Art. Education. Technology.
… but still darned fun. We got to play with “Boomwhackers” at the recent DEN NI thanks to Paula White and I recorded a couple short clips with my own new toy.
I think the video could have been better, but the audio’s half decent.
OK, Personal Learning Network, I’d like to run an idea past you.
In the past I’ve made attempts to get my Art Club members blogging, but never got a lot of significant buy-in. This was partially because (following my ADD nature) I kept introducing the students to so many different media and projects that we spent very little time in front of a computer.
This is not a complaint. I made my choice for where to devote my time and energy, and I got good results from those projects. But now I’d like to revisit this newfangled blogging thing and see where it takes me.
So here’s my idea: Every time the Art Club meets I want them to write a blog post. Some might be critiques of the artwork of others, some might be explanations of their own artwork (scanned or photographed and placed on the blog, of course…), and some might be responses to other blog posts. These will be 3rd through 6th graders (maybe just 5th & 6th graders), so the blog posts will be moderated, but just like last year’s theme was photography, this year’s theme will be blogging.
I might include other things along the way - maybe some movie or image editing with either built-in software or free websites, but I don’t want to do any project that would keep a student from writing something every week.
So what do you think? Is this a god idea? Bad? Is there anything you’d add or leave out?
Warning: The following podcast contains words which, when placed in a particular order, can be used to convey ideas. People who are set in their ways should listen at their own discretion.
So this weekend I actually got caught up on my audio podcasts. This was no small achievement, as I had several gigabytes of downloaded but unplayed podcasts on my hard drive before I went to the DEN National Institute, and while there I didn’t really listen to any of them until after I got back home.
That being said, I still have 43 video podcasts waiting for me to watch them. There was a time when video podcasting was unheard of, due to a combination of bandwidth, storage, and equipment costs. Times have changed since then, and while audio podcasts still outnumber their video cousins, there seem to be a lot more .mp4 files showing up in my podcatcher these days.
Unfortunately for me, my method of experiencing these podcasts hasn’t changed much at all. I mostly play them when I’m in the car, playing video games, doing dishes, researching art lessons, folding laundry, and playing video games - you know, activities where my eyes are required to be actively engaged in something other than watching video. It’s this ability to multi-task that drew me in part to podcasting in the first place.
But with video - good video - your attention is demanded. You might still be able to multi-task, but as you can’t look at two things as well as one you’ll always be missing something.
And that’s my inspiration for this episode - a comparison of the pros and cons of video and audio formats.
Cost
Audio podcasts have a much lower entry cost, both for creating them and carrying them on portable devices. I can spend $50 or less and get a half decent mp3 player, but it won’t do video at that price. Add to that the fact that all I need is a phone to record an episode and I don’t even need a computer with a working microphone to get started.
Video podcasts have gotten cheaper over the years (due in no small part to the iPod’s video capabilities and competitors’ desire to give more value for a lower price), with portable video players selling for $100 or less. Recording equipment is coming down in price too, with decent digital video cameras selling for $200 or less. Digital still cameras are actually able to record half decent video nowadays, and let’s face it, lots of laptops have built in cameras so you might not even have to buy anything new at all.
Work Load
Audio is, in my opinion, easier to edit than video. A lot easier. I can very easily remove hums, haws, ers, ums, yawns, and so on without the listener ever knowing those things were in there, provided there are no visual cues. When I cut something out of video using the same process, you notice. Yes, there are ways to cover these things up, but they’re not as simple to do as the tried and true “select, delete, and move on” method of editing audio.
Of course I suppose you could always go with the “I don’t edit my podcasts” method that some people have adopted, but I’m not willing to go there … yet.
Multi-Tasking
I’ve already covered this a little bit. When recording or listening to audio, it’s very easy to be doing something else at the same time. With video this is only possible if you don’t care much for at least one of the things that’s demanding your attention, and I for one don’t want to put the extra work into a video podcast if no one’s going to watch it.
Wow, I’m really hammering the video format in this episode, aren’t I? With all of these drawbacks, is there any reason to choose video over audio? You bet there is!
Multiple Learning Styles
Using an audio only format appeals the most to people who learn that way, but some of us (myself included) are visual thinkers. We can still digest information by hearing it, but it’s so much easier if you show us as well.
And by “show,” I mean it. Talking heads add very little to a presentation, but you can still insert slides from a PowerPoint, images of examples, and the like to keep your viewer’s interests. It’s true that many of the video podcasts I’ve made myself had that very problem (even if the times I waxed theatric helped a little bit), but I eventually came to realize that my audience wasn’t getting much more out of it through the video I was including.
