Google Earth

I saw a great demo of Google Earth this afternoon at NECC, and then tonight, I saw this blog entry from Ewan McIntosh about the work of some 12-year olds in Scotland in Google SketchUp. I don't know if my upcoming class can use Google Earth and SketchUp, but it sure is intriguing. I KNOW that some of my Monroe County teachers can use these tools this coming year.

I'm certain that I have not adequately explored the graphic, spatial, earthly presentation of data and/or story. Maybe my students can show me how to do it. This is so exciting. I think I will build a Google presentation of my Alaska trip this summer. Way cool.

Wikis in the Classroom

Another session, next to last for me in NECC 07.

The session presenters are Vicki Davis from Westwood Schools in Camilla, GA, and Adam Frey, co-founder of Wikispaces. Vicki uses Wikispaces for her amazing work. So is Wikispaces the wiki for my class to use this fall? Perhaps. Let's see.

Adam says a wiki is a web page with an edit button. Moreover, it is easy, keeps a history of changes, and promotes group participation. A blog is a stream of journal entries, but a wiki is a group of pages edited by groups. Wikipedia is the archetype of wikis.

Steps for doing a wiki:

• Create a space
• edit a page
• create a link
• monitor the page history

Oops - they are demonstrating how to use the wiki, but I've lost track of what they are doing. Unfortunately, I'm sitting in the back of the room, and I don't hear so well. Anyway, I'm getting the concepts down, even if I'm missing most of the keystrokes. I'll figure those out later.

Use wikis for:

• introduction and exploratory projects (wikis for facts, blogs for opinions)
• individual assessments
• rewards for students, can get the top students motivated to go beyond the rubric & this elevates the lower students, a great way to recognize superlative work
• classroom organization

Using wikis:

• make small edits, NOT a word processor, open edit page, make edit, get off.
• communicate with others in the Web 2.0 community
• use the history, esp. to counteract students submitting first draft, brings the process out of the closet, shows how others are involved in the process.
• be careful: this machine has no brain: use your own.

Classroom considerations:

• create student accounts, for IDST-2215 students create own accounts
• decide on private vs. public, for IDST-2215 we go public
• decide structure vs. free-form, for IDST-2215 we will be free-form to enable student participation/creation, to be prosumers in Wikinomics fashion
• installation options, public vs. private wiki servers, for IDST-2215 we use public wiki
• review: educationalwikis.wikispaces.com

Okay, so here are some fine ideas for using a wiki in the upcoming class. I'm definitely going to use a wiki for our discussion of Wikinomics. Given the name of the book, how can we not use a wiki?

One Laptop Per Child

I'm listening to a fellow, Greg Dekoenigsberg of Red Hat, Inc., explain the One Laptop Per Child program started by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab.

It works on the assumption that if more children own a laptop (one that works and connects to the Net), then those children will learn more. It is an incredibly optimistic program.

Unfortunately, the actual device, the XO, is not currently available for purchase. It is being used in pilot programs in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Nigeria, and ???. The company is waiting for major buy-in from some big countries, which will allow OLPC to build the device at a desired price (about $150).

Uses a totally different interface called sugar, which is a verb-based interface rather than a noun-based interface such as used by OSX, Windows, and Linux. Thus, the XO is oriented toward activities rather than objects such as desktops, icons, windows, etc. Essentially, this is a different GUI running on top of a flavor of Red Hat Linux.

Send email to gdk@redhat.com to learn more about this program.

So why is this Web 2.0? Because it reduces the admissions costs to the Net, and one of the major characteristics of Wikinomics and Web 2.0 is the extremely low access costs. The principles of Wikinomics demands very small or no entry barriers. Thus, more people get to join the conversation, vastly increasing the power of the group. In other words, wonderful things have happened since we have joined millions of Asians, North Americans, and Europeans. How many more wonderful things will happen when we add the poor people of South America, Africa, and the poor of those regions already on Web 2.0?

What Wiki?

Well, you can hardly be in two places at once, unless you're using Web 2.0, and there's an interesting topic for exploration.

Anyway, I missed the session on wikis because I couldn't resist another session, so I ran back to B308 to pick up a web address for CurriculumWiki. This could be it. I'll check it out later. OK, now for Birds of a Feather.

I should join the learning communities at:
Professional Development 2.0
Coming of Age
Classroom 2.0 Wiki
Classroom 2.0 Social Networking

OK, I just joined them. Cool.

