Tuesday, July 31. 2007
Checked Your Blog's Accessibility Lately?
Monday, July 30. 2007
SOS: Social Operating Systems
Sunday, July 29. 2007
Et tu, Moodle?
I'm not the greatest proponent of Distance Learning coures as they have been developed and implented at many colleges and universities (including NJIT). The idea of expanding a student population without having to budget the expense of building additional classroom space drove administrators and academic departments to shoehorn existing course offerings into a web browser accessible format and register additional "online" students. A result of those efforts was to produce online enrollments that sported (especially for undergraduate studies) drop out rates of about 45%. Oher attempts at improving distance learning courses and content delivery soon produced blended learning (or hybrid) courses that required students to attend classroom sessions that supplemented their online studies. The drop out rates improved and adult-oriented programs like Weekend University began to pick up some academic steam.
The usual notion of distance learning is to have a professor/instructor at some central location teaching students at remote locations, but what if students remainined in a classroom, and the teacher taught from a remote location?
The Spring, that question was asked by Bishop George Ahr High School and Continuing Professional Education provided the answer.
The well-accomplished Latin teacher at Bishop George Ahr High School was leaving for France before the start of the 2008 school year and, while they didn't want to replace that fine instructor, they needed a solution to provide four years of Latin educaton to their pupils. CPE at NJIT, using Moodle as a content delivery platform, provided detailed one-on-one staff training and course content conversion to place the curriculum materials in an effective distance learning format.
Beginning in the Fall of 2008, the Latin students at Bishop George Ahr High School will be able to view multimedia lectures from the classroom, home or any remote location, receive detailed feedback about their performance, participate in real-time chats with their instructor and take their examinations in a protected and proctored classroom environment. The administrators at Bishop Ahr tested this new program at the end of this school year and solicited feedback from students and parents and reported that everyone was excited and supportive of this new initiative for the start of the next school year.
If Web 2.0 technologies can usher in Latin instruction in a distance learning format, what could be next, English?
Friday, July 27. 2007
Summer Camp for Geeks
That's what the flyer (and webpage) called the KansasFest computer conference of July, 2007, a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the original Apple ][ computer.
It takes an extraordinary group of people to convene (for the 19th consecutive time) to celebrate a computer platform and philosophy that the manufacturer abandoned in 1992, but the original promotion by Apple Computer touted the Apple ][ computer as the "personal, personal computer," and that idea resonated with millions of people worldwide.
The days of Apple IIe labs and Apple IIGS clusters nestled on Appletalk networks in grammar school computer labs ended in the mid 1990's with Apple's failure to provide an upgrade path from the aging ][ series to the Macintosh. Schools were left with thousands of dollars of terrific educational software and no computer on which they would run. Schools began to move to PC hardware and Microsoft based programs.
Those early Apple computers never stop appealing to a dedicated group of users. Unsupported by Apple Computer, User Groups were created on online services such as CompuServe and Genie and new third party hardware and software continued to be developed and sold.
KFest 2007 was a remarkable mixture of the new and old --both products and people. The conference has actually grown in size over the past few years with oldtimer attendees (like me) meeting and greeting teenage and twenty-something devotees who hadn't been around long (if at all) when the Apple ][ line had been born or discontinued. There were attendees for the US, Australia and Canada with one of the Canadian presenters making the trip to Kansas City from Toronto on a Vespa motorbike.
There were presentations on new software, old hardware and foundation operating systems, there was a keynote address by David Szetela, the first editor-in-chief of Nibble magazine and, later, Apple Computer executive. My own presentation "FreeBSD, the Macintosh Unix" was preceded by Geoff Weiss's excellent presentation of software mapping between Microsoft's Vista and the Apple operating systems.
The real joy of this conference,though - the real reason for attending-- wasn't to make a presentation or watch other talented presenters loose their expertise upon the attendees. The real joy was in hanging out in the dormitories at Rockhurst University where we were housed and watching brilliant people shine. There was non-stop software developing, hardware hacking and on-topic/off-topic discussing all night long. Then, when people needed a quick break, they piled into a 1973 Chevrolet school bus driven from Oklahoma to Kansas City by an attendee to make a 3 AM Denny's Restaurant run. After that fast refueling, everyone was back at it again, hacking and programming and opining until it was time to go to breakfast. The red-eyed stumble became, at least for me, the dance of every day.
