Left is right, or something like that.....

Intellectual property rights are a daily issue for the public school teacher. Of the reading we did this week, the licensing scheme that intrigued me the most was copyleft.
Copyleft is a licensing scenario where the author or creator gives up some but not all rights under established copyright law. Rather than giving the work completely over to the public domain, where no ownership of copyright can be established, copyleft basically establishes some control over the actions of the secondary user of the product. Using copyleft, the work may be used as long as any products created are also licensed under the same copyleft scenario. The basic idea is no person or corporation can take your work and then modify it, and turn to traditional copyright to limit further use. It is really just a reciprocal licenses. Copyleft or reciprocal licenses are a way to make sure your work remains freely available in perpetuity, no matter who later uses it.
As an educator, this matters to me in a very real way. I understand people want to protect their intellectual property, but some of the things that education publishers copyright tie the hands of teachers. I hope I can create something that is so useful in the classroom that others want to use it, and I hope they will, and they will modify, improve, and then let others do the same. If I want to make money from it, that should come off my own time, teaching others how to use it, or writing about the product.
The story of how copyleft came to be exhibits the complexity of our current legal system of licensing intellectual property. Stories like this give me pause about the long term stability of open source licensing.
Below is a photo from the wikimedia commons which was released to the public domain.


See the information here. I would guess she just wanted to share a beautiful picture with the world.

wikimedia, publicly funded for the good of the world

As a public school teacher I have had a bumpy relationship with wikimedia. Personally, I love the concept, and the goal to develop and maintain open content, and to provide full contents of wiki based projects to the public free of charge. Hand in glove with public education, right? Well, it seems some in the educational world disagree, and wikipedia did suffer some credibility damage over the years, while others argue that new editing techniques using peer review insure non biased and accurate entries. I know I love to use it as a starting point for student research, a jumping off point of sorts.



My most important interaction with wikimedia came in early 2008 when my family participated in the OLPC give one get one program. OLPC is a non-profit organization set up to create an affordable educational computing device for use in the developing world. Its mission is "to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."
The OLPC project was completely supported by the wikimedia foundation. In August of 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that static copies of selected Wikipedia articles would be included on the laptops. Jimmy Wales, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "OLPC's mission goes hand in hand with our goal of distributing encyclopedic knowledge, free of charge, to every person in the world. Not everybody in the world has access to a broadband connection." So, when we got our little green xo-1 almost every help function, software download, upgrade, application background, etc. was to be found on a wiki page of some sort. The static wikipedia files were on the machine and super cool for the kids, easy and thorough. The access to community forums, software debugs, and upgrades was easy to follow in the wiki format.
As we used the xo-1 (mainly my the 6 year old daughter) we used one important wikimedia portal, wikibooks, specifically wikijunior. The xo-1 has been criticized on many levels, but it is a good e-book reader, and the use of ebooks and wikipedia articles was a boon for my daughter. Much like the OLPC, the wikijunior site is somewhat incomplete, but does have some great resources. Admittedly, the format was and is challenging for my daughter, but overall it has been a useful site.
Another wikimedia portal that is intriguing is wikisource. Wikisource has over 140,000 texts, an open free content library for the world. It has many nice older documents from prior to 1923, now copyright free, and a wide variety of more contemporary materials.
I think the wikipedia article about wikimedia is thorough and honest. It gives a nice overview of the structure, the history, and goals of the wikimedia foundation. In addition, it outlines some of the problems and pitfalls of the endeavor. I for one hope the wikimedia foundation prospers in to the future.

media sharing, let's have some fun.....

Like many in this class, I already had a youtube and picasa account, but very rarely used them. That is going to changing, as I have taken a closer look at these useful tools. I remember back in the day, before the 21st century, when sharing pictures was not so easy. I remember setting up a web page when my son was born, oh how I wish flickr and picasa had been around back then. Well, times they have changed. The photo sharing sites are wonderful and so easy to use. We have already discussed the great value of youtube. Now for the fun part, all the great web 2.0 apps that have cropped up to utilize the creative content in new and fun ways.
I love Stories in Flight and the app FlickrPoet. With this app you type or paste in a poem or story, and FlickrPoet will find matching photos on Flickr based on a search of tags, titles and descriptions of the photos. Great Fun, please check it out.



