Jing (I'm really excited about this)

I admit I'm a big fan of the company TechSmith. I've used two of their products, SnagIt (screen captures) and Camtasia (video capturing + narration of anything that is happening on your computer screen) for years. They have a new "project," ProjectJing, that I want to mention for two reasons:

(1) it's a great example of a company taking advantage of the collaborative web in a alpha product state. As you can see, they're using collective knowledge to understand how to use this tool, why to use this tool, to determine bugs & enhancements to the tool, as well as anything else they can think of.

(2) I haven't played around with it much but I'm VERY excited about the tool itself. Take a look at the video at ProjectJing to get an idea of what the product it about. It looks like a combination of SnagIt & Camtasia (screen capture and screen video) plus the ability to quickly/easily share with others. Particularly, but not exclusively, for those of you who train people on info on the computer screen, it could be amazing. Take a look!

Three other things:

• First, the documents are stored on screencast.com so you'll need to register with them in order to save your Jing docs.
• Second, TechSmith has arranged for FREE memberships to screencast.com (there is usually a membership fee), so this means you have 200MB of free online storage you can use for anything.
• Finally, at some point TechSmith will likely turn this into a product and shut down the FREE access; so enjoy it while you can!

Images on Wikipedia

In light of our conversation this weekend on copyright, I thought you might be interested in Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia (from Wikipedia).

Several of the items have to do with the copyright issues related to using their images (#10: "You can use (free) images from Wikipedia on your own site, or anywhere you like..." but don't forget to read the rest of the numbers too!)

Using Photos as Your Blog Background

I'm not sure if any of you are reading the blogger.com blog, but here's a post on how to modify your blog template to include your own picture in the background.

Robin's Note: Since the whole point of your blog is to have people read what you have to say, please consider readability as you think about which pictures to put in the background of your blog! (and remember, you can change the color of the various fonts if that would help.)

A few new collaborative sites & tools

Here are a few interesting things I picked up over the last few days from the Mashable blog (blog on social networking, and one of my personal daily "must read" blogs).

Here's a blog post from Mashable on how companies (HP is described here) are using wikis to gather data for market research.

Following in the spirit of our class (all our applications are free), the Mashable blog has a post listing LOTS of no-cost graphic software and a post on a new-ish (free) web-based photo editor.

I also recently read one of their posts on Ask500people. It's a mashup site where users can submit questions and poll the subscribers. Although not really useful (to me, anyway), I did spend a few minutes looking through the old/live questions. (FYI: most people voting believe the egg came before the chicken.) It took me a few minutes to figure out the layout: the questions in the center of the screen are questions that are queued up to be voted on, they don't contain any data yet.

Thanks for a good (and full!) weekend. (good thing we had chocolate! :-)

Here are the dates we agreed on for the OPTIONAL sessions:

• Thursday, Nov 1, 5:00p-7:00-ish: audio working session in the computer lab
• Monday, Nov 5, 7:30p-9:30-ish: audio working session in the computer lab

***NOTE: if no one is here after 45 minutes I'm going home. So if you're going to be late call me!

• Tuesday, Nov 6, 7:30-9:30-ish: Bonus Learning Session(including: Google documents, creating narrated powerpoint slideshows, delicious, skype)
  

Homework recap:

• Podcast (audio file) posted to your blog: DUE Nov 11
• Final paper or other final project: DUE Dec 2(Other project needs to be approved by me)
• Post class assessment (I'll send the link to you Dec 3): DUE Dec 10

Of course, feel free to call me with questions.

New Feature in Blogger

Blogger has implemented a new feature that I thought I'd pass on.


The first, is the ability to sign up to get email notification of additional comments on a particular blog post. Here's a blog post describing it. Basically, when you go to comment, you now have the option to click a box and have all the subsequent comments on this post emailed to you. (it's like following the conversation without having to keep checking back to the blog (see left).

For class on Saturday...

Here's a brief audio file to serve as your introduction to podcasting!

Podcast Directories

We're going to be talking about podcasting during weekend 2. Here are some podcast directories:

These are clients downloaded to your computer:

• Juice
• iTunes

These are web-based directories:

• Podcast Central
• Podcast.net
• Podcastpickle

(I have to confess, I use iTunes almost exclusively)

Haunted Houses in Second Life (SL)

OK, not educational, but since I see from your blogs that a few of you are exploring SL, I thought I'd share this list of SL Haunted Houses!

College Fair in Second Life (SL)

Since at least one of you are working in college administration, I thought you'd be interested to know that last weekend the first ever college fair was held in SL. Here's one review of the college fair, but you can also google it for more news or check flickr for photos.

Research Article: Wikipedia, Quality & Contributor Motivation

In the last class we were talking about the challenging to accuracy of information in an open system (like wikipedia). Although in theory a self-correcting system, we had at least one example of where incorrect information was spotted on wikipedia and speculated at the various motivations contributors may bring to their contributions.

Although not exactly the same thing...I did come across an interesting study by a couple of professor's at Dartmouth who looked at how contributor motivations affect the quality of contributions to Wikipedia. If you're interested, you can take a look at their study The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia

Blog Directories

Several of you have mentioned in your posts that you had trouble finding blogs. Here's a list of some blog directories. It's written from blog marketing perspective, but obviously you can use these to find blogs as well!