That’s why I’m back to audio only for the most part, saving video for special occasions. I think the only reason I got away with what I was doing was because video podcasts were still somewhat new at the time, and the “wow, this is new!” factor gave me a bit of an edge.
The problem is, newness doesn’t last.
Now there are people out there that are doing it right. If you ever get a chance to see one of Lawrence Lessig’s presentations you’ll see what I mean. They’re simple, true, but every slide reinforces the message he’s trying to convey.
A recent presentation on the culture of YouTube (found via Will Richardson) would make another excellent, if a bit long, video podcast. There’s a lot of talking heads in it, but the scenes are varied, mixed with images and video from a variety of sources, and even the inserted still images move across the screen in a way to support his message.
Warning: If you’re sick of hearing about micro-blogs like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Plurk, today’s podcast might not be for you.
Those of you who’ve been listening for a while (at least since show 128) may recall how enthusiastic I was over a website called Twitter. I found micro-blogging to be incredibly addictive in spite of its 140 character limit because the conversations were worthwhile. I quickly established a PLN (or Personal Learning Network) of fellow educators and thoroughly enjoyed the learning (and joking around) that ensued.
Then Jaiku came along, and I hoped with all my heart that the people in my PLN would all jump ship and move over to there. Alas, while some did, most didn’t bother, so I eventually abandoned Jaiku and reluctantly returned to Twitter.
Fast forward to the creation of Pownce, and history repeats itself.
I loved Pownce for many reasons, most of which I won’t go over here. It’s coolest feature however was the ability to have threaded conversations. Reading through the posts of everyone I’m following on Twitter is like standing in the middle of a crowded room. You hear snippets, but not always a complete conversation.
Ok, usually not. The problem was while I would often see people responding to other Twitter-ers, I wouldn’t see what was being responded to unless I was also following that other person. Through the creative use of putting “@” in front of user names I could find that individual, but if they were prolific with their tweets then it would still be hard to follow the conversation.
And remember, it was conversations that made Twitter cool in the first place.
The best way to solve this seemed to be following everyone that everyone else in my PLN followed, but there is a physical and mental limit to how many people I can follow so I merely replaced one problem with another.
I still think Pownce is among the best micro-blog formats out there, but the only times my PLN moved over there were when Twitter was down. Granted, that meant they were there a lot, but never to stay. Most conversations on Pownce could be summarized as follows:
“Oh, Twitter’s down again.”
“Is Twitter up yet?”
“No. It’s so annoying that it’s down so often.”
“I know! I’m about ready to - hey, it’s back up!”
And that’s the last I would see of them on Pownce until the the next Twitter outage.
So once again, I abandoned a better service for Twitter. As much as I liked Pownce, I had to stay with my PLN.
And then came Plurk.
Plurk has a few annoying things about it, most notably a lack of text messaging support and a right-to-left scrolling “timeline,” but every post can receive threaded responses so my main problem with Twitter is already solved.
Plurk also has something called “karma.” This has nothing to do with reincarnation, it’s simply a score for how well you’re interacting with others. I’m not too certain about the algorithm used, but I do know that your score goes up more for posting only a few “plurks” that generate responses from others than it does from posting 1,000 “plurks” and getting few, if any, responses. Your karma can go up as you gain followers, but the method I’ve seen on Twitter of going through and following hundreds of people in an attempt to get them to follow you in return will actually hurt your score.
That’s something cool that I didn’t expect to see in a micro-blog. In my opinion one of the cancers of Web 2.0 sites has been the large number of people who treat it as simply a game where whomever has the most followers wins. I’d first heard of this happening on MySpace when a friend complained that her brother had more “friends” than she did, even though he didn’t really know most of them and she knew all of hers. (I think she wanted me to create an account so her score would go up by one … I still didn’t.) I’ve since seen this problem on Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Youtube, and even to a limited extent on Pownce.
But I’ve yet to se it on Plurk. They’ve essentially replaced one score, your number of followers, with another score, karma. There are still ways to game the system, I’m sure, but I’m not getting 20 friend requests a day from people who are already following over 1,000 others on this service, and I like it better that way. (I often block those people when I see them on Twitter.)
On top of that, Plurk’s karma score encourages more meaningful conversation than Twitter did. Posts itemizing everything you’re doing from minute to minute can actually lower your score, as you won’t get many responses to “Hey, I just made some hashbrowns.”
