homonym trouble: does your cache have cachet?

For the holidays, a little wordplay fun.

At a public educational gathering last week I heard two educators at two different events toss off references to a minor concept in computing—using the wrong word. You ask, “if they were homonyms, how did you know it was the wrong word?” Okay, well let’s use the loose definition of homonym that allows for differences in spelling and non-identical pronunciation (maybe I’m asking too much). Check out Wikipedia for all the options: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym.

Cache, pronounced kash, in the way it was meant last week, refers to how our browsers store information from visited Web pages to make future visits to those spots happen more easily. You might know the cache on your browser as the Temporary Internet Files or you might just know it as the cache. As Merriam-Webster notes, it can also refer to a hiding place—where you might store your cache of stolen goods, for example: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/CACHE. Or you might be familiar with geocaching (jee-oh-kashing), where people hide and find hidden objects using their GPS devices, a kind of scavenger hunt.

Cachet, pronounced kashay, is a mark of prestige that an object or person possesses; physically, it was a kind of seal, perhaps like the Seal of Good Housekeeping! http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cachet.

But here’s the interesting part—both words come from the same French word cacher, which could mean both to press or to hide!

No big deal, but you could gain a kind of cachet if you pronounce the words right the next time you use them.

Filed under: aesthetics, communication, computers , picky grammar

Point/Counterpoint: Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate

Point/Counterpoint: Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate.

Interesting discussion of Twitter in terms of passion for a new and open tool vs. concern for privacy and firewalls. The debate took place at EDUCAUSE 09: http://www.educause.edu/E09+Hybrid/EDUCAUSE2009FacetoFaceConferen/DisrespectfulandTimeWastingorE/175838

You may need to download Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin to view the video.

Filed under: communication, digital literacy, education , EDUCAUSE, microblogging, twitter

will Google Wave change communication?

Here’s one possible way:

Filed under: communication, technology

technology and a different kind of virus

Mention virus anywhere near a technology professional and the response is likely to be a cringe, followed by a series of questions: “Is your anti-virus software up to date?” “Are you playing safe on the Web?” “You’re not clicking on links in emails, are you?” Recently, though, higher education has been worried about a virus of the biological kind–H1N1.

I’ve overheard (on one listserv) more than a dozen colleges and universities discussing plans of how to keep their semesters going if droves of students are unable to make it to class, or told not to come to class to prevent the spread of swine flu.

One solution, or emergency response has technology coming to the rescue, sort of. No, your computer won’t make you better, but it might allow you to continue to conduct your classes at a distance. Here’s one example of a readiness strategy from the University of Oregon: <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/cmet/fluedtech.html>. They try to cover all the bases, from changing your syllabus, to widening the use of Blackboard, to re-thinking your face-to-face course as a hybrid.

In some cases, faculty will still be able to hold their classes and accommodate only a few students too ill to attend, but there just might be areas of the country that are so hard hit as to seriously affect semester completion. Are we (you) ready for that? Can you imagine how you might change your course organization and delivery to meet what the U of Oregon calls “radical adaptation,” particularly if you get sick? Perhaps the pandemic won’t materialize. After all, we remember the Y2K dud. But maybe we were safe, rather than sorry, because we were prepared. I’d start packing that teaching first-aid kit now.

Filed under: administration, communication, computers, document delivery, education, online learning, teaching, technology

persuasive (not gratuitous) technologies

Can you use technology this well to ignite your students? Well, it certainly is inspiring, and it shows that visuals really can illuminate ideas. It is a mashup of technologies, including even PowerPoint, but not gratuitous technologies added just to show that Rosling is hip or clever–the combination is as persuasive as the speaker, and I know that’s how you really want to use technology, too.

Filed under: aesthetics, cognition, communication, education, learning, presentation, teaching, technology

twitter experiment makes the rounds

An interesting experiment I heard about on Twitter, of course, from Gardner Campbell at Baylor (http://www.twitter.com/GardnerCampbell). Here’s his blog commentary and a few other responses to the experiment:
“Twitter in the history class, and the ‘uni’ in ‘university’”: http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=840

“The Twitter Experiment: Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas”: http://kesmit3.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-experiment-bringing-twitter-to.html

Comments on the experiment from Monica Rankin: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm

Derek Bruff’s discussion of the project on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=250

Filed under: blogging, communication, digital literacy, education, free stuff, instant messsaging, social network, teaching, technology

“Social Media in Film Class”

Twitter Film Festival in Duke Film Studies Class from Jeff Cohen on Vimeo.

