This is the Emerging Learning Technologies report for the week of 28 March. I’m Jim Patterson, co-chair of ELT along with Roger Yohe.
This week –
Filmmaking and technology help kids to shape exhibits - Deborah Kennedy, Cincinnati Inquirer
The future began Thursday in Two Rivers Middle School in Covington where students wowed parents and judges with 60 exhibits on everything from tracking sea turtles to Renaissance art. The displays were part of Covington Independent School District's Technology Fair, aimed at helping students of all ages understand the importance of innovation in the classroom, according to Bev Paeth, director of the district's Student Technology Leadership Program. "We want the students to learn through technology. Technology is not the end product, but instead it enhances and enriches the learning experience," she said. See http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050325/NEWS0103/503250373/1059/news01 for details.
More on the power of blogs! Schools Chief’s Blog Offers Tips - Education Week
The writers of Web logs have shown their power to oust media executives and rewrite major stories in a presidential campaign. Now, a Chicago-area administrator hopes such a “blog” can help in persuading communities to provide adequate financing for schools. Ray Lauk, the superintendent of the 2,200-student Lyons Elementary School District 103, has launched one of the online diary-style logs to offer strategies for winning passage of school funding referendums. See http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/02/23/24lead.h24.html
From our friends at Educause, Are you looking for ways to engage and grow professionally? Participate in EDUCAUSE as committee member, conference proposal reviewer or session moderator, or ad hoc volunteer. To be considered in this year's volunteer cycle, apply online by April 29 at http://www.educause.edu/VolunteerOpportunities/861
The current Educause Quarterly has some interesting articles on learning styles, learning spaces, and electronic journaling at http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm05/eqm051.asp
Have a good week,
Jim Patterson
Welcome to another Emerging Learning Technologies report for the week of 21 March. I’m Jim Patterson, co-chair of ELT.
Free and Low Cost Software to Make Computing Easier - Miguel Guhlin, Tech Learning at http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=60401735
There is software is available for free. They may not be necessarily the newest or the best, but they are usually free or under $50. As a matter of fact, depending on your operating system, you could buy all the software in this article for between $45 (Windows) to $50 (Macintosh OS X). If you don't mind, come along and take a quick look at some of the free software out on the Internet. Many are freeware programs — fully functional programs that the author or company allows anyone to use without asking for ANY payment for it. Others are "try before you buy" shareware.
From ComputerWorld, Why WIMAX will not die. These wireless broadband technologies promise office-grade connections almost anywhere and breakthroughs for disaster recovery – eventually http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/technology/story/0,10801,99680,00.html
Also from ComptuerWorld, Taking Stock Of E-paper. The technology is just beginning to gain ground for applications such as e-books and in-store signage, but broader uses have yet to appear. http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,95986,00.html
From Fred Langa’s newsletter at http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-03-17.htm , if you find your brain does not work in a linear (left to right) fashion but still want to organize thoughts, try several listed free mindmap softwares. And try http://www.answersthatwork.com/ which will give you answers to your computer problems.
Have a pleasant week!
Jim Patterson
Hi, Jim Patterson here from cloudy and cool San Diego where I am at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. This is Monday 14 March, day one of the event.
I thought I'd share the wiki they set up for the conference at http://wiki.oreillynet.com/etech05/index.cgi Now you can see what is going on.
I should have a busy day today with some tutorials that look exciting. I'll report back later!
Jim Patterson
AFTERNOON OF MONDAY 14 MARCH
I went to the tutorial today by Kathy Sierra called "Creating Passionate Users." The whole idea is whatever you are trying to get people to do, students to learn, or faculty to use... you need to create PASSION. Not neutral, satisifed, or likes it... but PASSION. Kathy showed us how to do that. The bottom line is people, students, faculty have to come away from the experience and believe "I RULE." What that means is they do not feel stupid but empowered. What people think about themselves is key here, not what they think about you.