Then I found Bubblr, a tool to create comic strips using flickr pictures. The great part is that you can search for pictures using tags. Here is an example, I put in web 2.0 in the search, and of course I added the bubble:




and another, I searched Aardvark:


There is also big huge labs, the home of flickr toys

With video I found the National Geographic wildlife filmmaker, a wildlife mashup machine. So much fun. Here is one my daughter made in two minutes.

And last but not least for audio sharing I decided to introduce blabberize. If you are familiar with the old program crazy talk, this is the web 2.0 version. Well, this one is the MOST fun. My kids at school love this site, it provides hours of great entertainment. Here is one for you:




Hope you enjoy these.

Tagging and organizing, fun with social bookmarking

“The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”

“This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.”

These are quotes from Clay Shirkey, given in a series of speeches titled “"Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." and published on his blog here.

I have been reading more of Clay Shirkey this week after hearing him interviewed this week on Learncentral. Shirkey, a professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, is famous for his most recent book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". His insights on social media and research about how our networks shape culture and vice-versa, is directly related to our look at social bookmarking.
Shirkey has fascinated me with this idea of organization of information without formal structure. Without this ability, imagine how complex our catergorization of the web would become. Delicious of course, allows the user to easily tag, organize and reorganize pages. Tags allow me to label sites, and later find them easily. In addition, tags group sites in to categories, and enable the entire Delicious community to create user aggregated categories. The social aspect of the process, in some ways the crowdsourcing of the categorization of the web, is a great side effect of a service I can really use easily. This whole process allows for following other users, and the ability to monitor trends, which is probably more important to other types of users. It also allows for updates to twitter, FaceBook, or other social media sites if I feel compelled to share, very useful for breaking news and information.

Digg and Stumble Upon work using a different principal, essentially a binary choice of like or dislike of a site. Again, this is a user driven process, and as users submit sites, other users can review, or just digg a site. As a user, you can choose categories, and digg and SU will organize sites and stories for you. The process is based on your inputs, and what other users push collectively. As a user, I find this less helpful, as it does not provide long term organization.

Overall, Delicious has been a great revelation for me, tagging sites makes things so much simpler over time. I look forward to participating in the organic organization of information through tagging.

