OPLS blog

I’ve collected books ever since I was 9 years old and love them. We have more than we can accommodate in the house and yet still we keep acquiring more. There’s a copy of Prideaux’s Histories on the shelves, dating back to 1664, as well as, for some strange reason, the UK Board of Education’s syllabus for physical training in schools 1933 (it contains advertisements in the front for Weetabix and Ovaltine, with an explanation for teachers as to why they should recommend them to parents of “listless children” - deserving of a full blog post in its own right one day, I think). An eclectic collection but, as my old gran used to say, it “furnishes the rooms”, and to see them all on display warms the heart.

It was with some hesitation, then, that I recently purchased the new Sony ebook reader, with its promises of portability and signficant storage capacity (160 books on its internal memory - countless more through SD card slots). If I was to give up both the visceral and cerebral appeal of books, what could it give me in return?

I have to say, having access to a library on one device didn’t really appeal. After all, I rarely have more than two books on the go at any one time. I did, though, think it would be useful to have the IB’s document library accompany me on my travels and so I experimented with the Diploma core guides.

They went on easily enough via the software that came with the device, although I did have to rename them for ease of navigation on the Reader’s menu system. They rendered quite small initially (see below) so the increase font size button came in handy. Page turning was slower than I would have liked (I noticed it was much quicker when just reading one of the pre-supplied books), but the table of contents worked well.

Ebook reader and the IB's Learner Profile

Ultimately, though, I was disappointed with its lack of features. I wanted to annotate and comment on content - I couldn’t do this. Nor could I share these notes with others - it doesn’t even have bluetooth connectivity. I was looking for a device that had real application for teaching and learning. Instead, I simply had convenience. Yes, it stores images, but displays them in black and white only, and yes, you can store your music collection on there too. However, to justify its £200 price tag, Sony really needs to give us a little bit more.

Although it’s been out for a while, we haven’t seen any this side of the Atlantic until quite recently, so it was quite a privilege to be able to play with a Microsoft Surface at the Future of Web Apps conference held in London a couple of weeks ago.

I took a few photos and uploaded them to Flickr with annotations.

While I was having a play, my mind was buzzing with possibilities for how it could be used in teaching in learning. Obviously it would have immediate appeal to spatial learners and those who want to ’show’ what they know or have learned. I could also imagine a small number of students brainstorming together, perhaps using some mind-mapping software and working on individual elements of an issue in ‘their part’ of the display/screen.

There are already some great software and applications written for it (check out the photos on microbiology in the stream above and how it renders 3-D imaging) and the list will only grow as it becomes more mainstream.  What’s really important, though, is the notion that it can receive multiple instructions simultaneously through touch - and that makes it immediately appealing for an educational context; even if the price tag doesn’t at US$15,000.

Here’s Microsoft’s original promo video:

And the inevitable parody

I promised a review of Imagine Teacher for the Nintendo DS, in the vain hope that it would help teachers in some way with their own professional development. Well, the short answer is, it won’t!

I looked for insights into classroom strategies, help with identifying student learning styles, curriculum planning and perhaps learning space design. I think I was being a little optimistic.

The game is as taxing on the brain as watching Celebrity Big Brother, and, to be honest, I shouldn’t have devoted the amount of time I did in getting to know it, hoping against hope that I’d uncover a few nuggets of wisdom somewhere.

You’re better off using the pictochat feature on the DS and collaborating with peers across the staffroom.

Best avoided.

Many of you will probably know the great global issues comparison site, WorldMapper. Well now, many of the maps included on the site have been reproduced in a book entitled: The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford.

(Clicking on the image will take you to Amazon US)

It contains 366 digitally modified maps, or cartograms, depicting the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects, ranging from population, health, wealth and occupation, to how many toys we import and who’s eating their vegetables.

Well worth pointing out to your librarians.

In case you don’t know, wikispaces are giving away an additional 250,000 wikis to teachers and schools (no ads, greater administrative rights etc).

