $239 for the round-trip DLH-FNT flights. In each case I would have to change planes in Detroit.

Then I started shopping for round-trip airfare to Detroit in November. The lowest available fare is $680. My first thought is that they must be having a major fare increase between mid-October and mid-November. So, I decide to look up the Duluth-Detroit for the same dates in October when I an traveling to Flint. I was surprised to see that the fare was once again $680 and up.

So, here's the deal-ee-oh. I can fly from Duluth to Detroit to Flint for $239 or I can fly from Duluth to Detroit (on the same flight as above) and NOT fly to Flint for $680. I cannot find any way in the world to think of that as anything less than TOTALLY STUPID.

Just to see whether this is a complete anomaly I decided to check another flight. What about flying through the other hub in Minneapolis? Round-trip from DLH-MSP is $399. If I keep flying from MSP and travel on to St. Louis my cost drops to $249. That's right, I save $150 by taking another seat on another flight and eating more lousy pretzels and being sneered at by more disgruntled employees. Still, that's nothing compared to the $441 I save by flying on to Flint rather than staying in Detroit.

Airline pricing has never made perfect sense, but they seem to be reaching an all-time high in stupidity. BTW, I try to teach my children not to use the word "stupid," but I just can't help myself when I can't find another word without sacrificing accuracy.

Grand Marais Animoto

2007-08-30T08:34:00.001-05:00

Animoto is a new site for creating photo stories using your pictures, indie music, and some pretty well-done technology. This is my first attempt. It took me about twelve minutes and that included setting up my Animoto account, creating a new set of photos in my Flickr account, listening to clips from about 20 different songs before finding the one I wanted, and then letting the processor do it's thing. Here's my first effort, it's a 30-second short.

Animoto Shorts are free. You can create, share, and remix an unlimited number of them. Creating a full-length video costs $3, and the length will depend on how many photos you use and how fast your music is. Upbeat songs transition through the photos more quickly than slow songs. You can buy individual full-length Animotos as often you wish, or buy an All-Access Pass which allows you to make an unlimited number of full-length videos for one year at a cost of $30. I'll stick with the free option for now, but $3 is pretty cheap if you want a more serious end product.

My Inbox Zero Mission

2007-08-29T08:30:00.001-05:00

I really didn't think that I could pull it off. Hah, even I can fool myself. Much to my surprise, I was able to delete or file/archive all of my email messages at work. Somewhere around 15,000 emails have been deleted during the past few days and several thousand more have been moved into appropriate folders or archived if they really have a future potential use.

I've been inspired by the 43 folders series about Inbox Zero and also by several people I admire in the blogosphere who have been taking this idea to heart. Next step will be order the book Getting Things Done from Amazon and continue trying to make my life a bit more (okay, a lot more) efficient and productive. After I cleaned out my email box yesterday, I also threw out several boxes of old paper documents that I have been saving for the past few years, just in case I ever needed them. "Just in case" never seemed to happen, so now they're gone.

Dog Paddlers Rock the World

2007-08-26T22:36:00.000-05:00

The LSC Husky Dog Paddlers had what must have been their best day ever at the Lake Superior Dragon Boat Festival. Winning their first heat, and then taking six seconds off their time during the second heat, helped put the team just .03 seconds out of first place among the nine entries in the Education Division.

Overall they finished in 37th place out of 86 teams, just missing the finals of the silver (middle) division. The embedded slide show contains several shots from the day, although no one was able to get the Dog Paddlers in action during the races (it's hard to paddle and shoot pictures at the same time).

Just a few notes: Listen people!! You paddle a dragon boat!! You don't ROW one!! You use a paddle, not an OAR!! All the cute little names like Intimidate-Oars, Insure Oars, Holy Rowers, We are Outd'oar, First Oar Else, and Rowed Rage are just dumb. That's like having a fantasy football team named the Shortstops or the Point Guards.

The end result? This was a great day. Great weather. Great sportsmanship. Lots of money raised for charity. The Keyport Krew won the wet t-shirt contest (capsized) and for good luck, one paddler wore pearls from China (the home of dragon boat racing where the good paddlers stand up while putting on a major push - here's a 30-second video if you don't believe me). Yes, this was a great day. Those Husky Dog Paddlers are the bomb.

Not Exactly a Viral Video

2007-08-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

Although it doesn't compare to some of the viral videos that have been watched millions of times, I did have one of my YouTube videos eclipse the 10,000 view mark sometime yesterday.

My interview with Bill from Saigon at the Ben Thahn market is by far the most popular video of those that I have uploaded to the site. 34 comments (positive, no less) and favorited 28 times, and counting. 23 ratings - all 5 stars. I'll take it.

