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

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

Howard Rheingold’s Vlog

more about "Howard Rheingold’s Vlog", posted with vodpod

I think you will find this discussion of 21st Century Literacies very interesting–they might not be what you think they are. Note the section on attention and think about how you feel when your students are seemingly distracted by the technologies at hand. Now imagine what your online students might be doing as you are teaching an online course. How will you deal with the issue of attention in that situation?

Filed under: cognition, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, learning, learning styles, literacy, technology

eportfolio tools

Creating eportfolios as a course project is a good way to engage students in their coursework, if you present the eportfolio as an exercise in digital storytelling–specifically the story of their work and progress. If your institution has a campus-wide deployment of an eportfolio system, such as Epsilen or the Carnegie Foundation’s KEEP Toolkit (see comment below about availability), you can draw on common resources with which to introduce and support your students’ work.

There are a variety of free tools on the web, though, with which you and your students can be creative in crafting eportfolios to suit your course situation. Yours might be an essay-driven course, or perhaps yours requires students to create a lot of graphs and data-driven material. Or yours might focus on research and collaboration. Sometimes its easier to find the tools that work best for you than to reconfigure a template-based system.

Helen Barrett is a name you will run across in your research on eportfolios, and she not only provides expertise on the purpose of such work and lots of links to resources, she puts her money where her mouth is and has created a staggering list of eportfolios using all sorts of tools and methods, so that you have good models to view. Here are some of her resources:

Online Portfolio Tools (with links to models): http://electronicportfolios.org/web20portfolios.html

Portfolio and How-To on WordPress: http://hbarrett.wordpress.com/my-portfolio/

• Dr. Barrett’s Portfolio in a blog format with a special tab on how to create a portfolio in a WordPress blog.

Electronic Portfolios.org: http://electronicportfolios.org/

• This is a gateway site to many of her pages. She’s been at this for almost two decades and her examples are well worth visiting

I have used course portfolios in composition courses, in which students select drafts and graded papers, reflect on the process of creating them, and evaluate their own writing process and progress in a course. It is the truth that I find some of their best writing in their reflections and in their presentation of the portfolio. I have not asked students to use online tools for such a project, but look forward to doing it soon. Now that we can take advantage of more methods of telling stories, using audio, video, and photos, I think the results could be very interesting.

How would you use today’s tools to suggest creating an eportfolio?

Filed under: Web 2.0, blogging, collaboration, computers, digital literacy, education, grading, innovation, online learning, presentation , eportfolio

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

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

subway lines and random paths of meaning

Don’t know how long this interactive map of subway ends-of-line images will be up on the NYTimes online, so go see it soon.

I find this to be a perfect example of setting up material–in this case images of what you would find at the ends of subway lines in New York–that does not suggest sequential choices, but allows the user to choose random paths in the content, and allows for revisiting the material as desired. One of my interests is in how users make meaning out of content this way and how they reinforce their interpretations based on the paths they choose. For example, does it make a difference to one’s constructed meaning whether one image is viewed before another, and so on? In another example, does it make a difference in what order one reads about historical events to how one determines larger meanings and attitudes about history?

In what sort of controlled environment could we study such questions?

Filed under: cognition, collaboration, communication, computers, digital literacy, hypertext, student-centered learning, technology

why do we still have computer labs?

Building on the EDUCAUSE Review regular feature on IT Myths, in particular “The Myth about the Need for Public Computer Labs,” have you wondered whether colleges still need to devote precious campus space to computer labs? Don’t all students have their own computers today? Don’t most of them have laptops that they can tote to the library or wherever?

Well, I don’t know the data about student computers on our campus, although I do suspect that our students might have better access than is reported nationwide at large public institutions. The EDUCAUSE article cites a 2005 survey that only 72% “of all college and university students own their own computers.” I’d be surprised if our numbers are that low, but I’m also sure that some of our students fall into the gap of not having a computer. But even if all our students owned computers, I would argue that we still need to offer computer labs, in the library and elsewhere on campus. Here are some of the points I agree with from the article and one of my own:

1. computer labs offer computers with the speed and graphics capabilities required by some course software
2. computer labs ensure that a class is all working with the same advantages for in-class exams or exercises
3. computer labs mean students don’t have to lug their laptops around looking for outlets or network connections
4. computer labs offer spaces for “collaboration, socialization, and computational research.”
5. computer labs can provide the best software for special projects, such as animation or special document creation, music editing, or 3D experiences
6. computer labs can provide access to instructional assistance

The article does suggest that each campus asks the right questions, though. What questions should we be asking? What would you like students to be able to do in our computer labs?

Filed under: computers, education, labs, software, technology