Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Thing 4, 5 &6: I think I over posted

Just looking ahead to see what I needed to do for Thing 5 and realized I had incorperated it into thing 4.

Then jumped to Thing 6 and noted the same.

Is it O.K. to have lumped them together or would you like me to post additional info on those topics?

Thing 4: Flickr and other photo tools

Like all things created 90% of it is crap.  90% of all novels are terrible, 90% of art generated is terrible etc.  That being said, probably 99% of what is generated on the web is also crap due to the fact that it is so easy and requires little to no talent.

I find what people post on to Flickr to be pretty much crap.  However, if you mine Flickr and sift out the slag there are some precious gems to found.  Unfortunatly it takes some time, effort and equired skill on how to appropreatly search.  When those three come together... you can find some cool stuff:

*This is an artist that outlines shadows of immagies in chalk and colorizes them.  Very cool art that might not get noticed if not for Flickr.

*Here’s a sweet little photoset: A collection of street shots sassed up to evoke the HDR-stylized look of ‘Sin City’ and ‘300′ using Adobe Lightroom: The Street as Graphic Novel, by San Diego photographer Steve Gubin. 

It’s worth reading Gubin’s comments on the set, as he admits some distaste for post-processing while revealing how he achieved the effect.

*A collection of advertizing, illustration, cards etc. from the 1950-1970's.  

*Another example of cool use of Flickr is the posting of "Wanted posters" and Mug shots.  For some reason these photos are really fascinating.  take a look.

This is probably one of my favoite posts:

*Flickr’s The Commons project seeks to showcase publicly held photography collections from around the globe, and they’ve just launched a pilot program with the Library of Congress. Currently there’s some 3,500 photos available (a mere drop in the bucket considering the LoC’s massive archive, but a good start) across two sets: News in the 1910s and 1930s - 1940s in Color. 

These are the kinds of projects I like to see. Neat stuff, and I can’t wait for more to be made available. 


Lastly, and defintly not least:

*László Kozma adapted the excellent Flickrvision API gadget for Wiki use. By using Google Maps and the publicly available IP information Wikipedia logs for every edit, WikipediaVision displays on the world map where edits are coming from, and what subjects they’re contributing to. All just shy of real time, to boot.

Now, what is being show here isn't that great.  What it does do is show the power of using three or four great peices of web technology and merging them into one solution.   Albeit in this case a sort of lame use, but as a test case... super cool.

On to other tools

Now I know I'm supposed to make a "trading card".  Although cool and I have thought of some cool games to make with the cards (Electoral College game) etc.  And I would agree alot of those tools are fun to use.  They are not particularly "advanced" and are really specific in their usefulness.  Again, don't get me wrong.  I had a fun time playing with them, but there are other treasures out there.

So, I would suggest the following:

  1. On Line Media God:  Here is a sweet collection of apps and gizmos: Mashable’s Online Media God post has a collection of over “400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters & Musicians”, nearly all of which are either free or dirt-cheap to use.
  • When exploring this post (which I have explored less than 1% of) it is broken into parts:
  • Photography God: which has over 90 programs dealing with photography.
  • Video God: which features over 150 tools for video bloggers
  • PodCasting God: which features 70 plus tools for making and delivering podcasts including helpful hints etc.
  • On-Line Music God: this has 90 audio and music site that will help you either download, mix, mash and or create your own music.
  1. Google Sketchup:  I have only spent a short time playing with this tool, but WOW is it impressive.

This is more, but I think I am signing off on this one.

I wish I had more time to play with some of the features.  Wow are they great.  I think I will spend many, many a month exploring the richness around ON-Line Media God.  Whew!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Thing 3. RSS... been doing it. Hard to get other to do it.

First and foremost. I have to say I love the way you set up all of our blogs on your netvibes site. In affect making your site an aggregator for our class. Rock on. Very creative.

This will not be a particularly long post. I have been using RSS for about 3 years now. I used to use a Yahoo aggregator but now I use the Google aggrigator. It is great for my government class. News updates so fast and there are so many stories about issues so to choose 3 reliable news sources and two very extremist sources is awesome.

I would like to point out that itunes is in essence an aggregator. Every week it downloads the podcasts that I have subscriptions to and I can get them on any computer in the world. I draw the correlation that RSS is sort of like e-mail for your webpages.

If you are a user of Opera as a web browser (which I do) it sets up your home page as an indexed set of continuously updated pages. You choose your top 9 and they are at your click. Its a feature called speed dial. Take a looksy.
Now that I have extolled the virtues of RSS. My greatest frustration is getting others to use them. As you can see I love the RSS but my students are often playing the "dumb" on me. What I am happy about is that Moodle now has an RSS option (at least in 1.9 and beyond). That has some great opportunity for me and for helping set up info for the students.