The conference lasted about 5 days and it was a little sad to watch the attendees and presenters scatter on the last day. But, even before the end of the conference, Kansasfest 2008 was announced (specific dates pending) and, to a person, the attendees and presenters remaining to hear that announcement were eager to say they'd be back next year.
The old rallying cry of Apple ][ users was "Apple II Forever," now it might be "Apple II Users Forever." The convening of this group of remarkable people every year is now about who they are and who they may inspire to carry the banner of world-class independent software and hardware development to the 20th anniversary of the gathering next year.
Thursday, July 26. 2007
Blogs Have Legs
When I first started this blog in February 2006, I was excited that a few dozen people were reading a post after just 48 hours. As the weeks went on and I really decided what the foci was to be, I was a bit disappointed that the numbers didn't suddenly surge, though I had no reason to believe they should surge.
It took a month or more before I began looking at the stats and noticed that the numbers on the early posts were moving up faster as time went by. The blog posts had legs. People were finding posts weeks/months after I wrote them through the wizardry of search engines, tags and links from other bloggers.
Looking back at an entry I did back in month one on Web 2.0, I see that it now has had 25,388 hits. Even the first entry I did as a test that explained the 35 part of Serendipity35 now has almost 14,000 hits.
Now, we don't make any money on the site, so hits don't have that kind of value, but it is nice to know that what you write is being read.
I find it interesting to sift through the stats (thank you Tim & Webalizer) to find:
- that last month we were averaging 6631 hits per day (at times, more than 1000 an hour)
- how many people have come to the site from the mention we got in PC Magazine
- or on a foreign blog about ?? in a language I can't read (an explanantory comment below from any of you would be welcome)
- that the top search terms that brought people to Serendipity35 are things like cloning, olpc, kindergarten, minority report, cartoon family, father knows best, one day university, pedagogy, andragogy and classroom
- that the top countries outside the U.S. that we have readers in are Germany, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Australia, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom
Wednesday, July 25. 2007
The Horizon of This Flat World
Even this flat world has a horizon, and it's a good idea to look that way occassionally.
Lots of talk about YouTube lately, especially since the over-hyped YouTube Debates, but are there comparable sites in other countries? Someone sent me the link to iShare which is a video sharing site in India. The first thing that struck me when I looked at the site was that the majority of videos I clicked on randomly were in English. In fact, many of them were things that are probably available on YouTube already.
Does this mean India lacks content of its own? I doubt it. Does it mean that the most interesting videos to an Indian audience are the same as in the United States or that English is the language of choice for videos?
It might make a good lesson for your students to look at foreign sites. It's easy enough to do with major sites like Google. They often test out new ideas on sites other than the English version. I noticed that the Google Korea and Google Taiwan feature some icons and buttons we do not see. Some of this is because of local cultural preferences and perhaps because of the higher bandwidth available there.
Do your American-centric students know that we don't have the fastest connections in the world? That's a good lead in to a discussion on how we lag behind other countries in many tech areas. Here's something I found at Business Week online that is quite different from what I usually hear about that:
"One would expect that the numbers used in such debate would be defensible and grounded. Yet researchers at Duke University have determined that some of the most cited statistics on engineering graduates are inaccurate. Statistics that say the U.S. is producing 70,000 engineers a year vs. 350,000 from India and 600,000 from China aren't valid, the Duke team says. We're actually graduating more engineers than India, and the Chinese numbers aren't quite what they seem. In short, America is far ahead by almost any measure, and we're a long way from losing our edge."
What's the true story on this issue? Worth some research.
Do your students even know that there are other versions of commonly used sites? Perhaps, world language teachers are using them. Sending your French class onto Google France not only immerses them in the language for some research, but will introduce new vocabulary and can focus their search to French sites.
