Archive for November 2005

Recording Streaming Media for Class

Posted by: rkassissieh
November292005

Every month or so, a group as small as a single class or as large as the entire school watches a student or teacher attempt to support a presentation with a streaming media clip from the web. Often, the media sputters and stalls in front of everyone, ruining the presentation. I finally poked around the web to find software that would capture a streaming media presentation into a complete file. I found WMRecorder, which has both Windows Media and RealMedia applications for capturing streaming presentations. I gave this to a student, who used it successfully to capture video for an Amnesty International presentation tomorrow. This software looks pretty good, but I would like to know of free alternatives, including one for streaming QuickTime files. Let me know if you have used others before.

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(Not) Teaching PowerPoint

Posted by: rkassissieh
November242005

I taught two classes on supporting oral presentations with PowerPoint for a history teacher on Friday. Though PowerPoint is a visual aid designed to support oral presentations, too many users let it drive their presentations. I emphasized three principles:

1. Write separate speaking notes for your presentation.
2. Reading from your bullet points makes you a talking head.
3. Include multimedia content that supports your arguments.

It is ironic to be invited to teach a class on PowerPoint yet spend most of my time deemphasizing the role of PowerPoint in an oral presentation. This underscores how far we have to go in the use of technology as a tool to support educational endeavors.

I will post my supporting PowerPoint presentation once I remove some fair-use copyrighted content from it!

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Oh Dock, How You've Changed!

Posted by: rkassissieh
November242005

Open source and Web 2.0 applications have given my dock a facelift within just the past year. New arrivals include NetNewsWire, Sunbird, Cyberduck, Smultron, Skype, and Dashboard.

dock1

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dock3

After years of perfect happiness using Dreamweaver as my PERL editor and FTP tool, I am trying out Cyberduck and Smultron, both of which are free and open source. They are integrated enough that hitting the Edit button in Cyberduck opens the file in Smultron, and then saving the file in Smultron triggers file upload in Cyberduck. Smultron supports PERL syntax color coding, whereas Dreamweaver does not.

I had become a little tired of Dreamweaver's FTP operations. Dreamweaver 8's background FTP feature should have made this better, but for some reason the program now sends more commands than it used to, making file transfer operations take even longer. Yet, Dreamweaver is still better when switching between WYSIWYG web page editing and script coding and runs better on my PC at work. It's faster under Windows than Mac and file transfer isn't a problem when your servers are on campus!

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"Open" Document Format

Posted by: rkassissieh
November232005

Microsoft has announced its intention to "open" its document file formats. Will this allow alternative word processing programs to fully read and write current Word formats? Maybe. Will it release the DOC specification to the open-source community? No. Is this a political move to placate open standards proponents and compete with OpenOffice? Probably. What does it mean for the end-user? Who knows.

Update: legal analysis

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OpenSourceMac.org

Posted by: rkassissieh
November202005

OpenSourceMac.org clearly presents most of the best open source software projects for Macintosh. Some of my favorites are here, such as Camino and Celestia. I also learned about some new applications that I will have to try, such as Cyberduck (FTP client) and Vienna (RSS reader). While shareware stalwarts NetNewsWire and Fetch work well for me, free works better, especially when others ask for recommendations.

Referred by: Tim Wilson

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Risks of Word Metadata

Posted by: rkassissieh
November082005

This excerpt from the New York Times speaks both to the risks of hidden information in Word files and politics of peer-to-peer file sharing.

California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, floated a letter calling peer-to-peer file-sharing software - long the bane of the entertainment industry's interests - "a dangerous product." But a peek at the document's properties revealed that someone dubbed "stevensonv" had a hand in its creation.

Vans Stevenson, a senior vice president with the Motion Picture Association of America, said later that he had offered input on the document but had not written it.

"California AG Plays Sock Puppet to the MPAA," was one blogger's response.


Source: New York Times

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