Perhaps some project where they have to follow a "story" such as the lending crisis and by setting up an RSS to a news source, to Sound Money, to CATO Institute and to 1-3 other sources of their choice and put together the link between Economics and Government wouldn't be such a bad idea. If only to get the students to start using the feature.

If only I could get them to do something other than look at Myspace/Facebook, Youtube and World of Warcraft. ARgggg.

Well, thats it for the day on RSS. Check out the old Opera as a browser. Super great and virtually no malware are written to mess with it.

Not dealing with 23 but fascinating education discussion

Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Chief Learning Officer, Trump University; Author, Making Minds Less Well Educated than Our Own


No More Teacher's Dirty Looks

After a natural disaster, the newscasters eventually excitedly announce that school is finally open so no matter what else is terrible where they live, the kids are going to school. I always feel sorry for the poor kids.

My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don't learn much.

When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.

Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years philosophers and others have pointed out that school is really a bad idea:

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde

Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them. The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed.

The Government is and always has been the problem in education:

If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. — JS Mill

First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards. — Mark Twain

Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning. The government's role should be to create places that are attractive to children and would cause them to want to go there.

Whence it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally unfit. — Montaigne

We had a President many years ago who understood what education is really for. Nowadays we have ones that make speeches about the Pythagorean Theorem when we are quite sure they don't know anything about any theorem.

There are two types of education. . . One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live. — John Adams

Over a million students have opted out of the existing school system and are now being home schooled. The problem is that the states regulate home schooling and home schooling still looks an awful lot like school.

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.

Thing 2 Web 2.0.... or web 3.0?

Web 2.0 is such a bizarre concept for people to wrap their brains around. In essence, teachers have been doing this for generations, just not formally. Because something is on the Web, it takes on a strange quality of being difficult and so different that "we will never learn that".

What I mean is that in a school, teachers are creating new lessons, activities and curricular ideas and willingly sharing them with other teachers in their school or district. This is probably because of the limits to communication. What teachers were not doing were adding to the glorified and honorable text book. There has always been the feeling that what is said between those two hard covers is sacrosanct.

In the 90's there were a few people that were on the cutting edge of web 2.0 stuff. But really the web became a place for people to "share" with one another. To access information never thought possible. As soon as that teacher posted a lesson for other teachers to use. Like in their school, they were contributing to the whole. This time, however, the whole is made up of anyone in the world with access to a computer and a phone line.

Again, technology explodes faster than the average human can keep up. I, a self described tech geek, am often shown new web pages and tech tricks every day. There is just too much to know.

So, the advent of Ebay and Craigs list take what was once the Garage Sale and open it up to the world and more importantly... make it easy to find because the items you are looking for or are posting are automatically databased. Thus you no longer have to read through 75 car ads in the newspaper to find a 2002 Honda Accord. You just go to Cars.com or Craigs list and type in "Honda Accord". Tada! you got it.

Then came the behemoth Wikipedia. Despite its obvious faults, it is an amazing experiment on the web on human knowledge and condition. There was a TON of fictional info about certain topics for many years, but as Wikipedia learned there was more and more filtering and monitoring going on creating a remarkably accurate system. Generated by who? The common user. The real genius is not the information contained within Wikipedia, but the concept of a Wiki.

Some people are so enamored with Wikis that they are not being used proper. Wikis are only to be used when you want a large number of people to contribute to a final product. As shown by such wonderful spin-offs like:
  • Adobe Labs cut 1/2 of their support staff and just created a wiki. You have problems with an Adobe product. Not sure how to effectively use layers in photoshop? Check out this page.
  • Trip Advisor is a wiki put together by world travelers. Don't follow some guide that might get a kickback by Hotel x or y. what happens if the last travel guide was written 3 years ago? This is the place that will let you know what to look out for, where to eat and the hidden gems.
  • wikimapia This is a map feature that is just beginning where you can type in info about geographical features.
  • Wikihow is my favorite. it is the average person telling people how to... from how to make a mask out of tinfoil to changing the corroborator in your car. It totally rocks.
I guess this diatribe was to extol the virtues of how easy it is to contribute to the global community. To interact. In fact, the epitome of white tower knowledge, the Encyclopedia Brittanica is opening up a Wiki to add to their already very competent pages. Unlike Wikipedia, all the content will be read and edited before any changes are made.



I would like to note that I have not talked about blogging in regards to "live Joural, My space, Facebook etc." In that these are more private chat areas. Where as general Blogs (I.E. discussions about a news article) give instantaneous feedback and discourse on a specific topic. Thus the advent of blogs to sites like the New York Times, NPR etc. is awesome. Even many Blogger sites are open to the public and work wonderfully.

