View from HS-28

On User Generated Content [explicit]

paideiaphysics — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:40:59 +0000

I wrote this on a separate blog. I’m bouncing it around a few places because I think it unifies a few aspects of my life and discussions I’ve had in each place.

At work (Paideia) we recently had a seminar/lecture led by Dr. Alan November regarding the use of the internet/technology/your mom in the classroom. He was an interesting lecture that seemed a bit on the extreme side for me (by the way, books are dead so stop reading them) but that might have been a stance chosen to instigate more discussion. One of Dr. November’s points was that we could change our classrooms to global learning centers through Skype and social sites, and generate real content using podcasts and youtube. Much of the time was spent convincing us (the teachers) that there was nothing that we could do to stop this massive paradigm shift (that was our “english” class at Tech freshman year) and that it was really better for us anyway. His go to defense of the new paradigm was the ability for the student to be a part of something greater either through communication with more people or by unique content generation (videos, blogs, podcasts, etc.).

The idea of user created content has been talked about in the video gaming press for the past few years. Sure there are all the old quake mods, but things slowly started moving forward through leaderboards, the ability to upload your Halo 3 footage, and then it hit the fan with the big marketing of Little Big Planet and a push in MMORPGs. Up to a year ago people have been drooling over the prospect the internet offered for getting “work” done through multiple users. Remember when we were all playing with the google images tag “game?” I loved that game, and Google was getting me to tag their images for them.

Last tangent before I tie all this together. For those that haven’t read the book Tipping Point it centers around the ideas of Mavens and Salespeople. Maven’s are those people that are always up on the latest shit and want to tell you about it, and Salespeople are the ones with the connection to popular culture that can push something into the forefront. I want to add another class to the structure, Creators. These are the people that generate the idea/product/content that Mavens latch on to and Salespeople then push. Now to try and fuse these ideas together. Dr. November wants teachers to use the POWER OF THE INTERNET to connect learners and create new content. But 90% of the content created on the internet is crap. This type of learning is valuable because it will teach people the tools they need to be a Creator. Sure, only some of them will go on to create valid content, but only a small number of the people I teach calculus will end up using it anyway. But, without a valid curriculum for what creation tools need to be taught (and that is fucking hard to generate in an ever evolving landscape) it can often lack direction. Not to mention that this doesn’t teach people how to be Mavens, or perhaps better Creators. Then what about salesmen? Based on many of the discussion on my podcasts (and common sense) it only takes a few Creators to generate quality content, but it disappears in the pile of shit that is the web unless people push it to the top (iPhone top 10 list, the reason I follow PA, etc.). So it seems like a good thing for everyone to be at least a decent Maven. In the end, most people don’t even want to be Creators, and they don’t want to be Mavens, they just want to use cool shit that is easy and watch. This has been the failing of Little Big Planet. Sure it is cool that I can create my own board, but that takes time and I would rather play a board generated by someone who knows what they are doing. Same with youTube, I don’t want to post a video, I want to see “On a Boat” one more time. So, while Dr. November is pushing the idea of making Creators out of our students, which while valuable doesn’t seem as valuable as making more Mavens.

The focus of this article is pretty crappy.

Task 12: Final Exam

paideiaphysics — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:52:46 +0000

I didn’t see a section asking for a post of “Task 12.” I feel like I do a good job advocating for new technology tools.

As far as the class goes, it was a good class. I learned some things and most importantly I was pushed to play with things. I feel that often people don’t get involved because they have no reason to go explore (unless you are prone to doing that anyway . . . I’m looking at you Oman) and this class provides that.

I would like to say that I didn’t really get a good feeling of community with my fellow classmates. That could just be a result of me a.) taking too long to do things or b.) being comfortable working independently. But I also think that it is a function of the entire class being online. I mean, that’s cool and all, but I wonder if it would’ve been a good idea to have an (option) meeting every now and again just to see where people are in the course and show off what they have learned. I know I wasn’t nearly as actively looking at other people’s blogs as I could have been, and so I probably missed something that was cool. I miss lots of cool things anyway.