Plurk also has something else: Steve Dembo. Steve’s taken a liking to Plurk himself, and as a result many of those in my PLN have either made the switch or are now active in both. My one reason for staying on Twitter is gone. If I check only Plurk I feel that I have a sufficiently large and knowledgeable PLN.
Or do I? There are enough people who haven’t made the switch to make me wonder, so I did a little three part assessment of my PLNs on both services. Using Ping.fm I posted to both sites simultaneously, setting up a series of hoops to jump through.
Round 1: “Is this thing on?”
This was simply to test the waters to see who was not only listening, but willing to respond. I wasn’t too surprised that my first response came from someone on Twitter - after all, I have more followers there, so at any given time it’s more likely that someone’s loading their Twitter client right after I’ve posted something. What Twitter didn’t have was staying power. Responses there tapered off after only 6 responses out of 273 followers.
Plurk, on the other hand, had 18 different people respond out of a much smaller pool of 68 followers, some of them responding more than once.
These numbers included some people who were unbiased and used both services, and therefore responded using both services.
It should be noted that when I posted the round 1 results, at least two people on Twitter complained and more than one person on Plurk thought the result was very unexpected.
Round 1 Winner: Plurk
Round 2: “I have a question.” (a: Work b: Play)
One of the reasons for having a PLN is to use it as a resource when looking for answers. With that in mind, I asked two questions. The first one asked for useful online tutorials for the free, open source Photoshop replacement known as GIMP. Responses were limited to one on each side, but the one from Twitter was to a page that listed multiple tutorial sites, including the one that the Plurk responder provided.
My second question was for people to “waste my time” by letting me know what their favorite web based games were. Chris Craft posted a creative game involving Google searches on Twitter, but on Plurk the same question got me two very well designed Flash games and one reference to building up one’s karma score. Oh yeah, and someone complaining that after they read the answers they wasted some of their own time playing those games.
On top of that the conversation in that thread continued on Plurk even after I posted the results, hammering in the solid win for Plurk.
Round 2 Winner: Tie (a: Twitter, b: Plurk)
Round 3: “Convince me.”
For the third and final round I simply asked for people to tell me why their micro-blog of choice was better. I received just one answer on Twitter, though it was concerning Twitter’s compatibility with text messaging services so it was a darned good argument.
On Plurk I had several responses, ranging from short and sweet to links to full fledged blog posts on the subject.
Round 3 Winner: Plurk
So there you go, my take on the micro-blog battleground. I don’t expect Twitter to go away ay time soon, but apparently I’m getting a lot more out of Plurk than Twitter these days.
And hey, whether or not you agree with my somewhat subjective results, I’d love to hear your opinion in 140 characters or more. You could always leave a comment here, but I’d much rather see you write your own blog post or record your own podcast on the subject. If you link back to me when you post it, I’ll be sure to see it when I search Technorati or Google.
Academic Aesthetic 164: DEN NI 08
In today’s show I interview a bunch of people here at the Discovery Educator Network National Institute for 2008. (I decided to not put the full name in the title.) See how many faces you can recognize.
Also, my voice is giving out and I feel sick. Yay for conferences!
Yes, THAT Discovery. They’re doing an ed-tech conference all this week and I’m along for the ride.
You can be too, if you want. Most of the content I’m collecting can be found either on my Flickr acount or my Plurk acount. You don’t need to sign up for those to follow along, but they’re fun and free if that floats your boat.
The following was written back in June, but I’ve been sitting on it until now because I wanted to be able to take a step back and look at my writing first before posting.
One would think that sleeping until noon would be one of life’s simple pleasures afforded to teachers during the summer months. While I’ve nothing against prolonged inspection of the backs of my eyelids, I’m still dragging myself out of bed at 5:30 AM at least three days a week to help my wife get ready for dialysis.
I won’t go into any great detail on her medical condition here (that’s a subject for a different podcast), but it does leave me with several hours of alone time while she goes through the procedure. On days when I drive her to the dialysis center, gas prices are high enough for it to not make sense for me to drive home and back - making my period of solitude also one where I lack any ability to contact the internet. (UPDATE: I’ve since purchased a BlackBerry Curve, so now my addiction to the internet has reached the next level.)
Now granted, I’ve been incredibly lax in posting things on this site. I could go through lots of excuses, but the one I think I’ll stick with is that it’s a lot harder for me to do one of these entries when I’m not online, even though I feel most inspired when I can’t get online.
