Serendipity35

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that has gotten a lot of press - and a lot of that is people wondering just what it is supposed to do.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash, is a new comprehensive user manual to help you learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group.

I haven't started playing with wave yet because, though I applied, I did not receive an invite. That might be a good thing - saves me some of my free time, and allows others to work out the bugs.

If you are interested in Google Wave but have no account or background, I suggest you look at chapter one "Meet Google Wave" which explains Google Wave and the applications it might have to your work.

This book-in-progress, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is a new free "book" written about Wave which is so new that no one seems to really "get it" and there is still a lot to discover about it. A print book (at least right now) just seems foolish and instantly outdated.

As they say, Wave is a "young, complex, and frankly incomplete web application and technology." As developers work with it, it will change. There really isn't one place to go right now to find all the Wave information in an organized way. Yes, there are lots of blog posts, but most of us are still linear enough that a book structure probably works better. Wave is an ambitious project and has the potential to change how we work, collaborate, and communicate on the web.

I also interested in Trapani's approach to this book. In her own words:

I’m calling it a book, but for now it’s just a web site–with eight “chapters” and two “appendices,” free for you to read, share, and if
we’re lucky, help us expand. The site will grow into traditional book formats, however: thanks to the team at 3ones, a PDF version of the book’s preview edition will be available for purchase this month. In January of 2010, a softcover print version of the book’s first edition will be available as well as an updated PDF. Adam and I have committed to four editions throughout 2010, so the book will change and evolve along with Wave. The latest and greatest version of the book will always be available for free at completewaveguide.com.
I turned down a request-for-proposal from my traditional book publisher to try this experiment in iterative self-publishing. I ran down the whole story of why on the book’s About page. This approach scratches several itches I’ve had for years: I’ve always wanted to publicly collaborate on a book using MediaWiki, try my hand at self-publishing, and license a book under Creative Commons. Now, to see how it will all turn out.

Right now, the content is only available on the web at completewaveguide.com (8 chapters and 2 appendices, with plans to expand).

You can help the book grow and be revised by contributing to the guide. The contents of this book are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This means you are free to share and remix its content, as long as you attribute it to completewaveguide.com and share it under the same license. This also means that any of your contributions to this book will be distributed under this license.

A more permanent/convenient/traditional copy of the book will be available in a preview edition for purchase as a PDF later this month. The first edition print version will be available in January of 2010.

They plan to release four editions of the book throughout 2010 to keep up with the changing face of Wave, but the latest version of the book will always be available free at  completewaveguide.com.

The book's About page has more on their approach to publishing.

You can also get updates on book releases and various Wave tips by following @gwaveguide on Twitter.

RELATED POSTS
Catch the Google Wave
Riding the Google Wave

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gina Trapani is a tech blogger, podcaster, book author and programmer based in San Diego, California by way of Brooklyn, New York. The founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily weblog on software and
personal productivity, Gina authored a book based on the web site which is in its second edition: Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better. A Sun-certified Java programmer, Gina builds Firefox extensions, web applications and other software.

Adam Pash is a freelance writer, programmer, and web developer based in Los Angeles, California. While his interests are varied, Adam spends the majority of his time working as Editor for Lifehacker. Adam's freelance work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Wired, Popular Science, and PC World. He has authored a book on the iPhone called How to Do Everything with Your iPhone .

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs has become known for his product launch presentations. So, it's not a big surprise that a book like The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience would be published. It's written by communications coach Carmine Gallo. In it, he tries to describe how to use some of Jobs' strategies in your own presentations.

Gallo is aiming at a business audience (he also wrote 10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Business Communicators), but as he says in the book, Steve Jobs doesn't really sell computers and iPods - he sells an experience.

Does this translate to a classroom? I think most of us also hope to inform, educate, and entertain, and some of us are equally theatrical - being concerned about our "script," use some props, and try to use strong visuals.

Oversimplified, Gallo notes five elements of Jobs' presentations that you might use to sell ideas.

HEADLINE(s) Short, Twitter-age main ideas (MacBook Air = the world's thinnest notebook)

SIMPLE SLIDES  Simple, clean Apple products and simple, clean presentation slides that are more visual and devoid of bullet points. Gallo says the average PowerPoint slide has 40 words, but that Jobs might have 7 words in 10 slides.

