In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool. But this year, the demand was […]
A few clicks back I had played with a test Blogdigger collection – this is a service that allows you to take a pile of web/RSS feeds, and then have that itself be able to collapse into its own feed- an uber feed if you will. My test was to build up a collection of […]
I’ve not read much on Skype until I noticed via Joi Ito that a Mac version was out. Heck, I did not even know what it did! It appears to be a simple way to have audio conversations via the net, and even 3,4 way conversations. The trouble is I don’t have anyone to Skype […]
In a world where human behavior is in accordance to PT Barnum’s laws, we all would be using Internet Explorer. I am afraid we live in that world. I waste more time trying to fix CSS problems in IE than I care for. Why cannot those Microsoft engineers build a browser that follows Web Standards? […]
Last night, my friend and colleague Tom Foster invited be as a “guest expert” (hah!) for a class he is teaching at Arizona State University, “Social and Ethical Issues in Educational Media”. The students were all K-12 teachers, librarians, and media specialists, and they had amazing, heroic energy for a group who had worked all day with kids, then put up with technology stuff from 5-9 PM.
The class had already reviewed issues in Copyright and Fair Use, and Tom asked be to take the turn from the messages of what they cannot do in terms of using media found on the web, to one of, what they can do.
So I took a cue from Brian Lamb, and set up the who workshop in a wiki, Finding (and Using!) Good Free Stuff.
I have been a fan of Brian’s approach at UBC of making the wki his presentation outline and activity focus as well. First of all, it is very quick to build. You can easily re-dploy the same content for a different workshop be either editing the titles or copying to a new wiki page. But best of all, you can expose people gently and subtly to the wiki way.
Anyhow, the focus of last night’s session was to introduce the class to the value of using media resource sites marked by Creative Commons licenses, where the re-usage is more clearly defined. We provided a longer laundry list of media resource sites where they might find relevant media items.
Then for an activity, we had them spend time at these sites, locate a media item they can cite as useful in their teaching area, and we had the post a summary to a FoundFreeStuff wiki. I was pleasantly surprises that all 16 of them managed to get one or two wiki items added, despite the freakish things IE was doing to the web pages and the weird things that happen when wiki editing collides (on the spot problem-solving- create a second open wiki page).
Some observations:
Update: Sept 1
Tom sent some copies of the class comments gathered in the course discussion area…
In preparation for a mid September Grand Canyon trip, this past Sunday I completed the unofficial, unsanctioned CogDogBlog triathalon, which will not be covered on NBC or commented on by Bob Costas. The event included: A two mile mountain bike ride to Camelback Mountain A grueling ascent and descent of Camelback on the Cholla Trail […]
The CogDog will be doing a lot more running around for the time being. It is not just the zaniness of semester start up, but I am feeling the loss of a valuable part-time student programmer who has been with MCLI for 5 years. This reduces my technology staff from 1.5 to 1.0, and that […]
In another of our self-serving web celebrations, August 2004 marked the 10th year since we created the DirectorWeb, a resource site for users of Macromedia Director. We have an irregular scrapbook of the site showing some its evolution– this was an early lesson on that in the rush to create new content, iin web site […]
Wow. That’s about all, I can summarize. Wow. The newest EDCAUSE Review (September/October 2004) has not one, but two top notch articles on things near and dear to the CogDog, blogs and wikis. These are so good I am ready to print them, something I almost never do. In Educational Blogging Stephen Downes not only […]
I am just testing the Windows version of ecto, the MovableType desktop editor. I am offering it to our newbie bloggers in the interest of making it easier for them to edit their Ocotillo Action Group blogs.. It is about the same as the Mac version, different panes, buttons in different places, and the buttons […]
