Stretch

What *real* active learning space might look like - not what we have at Century.

MIA!

The Voki avatar I made the other day for my online course "welcome" message took me about 45 minutes to create. I wasn't familiar with the software, and then the uploading to the course management system took more steps than were obvious.

But now, that work has disappeared! As I'm double/triple-checking the course websites for the semester that starts tomorrow, I do NOT find the avatar! I don't see the facsimile of myself saying "Welcome to this class" in the voice of Kate. :-(

Dang! What happened!

*UPDATE!* The issue is Firefox. With Safari as my browser, I can see the avatars. Yea!
*DOUBLE UPDATE* But I can't edit the html in D2L when I use my MacBook. Boo!

The New Age

Associated Press writer Beth Fouhy has an excellent, thought-provoking news piece in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Obama to pioneer Web outreach as president."

The opening lines begin like this:

"Transition officials call it Obama 2.0 — an ambitious effort to transform the president-elect's vast Web operation and database of supporters into a modern new tool to accomplish his goals in the White House. If it works, the new president could have an unprecedented ability to appeal for help from millions of Americans who already favor his ideas, bypassing the news media to pressure Congress."

Despite its seeming cheesiness, I like the "Obama 2.0" catch-phrase for all it signifies: the soon-to-be-leader of the free world recognizes the age in which we live, the ways in which we are connected, the media within which we exist. It's about time.

Here are a couple more quotations, perhaps offering teachable moments for us rhetoric profs:

• Obama's team is determining how best to convert his army of online activists into a viral lobbying and communications machine. Staffers are reluctant to discuss specifics, but Obama clearly is poised to become the first truly "wired" president of the digital age.

• The transition operation has a new Web site, www.change.gov, designed for anyone who wants to post a message of congratulations, offer suggestions for the new administration or apply for a government job. People are invited to submit their names and e-mail addresses, with the goal of creating a new list for the president-elect to tap when he wants to communicate directly about a program he's promoting or seek help urging members of Congress to support legislation he's proposed.

• [D]irect online contact with voters could . . . present a challenge for reporters covering Obama, since the new president will in many ways be able to bypass traditional media while also taking advantage of it to reinforce his online messaging.

  "He can do a half-hour YouTube address every Saturday, addressing millions," [Joe] Trippi said. "The networks would never give the president that much television time each week, but the press is still going to have to cover what he says on YouTube."

  Aides say the Obama team will staff a robust "new media" operation out of the White House and plans a complete overhaul of the White House Web site to make it more interactive and user-friendly. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to use the Internet to make his administration more open, such as offering a detailed look at what's going on in the White House on a given day or asking people to post comments on his legislative proposals.

How about a writing assignment that asks students to analyze the changes to the White House website? Or to post a comment and track the responses it generates? Students could write to the *President* of the United States as a writing assignment! It's amazing.

Video Your Vote

Check this out: PBS has teamed up with YouTube on a project called "Video Your Vote." They're inviting voters to take cameras when we vote, using them to record what our experience is like. Long lines? Confusing ballots? Broken machines? Video what we see and submit the videos to YouTube.

Wow - what an intersection of technology and democracy. What a *great* way to empower citizens, to document real experience, to reveal the material conditions of people around the country.

Can you imagine what Florida in 2000 would have looked like if folks had videoed their experiences with the "butterfly ballot" (does anyone even remember these)?

Technology: extending the speed and reach of humanity.

Must Watch

Check out Lawrence (Larry) Lessig's talk at/for TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), a most amazing, smart, necessary, relevant thing:

The "mash ups" at about 10:00 impress me: the voices of "young people" on the screen. How do we get more people to understand and have this conversation?

Implications for online teaching

Listen to this interesting study I just heard on American Public Media's Future Tense. It's by Dr. Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University: it seems as though workers are more likely to lie when they communicate using email than when they use hand-written notes.

Yeah, well: no big surprise for many of us who deal with academic honesty.

In Class Demonstrations

The brief post from yesterday was typed on-the-fly in our classroom as I was doing a bit on technology: the opportunities and limits of web searching/web sources.

Because we were talking about "colonialism," we googled in different ways: the web, blogs, scholar, images, videos (almost all of these new to students, who are used to clicking the first google hit, usually wikipedia, which some consider an unreliable source -- we did change the wikipedia entry for colonialism to say it was the name of my pet golden retriever; in about 90 seconds, we got a message saying that our addition looked "unconstructive.").

To see if the Google blog list would be updated with my own blog's mention of colonialism, I asked students to give me something to say. That's when Mike said, "Colonialism is good."

We never got back to seeing how long it took for our post to show up on Google's blogs list, but it's there now, WAY down the list.

Online tools for writing

In the wake of my reading the Pew Internet and American Life study called "Writing, Technology, and Teens" (press release is here; PDF of the whole report is here), I've been thinking about what kind of online tools could help students write. I've learned about a few -- I'm trying to decide if it makes sense to tell students about them.

Dr. Paper: not free and originally developed for high school students, supposedly formats APA style correctly

Paper Calendar: free, will make a schedule for your paper-writing tasks

Late Night Writer: free, will ask questions to take you from topic to thesis to supporting paragraphs to finished (if disjointed) essay

yWriter4: free, writes a novel for/with you

Google Docs: free, create, collaborate, share documents online (I'm thinking of using this for class)

Buzzword: free (for now?), like Google Docs but an Adobe product

More to come, perhaps.

Free online learning?

So many kinds of online learning exist, obviously. I always use a CMS (Desire2Learn) with my courses at Century and at Metro State because it's what my colleges support. In the past, I've used other tools with my students (Yahoo! Groups, for example, and online tutorials for grammar/mechanics, and David A. McMurrey's online tech writing course as a supplement for my tech writing students). But I haven't really ever taken an online course myself - not wholly, just short-term workshops.

But lately, I've been wanting to learn HTML, something I know about and sort of know how to do, but not really. Today, I happened upon a great site called W3Schools for learning all kinds of things related to web building. The site even quotes 13th-century philosopher William of Ockam!

I'm enjoying playing around with the HTML tutorials, but like any language, it'll take me a while to achieve anything like fluency.

"Lesson in Manipulation"

This video from the Christian Science Monitor shows how easy photographs can be manipulated. We all know this, of course, but this video shows how common this "editorial technique" has become. Many would say, "What's the problem? You want to make a certain statement with your photograph - visuals are messages, after all - so why shouldn't I emphasize what I want so that my message is stronger?"

Ever hear of ethics?

I think this video would be a good teaching tool for lots of classes.