Look at http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/ for more information. I think this has real application in how we can get people at Maricopa passionate users of technology! Kathy will be authoring a book by the same name for O'Reilly set to come out in August of 2005. Here is another site Kathy recommends that is a blog on creativity
Oh, for photos, features, press coverage, and weblogs from this conference, go to http://www.oreillynet/com/et2005
TUESDAY MARCH 15
I am suffering from brain cramp. The sessions come in fifteen minute bites (bytes?) which is actually kind of fun. Today I started off watching the participants. Everything from suits to shorts. Everybody is carrying laptops. In fact, I noted during the presentations how I could hear the collective sound of about 500 people typing on laptop computers. You seem them all here. Blackberries, little laptops, big laptops, cell phones of all kinds. Most have several wireless devices. I also noticed I am about the only one here who is an early riser. A reporter for the Washington Post and I had breakfast; he and I were the only ones there for about an hour. He told me these folks are mostly programmers and programmers sleep in a lot.
Rael Donfest started off the day talking about etech being about small things loosely joined. The gospel of openness, whether it is opening the box and fooling with it or whether it is sharing data and code, to build greater applications. In fact, the whole day seemed to scream LEARNING OBJECTS to me. He said the companies that are going to win are going to allow for customization and let customers lead the way.
On the O'Reilly radar screen, they are promoting the use of combining multiple internet technologies so all can win and make money. Here is a perfect example in how to compare book prices. Tim O'Reilly talked about products in perpetual beta, always putting out the latest and greatest instead of waiting for a larger release. He noted Google, Flickr, and Safari U (create your own technology textbook) as examples. "When content is digital, it lends itself to being brokendown and remixed." Develop web applications with less pain at RubyRails And look at the use of visualizations for picking baby names. This is cool; it is called name voyager.
Some other cool things that are being worked on include interactive 3D mapping technology frm Applied Minds and Dan Hillis. Danny showed a great 3D way of showing maps on a desktop that actually contoured to show lakes, valleys, and mountains.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos showed a powerful vertical search engine called A9.com It will offer you more ways to search.
Rick Rashid of Microsoft Labs talked about something out there called Sensecam (a black box for humans) that will record all of your conversations and take pictures of what you see. He showed a version called Fridgecam that showed who and what was taken out of a refrigerator. The uses for this are good, for instance, with patience who have lost memory. And, it can also be used as a sort of super blogging device. He also showed some interesting out there display devices such as a way to turn any table into a 40 inch display with a way to hand manipulate what is on the screen. Something called a Touchlight is a large interactive vertical display.
Gary Flake of Yahoo Research Labs talked about a brand new thing they have called the Tech Buzz Game. He is looking for beta testers and there are prizes! You get to manage a virtual portfolio and make guesses as to what the next greates technologies will be. So go out to that site and get busy. If you want to see the other things Yahoo has in the pipeline, they have another page called Yahoo Next.
Peter Norvig from Google Labs talked about some of the things they have in the pipeline. One is called Google Suggests. This one is in beta so you will be one of the first to see it. It works with javascript to act like a auto complete feature, except the auto complete if from Google, guessing what you are looking for. TRY IT! Look at a more interactive beta of Google Maps. Pick an area of the map by holding down your left mouse button and move the map around. Also from Google Labs is something called Sets. For more, go to Google Labs.
Jim Patterson
WEDNESDAY MARCH 16
During the morning session, it really kicked in for me. It is not about the gadgets or the technology. It really isn't about the code, which drives most of the people here. It is about systems thinking (sum of the parts is greater than the whole). It is also about creativity and thinking in terms of combining what is out there in new ways that are useful to people.
Neil Gershenfeld talked about his experiences teaching in the Bits and Atoms section of MIT. He gave examples of how almost anybody can pick up on this idea of personal fabrication, by taking things from other areas and combining them in novel ways.
Justin Chapweske talked about a concept called swarm streaming of content delivery.
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia talked about social computing. They have almost 500,000 articles in English in the encyclopedia online. It contains peer reviewed articles and things submitted can be voted off. People share information freely. It answers the problem of individual web pages were there is no quality control and/or the author will get tired and not update the page. WikiCities is another new concept with over 170,000 groups so far.
