Ed's Tech Tips

 

The MHC Education Summit wiki web site is an interactive web site for the Mount Holyoke College Summit on Education for faculty, alumnae and students. Hopefully the site will be the vehicle for starting and continuing conversations about education before, during and after the Summit. So often, a conference generates a lot of excitement and enthusiasm that unfortunately fades shortly after the event ends. The wiki can function as a collaborative conduit for sustaining a dialog between alumnae who are educators, college faculty, and students who are aspiring to be teachers. Teaching methods, projects and internships may evolve from the summit and be shared via the wiki. Additionally, this wiki offers examples of various open source or free web 2.0 technologies that teachers may find useful in their classrooms.

The summit wiki is  built with the open source community edition of Mindtouch Deki. It is a powerful wiki platform that allows for integration or mash-ups of other web services, such as, Google maps, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, Flickr videos, embedded PDF's and much more. At the same time, the wiki is very easy to use with true WYSIWYG editing, extensive search capabilities, revision tracking, page printing, built-in scripting, page level security settings, file attachments and easy to following menu navigation. Mindtouch Deki significantly lowers the barrier of entry for sharing and collaborating on content on a web site.The school district of Dearborn, Michigan (which is very aggressive in their use of web technology) is seriously considering switching to it to allow all schools to have their own wiki web sites thus allowing all teachers, students and parents the ability to contribute to the web sites, instead of the current 1-3 persons per school that update their respective web sites via Adobe Contribute.

In addition, the wiki will allow alumnae that could not attend in person to particpate remotely in online discussions. The keynote presentation and panel discussions are going to be web cast live via video streams using Stickam that will be embedded into the wiki. The  Stickam web casts also feature live text chat sessions. The live video feeds will be recorded and embedded into the wiki to allow for viewing after the event.

On Friday June 25th, a young 47 year-old Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon Professor in computer science, passed away after a 22 month battle with cancer. It was a battle he waged with style, grace, humor and forever the teacher, he used it as a opportunity to teach us how to better live life. He leaves behind a wife, three young children and a legacy that they can be proud of. It's not many people that can say that they achieved many of their childhood dreams and then went on to enable others to achieve their own dreams.  

Randy gave his last lecture at the university on Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed crowd. In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture. Below is the video that millions have since viewed and has been turned into a book which provides more details and back story. Thanks to Google for hosting the entire 1 hour and 16 minute video - yes, take the time to watch the whole thing, you won't regret it. I highly recommend both. We would all be better off to follow his example.

Part of Randy's legacy is the Alice Project. Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. It happens to be appealing to female students, because it helps them focus on successful storytelling and learn about programming without realizing that they are doing so. Many colleges and high schools have adopted the program. It would be cool to see Mount Holyoke College adopt it as well. For more information and FREE download: http://www.alice.org

 

I listen to a number of podcasts and most of them are geared toward technology as is PRI's The World Technology Podcast , but this one stands out. This is how they describe themselves:

The World's weekly Technology Podcast brings you all the latest and greatest news from the fields of global technology and science.  The World is a US-based international news and analysis program co-produced by the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH Public Radio in Boston.

I put the emphasis on "global" and "international" because that is where the big difference is with this program. You get a global perspective. For example, many tech pod-casts reported and commented on Bill Gates stepping down from the day-to-day operation sf Microsoft. Many pundits focused on the history of Microsoft, the pros and cons of Gate's leadership and they speculated on the future of the company. However, PRI is the only one that went outside of the U.S. and asked people what they thought of Bill Gates. I was surprised to learn that he is greatly admired and respected in China, despite the fact that many computers there are running counterfeit copies of Windows. 

On the same show I learned about an obscure new language called NOL, which strives to become an Esperanto for the Internet and Cell Phone age. It features a compact grammar and vocabulary that is ideally suited for text messaging, while at the same time bridging the cultural barriers of language.

The show just celebrated it's 200th episode. It is very informative and entertaining. While it has not garnered the same popularity CNet's Buzz Out Loud or This Week In Technology, I encourage you to check it out. I think as Americans, we would benefit from a more global perspective.

It has been said that "information is power" and now sites like OpenCongress are utilizing Web 2.0 Internet technologies to shift power to the masses and bring about a revolution in participatory politics by making it very easy to learn and follow what is happening in the halls of Congress. That may sound like a lot of hyperbole, but I do not think it is. The Internet is changing our democracy and hopefully for the better.

I've written about Barack Obama's web site and how effectively it has been used to create an online community that has motivated him to not accept public financing for his presidential campaign, because he has been able to reach out to millions of small donors via the Web.

From the OpenCongress About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.

Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

There is even a Facebook Application to help you track bills through the House and Senate.

 

 

 

Last month (I cannot believe how quickly the past month has gone by) the Alumnae Association hosted  an Alumnae Summit which was a gathering of the alumnae volunteers that sit on various boards and committees of the Association. One of the items I developed for the  club committees was a Google map that identified the locations of all of the domestic and international clubs. There is a sidebar that list the clubs in alphabetical order. Click a club name and the location marker is highlighted and a pop-up balloon list the contact person and a club web site link if applicable. 

One of the coolest things about the map is what you do not see. The data for the map is listed in a Google spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet is updated, so is the map. Also, the spreadsheet can be updated via a form that can be delivered via email or embedded on a web page.  Check it out on the clubs overview page. It looks best in Firefox, OK in Internet Explorer, but does not work correctly with Safari.

 

 During Easter week, Spring Break here at Mount Holyoke College, seven students, seven alumnae and two Association staff went down to New Orleans and volunteered their time with Habitat for Humanity to help rebuild homes in the area devastated by Katrina. I created a blog for them that you can check out here.

I sent along a notebook and a couple cameras in hopes that they could blog during the week and they did post a few articles. I had configured the ability to recieve posts from mobile devices, such as a camera cell phone hoping that someone could post directly from the work sites. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

By the way, you cannot use Sprint phones to send email with photo attachments. They force you to use their Picture Mail service which costs $5 extra a month. Not only that you cannot easily post plain text email messages because there is no means to create a carriage return, at least not on my Motorola Razr 3M phone. The user name, blog ID and password have to be on separate lines, but I could not figire out how to do. I even tried to do it using the Google Gmail client and it was not possible - at least in a method that was easily visible to me. Post from my Sony Ericsson with Cingular was very easy. Not so with Spint. But I am on a tangent...

I did help create a post trip blog posting and added some photos and videos to the article. Hopefully there will be more post trip reflection posts. I also uploaded about 155 photos to our galleries and Flickr. There were over 450 pictures I had to go through. Many were very good. They captured the beauty, as welll as, the desolation of the area. 

FLOSS stands for "Free Libre Open Source Software" and is one of many regular podcasts that are part of the TWiT network produced by Leo Laporte and friends. Leo was a host on the now defunct TechTV Screen Savers show and hosts a wide variety of weekly tech orientated podcasts. My favorites are This Week In Tech, MacBreak Weekly, Jumping Monkeys (tech and kids), Windows Weekly and FLOSS. You can easily subscribe via iTunes, which is what I do and I listen either while I am working or at home doing various chores around the house with my iPod.

The shows are both informative and entertaining, although I do get annoyed sometimes with all of the talk about Twitter which I think is really only popular among the commentators and pundits on the show and not with real people trying to get real things done. Who has time to read inane chatter? But when you talk about getting things done I think wikis (may favorite is Deki Wiki) are a great tool and the inventor of the wiki is Ward Cunningham. He wrote the first wiki in Perl  to help keep track of and share ideas with is co-workers back in 1995. Since then wikis have been written in almost every computer language and have given birth to one of the most popular web sites on the planet, Wikipedia. 

Not only is Ward the father of the wiki but is heavily involved in the extreme or agile programming movement. It is a software engineering methodlogy intended to lead to a development process that is more responsive to customer needs ( "agile" ) than traditional methods, while creating software of better quality. Deki Wiki is developed with the "agile" programming approach and features an update or release almost every month.  

Besides all of that, Ward comes across as a real down-to-earth humble nice guy. 

If you are interested in technology and like to listen to hour long conversations (ala Charlie Rose style) then check out TWiT. 

 

 

M.J., a faithful reader of this blog, sent me a "tech tip" and I thought I would share it with you.

Upcoming (upcoming.yahoo.com). It's a great way to list events (either public or private) and keep track of things you're interested in (either by checking "attending" or "watching". You can see who else is in each of these columns for events. I really like that you can export events to your calendar (iCal, Outlook, Google, Yahoo or 30 Boxes) with just a click or two. Upcoming also integrates with Flickr, since they're both Yahoo products. I haven't used this feature yet, but after an event everyone can link their photos of that event to the Upcoming listing.

I learned about this from my friends in London where it's used quite a lot. There's not much action in the US outside of big cities. Hampshire County has only about a dozen upcoming events. But maybe it will catch on here. It could be a useful tool for the Alumnae Association groups around the country.

Thanks for the tip M.J.

The latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version is almost ready for prime time. It is now in Beta 4 and there are some marked improvements:

One of the most notable improvements is performance and memory usage. Since version 2 of Firefox, after a while it would become non-responsive and I would have to force-quit or terminate the browser. I use Firefox on a Mac, but I heard the same complaints from Windows users. There were memory leaks in Firefox that were so bad it would eventually consume up 1.5 GB of real memory on my system and slow everything else to a crawl until I killed and restarted it. Grant it I am a heavy browser user. I always have multiple tabs open and a lot of extensions installed. I use my browser to access and edit wiki's, blogs, email, Flickr and Google Docs. The browser is the one application I start and end my day with and use all of the time. I started using Safari for sites that I did not need Firefox's javascript compatibility or extensions for, but it is cumbersome to be switching back and forth between browsers. Firefox 3 appears to be handling memory usage much better, as well as, just rendering web pages faster.

The new full page zoom is a great accessibility feature. From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the entire layout, including text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site. Previously, you could increase text size, but if the layout was not fluid, it could get distorted. 

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Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone/iTouch last week. It is a pretty much a complete package. It is based on Xcode the same development tools used for Mac OS X. It gives you access to all of the hardware of the iPhone including the camera and accelerometer - the device in the phone that responds to tilting the phone. There is even a iPhone simulator so that you can test your apps on a virtual iPhone which allows you to develop for it without having to own one. It even allows you to simulate the pinching touch feature. This opens the device to some cool gaming possibilities.I won't go into detail because other sites have done that, as well as, Apple's own pages dedicated to the SDK. I'll just relate some issues from my personal experience.

First, why is this cool or important. Well, initially it appeared that Apple was not going to open the platform for outside developers, but now it has and it opens the door to thousands of applications. If you have used a Palm you know that there are many possibilities for small applications on a portable device and even more so on the iPhone because of it is screen resolution, multimedia playback capabilities, touch interface and connectivity to the Internet. Applications will range from currency converters to pharmacological encyclopedias and beyond. ReadWriteWeb offers some more sophisicated possibilties.

Also, the cost of entry is fairly low. The SDK is free. It is a 2 GB download that expands to take up 5 GB of space. It is not compatible with PowerPC processors, which I'm a little miffed about. It  only works on Macs with Intel processors. Like other features in Leopard, the PowerPC processor is not fully supported, but that was inevitable with the move to Intel's dual core technology. The G5 and lessor PowerPc chips just cannot keep up with the demands of the newer software. But, I'm on a tangent...

While the cost of the software is $0, the developer program cost $99 and $299 for proprietary, in-house developers. Applications can only be made available through Apple's App store which will be available on the iPhone and iTunes.  The developer sets the selling price. Apple takes it cut of 30%, but handles all related costs of distributing the application, including credit card processing and bandwidth.If you are giving away your application there is no cost beyond the developer fee. I think it sounds like a pretty good deal, especially for small developers to get their products in front of thousands of potential customers.   (More)

On the weekend of February 29 - March 3, Mount Holyoke College was host to the Future in Communications 2008 Conference where 65 alums and 25 students gathered together to discuss the future of careers in journalism and communications. You can read more about it on the College's News & Event page. I attended the keynote speeches, because I was asked to record the audio but I had wanted to hear Elizabeth Spiers anyway. She has been involved in a number of successful blogs, including being one of the founding editors of Gawker. I am glad I was able to attend despite having a horrible cold because the talks were very interesting.

I borrowed a Marantz digital recorder (PMD660) from the Communications department. It is the same model used by NPR field reporters. It has a variety of options and recorded straight to MP3 format. I was able to plug into the sound system at Gamble auditorium for the first speaker,  Priscilla Painton ’80, and get a perfect signal. Unfortunately, we did not arrange for microphones for the audience during the question and answer session. The questions could not be heard and they were not repeated so I had to cut out that entire segment of the presentation. I probably could have plugged my ac Book into the sound system and recorded straight into Garageband. Instead I connected the recorder via an USB cable and copied the files over which I edited in Garageband '08 which includes podcast specific features. 

On the second talk I was not able to  plug into the sound system at Willits. Instead I set up a microphone next to the podium alongside the  sound system microphone and that worked out great for the most part, too. We still had the same problem with the Q&A session at the end of the talk where we had no mics for the audience. There were not as many questions, but the answers that the speaker, Elizabeth Spiers, gave pretty much stood on their own so I left them in. She spells out her recipe for a successful blog. It basically boils down to finding your niche that you are passionate and knowledgeable about because you are going to have to write 6-10 relevant articles every day. 

The audio files are hosted on a separate page on the Alumnae Asociation web site. You can use the audios players on the web page or download the files to your MP3 player.  If you have any interest in journalism or web communications I think you will enjoy the speeches.