Hear about a class project that utilizes Twitter for student commentary on films.

The original post and video is here: http://digitalpapercuts.com/video/social-media-in-film-class/

You can read about the project in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus.

A lot of people, recently, are making fun of Twitter or dismissing it very angrily, but any sort of new tool is apt to meet with derision until we see some innovative uses and are inspired to use it ourselves. Any sort of situation that asks students for commentary and discussion could make use of Twitter. Or have you ever required students to attend college presentations by visiting speakers or campus performances? Why not ask them to Twitter about it as they are hearing/seeing it, instead of asking for a report?

What else can you think of?

Filed under: blogging, communication, digital literacy, education, technology , film, twitter

a new way to view data on TED Talks

A nice weekend visual post–just to make us wonder.

Filed under: aesthetics, communication, computers, innovation, technology , art, science

crowdsourcing, smart mobs, ideagoras: more collaboration or something else?

First a few terms.

crowdsourcing: from Wikipedia, “a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” Other terms for this act: “community-based design” and “distributed participatory design.” Some also call it spec work because members of the community can bid on doing the job or hope to be chosen for the job, instead of going through normal hiring methods. crowdSPRING is an online company that facilitates crowdsourcing for its members.

smart mobs: From Wikipedia, “A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior. The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.” Such mobs can physically gather just to create a scene, or they might have some social/political motivation, as in Meetups (remember how popular those were a few elections ago?). Are these virtual entities examples of the smart mob/crowdsourcing phenomenon: eBay (business built and powered by users), Second Life (a virtual world built by users), and Wikipedia, itself (an encyclopedia built and maintained by users)?

ideagoras: Depending on the context, a place/space/network/marketplace for ideas. Drawing on the popular concept of crowdsourcing, the focus is on innovation. Take the Innovate-Ideagora, related to the journal Innovate, it describes itself as “an open agora, where problems seek solutions, new visions are explored, and the status quo is challenged.” Or there’s this take on ideagoras in business that sounds a lot like any crowdsourcing article, but the concept in business often leans toward consulting services. I suppose the old think-tank is an instance of an ideagora.

__________________
What’s in it for education?

Here’s an interesting section of the blog Education Innovation on Crowdsourcing. It’s more than one post, so scroll down through all. The first post looks forward to a crowdsourced type of wikipedia of video content that is that is educational and research driven. More likely to happen in the near future are the crowdsourced textbooks envisioned in the second post, and I expect that they would also take advantage of the participatory wiki format. Can you imagine a wikipedia-like site with tones of content on one subject? Let’s say you need course material (no longer called a textbook) for a course in Nursing and there’s a comprehensive and searchable wiki on the topic that allows you to pick and choose where to send students for readings and resources, like videos and images with Creative Commons licenses, links to professional organizations and journal articles. And you might even ask your students to work on editing a page or topic in the wiki as a way to both contribute to the profession and learn more through research.

You could have students experiment with crowdsourcing an idea on Twitter or some other microblogging service and reporting the results. Or introduce a group project using the concept of crowdsourcing to give students a fresh approach to the old group project that so many students dread. Have them create a wiki for the project or use Twitter to discuss it or let them decide what tool to use.

Lastly, as a professional concept, how do you feel about crowdsourcing a solution to a problem in teaching? Have you built a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter that could respond to your questions? Does your institution or department have a wiki or blog that can serve as an ideagora? Maybe if college committees were called Smart Mobs and allowed to behave like them, they would be more productive and would be more interested in meeting.

I knew there was one good example of using Twitter as a crowdsourcing tool for a library project: http://b2e.nitle.org/index.php/2008/12/05/crowdsourcing_ideas_about_libraries_in_2

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, communication, crowdsourcing, ideagora, innovation, smart mobs, wiki

love the cloud, fear the cloud

I had two interesting experiences with clouds yesterday–as in those spaces on the Internet where you can access software as a service (SaaS) and store files, for example.

I sync my Outlook calendar (Entourage, really, on my Mac) with my Mac iCalendar and then with my Google calendar, so that I can always see what I should be doing when I don’t have access to the school network. In addition, it allows me to embed my Google calendar on my personal web page, so others can see where I am. All my information and the syncing process works through my account on Mobile Me, an Apple service that provides email, calendar, and storage.