The web 2.0 recipe, finding the right mix

We are now over a month in to this web 2.0 and social media class, and it has been packed with content and connections, new tools, exposure to great videos and articles, and a toe in the water of many new (to me) sites. I feel a bit like a dilettante chef walking in to a gourmet kitchen. The scale and volume of the content available is overwhelming, the palette of social media platforms and tools is vast, and my limited use of all of them can feel overwhelming. As others have pointed out, I would like to move towards a mastery of some tools, particularly where they relate to my daily challenges educating young learners. Extending the cooking analogy, right now I feel like I have been exposed to so much, but finding the mix that works well together will be an experiment, an organic process, and there is no recipe written yet.
I feel DI has pushed me to try new things, and exposed me to some awesome resources. The Wesch videos, and the Epic videos produced by Karl Fisch are thought provoking and challenging on many levels. The Wesch article that Lucy referenced challenged further as an educator and a parent. The variety of materials and activities have been challenging in a positive way. Establishing a blog is something I simply would not have done on my own, and as I move forward it has been an excellent way for me to sort out my thoughts about the myriad of resources I come across daily. Shelley referenced a nice graphic called information overload that is descriptive of my situation as an educator. This blog has helped me slow down and be thoughtful about what things are critical, and I hope to extend that after this experience. A tool like Wordle was a revelation, fun, effective, and simple, my favorite combination. The logo development process was a rich reminder of my weaknesses, and a helpful push towards trying new tools and not being satisfied with the first thing I find. The wiki editing was also a push I needed, and a super fun project that got my kids interested as well (BTW, each of my kids has now started there own blog on topics of interest after the wiki project, not at my request, but rather by seeing how easy it was for me to set it up. I guess they figure if the old man can do it, can't be too hard). Social bookmarking helped me bring together a lot of divergent resources. Experimenting with Delicious, Digg, and Stumble Upon helped and get a better feel for where these tools can be most effective with my own students.
I heard someone say recently that RSS is dead, well I am a happy Google Reader user, and I think these social bookmarking tools are the evolution of RSS for a new generation, and an evolution of the organization of information, as Clay Shirkey points out here in a great set of speeches turned in to an article. The additional exercises in explaining web 2.0 as we currently see it, and to someone who presumably does not understand it, and writing a job description, have been less helpful in focusing my understanding, but still challenging. Second life is worthy of entire blog post, but suffice it to say that I certainly have been educated on the potential value of this tool. Crowdsourcing is another topic I want to explore in more detail as it relates to the students I teach daily.
Where do I hope to go on the rest of this journey? What have we not done well? Big questions. Over the past week or so I participated in two elluminate sessions offered by classroom 2.0 and learncentral. I would love to learn to moderate using elluminate, and have some structured class or group collaboration sessions using this tool. On learncentral they have a series of sessions on how to moderate, but it costs $199, I feel like some of you probably know how to do this already, or that at the very least we could teach each other, that would be valuable to me. It also feels like a platform (again limited experience here) where we could make concrete some excellent collaborative ideas. I feel like the wealth of knowledge in the participants in this class is tremendous, and I would like to have more of a chance to learn from all of you. On thursday Clay Shirkey was interviewed as a part of a learncentral series, it was interesting to say the least, but the interactive aspects of the interview were dominated by the moderators, 45 minutes of a single questioner, versus only 15 allotted to participants.
I think Lucy has already pointed out the desire to focus in on educational applications of these tools, and she has done it far more eloquently than I could, I second that concept.
I really appreciate being able to have direct interaction with DI, and using a new and evolving tool like Buzz, and getting to follow his thoughts and reactions early was enriching. I love that he shared those early thoughts with us, pointing out problems and positives. I love being able to share in buzz right to the group, and I hope our Google group will become more active. I also appreciate the honesty of evaluating a faltering tool like wave, which I still have lingering hopes for, but is not fitting in our current progress.
Reading back through this it looks like my recipe is pretty full, in 4 weeks we have touched on a lot. I hope we can create a wonderful recipe together, one that is more refined, over the next ten weeks.

Wiki, where will you take us?

I have worked with wikimedia previously, but never actually made an edit to a wikipedia page. I had a snow day on Monday, so I took advantage of the morning and sat down with my kids and looked at the Asheville page. That led to looking at the page about our neighborhood. We had some fun editing, and adding some information. We researched and added information about a former Governor of North Carolina, Locke Craig, who happens to be buried in Riverside Cemetery very near our home. Then we walked up and took some pictures to add to the site. There are quite a few famous people resting eternally at Riverside, including Thomas Wolfe, whose gravestone is pictured above. My kids are eager to do some more wiki contributions.
Actually setting up my profile page was more challenging in terms of creative content. I am not fond of writing about myself, so I bailed and just used my career and education information. I think I used 10 editing functions, but wikimedia keeps things fairly simple. You can see my profile page here.

What we missed in the buzz...Google fiber

In my mind the bigger announcement from Google this week was Google fiber. I spent many an hour reading about and reacting to buzz, but I think in the long term, as it relates to new media, the fiber roll out is the bigger deal.
From the Google press announcement " Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

* Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
* New deployment techniques: We'll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we'll share key lessons learned with the world.
* Openness and choice: We'll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we'll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way."

