StigmergicWeb

The presentation looks pretty good, especially if you go into full screen mode. I don’t know if it handles really complex powerpoint but the straightforward, page-turner stuff looks pretty good. Now we just need an interface for making the presentations and I won’t need to deal with Microsoft Office ever again! Or at least, not so much.

One of the problems that always comes up at my school is students want to be able to work on essays and such at the school and at home. The usual solutions are e-mailing back and forth (tedious, but at least there is a degree of revision control built in) or putting the files on a portable medium such as a USB drive or a CD-ROM. I showed Google Docs to a student the other day, and I could see the light bulb go on over his head. With the Google Apps suite available to schools for free, this is a service that a school or college could offer all students with zero cost to the institution. This is done without students seeing any ads - I’m glad google gets it that it is clearly unethical to use the offer of a free technology service in order to force students to watch ads.

Again, I find myself being a Google fanboy. I know that there is a cost attached - TNSTAAFL, after all - but they seem to be creating/acquiring the web applications that are most valuable for individuals, and for schools.

It is now all finished. The project is complete, even after some major setbacks. The paper that accompanies the project is done. And the presentation was this morning.

Done, done and done. I still have one more class before I can add more letters after my name, but the big hurdle is finished.

One of the tidbits of information I included in my paper and in the presentation was my list of lessons learned. I want to pass these along to anyone who might need them:

• Back up your data. Often. In multiple locations. If you are lucky, you will consider this to be a waste of time.
• Get out for a walk. Stretch. Taking breaks occasionally will actually save you time in the long run (as long as they are breaks from the work and not an end to the work).
• Have reasonable expectations. More than likely any one project or thesis will not revolutionize your field of study. Add a good solid contribution to the corpus of knowledge and you will be doing an important job.
• When designing instructional resources, think long and hard about your target learner group and your content/learning objectives before picking a medium of delivery. Its fun to work on something with a lot of techno-cool bells and whistles because, to be honest, we (instructional designers) tend to be somewhat of a geekish lot. But the bells and whistles might not be the best way to deliver the instruction to the learners. Make the method and medium of delivery as simple as possible and not one bit more complex than is absolutely necessary! I found that I ended up creating the resource in a much simpler and straight-forward manner than I originally planned because I was bedazzled by the delivery method (”ooooh - a cool and sexy looking website with lots of embedded Flash multimedia that show off what a slick designer I am“). Consequently I ended up spending a lot of time exploring quite a few paths that didn’t go where I needed them to.

I pass these words of wisdom on to you that you don’t need to repeat my mistakes. Find some original mistakes instead! ;^) Yet somehow, I don’t feel like everything is done. I’ve spent a lot of time putting this project together, and I’m not ready to let it die. One of the ideas that occurred to me as I was finishing up the editing was that this project would have made a dandy CD or podcast. An overwhelming amount of the video footage is me talking. If I’m going to be revising/tweaking the project, that’s how I’ll do it.

At the last minute, I also thought it would be a good idea to have some links to appropriate resource materials for anyone who is interested. To that end, I’ve set up a Digital Audio Guide wiki. It is quite sparse right now, but I will be adding to it quickly since I put the address for it in the credits of my DVD. If you are interested, you can find it at digitalaudioguide.wikispaces.com. If you can think of anything I should add, give me some comments right here or send me an e-mail at robwall@gmail.com

Drupal 5.0 released

I’ve set up a few sites, like openthinking.ca, with Drupal. This latest version looks fantastic with a new default theme that can have its colour scheme configured from within Drupal. The usability of the administration of a Drupal powered site just improved by an order of magnitude with the revision and enhancement of the administrative features. There is also (finally) a web based installer script similar to WordPress installation. These improvements should lead to a lot more Drupal sites.

Just saw this via Brian Lamb:

Stewart Mader has published a book Using Wiki in Education, which has some interesting sounding (I haven’t actually read the book yet, so this is one of those Read The Fine Article reviews) case studies of wikis being integrated into a variety of settings. Stewart’s publishing model is an interesting mix of traditional publishing and open content. Intially, two chapters (of ten) are free then every month a new chapter is made free. For $19, you get access to the entire book, the ability to download chapters as PDFs and access to edit the tenth chapter. If you just want the content online, it’ll be free in 8 months. If you want the whole book now, you want access to the PDFs or you want to be able to participate in the content of the book, you fork up the $19 (which is not a bad price for a good book). I’ll probably pay the $19 just to support a great publishing model.

Watch for my book Turning Random Streams of Consciousness into Content soon.

Here’s a great post from Kathy Sierra

Creating Passionate Users: If Tech Companies Made Sudoku

Sudoku is perfect. It can be as engaging, addictive, and flow-inducing as the flashiest real-time rendered, explosion-filled game on the planet. But I can’t help imagine what would happen if someone like, say, Microsoft had designed it.

Check out her post to see what happens to Sudoku (which is, I agree, perhaps the perfect puzzle) with the Microsoft treatment. It just goes to show that less is not only more, but in some cases less is everything.

I have to admit that my reservations about Apple co-opting podcast production and distribution are beginning to falter. I still have a bad feeling about GarageBand because it seems to produce podcasts only in Apple’s proprietary formats (or am I mistaken about this? Please let me know). These probably could be converted to standard formats like mp3, but when the tools make it super easy to produce great content in proprietary formats, why would anyone bother? (Except for ed-tech nerds like you and me, of course).