Well, something went wrong yesterday, meaning I did something wrong. Wasn’t paying attention. Said yes when I should have said no. In an instant, all my calendars were empty, and I realized how much I depend on them to guide my work and schedule. I had some frightful moments, until I realized I had published my iCal as a web page for sharing and that it still existed, but I didn’t know for how long. So I subscribed to it and then went about fixing everything in a backwards fashion. So, yesterday, was clearly an example of the love/hate relationship with one cloud in my sky.

Later, there was a flurry of discontent on every social network about Facebook’s new terms of service which spelled out what seemed to be a right to everyone’s posted material, such as photos and videos, forever. Here’s how Mark Zuckerberg explained the situation, and let’s see if he objects to my using the photo he uses on Facebook:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear. Read the rest . . . .

As I noted on Twitter yesterday before this was posted, to quote myself, “I sorta figure when I post any content that I am tacitly agreeing to share it with anyone who can right-click–what’s the FB difference?” So, it didn’t come as a surprise to me that Facebook made clear that it was one of anyone. Some people were talking about how to delete your entire Facebook account, but in social networking, aren’t we making the first step of trusting the network itself? Sure, there are ways to work safely, to be selective in the information you share, but if you fear the software/application/site/etc. you are paralyzed. I’m not worried about my content on Facebook, but I can tell you that I do not share everything. I am not playing the 8, 16, 20 or whatever number things-you-don’t-know-about-me game that’s going around. Let’s leave some things unknown and still socialize for our own reasons.

P.S I could have posted any number of page images from Facebook to illustrate my post, but decided on the Tri-C libraries fan page, in case you didn’t know about it and wanted to be a fan.

Update 2/18/09: Facebook reconsiders its TOS, reverting to the old TOS in the meantime:

Filed under: Web 2.0, cloud computing, communication, computers, social network

why Twitter?

It’s been a year since I first posted about Twitter. I was harsh, unkind, suggesting that we were twits, me included. Yet, I gave it a long chance to become part of my daily technology-reading routine, alongside reading RSS blog feeds, online news, email, calendar agenda.

During that time, I thought a lot about whether it could usefully be an educational tool, and I think that it has developed into one, not limited to a prescribed use, but open to your imagination.

Twitter is a tool for microblogging. Micro, because you are limited to 140 characters. Go over and get a warning, meet the 140 exactly and you’ve created a twoosh. Blogging, because you are publishing, and if I must remind you again, a blog is not a discussion board. You publish for your own reasons and replies are gravy. On Twitter, you may get a reply, a re-tweet when someone wants to let more people know what you said, a direct message that is not public, or you may get nothing at all. On occasion, your tweet will create a ruckus and it will spread like a virus, but virality is not something you can control.

I use it personally and professionally by carefully picking people to follow whom I know personally and/or professionally or would like to know. I follow around a hundred and that’s plenty for me, because I like to keep up with what they are saying, and that’s not as hard as it sounds because there are a host of applications and plugins that make it easy to stay connected. I often have both Tweetdeck and Twhirl open, or might go to the Twitter web page, using the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, because it shows pix and videos inline. Another Firefox plugin, Twitterfox, pops up with new Tweets from the browser status bar. You can have Twitter update your Facebook status through a Facebook app, and you can install a Twitter gadget alongside your Gmail.

Professionally, I benefit from hearing about new technology, following links to neat blogs and articles and videos about technology, as well as hearing appeals for answers to complicated technology problems, or news about successes. And along the way, these professional voices become a community I belong to, not one that is all work and no play.

What can you use it for in your classes? Well, I hear that it can work as a classroom response system if all your students are equipped with computers or web-enabled mobiles. You would “collect” the responses on the Twitter web page if you wanted to display it.

Although I’m not a fan of using Twitter to create threads, hash-mark tagging (#your keyword) allows you to see all the comments with the same tag. So, you can create a tag for your group or class and then see them all on the Twitter search page. You might allow students to create what’s referred to as a backchannel in the class, an ongoing Twitter discussion of participants (students)–such use of Twitter is now common at conferences and large meetings, or at national events like the recent election or last night’s Grammy Awards.

I’ve gone way over my 140 character limit. Give it a try, a good long try, and let me know what you think.

Filed under: blogging, collaboration, communication, free stuff, social network

voicethread–create a conversation

After an interesting Second Life session yesterday, I heard about VoiceThread, a free technology that lets you create a conversation around a photo or video or text document. You could create a public conversation or have students use it to create a presentation. Feel free to comment on mine, and notice that even though the tool is called voicethread, you can choose to write a text comment [there is no embed code that works for WordPress, so follow the link]:

http://voicethread.com/share/305552/

Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, communication, digital literacy, discussion board, peer review