Usually when I’m writing out my scripts I’ll have three or four tabs open for reference purposes. Either I’m responding to someone else’s blog post, or linking to another site that further explains a concept, or even looking for just the right picture to insert into the entry. I can’t do any of these things without the internet at my fingertips.
But here I am in my car, in just such a situation. I can do whatever I want, so long as I only use the software and files in my little magic box. Cloud computing? Ha! That’s no good to me here.
This very much reminds me of a job interview I went to a few weeks ago. The position was for teaching technology to students and teachers in a Pre-K through 5th grade school, something that on the surface is really right up my alley. Still, I went in with more questions for them than they had for me.
And everything I encountered made it look like a dream job come true. The school was fairly new, so there weren’t any old computers on the verge of breaking down. The computer lab, the ceiling mounted LCD projectors in every class, the three (THREE!) mobile labs that teachers actively fought over, the school-wide wi-fi, everything about it looked awesome.
Everything, until near the end of my visit when I started asking about wikis, blogs, and podcasts.
Oh, they don’t do those.
In fact, anything that remotely resembles a blog or wiki is actively blocked. The school administration was very forward thinking, but the district had adopted a “walled garden” approach that would have prevented me from visiting even my own website from school.
Contrast this with my current employer, which isn’t throwing as much cash into tech programs but is actively encouraging teachers to use resources available to them on the internet - including workshops on blogging, podcasting, and wikiing.
“Wikiing?” Is that a word? Nevermind.
Long story short(er), I’m not pursuing the job. I only went to the interview because it sprung up at the last moment, and I felt I needed to dust the cobwebs off of the old portfolio. With the way technology is advancing, and the skills that I see successful people using right now, I feel I could do more to prepare kids for the real world with a lab of salvaged computers running linux and my current employer’s filtering policy than all the high tech gadgetry in the world but no way to use it properly.
Because while the tech is cool, it’s really not about the tech. It’s about communication. It’s about collaboration.
And it’s about teaching students how to use these things responsibly, because locking kids in their rooms for fear that they’ll go to the mall and something scary will happen will not prepare them for when they finally move out and go there themselves. Instead, we should take them there, hold their hands at first, and show them how to react in that environment.
Anything else is a disservice to the generation that will be running our nursing homes when we retire.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Sound Waves™
<announcer voice> That’s right, in today’s modern world there are many kind of waves, but only Sound Waves™ are capable of taking this podcast and transferring the information from your speakers to your ears in a format that you, the listener, can comprehend.
Sound Waves™: helping you hear quality audio … and this show, too.</announcer voice>
…wait a minute, who wrote this ad, anyway?
But seriously, lately I’ve been thinking a bit about commercialization on educational websites. It’s a topic I’ve visited before, though I think it bears revisiting.
I don’t know exactly why I’ve been thinking about it recently. It might be because of some recent large purchases I’ve made. It might be because sites like Tips From The Top Floor and Twit.tv are doing pretty well with ads in their podcasts. Perhaps it’s because Professor Bob from the History According to Bob podcast is able to sell CDs of things he originally gave away for free on his website, and even the great and powerful David Warlick and Will Richardson sell their books and/or ask for donations to their Starbucks cards on their websites.
Maybe its because sites like Makezine.com, Craftzine.com, and DiscoveryEducatorNetwork.com are essentially advertising models for their parent companies - though I’ll be the first to tell you that they’re brilliant ad models because they draw in visitors with high quality content that makes them worth visiting repeatedly.
Or … perhaps … it’s because of some emails I’ve seen over the past few months. You may have gotten them too, in fact.
“I represent [insert company name here] and we’d like to pay you to blog about [insert product name here]. We’re going to assume that [insert product name here] fits with the general theme of your website because you’re a blogger and right now you’re probably just happy that someone, anyone, has managed to find your little corner of the internet. We’re certain that you’ll be satisfied with the meager amount of shiny coins in exchange for linking to us repeatedly in your blog post and thus increasing our ranking on Google, even though it will most likely destroy your integrity and make you lose the small collection of loyal readers you’ve worked so hard to build over the years.”
Well, they went something like that, at least. I might not have remembered the emails word for word, but I think that’s an unbiased representation of what they said. You might even think that this posting would discourage future offers of a similar nature, but I don’t think those people actually read the blogs they contact so I’m out of luck, there.