 

 

Webkit is the open source engine used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail and many other Mac OS X applications.  You can download nightly development builds of the project. The current version is the fastest browser avilable on the Mac. Even beating Firefox 3. Some tests indicate that it is two and a half times faster than the current version of Safari.

Keep in mind that this is a development build and may not be entirely stable. If that is a concern then wait for the official software update from Apple. But if you cannot wait then you can download it now. It looks and feels just like Safari, except it is called Webkit. It is available for Mac and Windows.

While it does not have the add-ons that Firefox offers it has the speed. So much so that if I do not need a Firefox extension or compatibility and just want to browse the web I turn to Safari/Webkit.

In a previous post I praised Deki Wiki, the awesome wiki application platform from Mindtouch, which we use for an Intranet here at the Alumnae Association. Now I have put my money where my mouth is and developed a web site of my own with Deki Wiki (Deki is Japanese for "smart" and Wiki is Hawiian for "fast" ). The site is called "You Know You Are From..." and is located at youknowyouarefrom.wik.is.

It is a wiki which celebrates the uniqueness of the different corners of the world or at least the United States of America, for now until additional countries are added.

In an age of franchises, fast food chains, big box mega stores, media conglomerates, look-alike shopping malls and the general omnipresent sameness there is still a lot that makes us stand apart from the rest of the crowd. The stuff that makes places special. Things like food, names, accents, pronunciations, attitudes, jokes, stores, restaurants, personalities and one of a kind landmarks. Unfortunately many of these  things only continue to exist in our memories, so the purpose of the site is to gather those memories and observations in a web based collective scrap book.

Take a look at the Maryland and Boston pages as examples. If you are from either of these places some of those items may have made you nostalgic or laugh out loud. If you are from somewhere else, you have similar memories or knowledge of unique characteristics of your hometown, city, state or even country.
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Japan is a nation of readers. Many workers who commute via bullet trains, buses and subways spend the travel time reading and it is not all light reading. A new translation of Dostoevsky's classic The Brothers Karamazov, released in July, has surprised its publisher by selling more than 300,000 copies already. However, a 142 page hardback book about a high-school romance written by a 21 year old first novelist has caused the bigger fuss. It has sold 400,000 copies and was composed on a cell phone.

"I typed it all on my mobile phone," Rin explains matter-of-factly over the same device. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long. I never planned to be a novelist, if that's what you'd call me, so I'm still quite shocked at how successful it's turned out."

So successful that one volume of her book, which began its life in a series of instalments uploaded to an internet site and sent out to the phones of thousands of young subscribers, has sold more than 420,000 copies since it was converted into hardcopy format in January.

Rin is a nursery school teacher from Kokura, in Japan's south and is not the only one writing a best selling novel on the commute to and from work. Book sales last year showed that five of the top ten sellers, in Japan, were mobile phone novels. Furthermore, the top three were all written by first-time novelists on this cellular format. Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold more than 1.2 million copies since being released in book format last October.

Read more in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Since Japan is usually ahead of the U.S. in terms of technology trends, cell phone novels may loom on the horizon for young American readers.  

Time Warner, the parent company of HBO,  announced that the premium cable company that produces hit iconic shows, such as, The Sopranos, Curb Your Ethusiasm and Deadwood is finally going to make it's shows available online for free. I was excited when I first heard the news. I thought I would finally be able to watch the rest of Deadwood (an awesome show if you like westerns) and the last season of The Sopranos. Unfortunately, there are a few obstacles in my way which quickly dimmed my excitement:

First, they are going to test the service in Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The timetable for roll out to the rest of the nation has not yet been announced. You would think that steaming video technology had reached a point that a limited geographical test was not required. Look at all of the major networks, Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. However, HBO is doing things a little differently than anyone else. 

Although they say the service is "free", that's not exactly the case. You need to already be a subscriber to HBO and you can only access the broadband service through your local cable provider. For instance, if you use Comcast for your cable television service and are a HBO subscriber and use Comcast as your Internet service provider then you will be able to get HBO online. However, if you use another Internet service provider, such, as Verizon DSL you are out of luck. 

If that was not bad enough, HBO Broadband (the name of the new service) only works on Windows computers. Netflix is guilty of the same blunder. Come on guys, can't you figure out a way to make these videos available for Mac users, too?!? 

HBO should sell it's shows on iTunes. That way they would be available to everyone (Windows and Mac users, as well as, Linux users via Wine or Codeweavers CrossOver) and they could make a ton of money. I am not one to usually buy television shows, but I might make the exception for HBO's shows because they are really that good and I want to be able to watch them when I want to.