Their search may turn up a Wikipedia entry from the French Wikipedia. Even if you're anti-Wikipedia (and you really must get over that, educator), there's great value in looking at the entries with your students and comparing the results to the English version and to other sites and sources. Check out all the languages that Wikipedia is available in at this point. Try the Esperanto version - perhaps after an explanation this interesting constructed international auxiliary language called Esperanto (in English).
If you teach literature and want to incorporate some world literature into your high school or college classroom but lack the background, take a class or two in iTunes U.
Dr. Norbert Elliot here at NJIT offers his World Lit I & World Lit II in the public area of our iTunes U site and they are getting plenty of downloads. Since his courses have been featured on the main iTunes U page, he has related to me instances of email from world readers far from our New Jersey campus.
Here's one he shared with me recently:
I am a senior high school student in Auckland, New Zealand and I jumped for joy when I discovered the open courseware section of iTunes which included a selection of audio recordings of your lectures. I downloaded one lecture of yours which was about New Zealand Literature, as I am fascinated to know what the American perspective is.
As Maori is only spoken in New Zealand, I did not expect you to pronounce Witi Ihimaera's name properly (fair enough), but for future reference it is said ee-hee-my-ra.
However, I thought I should contact you to correct you about the capital of our small nation (and I'm sure I'm not the first), which is in fact Wellington, not Christchurch.
Hopefully these corrections have been helpful. I am glad the literature of our country has interested you and I would urge you (if you have not yet) to read The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox.
Caitlin, English Prefect, Auckland Girls' Grammar School, New Zealand
Do you think Dr. Elliot was upset about being corrected? Hardly! What a kick to get mail from a young reader around the world commenting on your take on their literary heritage and adding to your own knowledge!
Point being that we talk about the flattening world and classroom, but how are you addressing it in your classroom?
Tuesday, July 24. 2007
Too Much Blogging Going On
I'm just back from EduWeb in Baltimore and folks were blogging away about the conference. I did no blogging at all. I did read a novel. Remember reading books? It felt good.
Technorati is currently tracking 74.8 million blogs and the growth is not slowing down.
Obviously, I like blogging and I enjoy reading blogs, but it's getting overwhelming.
When I go into my Bloglines account where all my current blog interests are aggregated (and lately that's not every day), there are so many unread posts that I almost don't want to start reading.
This is what happened to me with magazine subscriptions. Adding up the few I paid for and the many that I get for free or at some ridiculously low "professional" rate, and the ones that came weekly, I was getting 63 issues a month.
Plus the ADD or OCD or whatever part of me that doesn't want to recycle an issue without at least paging through it didn't help. I had to cut off some reading.
I checked Bloglines just now after a few days away - 665 unread posts. Makes you want to just watch TV.
It's these blogs that have multiple posts each day that are killing me. When I saw how many were in Educational Technology I had to unsubscribe. Same thing with Kept Up (Helping Academic Librarians "Keep Up" With News and Developments In Higher Education). I enjoy the short Quotations Page but I've let so many go by unread that now I'm afraid to open the folder. Open Culture (cultural and educational podcasts, videos, online courses, etc.) has gone unread long enough to have 169 posts.
I'm not currently job hunting, so I should drop the customized search I set up at Monster.com, but I added searches for a marketing internship for my one son, and another search for my Virginia Tech engineering graduate.
The Chronicle's Wired Campus posts more than one a day, so their count is high, as is the Official Google Blog, Educational Technology, Crucial Thought,
I suppose I can drop my "What's New At Netflix" feed that tells me what DVDs were added this week. You only have to read titles, but there's always a hundred or more in that RSS feed. I enjoy discovering Zen Buddhism: In Search of Self, or some foreign film that slipped my mind, but you also have to sift through Hercules and the Masked Rider & Jollybean Kids Mystery.
I could just click on the feed link and then not read them or mark all as read, but then I feel like I missed something really important.
You can check out what's left on my list at the public version on bloglines.com/public/ronkowitz
I'm a little afraid to open up iTunes on my home computer and see how many podcasts I missed from those 48 subscriptions.
Friday, July 20. 2007
First Life Version of Second Life
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