I’ve also gotten at least one offer from someone who wanted to be a “guest blogger” on my site. It was essentially very much like the previous email, except she offered to take the hard job of writing the post that would destroy my reader base off of my hands.
Not all emails from businesses were that bad, however. I’ve received at least one offer to sponsor my podcast on a repeated basis with a short audio ad placed in each show, which I politely turned down because while the product was educational in nature I hadn’t used it myself and therefore felt uncomfortable promoting it.
I even went so far as to hand out some books at this year’s MICCA conference, but only because after looking through them I felt they were useful resources. The copies they provided for me to keep as “payment” were also given away, but that was because I already knew a lot about the subject mater already.
I’ve toyed now and again with turning my website into a moneymaker, but this was mostly through the addition of Google Ads - and those tend to mostly work on the kind of people who aren’t likely to visit this website. Over the years they’ve been on and off of the site, but in all that time I still haven’t earned enough for them to cut me a single check. To be perfectly honest, even if they did pay me all of my earnings right now it would be a drop in the bucket compared to what I’ve paid for domain name registration, hosting (my hosting is cheap, but not free), and equipment.
I’ve also included Amazon affiliate links in posts from time to time, but those have made even less revenue than the Google Ads - mainly because I’ve only ever done that for products I’ve owned, and zero minus the price of said products equals a negative number.
I’m not saying this to complain, mind you, but to prove a point that I’m not blogging or podcasting for the money. If I was, then I would have quit a long time ago. I do this because it’s fun, and I enjoy it when I can become part of a conversation that is truly global in nature.
And then the bills come in, and I begin to think about how I can supplement my teacher’s salary.
So, (and I hate to admit this,) I’m going to try a little revenue building experiment. No, I’m not going to be embedding ads in every podcast. Nor will I be placing flash banners where you get to shoot chickens or pick the next president all over the site either. I’m going to try something a little more low key than that.
On my site I’m creating a new page. That page will have links to things where if you buy them I might get a buck or two sent my way.
Maybe.
I think.
If you don’t like seeing ads on education themed sites, then don’t go to that page. If you don’t mind, and throwing me a bone is something you might consider doing, well then you can go and check it out. My intention is to only become a corporate shill for products I’ve owned/used and enjoyed myself, so while I may be destroying my integrity here it shouldn’t burn quite so bad.
And who knows - maybe I’ll end up writing a book and promoting it there, eventually retiring from teaching to run around the world giving lectures and working as a freelance consultant.
… or, maybe I’ll just make enough to pay some of my server costs.
… And my last new toy for a while, I’m afraid. Oh well.
As those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, and who knows where else already know, I am now the proud owner of a BlackBerry Curve. To be honest I liked the Palm models better, but apparently unlimited data plans cost less with these little guys so my wallet had something to say about the decision making process.
Note that I didn’t mention the iPod or any Windows Mobile device. These were both ruled out for different reasons, one being software issues and another being service issues. I’ll let you pick which is which, but I’m moving on for now.
“Curve” is a great name for this model, since there definitely is a learning curve as you start to use it - especially if you’ve never owned a smart phone before. The qwerty keyboard really makes typing easier, though the small size does force me to type slower than normal. This isn’t too bad, since I’m making considerably fewer typos now.
Within a couple minutes of Its activation I had already changed many of the “out of the box” settings, including but not limited to syncing up with my gmail account. Not having to use the web based interface for that is a real boon.
Oh yeah … about web browsing … that’s a mixed bag. A lot of sites (Flickr, Bloglines, Youtube, and more) have smartphone-friendly versions that work pretty well. I actually prefer the “mobile” version of Plurk to the regular one. Sites that are text-heavy and use images just to break things up visually work pretty well also.
The problem sites are the ones that use a lot of Java, Flash, or focus on large images (like webcomics). The first two won’t work at all most times, unless they have a mobile version. As for the large images … well, you can enlarge them to full size and scroll around, but this involves more than one time consuming step and is awkward at best.
Still, I didn’t get this to have it be my primary conduit to the interwebs. It’s a backup and a way to make mobile blogging possible without depending on a conference’s intermittent (or nonexistent) internet access.
And so far I think it’s worth it. After all, I just wrote this whole post while sitting in my car and waiting for my wife. (I bought her one, too.)
More to come as I figure things out.
(Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry, edited later because adding links was darned difficult.)
Written during last Wednesday’s thunderstorm-induced power outage (which gave us off on Thursday…), and recorded during tonight’s thunderstorm, I talk a bit about how the “old” should not always be replaced by the “new.”