While in the exhibitor area, I made some personal contact with a few there because of my University of Arizona connection. One fellow from Yahoo invited me to be on the faculty advisory team, so maybe something neat will come of that. Somebody from O'Reilly with an Arizona connection engaged me in a discussion of one of my interests (I used to be a radio reporter) on the whole concept of people using the Internet to go around reporters and Old Media. She handed me a book called We The Media written by Dan Gillmor. I would love to teach a class on this but wonder if it would fly at my college.
Tonight I go to the O'Reilly Maker Fair. Lots of beer and a chance to see and touch some gadgets.
Jim Patterson
As a result of our chats with various Maricopa colleges and groups, Roger Yohe and I have come up with a report that is located here
Firms firing workers for blogging
By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer
Published March 7, 2005, 7:39 AM CST
NEW YORK -- Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it. Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web journals, particularly those written outside of work hours.
Simonetti had posted suggestive photographs of herself in uniform, while Jen speculated online about his employer's finances. In neither case were their bosses happy when they found out.
"There needs to be a dialogue going on between employers and employees," said Heather Armstrong, a Web designer fired for commenting on her blog about goings on at work. "There's this power of personal publishing, and there needs to be rules about what you can or cannot say about the workplace."
On blogs, which are by their very nature public forums, people often muse about their likes and dislikes -- of family, of friends, of co-workers.
Currently, some 27 percent of online U.S. adults read blogs, and 7 percent pen them, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project.
With search engines making it easy to find virtually anything anyone says in a blog these days, companies are taking notice -- and taking action.
"Because it's less formal, you're more likely to say something that would offend your boss," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a workers' rights group.
Armstrong, who wouldn't name the company that fired her in 2002, said some of her bosses took issue with such posts as "Comments Heard In, Around, and Consequent to the Company Christmas Party Last Evening."
Soon after she was sacked, sympathizers coined the term "dooced," meaning "to have lost one's job because of one's Web site," in her case dooce.com.
In 2003, a Microsoft Corp. contractor was fired after posting photographs of computers from rival Apple Computer Inc. at a loading dock. Because Michael Hanscom had described a building in his posting, Microsoft said he had violated security, he said.
Last fall, Simonetti posted photographs of herself posing in a Delta Air Lines uniform inside a company airplane, her bra partly revealed in one. She was fired weeks later.
And in January, Jen was fired by Google over a blog that discussed life at the company, even though he said "it's all publicly available information and my personal thoughts and experiences."
Upon reflection, Jen said, he understood Google's concerns, given readers' tendencies to read between the lines and draw conclusions based on "random comments I made."
He said he hoped his case would prompt workers to "talk to their managers at length about blogging before they begin."
Simonetti said she still doesn't know what she did wrong, saying that plenty of employee Web sites and dating profiles identify Delta and include photos in uniform.
"If there is a policy against this, why weren't all these people punished before?" she said.
Delta and Google officials would only say that Simonetti and Jen no longer worked for them.
In 1997, blogging pioneer Cameron Barrett lost a job at a small marketing firm in Michigan after co-workers stumbled upon "experimental" short stories from his creative writing class on his site. Now, he's much more cautious, and he suspended his blog while campaigning for Wesley Clark during the Democratic presidential primaries.
"I knew that everything I wrote would be scrutinized at (a) microscope level by the other campaigns and their supporters," Barrett wrote in an e-mail.
Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often "don't realize the First Amendment doesn't protect their job."
The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.
A few companies actually do encourage personal, unofficial blogs and have policies defining do's and don'ts for employees who post online. They recognize that there can be value in engaging customers through thoughtful blogs.
"There's always a risk, but you always have that risk anytime you put an employee on the phone," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said.
Sun Microsystems Inc. encourages blogging, offering server space for personal blogs but warning bloggers not to reveal secrets or make financial disclosures that might violate securities law. Sun also offers advice on how to keep blogs interesting.
Only in rare cases are employees "unofficially asked to soften some wording," said Tim Bray, the Sun policy's chief architect. Rather, he said, the policy creates a structure for discussions between employees and their managers.
Jeff Seul, general counsel at Groove Networks Inc., said the policy he wrote for his company aims to tolerate dissent but not disrespect.