I belong to a number of Blogs where the discussions have lasted for days in an A-synchronous chat. It has been fabulous. My students love using Bogs as a forum for debate outside of the classroom.

What this is pointing back to are two main features:
1. The necessity for the Text book is next to nothing (i haven't used one in 10 years)
2. there are some standards on the web... once you learn how to do one thing, you can apply the same basic technique to other programs and the learning curve is quite fast. So interacting with the world is not only easy, but the fear factor is misplaced. There is no nasty rejection letter from an editor.

So, with the marrying of technology like:
Blogs,
Wikis
chat rooms
traditional searches
podcasts
Video
with the standard classroom one can create a very dynamic setting that the kids have a full hand in helping create. Learning is far more the way Dewy would have preferred. Kids are doing and while doing are learning. For, in the future computers are not going away and thus proficiency key.


taking technology to the next level. Since the advent of programs like Skype and oovoo VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is a reality. We can have free long distance calls with video and at the same time be sending documents and files back and forth.

there is also Webtv and other communication tools. The merger of animated and/or scripted communication rather than with real people. Is this the danger that befalls society? Continually the weakness of western civilization has been the over exertion of technology and resources with out first mastering what came before. The real wisdom of 1st nation peoples is that they mastered social interaction and interpersonal skills. They had a VERY high emotional Intelligence. Although "civilization" conquered those people physically. Will our own advancement be our demise?

Remember more than 50% of communication is non-verbal. one of the most important issues to human development long into adulthood is human touch. Can we really supplant that with vast banks of computers? Or will we take a step back and recognize the awesomeness of being able to take a class on Chinese and in the class talk with and see Chinese students who are studying English. But then realize when that awesomeness is over, a good beer and the breaking of bread with friends and family will always be more important to the human condition than anything the computer can give us.

with that I say lets see what else we can develop but keep the human spirit pure.

Thing 1.4 Avatars (the good the bad and the ugly) 6-19-08

After spending many hours running around Second Life, I am actually quite disappointed given the hype.

I have played a number of on-line simulations that use avatars. although second life is akin to a wiki in that content is generated by the users. Generally the content is either:
1. cars and airplanes (note picture)
2. sex
3. violence
4. or world creation

Now, I will return to the "Good" but for now I must rant for a moment.

Because second life has this really really cool feature called fly. there is really no reason to have any other mode of transportation. There are no barriers to where you can go. So the fact that region after region people are designing cars and airplanes and jet skis is a bit crazy. The other reason why it is crazy is for the same reason I am angry about Sex and Violence.

The issue around sex region creation is an individuals right. The problem I have it that you often don't know that is what your getting into until you have "teleported" to that region. Additionally and quite frankly, if your going to have animated characters have sex you might as well have animated characters that are far more lifelike.

The next section is about violence. Now I have have dabbled in WoW but I have played some other Avatar rendered games quite extensively(The Witcher, Titan Quest, Never Winter Nights, Elderscrolls III & IV, Imperia, Fallen Sword etc). Why someone would make a world that allows tons of creativity and imagination and try emulate games of such extreme development in both how "combat" works as well as superior animation is just plane stupid. Not to mention some of those games (like NWN) give you a the capability of generating your own "adventures" not quite as open as Second Life but similar.

Where Second life shines, but it never really embraces is its ability to "transport" people to new cultures and places. I went to a virtual D.C. that was terrible. It had almost nothing to do with the real D.C. If I had the time I am beyond confident that I could make a better D.C.

However, because of the HUGE and open licensing surrounding Second life there is a ton of potential. Either those that are using it are just hard for newbies to find and/or have not really emerged into this new environment.

The best Secondlife region was the NPR second life site. they rocked! The meet every friday and discuss the issues and there are learning stations around the region. If more regions could have this focus and they could work better on the interface socond life could really become a frightening alternative to life. Gulp!

But for me... as much as I love playing with the many Avitars I have had in the past and... um... well present. I will always enjoy a good beer and discussion that I can actually taste, hear and touch the person in question.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Thing 1: Create a Blog

O.k. so this part isn't new to me... so I am going to try and mess with the HTML coding and had in a hyperlinked caledar from google etc. In my other blog although super geeky, I have done some of these things before. I will put the link up but I warn you, this is all about D&D and other game related matters.

I figure if I can expand in the HTML part, then the blog pretty much becomes as personalized as it can be. I dont' know HTML so that will be quite the experience.

So here is the link to my other blogger site. Gulp. Don't Laugh

Just starting 23 things

This is the first post to make sure everything is working the way it is supposed to.

I have other blogs but they are for super geeky stuff that I don't really share with the general public :)