The World Affairs Council of Northern California has launched a podcast of its speaker series. WACSF has maintained an audio archive for years, so this is not new territory for them, but it does make it a lot easier to receive new broadcasts. The above link contains subscription information and a link that will automatically bring you the iTunes subscription page. You still have to click the Subscribe button to set up automatic download of new programs.
Thanks to Tim Wilson, I have found a terrific collection of presentation tips at Presentation Zen. The site teaches by example, including wonderfully specific screen shots and stories. Particularly good posts include The size of your deck is not important, Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic, and “The Lessig Method.” From author Garr Reynolds’ main site, I have posted Top Ten Slide Tips to our PowerPoint support page.
This semester, both Zach and Nasif have set good examples for how to use presentation software at ASM. However, PowerPoint inertia is extremely powerful, and most students lean on their visual aids for support. Early instruction and lots of practice may provide the solution.
People are taking a while to understand the Wikipedia concept. The recent Siegenthaler case points out one common misunderstanding, as a practical joke on a friend turned into an accusation of defamation.
It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.
A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.
Source: N.Y. Times (registration required)
Our students are also learning the Wikipedia concept through experimentation, fortunately with benign consequences. One day last week, a group of students were looking at Wikipedia and discussing the editing option. One asked, “They review new entries before they appear, right?” Another student decided to test this theory. She edited the entry for George Washington to include the line, “Note: George Washington was actually born a woman.” To the group’s surprise, the edit went live immediately! Lesson learned.
How often does this sort of modification happen, and how long it takes to correct each one? I located the student’s entry two days later and found that her edit had lasted all of one minute before someone reverted the article to its previous version. I then browsed further and found that this was happening several times a day. Here are some of the more choice entries from the past few days.
George Washington was obsequious, clairvoyant, and purple.
An interesting fact that most people don’t know is that George Washington is a known homosexual,i.e., he likes to have anal sex with men.
George Washington is a Communist bastard.
Washington first gained prominence by sucking like the loser he was
Washington was part of the economic and gay elite
George washington was a pothead who also was known to do crack cocain. He was gay.
Unfortunately, his daughter Emily Hollander tarnished his family reputation. A stripper with a serious heroine addiction, Ms. Hollander had 36 husbands before the age of 6 and a half. She managed to negotiate with the Southern planters to keep slavery intact, thus causing the Civil War, and set off World War II by ranting to Hitler about the “annoying Jews who sell her expensive anti-chlamydia drugs.” In the end, Ms. Hollander left 428 illegitimate children and had caused 7.28 major wars. In Vietnam, she fought valiantly but was gunned down not by bullets, but by gonorrhea that one of the Vietnamese soldiers gave her.
I’ve had several reactions to these posts. First off, I was alarmed by the frequency of homophobic posts. Second, these modifications occurred at the rate of a few per day, yet all were removed within a minute of being posted. This suggests that the erroneous posts were read by very few users, and serious readers outnumber jokers by many times. However, this is the George Washington entry, and the Siegenthaler case points out that less scrutinized modifications may remain online for longer, even indefinitely.
Edit history may also contain the shadow of a political tug-of-war. Note the following consecutive edits:
Though Washington was not a cruel man, the enslaved people at Mount Vernon were poorly housed and clothed. Many lived in flimsy shacks and had to steal burlap sacks to repair their clothes.
He was noteworthy, however, for the humane treatment of his slaves and for his growing unease with the “[[peculiar institution]]”.
The latter opinion remained as the majority opinion on this issue (though likely not the last word!).
Students use Wikipedia as they would any other online encyclopedia, usually without critical comparison to other sources. I would like to organize an activity within one of our courses in which students compare a Wikipedia entry to other popular reference sources and draw their own conclusions about the accuracy of the information presented there. As other bloggers have noted, editing the entry to improve its accuracy could even become part of the activity.
Safari, Apple’s web browser, is not fully compatible with Moodle. Specifically, Moodle users lose the WYSIWYG toolbar and get a less functional file upload field when running Safari. The workaround is to use another browser such as Firefox. Why does this problem exist? A little searching on the Internet reveals that Moodle uses a tool called HTMLarea to create the text formatting area, and Safari does not support this. There are other WYSIWYG toolbars out there, so either Safari will provide support for a different one in a future release or Moodle will change its tune and provide support for Safari. Most Mac users at our school are not wedded to Safari, since it only just surpassed Internet Explorer in reliability a couple of years ago. They are quite happy to switch to Firefox when recommended.
