StigmergicWeb

This is just a quickie braindump post so I have some notes on a bit of tweaking I just did on the school’s installation of Scuttle, an open-source social bookmarking tool similar to del.icio.us.

The problem we were running into was a lack of administrative control to get rid of undesirable (spam) links in the bookmark collection. Looking through the code, I saw that Scuttle does have a stub admin function included, but it isn’t currently implemented.  In a disgustingly quick and dirty hack, I rewrote the code for the admin function so that anyone whose user ID number in the MySQL database is automagically the administrator (and that happen’s to be me in this installation). Nicely enough, once I did that I had edit and delete power over other user’s links - the author of Scuttle has obviously been planning to include some administration tools, and started building a bit of code to do the job.

Samples of code available upon request - if you leave a comment asking for it, I’ll post it up.

Jay Wilson is talking about using iMovie/iChat. Some key points

• Ugly is good. Don’t worry about making it beautiful - capturing good content is more important than competing with Spielberg. A lot of educational video is not played back under optimum conditions - low bandwidth, old equipment, etc. so spending a lot of extra time on gloss is not important. (Wildcat video)
• file formats: for streaming video, Jay’s experience has been that Real Player gives the best performance.
• FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE1394 a.k.a. iLink) is the most universal way of getting video from a camera to the computer. You can use the camera to shoot and the computer to record when they are hooked up. To record straight onto the computer, an iSight camera works well (autofocus, good microphone, adjusts well to various lighting situations)

Jay demoed iMovie. As always, iMovie is pretty easy to use and almost anybody can start using it right away.

(BTW - Heather Ross is sitting right across from me, and is blogging this right now. Well - I think she’s blogging this. I just checked - she is blogging about the conference in general. Cool. I wonder if she’ll mention me).

Back to demo. Jay has loaded clips from a video camera. Showing how to add clips to the product. After the movie is created, it can be exported (”shared” in MacSpeak) to e-mail, DVD, back to the video camera, etc.

Jay says the most practical way of archiving old tapes from the video camera with stock footage is to keep them on the tapes, and store the tapes in a cool, dry place.

Final Message - in relatively little time, we can assemble some video together that looks well packaged.

A grade 11 biology class that I teach has been involved in an interesting project that I’ve meant to pass along to you. The course objectives include a study of classification of organisms and a study of some basic ecological principles. I wanted to combine these two into a long term project for the course on the study of species at risk, a topic that I think is only going to be of increasing concern as the effects of climate change begin to manifest in increasingly dramatic ways.

But I didn’t want to do the standard go-to-the-library-and-research-then-hand-in-a-report sort of project. I want to concentrate more on the process of the research than the product. To be honest, I still don’t know what I want to do as a final product. My students find this vaguely disorienting since they seem to be very focused on whatever that final product is. To be completely honest, I also hate marking essays, so if I will avoid it if I can.

In consultation with Donna DesRoches, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, we came upon the idea of having the students create a pathfinder - a sort of expert guide for a topic - to document their research process. We’re using a couple of tools for doing this:

• Wikka Wiki - a very robust, easy to use, easy to install wiki engine. One of the most important features of it is that it can easily integrate an RSS feed so that as the feed is updated, updates are automagically made on the wiki. It also provides RSS feeds for pages so that changes can be monitored and wiki-spammers can be thwarted. Wiki-spam actually hasn’t been a problem (we’ll see how it holds up once the URL to the project is posted). A pathfinder template page was created so that students can paste it into the pages for their species at risk.
• Scuttle - a free (beer and speech) social bookmarking tool. Similar to del.icio.us in many ways such as tagging, but we have the luxury of being able to resrict access to the school community so that there is no tag-poisoning by spammers. Scuttle can, like del.icio.us, create an RSS feed for a tag, so that it can be integrated into the student’s pathfinder on the wiki. You can download Scuttle and install it on your own server, and there is a small but growing Scuttle documentation wiki.

The students have each picked a species at risk from a list I posted on the Pathfinder wiki. They registered on the wiki to be able to edit it (take that, wiki spammers!), copied the student Pathfinder template to their species page, and started the research process. I had them focus on reference resources, especially print resources, for the first two days. After about a week back in the class, we went back to the library and I showed them how to bookmark, tag and comment web resources using Scuttle. The next session, I showed them how to integrate the RSS feed into their wiki page.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll have them do as a final product for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards having the work in pairs to prepare and present to an elementary classroom on one of the species they have researched, but I’m open to suggestions.

Links:

• Species at Risk Pathfinder research wiki assignment page
• Pathfinder template (thanks to Donna for putting this together)
• Species at Risk pathfinder list - links to students work. Some notable ones are:
  • Nilgiri Tahr
  • Peregrine Falcon

I’ve told my students I would publicize their research. If you have any comments, you could leave them here, or on the wiki pages.

I was just taking a look at try ruby! (in your browser), a very cool little programming tutorial for the Ruby language. Normally, I would just add this to my del.icio.us feed, but del.icio.us appears to be well and truly bollixed at the moment. (Sorry if this is offensive language to anyone, but it is the only apt description I could think of). Besides, if I post it here, someone else might get some enlightenment from this tutorial.

Almost forgot credit where it’s due - I found this via a post from David Wiley, who is also upgrading to WordPress 2.0 (which I hope to get done tonight!)

I see that many bloggers are signing off for a little break including Rick, who has pointed out that we can monitor Santa’s path using NORAD Santa Tracker

In the meantime, remember to follow Santa’s movements around the globe from the NORAD tracking station.

Hmmm - I think NORAD tracker is a little too 20th Century, Web1.0ish. My daughter and I are keeping track of Santa via Google Earth! (and you can get the file for following Santa at http://services.google.com/earth/kmz/SantaRadar.kml

Santa might know if you’ve been bad or good, but who do you think indexes his list? Google Base, perhaps?

I’ve been reading Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. One section in particular that I enjoyed was his discussion of how games provide an opportunity for cognitive growth. A good example of this is Planarity, a cunningly simple game that will is so much fun, you might not even realize that you are learning some pretty deep geometry. Warning - This game just took 90 minutes of my life away without my realizing it; I suggest you set a timer or something before you start!

The Sofia Project is an open courseware project, similiar to MIT’s OpenCourseware, but geared to the community college level. Eight courses have been published online so far, including a very well developed course on web page design using HTML. I just had a grade 11 class finish a unit on web page design, and I think I will try to integrate the Sofia course content next time around.

I think Alan is right - who needs institutional learning object repositories when Google will find all the resources on the web?

What Are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?::There seems to be a lot of discussion around this post, at least in the Knowledge-Management-Social-Software-Markets-Are-Conversations sphere. I appreciate the analysis, and I think that Lee is right as far as he goes, but I think there’s something missing. Both blogs and discussion boards have lost some of their, to me, essential flavour in the analysis. Blogs aren’t just publication - blogs are a party. Its like talking about books, but only examining textbooks and forgetting the literature.