Task:

paideiaphysics — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:19:34 +0000

I feel like this is cheating a bit, but I’m going to cite the web2.0 uses in my classroom as the stuff I do already. That would be the following:

Use of Vimeo (vimeo.com) to publish videos of classroom activity

Use of Blogger (blogger.com) to create a blog (http://paideiaphysics.blogspot.com/) for students to post article reviews and comments

Use of email (http://www.email.com/seriously/) to deliver and receive labs with students

I guess I have one idea that might be a good one to try out. I’m still playing around with using ZumoDrive as a cloud. I might be able to manage it more like a server and give students rights to upload/download files. We run into a problem often of people needing to email things to themselves, and then having to email it to me. If we instead were to have people receive their lab from the cloud, then upload it back to the cloud when they are done that way there will be less “email.” That isn’t really much of an advantage. More of an advantage would come from the accessability of ZumoDrive anywhere there is the internet and also that I can collect the labs on the day assigned (without having them email it to me). I dunno, maybe that will be cool.

Task 10: Seriously dude, give it a rest.

paideiaphysics — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:57:35 +0000

I’ve tried to write this post 3 times now, but each time the page hangs up when I try to insert a link. So screw links for this page, I’m just going to drop them in-text and force you to copy and paste.

This is supposed to be about apps, and I found some good apps that I like recently. Both of them come from Go2Web2.0:

http://www.go2web20.net/

The first is a cloud service called ZumoDrive (www.zumodrive.com) where you can install this app on your machine and it will provide a direct connect to a cloud where you can store documents for access from any machine. A friend and I often talk about how this is where technology is going. The idea that I have physical media that I have to take from place to place is become (easier to do and) more antiquated. It also forces a computer to have a hard drive of reasonable size and an OS that must have things installed on it. Instead (as my friend asserts) we need to push for more secure clouds and smaller (i.e. less expensive) computers that do specific things (browse the web, edit a word document, play a video) by pulling files from the internet and editing them. That way we don’t need to have local hard-drives and each machine can be suited to what it does rather than being a super machine.

I also found a site called BubbleComment which allows you film a small comment about a webpage and then send it as a link to someone. This seems like a god-send for a design class where you tell people to go find some web-pages/pictures that you like and then comment on them. Or even run an art class where you have people go find art that they like and then comment on that. I performed an example of that here.

http://www.bubblecomment.com/id/i725

Hopefully you can see that.

Task 9:

paideiaphysics — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:13:14 +0000

I’m still not really feeling Delicious. I think I understand it’s appeal, and I think it would we wicked awesome in a social studies class as a way to aggregate multiple student searches. If I was studying the civil war, then I would tell my kids to go learn about the civil war online, add the URL to their delicious account then tag it with the class name. Then we can all go see what people found. But the value there lies in being able to spend the time to go see what other people found.

Maybe it is better employed as a “get to know each other” activity. So you get some people together, then have them all tag their links “group X” then we can all see what each other likes? I don’t know, I feel like I am stretching a bit. I’m sure there is an application for this, but I don’t know what it is yet.

Task 7: Wikis

paideiaphysics — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:57:14 +0000

So Dave Fegemann told me about the pisci wiki when I first started talking to him. He gave me the idea of taking my normal lab reports and making them wiki-labs. I’ve used them once so far, and they are awesome. There have been some small hiccups, but not only does it allow me to avoid paper grading, but it will allow the students to submit peer reviews where they enter into a discussion on the quality of the lab.

The other idea I had was to have students build a set of wiki pages as a study guide for a course. I think I am going to use this in my Calculus class as a summative assignment. All in all I’ve been pretty happy with these implementations of wikis (I wish there was a better name), and I’m excited to see what I can do with them in the future.

Task 6: Web-apps

paideiaphysics — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:43:10 +0000

Well, I’ve tried a few of the apps on the list and a few more. There are so many possibilities out there, but there are seldom ones that are exactly what I am looking for. I found Webspiration, which provides an interesting option for collaboratively grouping things or creating links between things. If I taught biology I would use it to group organisms into their phyla (sp?) or something.