Here's a new idea. I'm about to take a vacation in Alaska with my wife's family and some friends, so I will use Google My Map to build the route that we follow and attach movies, pix, and commentary to important spots. Cool. If I learn to do this, then I can show my students and teachers how to do it. Yes.

Another idea for the class: assign a scribe each class night who will take the notes for the class and post them to the class blog. That works.

Linux Solutions for Thin-Client Computing

I'm live blogging this NECC 07 session. This could be fun.

This session is about Linux thin-client applications, NOT about the Linux OS; however, it is using Ubuntu Linux. I'm currently using a 6-year old IBM ThinkPad with no hard drive. I've some old IBM laptops at the office that I could do this with. GREAT idea!

LTSP is the Linux Terminal Server Program, open-source software that sets up a server that workstations boot from. Linux thin client is used world-wide, primarily in North America & Europe. The technology is very robust.

ADVANTAGES:
LTSP addresses many school issues: budget woes, tech woes with maintenance & viruses, time woes, non-working, unused, or unusable equipment that must be recycled. Main benefits of LTSP: ease of installation, client/server, one machinge, easier backup & maintenance, login machine independent, reduced maintenance issues, Linux reliability, few viruses, no individual PC maintenance, remote access for troubleshooting, reduced wear & tear (solid state PCs with no hard drive generates less heat, lasts longer), ease of expansion or replacement, greatly reduced TCO, community of users used to working for free. Many financial benefits: reduced acquisition costs, can accept donated PCs, e-rate client-server technology???, utilizes Open Source software for client boot and for user apps, more software choices for less money, no license fees, no upgrade fees. Linux much better known and accepted now. GUI is familiar, can run Microsoft software in server editions, and users can remotely access the system with free software over the Internet. Enables a school refurbishment program: reduced PC refurbishment tasks, can use P1 PCs, saves landfill, reusing & not recycling, can accept donated PCs without hard drives.

DISAVANTAGES:
Best used for very simple group of applications, not Microsoft, Windows software difficult to run or requires server edition, learning curve for installation & configuration, floppy & CD access not perfect, sound has issues. Remember: most of the action is taking place between PC & server.

Setting up thin clients:
*Configure PC to boot to server using a floppy drive, CD drive, hard drive, or NIC.
*Some configuration issues with mouse, video, sound. Easiest way to deal with configuration is to use similar machines on a single server, or get Symbiont app to help (open source app now).
*Can use multiple servers to handle different functions: boot server, authentication server, application server, storage server. This will improve performance, but a single server can handle 60 thin clients running OpenOffice and FireFox.

fl_teachertool allows teachers to manage all desktops on thin clients. iTalc will do similar task.

Can get plenty of help and all the software at K12 LTSP site.

So what does all this have to do with Wikinomics and Web 2.0? That's a good starting question for my class, so I won't offer any answers, or musings, here. I look forward to the comments from the class.

EduBloggerCon 2007

I spent most of today in the company of about 60 educational bloggers from mostly North America but also from as far away as Bangladesh. I clearly don't know enough about Web 2.0. I'm definitely on the front, steeply upward side of the learning curve. So what am I doing here?

Picking up ideas.

Tagging needs to be a significant part of my class. The classes need to help build the folksonomy around Web 2.0 and Wikinomics.

I also need to go home. I'm exhausted, and I have a long way to drive. Later.

Thoughts about the Class

I drove up to the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta this morning to do my volunteer work for NECC 2007. NECC is the premier educational technology conference, so it has me thinking about how to teach this IDST class about Wikinomics and Web 2.0.

I think Google is again central to what I want to do. I really like what they are doing with the Web.

First, everybody gets a Gmail account so that we can all contact each other and use Gmail Chat. I really believe that Gmail created a class identity last semester, and with my wacky schedule, it helps me keep in touch with the class.

Then, Gmail accounts are the key to the other Google resources that I want to use. Second, is Google Docs. I'm thinking that this semester's students will write only one paper, but I want them to do it online. That worked really well last semester.

What's next? Google Reader. I want the students to track their reading about various topics in Google Reader and share that reading with the rest of us. Perhaps through Delicious? That's a possibility. I'll think on that.

I also want to explore Google Scholar, Google Notes, and Google Talk. Lots of interesting things to explore with Google, and I haven't even gotten to wikis and Moddle. Oh, well.