DEMO(s)  Jobs is into demonstrating a new product or feature by the 10 minute mark.

HOLY SMOKES MOMENT(s)   It's tough to have what neuroscientists call an "emotionally charged event" in every class. (Steve Jobs doesn't have to present 180 days a year or every Monday and Wednesday in a lecture hall.) But, if you have one "mental post-it note" moment that students can take away...  Okay, when he launched the iPod in 2001 and said, "In our own small way we're going to make the world a better place" that may have been a bit lofty, but he's good at presenting a sense of mission, passion, emotion, and enthusiasm. Does that describe any teachers that you had, and that you still fondly remember?



    BusinessWeek interview with Gallo

2010 Categories: Poetry (one poem), Short story (10-page max.), Personal essay (5-page max.)  All personal essay submissions must respond to this year’s prompt. Poetry and short story submissions are not limited by topic.

Personal Essay Writing Prompt: By choice and by chance, we all belong to many groups. These groups include not only those into which we’re born or which we build over time (such as family and friends) but also other groups that form more fleetingly out of circumstance (such as “the students who take the 7:30 bus” or “the ones who sit out during gym” or the readers of a certain blog). In a personal essay, tell your readers about one of the groups to which you belong, or to which you once belonged. Use imagery, details, and other narrative techniques to bring to life your group. Encourage your readers to consider meanings through your portrait of, and reflections on, your group.

You might use the following questions to prompt and/or to guide your writing about your group:
Who are you? Where do you "live together"? By what rules or understandings do you live? How do you impact one another and/or how do you impact others and the world? What do you learn together? What do you share together? Why is this group important?

Aim to educate your readers about segments of life and views on life that they might not already know. You might find it useful to imagine that you are describing your group to a visitor from another country (a distant relative or an exchange student visiting your school) and that you are acting as the spokesperson for your group. Surprise your readers as you allow them to see through the eyes of the group. We encourage you to express your answer in the first person plural (“we”) voice.

Each student may submit a maximum of one entry in each category. Each participating teacher may submit up to ten entries in each category.

This year all submissions and all judging will be digital. Students (and/or teachers on behalf of students) will upload submissions to the online galleries listed below. Upon approval by contest curators, submissions will be published to an online gallery of writing. Until judging is complete and to ensure fair judging, all submissions will be posted anonymously.

Submission deadline: December 15, 2009

Poetry Submissions:http://www.galleryofwriting.org/galleries/735416

Personal Essay Submissions: http://www.galleryofwriting.org/galleries/699259

Short Story Submissions: http://www.galleryofwriting.org/galleries/725566

Questions or concerns? Want more information? Visit the contest blog: writingteacher.edublogs.org and njcte.org

Wondershare QuizCreator is a tool that a colleague quickly demonstrated to me. It helps educators quickly and easily create Flash-based rich, interactive quizzes for online tests or Web assessments. Besides SCORM compliance for LMS, the built-in service FREE Quiz Management System (QMS) also help track, analyze and report quiz results for effective learning.

• Insert Math and Science Symbols with Equation Editor
• Import question from existing Excel document
• Insert images, background images and background color
• Insert screenshots and Flash animations
• Import music or record sounds to questions
• Customize fonts of questions and answers
• Add notes to questions
• Add feedback: Answer level feedback & Quiz level feedback
• Insert hyperlink to questions, answers and images
• Set difficulty level of questions
• Create Question Bank
• Shuffle Question and Answers
• Randomize Quizzes

Here is an overview. If you have used the tool, add a comment below.

A followup to an earlier post on vooks (video + books) is this one on blooks - blogs + books. The website OurBlook is self-described as:

OurBlook is a website combining the dynamic online atmosphere of a blog with the researched, in-depth analysis of a book. Our online community is a collaborative resource created and used by academics, public policy officials, and journalists at the natural intersection of current events and the media. Everyday, these experts join OurBlook to engage in an on-going conversation with their colleagues that seeks out the responsible, sustainable ideas that will define our future.

If you have not used a blook, you can click to their blook, Future of Journalism, where experts discuss the future of journalism, what the information distribution map will look like in 20 years, and question whether traditional journalism is a thing of the past. Highlighed contributors include John Yemma, Chris O'Brien, and Charlotte Grimes.