Beloit College Mindset - Class of 2011

2007-08-22T07:16:00.000-05:00

With the start of a new school year we again see the Beloit College Mindset List. Most students (recent high school grads) entering college this year were born in 1989. What has their life been like? The Beloit list has 70 items on it. I picked the top ten that have some sort of meaning for me, either things I have strong memories of, or things that I never thought would happen (pay for water?).

For students entering college this year:
10. China has always been more interested in making money than in re-education.
9. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
8. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
7. Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
6. When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.
5. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.
4. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
3. MTV has never featured music videos.
2. Fox has always been a major network.
1. They have grown up with bottled water. (CC photo by shrff14)

Thriller Video - Finding the Truth

2007-08-20T20:19:00.000-05:00

Scott McLeod from Dangerously Irrelevant posted the most interesting thing that came through my RSS feed today. His post about the Filipino prison inmates doing their Thriller dance routine is a great example of the power of using the "personal media" to tell your side of the story - without needing to bother with the idea of providing equal time to opposing views.

As of this evening, almost 5.5 million people have viewed the original video uploaded to YouTube by Byron F. Garcia, a provincial security consultant with the Filipino prison system at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC). I'll embed the video below, but here's the link to YouTube for more info.

Someone else has posted a rebuttal video that tells a very different story about life inside CPDRC. I'll also embed that video for your comparison. Although this one is labeled "The Truth," you'll probably agree that it is not easy to know for sure where the truth lies in all of this. My gut is telling me that there is more truth in the rebuttal than Mr. Garcia would care to admit.

Disturbing item #1: First video has been viewed about 5.43 million times more than the second.
Disturbing item #2: First video has been "favorited" by 29,867 YouTube viewers.
Disturbing item #3: Even ABC news has an all-positive story about the dancing at CPDRC.
Disturbing item #4: Apparently Mr. Garcia is quite a choreographer since his YouTube account currently contains 14 videos, most of which are other inmate dances. I have no doubt that he is also enjoying his new worldwide popularity.

The most "fair and balanced" (I'm beginning to hate that phrase) coverage that I've found so far comes from a new media company NewTeeVee.com where they ask: "with evidence of tattooed concubinage and the unsettling popularity of Gracia’s YouTube, is this really new-age rehabilitation, or age-old exploitation?"

For those of you in education, I hope you can find your own version of a teachable moment in here. Looking past the funny video to an underlying truthiness should be an important info literacy skill for current and future generations.

Workshops at Norfolk State

2007-08-17T10:30:00.000-05:00

I just returned home from an excellent, very short, but very fun trip to Norfolk, VA. That was my first time in Norfolk and I found it to be an excellent place to visit. Great people, lots of history, and lots of things to do and see. The fun part for me was not the sightseeing; it was the four workshops that I presented to the faculty, staff, and administration at Norfolk State University School of Liberal Arts.

Here is the flyer that they distributed for the workshops (descriptions here). I keep all of my presentation materials online and available to the public. These are the four workshops that I presented at NSU:

What a great group of people. Many faculty attended, including several who are fairly tech-savvy as well as several who are just starting to cut their teeth on using technology in a serious way to enhance their teaching. Their enthusiasm and attentiveness was obvious and inspiring. These presentations tend to be fast and furious. I like to throw out lots of ideas, tools, and possibilities and hope that each participant picks up a few things that they can incorporate into their teaching and their own personal learning. Several administrators and staff members also attended the sessions.

My special thanks go to Damani D who invited me to come to Norfolk State and was my host during the stay. Damani had attended one of my sessions at the ITC Conference in Albuquerque and decided that I had something to offer to the employees at NSU. Harry S was very helpful, informative, and engaged in the whole process. It was pleasure meeting Danny A who is their director of e-learning, as well as the Dean and Assistant Dean of the School of Liberal Arts. Their instructional designer, a gentleman named Murat who hails from Turkey, can also be counted among my new friends.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Norfolk and especially enjoyed my role of opening the minds of some very smart people to some new possibilities for using collaborative web-based tools that they might not have considered previously. That is the fun part for me.

Back to Work

2007-08-16T07:15:00.000-05:00

I have been on vacation for the past two weeks, which is one reason why I haven't posted in at least that long. Because of conferences, meetings, and vacation; I have only spent three days in my office since July 3.

Tomorrow I return to the office to get settled back in and start trying to play catch-up. As usual, all the benefits from the time away will probably get washed away during the first day or two back on the job. Ce la vie.

Must See for Congress

2007-07-27T07:22:00.000-05:00

I'm almost finished with Larry Lessig's excellent book, Free Culture.

Lessig continues to educate me about copyright law, the history of copyright, and the total clueless-ness that our lawmakers are exhibiting in the realm of copyright protection.

His book is excellent, but I can't imagine that any seat holder in Congress would ever take the time to educate themselves about this topic, so I have little hope that any of them have or ever will read it.