More information from Dave Hyatt
Dave,
Looks like some nice improvements. One of the issues that I hoped was to be fixed in 2.0 (and seemingly 1.3) was the use of WYSIWYG editors like HTMLarea. I thought I read that this was a feature that was to be added. We use Moodle, and OSS Course Management System on 10.3 Server and it uses HTMLarea for WYSIWYG editing. Seems there was some discusion on the webcore-dev list about it back last fall.
http://lists.apple.com/archives/webcore-dev/2004/Oct/msg00005.html
What is the status on adding support for it?
Thanks! Tim
Tim -
Re: HTMLarea … as far as I can tell, the project doesn’t show a lot of get-up-and-go as a project (can’t speak to Moodle), so even if Safari would be good to go for WYSIWYG editing now or in the near future, odds are that HTMLarea would likely not be updated to reflect that.
I could be wrong, but I haven’t seen many signs of life for many months with regard to HTMLarea development. There’s greater likelihood of other WYSIWYGs adding Safari support … though that may not be of much help if Moodle is tied to HTMLarea and there’s no way to wedge another editing interface in its place.
Posted by . at April 16, 2005 05:06 PM
Barbara Gangley writes eloquently about finishing a college English course in a manner that reduces stress and promotes reflection. She changes the semester-end activity from summative evaluation to formative exercise. Barbara concludes that this type of finish reduces burnout and promotes enthusiasm for learning.
Barbara then reflects on the learning activities she designed this semester, including recording writing ideas in spoken form, creating stories with images instead of words, and blogging to promote a community of writers. She sees different kinds of learners benefitting from this approach and the activities promoting learning about the writing process.
Not only do I appreciate this thoughtful approach to teaching English, but I am also reminded of work on learning profiles and differentiated instruction. Teachers often find technology useful to support these sorts of learning activities.
Our big server upgrade is coming up in just a couple of weeks. Our intrepid network administrator has chosen Christmas week to take down the old servers and bring up the new servers in their place. Exchange is projected to be down for a couple of days, the admin servers for the better part of a week, and the academic side of the network for at least a week, if not longer. Why perform a server migration halfway through a school year? It appears to be the time when the least users are active on the systems. There is actually quite a lot of administrative, teacher planning, and student email activity during the summer. A network migration would be more disruptive then than it will be during Christmas week.
Of course, the pressure will be on us to bring the servers back as quickly as possible. Note that we made this more difficult for ourselves by choosing to change our network structure. If all we were doing was to upgrade the servers, then the migration would be a lot more seamless, involving only data migration.
We are nearing the end of the semester, and as usual, online activity is picking up on our forums. At first glance, this seems paradoxical: the students have more work to do, so they engage in more online discussions? The solution appears tied to students’ work habits. They are relentless multitaskers who break up the monotony of reviewing readings with online chatter in several forms at the same time. They spend more time at their desks, therefore they spend more time online.
TechSoup has published an excerpt from an Idealware survey of online donation services for nonprofits. It goes into much more detail than I’m capable of and reviews a dozen online services. I first wrote about my experiences with online giving here.
iPodLinux epitomizes the best of open-source intentions. Preserving your Apple iPod installation, you may install Linux on the side and add a new level of open-source, customizable functionality to your iPod. While the additional tools do not include much for the average non-gamer, the potential for a wider range of iPod applications is outstanding. Please sync with my Sunbird!
eSchoolNews reports
At least half of the nation’s higher-education classrooms will be equipped with digital projectors, control systems, audio or video conferencing equipment, or other audio-visual (AV) technology within the next five years…
The same thing is happening at UHS. Our new building on Sacramento St. will include a data projector, control panel, and speakers in each classroom. The same is true for remodeling classrooms in the main campus. Within two years, we will have A/V systems in all of our classrooms.
Support for A/V systems in classrooms starts with teachers but does not end there. Data projectors are more securely fastened to a difficult-to-reach part of the room than any other A/V device. They also solve the problem of TV carts clogging the hallways and violating fire hazards. Finally, they are multipurpose devices, suitable for all kinds of computer and video presentations.
Now that we have about 15 setups in our school, the maintenance needs of these systems have become clearer. Projector air filters needs to be cleaned regularly, as often as every few months in a dusty environment. The devices also need manufacturer service a lot more often that I had imagined would be the case. We are acquiring a spare mounting bracket so that a loaner may immediately be put in place when a projector must be sent out for service.
As recently as last year, I did not have to concern myself often with projector maintenance and repair. Now I need to count on it, in terms of time, equipment, and budget.
[Edit 12/9/2005]
One more thought. There has been some listserv discussion recently regarding running video over Ethernet to data projectors. Since the network cards increase projector cost by a few hundred per unit, I have decided to wait until the technology is proven. I bet that video over wireless will be much improved not too long from now, eliminating the need to use wires at all. In the meantime, we will use video cables and remote control technology if we choose to display student screens on data projectors.
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
@kassissieh on Twitter
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