Well, the reaction in my community was that every tweeter and social media "guru" rushed to the forefront to say "hey, Google, we'll take some of that" I am already a member of a Google group called "Asheville's Google Fiber Initiative", and a fan of said group on Facebook. A proposal is in the works, a video being planned, analysis of what other communities are doing is taking place via the Google group. The group includes politicians (city council and county commissioners), business folk (COC reps) activists, free lancers, educators, and I suppose a lot more labels could stick. Why are we all so eager to collaborate? Because we know how, and we know that infrastructure like this will allow a future of boundless collaborative opportunities afforded by web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond apps. Second life as a truly educationally functional web app gets way more realistic at 1 Gb per second.
Ironic that now that we have a chance for infrastructure, our true geographic community comes together, so we can build better and stronger virtual communities as a result.

So, where is the bad in all of this? the conspiracy theorists are folding up tin foil hats for all of us. What is Google up to, what are they after, there must be some evil motive here? Call me naive, and educate me please if I am wrong, but I really think this is just win-win for Google. By making it easier to do what we do online, they win. In a post modern business world is that wrong?

Welcome to Second Life

What I knew about Second Life prior to my experience this week was next to nothing. I had heard it discussed on NPR weekend edition, I had the sense that it was an immersive world with a complex set of graphics and 3D environments. In my mind I had lumped it with World of warcraft (which I hear about from my students constantly) and other immersive "games". I am not all that interested in immersive games, so I had never taken any time to pursue information about SL. I went in to this week with skepticism, I can barely keep afloat with my responsibilities in one life, how could I make time even to play at a second?
Well, this week I had an educational experience. I was introduced to Second Life's offbeat, dream like landscape. I encountered a programming environment which is multi-faceted, crammed full of features, almost overwhelming at first glance, but comfortably intuitive for the user. And, most importantly, I learned to fly.
DI's notecard and walk through on Friday evening was insightful and quite useful. The explanation of how SL creates "emotional investment" and "proximity" started to make things seem more reasonable as an approach to an educational environment. My questions: What can we do here that we cannot already do with a skype connection, video conferencing, and other simpler online tools? Well, after an initial experience the answer seems to be a lot. The "virtual" proximity is much different than virtual conference room, less structured, more comfortable, more capability for honest interaction. More authenticity, a word that seemed antithetical under my old mind set. Learning on a flying carpet at 200 meters was pretty cool. While I can see how some users approach the SL world as a game, I was quickly convinced it is not a gamers environment. As a matter of fact, I suspect gamers would be disappointed that there is no "quest" or "goal" other than interaction. Question 2, how do you overcome the skepticism of people like me that a virtual world just does not have the austere environment that an educational experience deserves. Answer, you likely cannot, but the skeptics are really not important if you can get results with a generation of users who are comfortable and most importantly, productive within the immersive world environment. I then realized that the best educational experience I ever had happened on a beach in Costa Rica, not a classroom in Asheville, Boone, or anywhere else.
There are still many hurdles to overcome. As Neil pointed out this is not a true web 2.0 environment. The program is so far out of reach for my current teaching environment that I can not even contemplate it relative to my reality. However, part of this program is understanding where these new media will take us, being prepared, and developing the tools to maximize these environments when the infrastructure is in place. Is this web 3.0? Maybe, it seems very possible.

A quick side note, if you have time to view this video about Alice, please do. Teaching students to program in an environment like Alice will better prepare them to appreciate the complexity of SL, and appreciate the value of the SL experience. Plus, they will get to make things fly!

Fun with words

Words hold the potential to impact many lives, change a course of events, or trigger a radical change. Words can give us hope, they can scare, encourage, console, entertain, and much more. Certainly in the modern age of digital collaboration, words are our most important connection.
Wordle is a web 2.0 application which allows the user to create fun and interesting word clouds. It really is easy to create a Wordle. You input a piece of text, or a list of words, click go and your text becomes a Wordle, a word cloud in which the most frequently used words are displayed in a larger font. You can then play around with the font styles, colors and layout until you have a finished Wordle.
In terms of my own teaching, I can see Wordles as great activity starters. It could be a tremendous vocabulary exercise, which allows pupils to discuss classification. In the computer lab it is an excellent way to help students craft a writing assignment, and combine it with a fun technology tool. With younger students it would be a fun way to craft a greeting card or a poster about themselves.

