February 2007 Archives

A couple years ago, Jim Austin told me about StumbleUpon, a browser add-on that provides you with a a way to "Channel surf the internet ... Discover great websites,videos, pictures and more â€" all according to your interests."

Back then, two long years ago, you stumbled upon websites selected from a personal profile you set up. For instance, I selected these categories: Arts, History, Internet, Open Source, Jazz, Web Development, and Weblogs. Part of my interest was in how StumbleUpon developed a sense of community among its participants. You could set up profiles and, based upon your interests, you could hook up with others of similar interests. As Wayne explained today, community building is one of the basics of Web 2.0.

I found StumbleUpon rather addictive and could sit looking at the new websites it was showing me in my various categories for 20-30 minutes. For the most part, I've not been stumbling for the past year. Something that I noticed just this week was that Firefox prompted me to allow an update to my StumbleUpon and then today, I had an email in my in-basket alerting me to a new service from StumbleUpon "that automatically finds and plays videos that match your interests." So I tried it out and from my brief test-drive, I stumbled upon these videos.

• 1937 Pathegrams, Inc. newsreel of the Hindenburg exploding (History)
• "The Machine is Us/ing Us" (Internet or Web Development)
• jazz great Wes Montgomery playing in Belgium in 1965 (jazz)
• software piracy around the world (Internet or Open Source?)
• Light Criticism a 2007 video about advertising in cities (Art)

If you install StumbleUpon you'll see it lets you save a site to your bookmarks, send it to a friend, reject it, stumble for news items, now videos, and images that match your profile, and a page linked by someone you designated as a friend. You can tag items too, and I noticed when I connected to the StumbleUpon homepage it was promoting using del.ic.o.us.

1. In the February 17th issue of The Economist is The End of the Cash Era." I remember about 20-25 years ago reading predictions that we would be using debit cards at stores all over the place, instead of writing checks and paying cash. In "The End of the Cash Era" I learned that using cash for purchases just about anywhere is going the way of the dinosaurs with the coming "age of electronic money." You're wondering, aren't we already doing that with debit cards? What the article tells us is that "... a phone or smart card that can be waved over an electronic reader will beat notes and coins hands down for convenience." A term I suspect we will be reading more and more of in the future is "information-money," meaning that the transaction can be handled by any information-processing device. VISA, the article noted, thinks that a contactless digital transaction takes less than half the time of a cash one and that people liberated from what happens to be in their wallets spend a fifth more." The article wisely points out the privacy issues and that we should prepare ourselves for a barrage of e-coupons and offers designed to "fit your profile" that are uploaded to your phone.

2. "Google class debuts at the UW: Students learn firm's approach to programming" by Laurie Burkitt, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 20, 2007. A 26 year old Google programmer designed a 5 week course taht was just piloted at the U of Washington. "The class is aimed at creating programming prodigies and revamping the way colleges teach computer science." How exciting it must be for the students who were lucky enough to be in the class. Current plans, the article reported, are for Google to offer the course at other top schools, including the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University, then "then three or four, and then hundreds of schools." I hope the UA can get in on this.

One of the modules I cover in my IRLS571 Introduction to Information Technology, is Mobile Technologies. What follows is an entry I wrote this morning to my class. It summarizes what some universities are doing with text messaging. In this case with a vendor called Mobile Campus. I've been reading about this now and then in the news alerts that come in through Campus Technology's IT Trends and EDUCAUSE's edupage. I think it has the potential to be a much valued service to students. You likely won't see me and my colleagues text messaging each other, but you sure do see teens and college students doing it constantly.

Last week I attended the EDUCAUSE SW Regional Conference in Austin, Texas. You can view the conference's program on the Web and follow the link to view a list of sessions with available resources. I also presented "Campus Casting Call: Engaging Students and Faculty with Podcasting" [PDF 1.2MB]

Here is an MP3 version of the podcast I created for my IRLS 571 Spring Semester class and RTF copy of the script to the audio. I am podcasting each week and for this week's podcast was about the conference. It's a way to share a real-world experience with students. The audio is 15 minutes long and includes short summaries of presentations I found interesting. If you listen, I'm sure you can easily do other things. FYI, the first couple minutes explain EDUCAUSE and briefly describe the conference's organization so students have a better understanding of the organization and how its conferences are structured.

When I create my course podcasts, I write a script, read it over once or twice, and then record it. As I wrote in one of yesterday's entries, I recorded a podcast for next week's class using audio over a Powerpoint presentation. Then, in Camtasia Studio 4, I exported it to iPod/iTunes which created both .m4v and .mp3 files. I added the .m4v to my class podcast series.