In his TechLearning blog, Terry Freedman asks what it means for Web 2.0 to be embedded in a school's instructional program. He answers: "If a school cannot function effectively, or even at all, without Web 2.0, then Web 2.0 can be said to be embedded." I think that is the kind of class I want to build. We'll see.

Web Two Point Naught

Well, here's a slightly different view of Web 2.0 from our friends across the water in Great Britain somewhere. Somehow, hearing the Brits say Web 2.0 makes it more solid, but then that may just be the adolescent inferiority that most Americans feel in the presence of those who speak real English.

So watch the video:

Unconscious Collaboration

One of the key ideas in Wikinomics is collaboration enabled by the new Web 2.0 technologies. Usually, we think of collaboration as a conscious activity that participants engage in for mutual benefit, but I've come across a most clever example of mass collaboration that is largely unconscious, at least for the collaborators: reCAPTCHA.

In an effort to curtail automated net bots and to insure that an actual human is connecting, many web sites are now requiring people to match some kind of text before continuing into the site. Most web users have seen the usually distorted text image such as the one above that they must match before continuing.

Some programmers at Carnegie-Mellon University created a captcha that makes two uses of the text strings that millions of people enter daily. First, it authenticates that a human, and not some spam bot, is trying to use the web site. Then, it captures the two words that the human typed in and uses them to convert scanned documents into digital text.

Universities have been busily scanning public domain print documents into electronic format for years, but the process is slow and labor intensive. Even with the use of OCR, the task is arduous because of the errors persistent in even the best OCR programs. reCAPTCHA uses a two-word text string that includes one unrecognized word from an OCR-scanned print document, and when a web surfer types in the two words to gain entry to a web-site, reCAPTCHA collects the text-entry and sends it back to the group translating the print document into an electronic document. The person entering the text string does not know that they have collaborated on identifying a misread word for the translating organization, and the translators don't have to pay a human reader to correct the OCR errors.

One word at a time seems too slow, but remember that people log into web sites millions of times a day. Thus, the translators are able to correct millions of errors a day, far more than they could ever hope to correct with even hundreds of employees, and for far cheaper. And the unwitting collaborators gain access to whatever web site they are hitting on. Everybody wins.

So by using just a bit of Web 2.0 programming, reCAPTCHA creates a collaborative group that is far more accurate and far quicker than a group of professional editors at correcting errors in scanned documents. Moreover, most of the collaborators will never know that they were in the group at all or that they corrected an error in the scan of an ancient document. This is extremely powerful. In this case, it's powerfully good. I wonder when someone will invent a powerfully bad use of this collaborative technique.

Does Web 2.0 Mean Anything?

Web 2.0 Annotated

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Well, doubter Paul Graham has decided that it is beginning to mean something, though perhaps not what anyone intended when the term was invented. Surprised? Not I.

Graham begins his discussion firmly on the geek side by pointing out that AJAX is at the core of Web 2.0 development: For him, the key to Web 2.0 is using "the web as a platform,"

• I think this definition is too skewed toward the geeks and programmers who are moving their apps to the Cloud. They are consciouly developing and using "the web as a platform." Of course, users are also using the web as a platform, but not consciously. From my experience of teaching people to use technology within a networked environment, most of them don't know where their apps are anyway. They seldom recognize when they move from an app on their local hard drive to an app on the school's server to an app in the Cloud, unless the transition is in some way problematic or intrusive. Users are focused on engaging in some kind of meaningful work or play, and anything that distracts them from that work and play is a nuisance at best and a problem at worst. Most users, then, are not "using the web as a platform;" rather, they are connecting to information and people for work and play. They don't care, and seldom are aware of, what platform they are on. It reminds me of when I would ask very young students what computer they were using, a Mac or a PC. Even if they were savvy enough to look up from their Reader Rabbit edutainment long enough to tell me, they were also likely to be annoyed by the question. The platform didn't matter–Reader Rabbit did. - post by khamon

But Graham soon turns his discussion to users when he notes that for Web 2.0, the conversation is everything. Web sites that can't move to Web 2.0 will lose out. They're not part of the conversation.