So, here is a 30 minute "cliffy," an abridged version of the book on SlideShare that is a lecture by Lessig, with minimalist PPT slides to help you follow along. Every person serving in Congress should spend 30 minutes educating themselves about this topic. BTW, this is only the tip of the iceberg, the book contains much more information that he couldn't fit into a 30-minute presentation.

This also illustrates a use of the new SlideShare feature of embedded audio, which makes it a much better service.

Thanks to Ross Mayfield for the tip on this particular SlideShare presentation.

International Reach

2007-07-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

The most fascinating part of blogging (for me) is to see how many people from other parts of the world find one of my posts or somehow stumble across something that I had to say. I'm not saying anything about the quality of the experience that they had, just that they visited my blog for one reason or another. For example, here are the last 18 visitors today to this blog:

Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
Upland, California, United States
Caldecote, Slough, United Kingdom
Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey
Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Mechelen, Antwerpen, Belgium
United Kingdom
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Greensboro, North Carolina, United States
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Reykjavík, Gullbringusysla, Iceland
Skopje, Karpos, Macedonia
United Kingdom

8 from the U.S. (6 states plus the D.C.) and 10 from foreign countries. I have never been to Turkey, Spain, Belgium, the U.K., India, Iceland, or Macedonia. But my blog has.
(Creative Commons photo by Chaz Odalaigh)

Internet Crash 2007

2007-07-19T08:55:00.000-05:00

This is funny, not hilarious, but funny.

Here is the direct link to YouTube.

Lapsing Into a Comma

2007-07-17T23:14:00.000-05:00

One thing that blogging has done for me is to make me more conscious about my writing style. I want my writing to be engaging as well as technically accurate and above all it should be an example of proper American English usage. That previous sentence is a perfect example of how I’m not quite certain sometimes when I write; in this case I am uncertain that I followed appropriate punctuation. I could always break it into two sentences, but I’m more of a run-on sentence kind-of-guy. So shoot me (see, I like fragments also).

I’ve never been an English teacher nor did I ever major in English. I always was an A-student in English classes, but that was so long ago that it feels like a previous life. In an effort to improve my writing style, I have been poring over (or is it pouring? I know, do you?) “Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print – and How to Avoid Them.” (Amazon link) It was written by Bill Walsh, the copy desk editor of the Business Desk for the Washington Post.

This is definitely the most interesting style book that I’ve ever read, and maybe the only one that I feel compelled to read more than once. I think that it is so helpful that I am going to occasionally give you small snippets here in the blog as a way of spreading the knowledge, and particularly in an effort to drive it home for my own learning. It seems that I remember the things that I write about much better than the things I read about.

To start with I am going to give you four common inaccuracies or misconceptions. All of these are found in pages 200-212 of Walsh’s book. This is where the audience interaction portion of the blog comes into play. Please answer the embedded poll questions below and then leave comments on this blog post to answer those “why” questions or to argue your point. After a few comments have been posted I’ll chime in with what Mr. Walsh deems to be the correct answer, or at least what I believe he would say based on my reading of his book.

Technorati Tags: BillWalsh, StyleGuide

Welcome GAFA and CAFA

2007-07-16T09:44:00.000-05:00

This morning was the kickoff for the International Wood Firing Conference & Workshop at Lake Superior College in Duluth. We are hosting about a dozen students and three faculty from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA) and about 6 students and one faculty member from Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. This promises to be a truly great ceramics conference and cultural exchange.

Congratulations to Dorian Beaulieu, Jim Berg, and several others for helping to pull this off. I truly enjoyed my time at GAFA and have also enjoyed two trips to Beijing. How exciting to have them all here in Duluth.

Podcasting Workshop

2007-07-11T17:43:00.000-05:00

One of the technology workshops that I have been wanting to deliver for several months now has finally seen the light of day. It is titled Podcasting without Fruit. I created a list of resources using Google Reader that is publicly shared for anyone who has an interest in Windows-based options for creating and delivering podcasts.

"Podcasting without Fruit" resources.

Beijing Normal Motto

2007-07-07T12:44:00.000-05:00

The image on the left comes from a t-shirt I bought at Beijing Normal University. The second image below is a picture of a large stone slab on the campus bearing the same Chinese characters. This is the motto for BNU, which was founded as a teacher's college. When I asked people in China to tell me what it means they told me that there is not just a single translation.

Answers.com gives the following: Study well, teach others. Be your best, set an example.

This site says: Behave to be the model, learn to be the master.

Another variation: studying to teach and acting to example

The following is my own choice for best translation, sort of the consensus opinion of those I talked to at BNU about what the motto means in English.

Learn, so as to teach others. Act, to serve as an example to all.

Another free web poll

2007-07-06T21:04:00.001-05:00

Here is an example of a free polling site. Make your own polls and embed them in any webpage at PollDaddy. All free.