Grab yours from here now.

As an update to the previous post, Chad Hurley (the CEO and co-founder of YouTube) has just blogged on the future of online video.

Some key comments:

“Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially.”

“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call.”

“In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication.”

“Over the next decade, people will be at the center of their video and media experience. More and more consumers will become creators.”

A typical response to presentations I have given to IB leadership on social media and education technology is, “That’s all very well, but my school district or education authority bans this technology.”

Well, for all those who are faced with this problem, this video by Michael Wesch is for you. It’s an academic’s response to the transformative power of YouTube and why we need to understand it better. It was presented in June this year, at the US Library of Congress.

The video is nearly an hour long, so it’s best viewed with colleagues and coffee (and possibly at home?).

Michael has published a timeline, which I have copied for convenience below.

0:00 Introduction, YouTube’s Big Numbers

2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams

5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape

12:16 Introducing our Research Team

12:56 Who is on YouTube?

13:25 What’s on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.

17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?

17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and “networked individualism” (Wellman)

18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community

19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation

21:18 YouTube as a medium for community

23:00 Our first vlogs

25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is (“context collapse”)

26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)

27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers

29:53 Aesthetic Arrest

30:25 Connection without Constraint

32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture

34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity

34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio

36:55 YouTube’s Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15

39:50 Reflections on Authenticity

41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System

43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture

47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV’s “The Message” and the message of YouTube

49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World

51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973

52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)

Enjoy!

Andrew Keen wrote an interesting short piece in the Independent’s media supplement recently on a new American website called OpposingViews.com - a digital debating chamber for proven experts in politics, economics, culture, science and faith.

Keen argues that “it offers convincing proof that Web 2.0’s cult of amateur content is rapidly going out of fashion and that the Internet’s new “new thing” is expertise”.

I’m not so sure.  For me it simply highlights, once more, the imperative to critically evaluate sources and content, developing one’s own judgement in the process.  This would certainly be the approach I would take when looking at OpposingViews.

A great TOK lesson in the making too, I think, when you consider it is the likes of Amnesty International who say “Yes” to the question: “Should the US abolish the death penalty?” and Joshua Marquis, a District Attorney in the US and media commentator, who says “No”.

One for you to ponder.

Since 2007, Techcrunch have hosted a conference for online start-ups in a bid to attract further investment. Called Techcrunch Top 50 in 2008, there are some interesting ideas in development.

To help you navigate your way through, I thought I’d pare the list down a little, in so far as the ones listed below have some resonance for teaching and learning. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.

Youth and Culture:

• Blah Girls - Backed by Ashton Kutcher, Blah Girls is a gossip site that features a group of animated teenage girls who provide opinions on what’s going on in the world of entertainment
• Tweegee A hub for tweens, Tweegee offers the youth market a suite of online tools for social interaction and organization
• Shryk Web-based financial software for children aimed at promoting financial literacy and good saving habits
• Hangout Industries Blends social networking with virtual worlds by creating a 3D, online environment where 16-24 year olds can chat and share media.

Memes & News:

• DotSpots Tracks the memes spreading across the web, aggregates the content associated with them, and gives everyone Wikipedia-like control over that content
• Angstro Lets you set up a feed of news about your friends, instead of news by your friends
• LiveHit Tracks the music, videos, and entertainment sites people are clicking on right now
• Quant the News Creator of StockMood.com, a service that tracks the sentiments of online news stories about stocks and then measures their potential impact on the direction of those stocks’ prices.

Advertising & Commerce Monetisation:

• Burt Collects user data to tailor individual advertising campaigns and target users more effectively
• Adgregate Markets Brings online stores to consumers through a display ad that is a fully transactional widget
• Adrocket Contextual text-based advertising for email; assigns keywords to each address depending on known demographic and contextual data.