• From the user's point of view, Paul Graham has gotten to the core of Web 2.0: creating and joining the conversation. Work or play, Web 2.0 is all about the conversation. Web 2.0 is all about giving people a street corner, coffee shop, or water cooler around which they can gather for work or play and talk. And as Graham notes, "we now have several examples to prove that [the conversation of] amateurs can surpass [that of] professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts." In other words, build a street corner such as Wikipedia where millions of people can gather for conversation about whatever interests millions of people, and you can get a conversation that is as rich and fecund as that in an Ivy League classroom or a professional conference, and it is infinitely more accessible, more democratic. - post by khamon


• And democracy is a key concept, as it is for Graham. To my mind, democracy implies that all voices are given a chance in the conversation. This means that the conversation has very low barriers to access–anyone who wants can join. The technology is cheap enough and widely available enough so that most anyone who wants to be in on the conversation can be. Second, each voice can be heard. No one has a louder voice because they can afford better technology, a better, louder megaphone. This does not mean, however, that some voices won't come to the front of the conversation. They will, but those voices will succeed on the basis of whatever merit the discourse community places on what those voices are saying and how they are saying it. Status in the group will be based on merit, not on the power of a bigger megaphone. - post by khamon

Graham expands on the idea of a democratic web when points out that Web 2.0 sites don't maltreat users.

• So why don't Web 2.0 sites maltreat their users?
  
  Don Tapscott gives the answer in his book Wikinomics: Because Web 2.0 users are prosumers, collaborators, not consumers. The users are as much, in some cases even more, responsible for the content and value of a Web 2.0 service than are the programmers behind the service. The entire world contained in Second Life was created by the users, not by the programmers, who only created the tools for the users to use in building their virtual second lives.
  
  Smart organizations are following Tapscott's observations:
  
  Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they collectively can advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius.
  - post by khamon

Tech Fear

One issue that I was surprised to encounter last semester was web fear, or a reluctance to use the web. I thought that everyone coming out of high school was web-savvy, would prefer using the web to handle the class, and would be adept at using web tools and learning new web tools. I was wrong about as often as not. Some of the students were competent web-users, some were not.

This was a mistake on my part, and I don't think I prepared last semester's students as well as I should have. I want to do better, so my first message to the incoming students is: relax. The class is supposed to stretch your competence and push you past your comfort zone. However, if you just show up and try all the things in the class, then you'll do well. I'm on your side. I want all my students to earn an A in my class. I always feel that I failed when one of my students fails.

So keep a sense of humor, and remember, someday we will all look back and be amused that we could have ever been intimidated by this new technology. This video skit from Norway explains it best.

Web 2.0

So Web 2.0 is the newest buzz in the world of web. If you're on the geek side of things, like Tim O'Reilly, then "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform." But if you're on the user side of things, like me, it's all about connecting people so that they can collaborate on creating the content of the world wide web.

But better to see it. Fortunately, Michael Wesch, assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University has composed a marvelous little video that explains Web 2.0 about as well as can be done. I'll let the video speak for itself. And by the way, this is the first time I've embedded a video in my blog. It was way easy to do, and I feel so cool–so Web 2.0.

Also, this is required reading/viewing for my upcoming class. Ok, future students, hang in here with me, and enjoy the ride. Now, to the video:

Fall, 2007

OK, so it's time to start thinking about the upcoming Fall Semester at GCSU.

I'm teaching two more IDST 2215 courses, Communication and Society, which means pretty much whatever the class and I decide that it means, which in some cases means that it means nothing. Like most things, this class depends on what you bring to it.

This fall, I'm focusing on one book, or maybe two. I'll let the class decide on the second. The first book is Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, the second book is Growing Up Digital also by Don Tapscott. The general idea is to explore the emergence of the collaborative Internet and its effects on – here's the surprise – communication and society. Whoa!

Part of my idea is to make the format of the course a means of exploring and experiencing the content of the course by using the collaborative internet as a means of building this scholarly community. In other words, we'll use Web 2.0 to learn about Web 2.0. Seems reasonable to me.

Much of this builds on my Spring, 2007, IDST course, which used Gmail, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Chat, and Google Video to make the class work. All in all, I was pleased with how it went – pleased enough to want to do more. So of course, I'll do the things I did before, but how do I do more? That's the question.

One of the first things I'm exploring is connecting my IDST classes with Prof. Mark Ledbetter's IDST classes. We talked about this last night, and it seems promising. We'll see.

Anyway, the opening line of the Reboot 9.0 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, this past week was:

"Be creative and innovative in exploring possible solutions"