However, this left me without a script to put up on my podcasts text page. I always put the text up on the course website to comply with ADA guidelines. What to do?

I took the .mp3 file, opened it in Audacity, exported it to a WAV file, and then opened the WAV file in Dragon's Naturally Speaking. Naturally Speaking will "read" a WAV file and convert it to text in a RTF document. I then took that document and edited it, playing the audio in short bursts. It's said Naturally Speaking is about 80% correct after you train it to your voice. I guess that's about right. It still requires a lot of tedious, time-consuming editing to get the text to a useful point. All told, I spent about 2 hours working on it today.

For anyone who has worked a help desk, and coached technology newbies, luddites and technophobes, this is must see YouTube. Introducing the book

There is a new Noel-Levitz report available: "National Freshman Attitudes Report."

The report is based on survey responses from 97,626 entering students. Ethnic/racial breakdown of the respondents was 60% White/Caucasian, 20.7% Black/African-American, 8.1% Hispanic or Latino, 3.6% Asian or Pacific Islander, and 8.1% other or preferred not to respond.

Some of the Findings

• One of the report's findings, and one that I find troubling, is that although "the vast majority of today's first-year students arrive at college really wanting to complete their degrees, only half of them are likely to accomplish their goal."
• "Although their desire to attend college was strong, only about half of the respondents indicated enthusiasm for reading and appeared to have strong study habits." [I wonder is there is a downward trend. I'm assuming that this is alarming. Could the way literature and reading is taught in K-12 these days be the cause?]
• Half the first year students entering two-year programs expect to work 20 hours a week. It appears that about 18% of students entering 4-year public institutions expect to work that much.
• "Respondents indicated high levels of receptivity to assistance from a variety of campus services." This should be particularly important to campus staff whose jobs involve working with incoming students.

I'm going to be at Educause SW in Austin next week. Normally, I would take the Powerpoint presentation I give to my hybrid class, activate the recording feature that Camtasia Studio placed in my Powerpoint, and record over the slides. Then I would export the Camtasia project to a Flash movie and link it to the class webpage.

Camtasia Studio 4 includes a feature to export to iPod/iTunes. It works quite well and since I am podcasting micro-content to my class for each course module, I added it to my podcast series. When the students open their iTunes next, iTunes will see it and download it. I'll make the PPT available on the webpage as well so students can follow up with specific links.

One of my LTC colleagues makes instructional videos using Camtasia Studio and we'll look at exporting these videos to iPod/iTunes and make podcasts of them.

I posted about an article that appeared this week in the Arizona Republic and was reprinted in the Tucson Citizen the next day. Overall, the reporter did a good job getting quotes and working up 900 words to describe wikis, blogging and podcasting at the UA. The flip side, of course, is that 900 words can't do it justice.

Anyone who has taken calls from reporters has likely had the same experience I had. You sense that the reporter really doesn't understand what you are doing or what these technologies can do. You field questions that you know are designed to grab a print sound-bite, you are as cooperative as possible (after all you're representing the UA), and hope the final version is pretty accurate. Sometimes you spend two hours with a reporter and they botch the story, write something sensationalized, or their editors re-write parts for them that ends up not resembling facts.

Good press can be a good thing. An article that has been in the works for the past week appeared in the Arizona Republic today. Professors braving frontiers of Web to expand class reach," by Anne Ryman. You have to chuckle a bit when you read the headlines the editors come up with. Gosh, this podcasting, blogging and wiki stuff is barely one step from Aldous Huxley's: Brave New World. Then again, sometimes I do feel like I'm on Golding's island with Piggy, Ralph, Roger and The Beast.

Ms. Ryman did a good job, especially when I compare what she got in print to what happened with the Star, Citizen, and a local TV station in Feb. 2007. They sensationalized the story to make it sound like 1) all profs were recording and podcasting their lectures and 2) students would cut classes left and right. They knew better too. In Ryman's article one of my students from last semester is the lead, which is nice to read. And she quoted both Bill Endres and Leila Hudson, two of our best instructors. Both Bill and Leila put a lot of thought into how they teach and have made good use of blogs. Leila's also an early adopter of podcasting her lectures.

One of my LTC colleagues, Heather Lares, posted this to our webboard.

Cool Web 2.0 video... Check it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

It's a video on YouTube, as you no doubt see from the URL, that Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State, put together. It is very good and I recommend that you check it out and share it with others. In the Intro to IT class I teach at the UA we have a module on social computing later in the semester. But this week the students are grappling with HTML and XML, both of which are quite new to most. This week, the video will seem abstract to them. Maybe by May, it won't. Time will tell.

Michael Wesch has other videos on YouTube that I'll be checking out.

Comments to this entry are welcome!