Adobe
has announced that the next release of Flash will be available on iPhones and that will continue the process of redefining newspapers, textbooks and magazines.

MORE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blook
http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2007/09/

I was working over the weekend on my presentation for the upcoming NJEDge.Net Conference 6.0 (November18-20). My session is titled "The Ripple Effect: Faculty Redesign Through Course Redesign" and I guess the title hints a bit at where the presentation goes. I might have called it "The Shell Game," because part of the idea is sleight-of-hand.

The Writing Initiative at Passaic County Community College which I direct has as its primary goal improving writing. The means to do that is by redesigning more than twenty courses across disciplines as writing-intensive. But, when the grant was written, an embedded component of the project was also to increase the use of technology by the faculty and students both participating in those writing intensive courses and in the larger college community.

There's a good chance that there has been some type of faculty-development, technology-infusion effort at your school at least once in the past decade. Many of them are not very successful. There are lots of different reasons for that and my session won't try to determine why, but what I have observed is that in some cases the technology was never accepted by faculty as necessary to what they were teaching.

Our approach has become (and it has changed during our first two years) trying to make sure the horse is in front of the cart. Though we, by necessity, still need to offer some formal faculty development for our Initiative technology, we are trying to keep a lot of that less formal.

We have a lot of technology in the writing courses for students and faculty - collaboratively creating digital content that is shared with other instructors, online assessments, lecture capture, streaming video, e-portfolios, e-tutoring, online scheduling, and promoting the use of the college portal and learning management systems. We have courses that are online, blended, and face-to-face. There's so much technology that we were often questioned (particularly by faculty) in the first two years of the grant if we weren't losing sight of the writing.

Now, as we start year 3 of the five-year grant, we can definitely point to one successful aspect of our efforts: the ripple effect in the adoption of the grant-funded technologies beyond the writing-intensive courses and instructors.

My session will report on the successes and challenges of these efforts including the data collected by my team and PCCC's Institutional Research department about the initial effects the Initiative is having on student success, learning outcomes and retention.

It pleased me to read the EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges report for 2009.  In trying to set the agenda and collaborate with colleagues around real solutions and innovative directions, the community came up with their Top Five Challenges in teaching and learning with technology. Our Initiative addresses all five.

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
2. Developing 21st century literacies (information, digital, and visual) among students and faculty.
3. Reaching and engaging today's learner.
4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts.

"Faculty Redesign" is not something you really hear being discussed on campuses as much as course redesign, but that's what I am talking interested in seeing happen on our campus. Both are best done as a process, rather than some thing we do because we have new tools to use.

The first 3 challenges in the list above are more explicit in our grant. The last two may ultimately be the most important.

If you want to know more about the EDUCAUSE Challenges and participate, check out their project wiki where they are trying to build a network of solutions and join the Challenges Ning Network.

Last week was the BlogWorld & New Media Expo which included the 2009 "State of the Blogosphere" report compiled by Technorati and delivered by their CEO Richard Jalichandra.


Since 2004, Technorati's annual State of the Blogosphere report has followed growth and trends in the blogosphere. This year bloggers were surveyed directly to provide the data for the report.


The 2009 State of the Blogosphere survey demonstrates that the growth of the blogosphere's influence on subjects ranging from business to politics to the way information travels through communities continues to flourish. In a year when revolutions and elections were organized by blogs, bloggers are blogging more than ever, and the State of the Blogosphere is strong.


Technorati released five segments that you can now access online. They started with demographics on Who Are the Bloggers, then onto the What and Why and the How of Blogging. The last two segments are of less interest to me and most educators - blogging revenues and their political impact - but are probably where the most interest is in blogging in the larger part of the blogosphere.


In addition to the survey results, there are also interviews with some big names from blogging:

Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist
Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital, Micro Persuasion
Alex Santoso, Neatorama
Henry Copeland, Blogads
Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
Jonathan Salem Baskin, Dimbulb
Mathew Ingram, Toronto Globe and Mail
Seth Godin, Squidoo, sethgodin.typepad.com
Simon Mackie, Web Worker Daily
Dan Gillmor, dangillmor.com
Duncan Riley, The Inquisitr