I took some time to check out Skype, which is cool. I think I am going to keep using iChat instead, but Skype will let me chat with PCs which is cool. I checked out Ta-Da. I started using it for a while, and although it was pretty cool I eventually wanted more. So I found Remember the Milk, which has the nice feature of syncing with my google calendar. I’ve never been good at keeping a continuous to do list, but now it is always live on my calendar. I don’t know if it will actually make a difference, but it might.

Task 5: More Feeds

paideiaphysics — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:38:56 +0000

I normally scour the following feeds: Next-Gin.biz, Penny-Arcade [Explicit!], and Ultimate Coaching and Strategy. I also found the cool feature where I add the feeds that my friends decide to share. It is a pretty cool system for sending useful tid-bits without using email.

Task 4: RSS Feeds and Google Reader

paideiaphysics — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:56:54 +0000

So . . . does this remind anyone of old newsgroups. I guess we call them RSS feeds now.

I’ve dabbles with RSS feeds before. My class blog even had an RSS feed, but it was never really worth it. In they end I think they are potentially very useful for being able to aggregate a lot of headlines and being able select from there. On my personal Google Reader I’m able to keep up with what is going on with various topics of interest (video games, ultimate, legos, etc.). The problem is that if we are looking at the aggregate of a large number of RSS feeds then it is easy to miss something in the quickly flowing stream of information. Kind of like missing the score of the game on the ticker.

After reading posts off of the recommended sites I have the following to say:

While the Students 2.0 post about “Where have all of the students gone,” really just points out what we already realize (that students are temporary actors in a long play with a revolving cast), it was the entry that I had the most fun reading. It did kind of sound like some Emo kid whining about how life is “tough,” but at least there was something to think about.

The post off of TechLearning was basically a recipie off of the food network. ”Here’s what’s going on with technology.” This probably makes it the best thing for aggregating since most of the posts weren’t worth looking at. With Students 2.0 the RSS just serves to let you know when something new comes out, rather than acting as a headline sifter for you to decide what is interesting.

The last one (InfiniteThinking) had a cool conference in NYC teaching people how to use Google Apps to enhance your teaching. Interesting idea. I originally wanted to have my students publish data to an existing GoogleDoc, but that requires everyone to have a gmail account. Kind of how my Digg idea fell on its face because it would require everyone to have a Digg account. Granted one account works for both (?) but it means a certain amount of overhead before implementing the idea.

Task 1-Thoughts about web 2.0

paideiaphysics — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:55:42 +0000

After using writeboard I wrote the following:

PiSciTest

we’re going to be testing if this works as a method for writing collaborative lab reports. I’m a little worried about losing this file’s location, so I should send my self an email or something.

I thought the first article seemed a little silly, or perhaps pointless. It painted a picture of how technology could be used to create a super school where everyone receives information in real time on their phone-blogs and internally through their youTube IV drip. In the 50s they told us we would be in flying cars also. I don’t want to suggest that the ideas in the article were flawed, they could work very well if implemented. But the article said nothing about how to go about creating this utopian education space. I have no doubt that the stuff is out there, and that the limit is (as usual) my imagination, but in order for me to reach that goal you have to tell me how to at least start.

This is why I liked the second article more. While not giving the reader tutorials, the article at least suggested what some of the tools to use in creating the first article’s dream school. Still, no one was talking about digg.

I still stand by those feelings. It seems that del.icio.us is getting more publicity at Paideia than digg. Maybe it is because it is better? Hard to say until I get my feet wet. Speaking of getting your feet wet, a friend told me that there is a japanese video annotator. Turns out there are a good number of options for video annotation, but the best one may have just closed?! Mojiti was offering motion graphics in addition to subtitles, etc. when you go to their site they say they are “moving on to other things.” A bit more digging suggest that they were bought out, which would explain why the service no longer exists. All the same, a video annotator would offer some great project/extra credit options.