A major advantage of wordle is that you can use these word clouds anywhere, even in commercial publications. All wordles are under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. So don’t be amazed if you see one in your favorite blog, or maybe your favorite magazine.
There is no option to save an image file, but you can always create a screenshot. There are lots of options to play with, including fonts, colors, alignment, and some language filters. You can also save your Wordle into the public gallery. The FAQ is a good resource if you need to learn some extra tricks.

Which Browser?

There has been a significant amount of discussion in this class about the relative merits of different browsers, particularly firefox, safari, and chrome. In previous classes I had always used firefox, and really love some of the extensions and add-ons, but had grown tired of the update process and relative slow start up I was experiencing. When Chrome entered the scene I tried it out and quickly found myself using it often on my PC at school. I like the speed, and the minimal interface, and at school the add-ons and extensions were not as much of an issue. There is no question that firefox has the best and most extensive library of extensions and add-ons. But I continue to be drawn to chrome, and each time I am I hit a snag, particularly on the mac, relating to lacking an extension. I know they are coming, but they are not here yet. Anyway, here is article from Farhad Manjoo extolling the relative virtues of the browsers currently in play. I loved this statement: "I think Chrome is perfect for high-volume consumers of the Web—idiots like me who keep several browser windows open concurrently, each populated with dozens of tabs, and don't restart the browser for days and days on end. More casual Web users may find its unusual interface—and its lack of support for third-party interface add-ons like the Yahoo Toolbar—hard to get used to." I sometimes fall in to that class of idiots.
Any thoughts from classmates? Which browser are you using and why? Which one works best with the most useful web 2.0 apps?

Cognoscor Ergo Sum

Stephen Colbert had some interesting thoughts on some web 2.0 applications in the segment called "The Word" on Tuesday night. Click here to link to the video. Now his examples were a bit on the extreme, I cannot fathom the usefulness of blippy. However, the general theme was thought provoking, how much of social media is productive for society?

Three cheers for CMU, bringing the world productivity through fun!

The google tech talk in which Luis von Ahn outlines how he and his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon are openly enticing gamers to do the laborious work of image labeling by creating a fun environment is nothing short of fascinating. I must say that the CMU computer science department is high on my list of the coolest programs in the US. I discovered Alice
a few years ago, a CMU creation, and have used it as a primer to programming for 5th grade students. Storytelling Alice is an improvement upon the original design. These are great “teaching games” that encourage creativity, create enthusiasm, and foster a desire to learn by having fun. von Ahn is extending this tradition of creative education and productivity through gaming from CMU. I must say, the 9 billion hours of solitaire is a real disappointing, but not so shocking number.

Games like Free Rice are big hits with elementary and middle school aged students, and just plain fun. My 3rd grader will play free rice for hours, just to make a high score, capitalizing on our human drive to do better than before. I also teach 8th graders who love the game, and have more altruistic goals. Many of my students have asked recently if they can play free rice for Haiti, so fun and altruism can work together. I can think of countless instances in my school where teachers have made kids "work for free" by making it into a game or reward. You would be surprised at the competition among kids to “earn” the right to clean computers at the end of the day.
Are things different with adults? I don’t think so, especially when you look at some of the classic crowdsourcing examples from wikipedia. Adults recognize where self interest and community interest intersect, and are happy to live in the middle of that Venn diagram. Business and corporate interests will undoubtedly try to overuse this basic human desire to improve things for the common good, and might turn people off at some point. However, I think that in the growing culture of “free is good” people understand that value is built by common interest and collaboration. The economy of cooperation can work to maximize the potential of the human mind and the human spirit.

Future of eReading might not be iPad, but Blio

I'll admit it, I geeked out over the Ipad. This supersized Ipod touch seems to have unbelievable potential in the classroom of the future. As inelegant as the name might be, the device itself is sleek, clean, and appealing. I read all the reviews from writers I trust saying their skepticism melted away when they held the new device.

But time brings about equanimity, and some further research. This interesting story from ESchoolNews sobered me right up. Yes, I still want a sleek tablet that can handle my day to day classroom tasks, but until the right one comes along I will be paying close attention to all my options.