Collaboration:

• Tingz Offers a unified platform for delivering internet content across multiple devices including mobile phones and PCs
• MIXTT A group based social network/dating site that encourages real world interaction that’s more comfortable than the 1-on-1 format of most similar sites
• Imindi Based on neuroscientific principles, Imindi’s Thought Engine tries to exceed human thought and help its users find new ideas, concepts, and questions on the Web
• Popego Surfaces the most meaningful information from within your social graph based on your interests and other factors.

Finance & Statistics:

• PersonalRIA Allows users to shadow a professional investment advisor’s portfolio, automatically executing trades (which most brokerage sites cannot do)
• Emerginvest Offers commentary and analysis on Emerging Markets and tools that provide you with information on how to diversify globally
• ExchangeP Dubbed a ‘fantasy stock market’, ExchangeP’s service allows users to sign up for free and start investing in private companies
• Me-trics Lets you see how mood, weight, and goals correlate with other metrics, including web services like Facebook or RescueTime
• iCharts YouTube for embeddable, interactive charts (link not working at time of post).

Mobile:

• Mytopia A gaming platform that lets players compete across mobile devices and social networks
• Tonchidot Makes the Sekai Camera, a camera system that aims to merge the virtual and real worlds by using a digital device as a viewfinder
• FitBit Developing a small wireless sensor called the Fitbit Tracker, which automatically records data about a person’s activities, calories burned, sleep quality, steps, and distance throughout the day.

Language & Communication Tools:

• Alfabetic Translates any blog or Website into another language and places ads alongside it in the new tongue
• Postbox Based on Mozilla technology, Postbox saves users’ time when looking for particular information within their email
• Swype A new method of text input on touch screens; does away with traditional “hunt and peck” in favour of a more fluid motion
• DropBox Provides an easy way to backup your files, share them with co-workers and friends, and synchronise them between computer.

Rich Media:

• VideoSurf A visual video search engine that allow users to search across millions of videos for a given actor and to view summaries of videos through a series of detected keyframes
• GazoPa An image search engine developed by Hitachi that uses visual similarities between photos to suggest matches (rather than simply relying on keywords)
• Fotonauts A photo sharing application that turns every album instantly into a Web page
• Bojam Although there are a slew of online music services already on the Web, Bojam is trying to do something a bit different: it wants to connect musicians and allow them to collaborate over the Web.

Games:

• Grockit A “Massively Multi-Player Online Learning Game”
• Akoha A web-based social game played with trading cards aimed at spreading good deeds around the world
• Atmosphir A platform for creating 3D interactive games by selecting blocks (such as a sand castle tower, fireball-breathing bird, or trap door) and snapping them onto a grid
• PlaYce Provides a 3D virtual world inside the browser for games and social interaction that is based on the real world
• Shattered Reality Interactive A new massively multiplayer online game (think World of Warcraft) that lets the crowd guide the direction of future expansions.

Research & Recommendations:

• GoodGuide Provides information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies
• GoPlanit A one-click travel planner that assembles a customized trip itinerary with the click of a button; also supports mobile microblogging
• Goodrec A mobile and online recommendation service that provides brief, to-the-point recommendations from friends and trusted sources.

We’ve been having a look at some new developments in web-based technologies to improve and evolve the user experience of the browser.

One great example is PicLens by Cooliris. This transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos. It’s a small download, but once installed improves the user interface significantly and offers all sorts of possibilities when displaying content. We’re trialling it with Visual Arts folders for example. Highly recommended.

Another is Tag Galaxy. This is basically a cool way to display shared photos from Flickr. Just type in a keyword and wait for the results to display in a planet-like orb. Related tags are then displayed in a solar system arrangement. Great fun.

Just launched, as a proof of concept, is Aurora from Adaptive Path. The best way to describe this is that people, places and things are represented by objects in a three dimensional space. Closely related objects are clustered together and users can rotate through these as required. Try this video for more details (sorry about the link only - the embed code didn’t work in Wordpress)

Clearly, as more learning takes place via the web, anything that can be done to improve the experience and facilitate access to information will ensure that learners are, in turn, more inspired and engaged.