Microsoft refused to comment on Hanscom's case, but pointed out that it encourages blogging and has more than 1,500 unofficial bloggers -- the bulk on Microsoft's official Web sites.
Christopher Cobey, an employment lawyer at the Littler Mendelson law firm's Silicon Valley office, said publicity over recent blog-related firings has prompted increased inquiries from companies about developing policies.
But some experts question whether a separate blogging policy is needed at all, given more general employment guidelines and common sense.
Anil Dash, vice president at blog software developer Six Apart Ltd., said publicized firings have been generally not over blogging but over other violations that happened to be done through blogging.
Mark Dichter, chairman of labor and employment at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, said policies can tie the hands of employers.
"It requires you to anticipate and draw lines," he said, "and once you set policies then you get into litigation into which side of the line it fell."
* __
On the Net:
Simonetti's blog: http://queenofsky.journalspace.com
Jen's blog: http://99zeros.blogspot.com
Microsoft blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com
Sun policy: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Polic y
* __
Anick Jesdanun can be reached at netwriter@ap.org
Welcome to the Emerging Learning Technologies report for the week of March 7.
Next week, I will be in San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference at http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etcon/ I will report from there (have laptop, will blog!).
I found some announcements from our MERLOT friends.
MERLOT International Conference - July 25 – 28, 2005 in Nashville Tennessee
Deadline for proposals: March 14, 2005. For details, visit http://conference.merlot.org/conference/2005/.
Deadline for Hotel reservations: June 24, 2005. For details, visit http://conference.merlot.org/conference/2005/hoteltravel.html.
MERLOT Partner, the Teaching, Learning and Technology (TLT) Group sponsors a wide variety of workshops and events of interest. Below are two events of special interest to libraries and Librarians. For more TLT events, visit http://www.tltgroup.org
TLT Event: Effective Collaboration for Campus-wide Information Literacy: The Blended Librarian's Perspective on How To Make It Work, March 10-24, 2005. Webcasts each Thursday at 3PM Eastern. Co-Sponsored by The Association of College & Research Libraries. http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlproftools/collaboration.htm.
TLT Event: Low Threshold Applications from Libraries - Session 1 of Low Threshold Applications and Low Threshold Professional Development Activities
March 29, 2005 3PM Eastern - Online Series for more info: http://www.tltgroup.org/Registration/DescriptionPage/LTANavPage.htm.
I found another neat newsletter called Technology Enabled Teaching at http://www.campus-technology.com/ It is a new bi-weekly eLetter on the converged areas of eLearning, CMS, display, and presentation technologies. Formerly eLearning Dialogue, TET's expanded content will provide news, opinion and best practices for implementing the next level of the "smart" classroom. A few teasers from this newsletter include
VIEWPOINT
* The Next Teaching Technology: Digital Content Servers
NEWS and PRODUCT UPDATES
* Blackboard Brings Eight More Universities Into Its Fold
* Reporters Work on Journalism Masters Online
* How's That iPod Experiment Going at Duke University?
MCLI superstar Alan Levine is good about sending me links. This one is on portable devices http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2005/03/interactive_and.php
Another Maricopa superstar and fellow Ocotillo co-chair is Shelley Rodrigo. She is also good about sending me interesting links. This one is about FURL and it will help you start your own blog. It is at http://www.furl.net/index.jsp Shelley Rodrigo is with the English Department at Mesa Community College, http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~rrodrigo
Oh, from PVCC’s own Carol Myers. She reminds me that the Educause/Internet2 Security 2005 Conference is filling up very fast. It is April 3-5, 2005 at the beautiful Fairmont in downtown Washington, DC (5 minutes from the Lincoln Memorial and the fabulous Mall). The 2 keynote speakers are Edward Roback - Chief of the Computer Security Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology AND Bill Boni - Vice President for Information Security and Protection Motorola, Inc. Learn more about the conference and register online at
http://www.educause.edu/SEC05 AND, you can go here for more information on security and Internet2 http://security.internet2.edu/
That is enough content for now. Keep your emails coming with tips.
Thanks, Jim Patterson (jim.patterson@pvmail.maricopa.edu)