I have to confess that I don't use most of these. I find most of my blogs by finding a reference to them in something else I'm ready (the electronic version of 'word of mouth'), or else I tend to just use the yahoo or google blog directories. Let us all know if you find any of these particularly useful!

Google Translator

Since we have several bi/multi-lingual people in our class, I thought you might have fun exploring Google Translator. Not only does it translate words/phrases in eight languages, it also translates webpages (maybe test it on your blog?).

Web 2.0 Summit

Since it ties in to class, I thought I'd mention that the Web 2.0 Summit is going on right now in San Francisco. It's a conference filled with many of the most innovative thinkers (and productizers) about the internet. This is the conference where they meet with their peers and dare to dream and discuss 'what's next.'

PC Magazine's 100 Favorite Blogs of 2007

Nope...they're not all geek blogs. Check out the list. While mostly not educational blogs, you'll still probably find a few to add to your reader!

Creating Books Together?

Some of you may be familar with Blurb (if not, it's a FANTASTIC website that let's you create pretty high quality soft and hard cover 4-color printed books. For moderate prices. You can even easily create a book of your blog! OK, maybe you don't want to print up your blog for this class, but if you were doing a travel blog?...)

Of course, I'm not here to help you think of holiday gifts :-) I recently saw a post that says Blurb is in beta with Community Books which allows groups of people to collaborate on books. Intriguing idea! Applications for learning?

Tokbox

OK, I hate to (once again) pass on a technology I haven't really looked at; but here goes...

Ken (the SOE tech guy) sent me the link to Tokbox. I won't have a chance to play with it before class, but wanted to pass it on because it's pretty intriguing looking. From their website:

Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. Here's how it works: you sign up and we give you a link. When you want to talk with anyone, just give them the link - they click and you chat.

Here are a few things that excite me about this so far:

• no chat client needed. For example, we'll be looking at Skype in our next class which is VoIP and also just added video conferencing. But when we do this in class, you'll see that we all have to sign up, then the PC people will need to use the macs or download the SKype client on their computers, etc. This sounds SO much easier (although Skype does allow 4-way video conferencing which is pretty dang cool!)


• Apparently you can add Tokboxes to your social networking sites, websites, and BLOGS! (if we combine this with ideas of informal, non-classroom-based learning...the mind boggles!)


• It's free

So if you get a chance to try it before I do (and I hope you do!) I'd love to see a demo in our next class.

(by the way...macintoshes need USB headset/mics, but PCs can use either headset/mics with either USB or the "stereo" plug connections--like where you plug speakers in to your PC. I have some non-USB headset/mics I can loan out if you want to explore.)

Article: Learning and Networking with a Blog

I'm still poking around Tony Karrer's blog (Thanks Carol) and saw this post where he refers to an article he wrote in T&D Magazine called Learning and Networking with a Blog. I can't post it here (copyright) but did put a link to it in BB-->course documents in case you want to take a look at it. I'd love to see your thoughts on it in your blogs or in class.

(plus, in this article you'll learn the definition of the word flogging...a term I've specifically kept out of this class for obvious reasons! ;-)

By the way, you might also want to check out the first time visitor's page in Tony Karrer's blog for some great links on web2.0/collaborative technologies, elearning and other related topics.

The 1% Rule and You

I was reading Carol's Oct 15 blog post, checked out the blog she referenced and starting reading around it. What captured my attention was the blogger's definition of the 1% Rule. His describes the 1% Rule as:

This rule tells us roughly that in online communities:
90% will read-only
9% will make limited contributions (comment)
1% will actively contribute content

Of course I can make a link to online communities, and to our class and the collaborative technologies we've been exploring. But instead, my mind goes to the more traditional face-to-face formal or informal learning experience--the non-online educational communities we're all a part of. Does some version of the 1% Rule hold for communities and groups in general? (Maybe it's the 10% Rule instead, but I'm reluctant to believe it's anything like the 80% Rule).

So to me, regardless of the technology or situation, does the 1% rule still apply. So then, the real question is:

When you think of learning experiences...
what kind of participant are YOU?

• Reading (in a f2f class, the equivilant of listening and letting everyone else do the participating)
• Limited contributions (in f2f, you rarely participate or extend the learning for yourself and others, maybe only if it's assigned or required?)
• Or actively taking a part in any and all of your learning experiences?

Revised Spring/Summer Schedule

I've posted a Spring/Summer class schedule on BB in Course Documents-->Other Drake-Related Resources. This schedule is revised as of Oct 4, so if you received a copy of the schedule in a class last weekend, this is a new schedule (we added one additional class: ALOP 298 Recreation Services in Higher Education, 1 cr, Feb 22 & 23)

Registration will start the week of Oct 22 (once I know the final date I'll pass it along, plus you'll receive a notice in your Drake email).

Feel free to meet with your advisor if you want to talk through which classes to take this spring/summer. If you don't have an advisor, I'm happy to meet with you!