So why the faltering of my opposition. Because Will Richardson linked to these terrific student produced digital stories this morning. I don’t think these sorts of things would have been produced if the only way to get it done was to use 5 or 6 arcane tools that needed to be MacGyvered together in order to work. Most people just don’t have the time or inclination to bother, nor do they care about the advantage of standardized file formats. And when I look at the results that can be produced by students using really easy to use tools, the educator part of my brain duct-tapes the ed-tech, open-source loving, ubergeek part of my brain that is trying to scream out in process. Enough of reading me - go look at some really cool stuff!

Long Elementary Student Podcasts

A List Apart: Articles: Home Page Goals

Derek Powazek shares some ideas about the craft of designing home pages for web sites. I like his emphasis on the other pages, the atomic elements, of a web site. These are the important pages and looking at the traffic on a web site will confirm this. The home pages, however, are the cause of much more stress:

Home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals.

Derek describes 4 simple goals to keep in mind when designing the home page (as well as sharing his advice to design the home page last):

1. Answer the question “What is this place?”
2. Don’t get in the repeat visitor’s way.
3. Show what’s new
4. Provide consistent, reliable navigation

Jeffrey Zeldman has pronounced his judgement on the Web 2.0 hype in A List Apart: Web 3.0. Much of his discontent seems to spring from an incident with a Web 2.0 boor:

“Web 1.0 was not disruptive. You understand? Web 2.0 is totally disruptive. You know what XML is? You’ve heard about well-formedness? Okay. So anyway—” And on it ran, like a dentist’s drill in the Gulag.

His comparison to the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall is amusing enough to make it worth the read. But there are boors in any profession or industry. You don’t give up on something good - and I think that despite the hype, some of the so-called Web 2.0 applications (think Flickr, del.icio.us, bloglines and many others that I don’t even know about yet) are very good because they give anybody with access to a computer the chance to be connected that no one in history ever has before. I can enjoy fruitful collaborations with people from around the world because of some of these technologies. Zeldman’s discomfort with the Web 2.0 hype, and I share this, is that the good stuff will be obscured by the noise of the hype. This seems to be heightened by a sensitization to hype that was earned by living through the Web bubble of the late ’90s:

I hated the bubble. I hated it when Vanity Fair or New York Magazine treated web agency founders like celebrities. I hated that mainstream media and the society it informs either ignored the web or mistook it for a high-stakes electronic version of the fashion industry.

True enough - there are so few media outlets that really get the whole web thing. And what we’re seeing now isn’t really Web 2.0, its more like Web 0.9 - this is just a preview candidate of what the real thing will be like. There is definitely more functionality than we’ve seen before, but the best stuff is yet to come. Those who are easily distracted by the hype may get misdirected for a while, but there will also be those who continue to work and refine and improve the web for the benefit of all. Zeldman concludes with a word of encouragement to these people:

To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears. As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?

Web 3.0, Jeffrey? I’m still waiting for 1.0!

Trey Martindale has written down a few pointers, supposedly as reminders for himself, onHow to give a tolerable presentation. These are good pointers for everyone, especially about not reading your slides to people and not putting bullet points on the screen just to remind you what to say. I have a presentation to give on Saturday, and I’ll keep these in mind as I prepare.

I’ve been doing a lot of work at school lately putting together screencasts, mainly as a training tool for teachers working with various computer programs, and I notice that screencasts were also mentioned today by Heather Ross and Will Richardson in their blogs. I think that screencasts can be a powerful tool for learning, but I am concerned that we will descend into a period of anarchy with regards to the creation of screencasts, much as we saw in the how many fonts can I put onto a single page maelstrom that we saw at the beginning of the Desktop Publishing era. (I won’t even mention the damage that was done to many impressionable minds when Apple released the San Francisco font on the original Macs - the horror, the horror!) With that in mind, I offer the following modest guidelines for producing screencasts that are effective (i.e. don’t suck):

• Plan ahead. A little outline or storyboard of what you want to do can make your screencasts much more effective by making them shorter and more coherent.
• 3 minutes is the optimum length, with an absolute maximum of 5 minutes. If you are taking longer than that you need to find a way to explain your point with greater brevity, or divide what you are trying to explain into smaller chunks.
• The final version of your screencast should be in flash (.swf) format. There are tools that create Windows Media Player screencasts or Quicktime screencasts. I work in a school that is primarily a Linux environment (yes - it can be done), and resources in Quicktime and WMP formats are not usable. Flash is the closest thing to a universal media format on the web, so use flash as your output format to ensure that you can reach the widest possible audience.
• Audio in screencasts is great, but try to support it with text - don’t assume your audience has sound enabled. If possible, you could even create a version with sound and a text only version to create wider accessability for all potential viewers.
• Using graphics to highlight part of the screen can also be particularly effective when creating a tutorial screencast.

Like any list of guidelines for using technology, there will always be exceptions. But as a beginner starting to create screencasts, you are better off to start by creating short, simple and effective screencasts.

If you are running Linux or Windows, a great little tool for creating screencasts is called Wink. Its freeware, and you can get great results with it. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for Mac.

If you have any tips or guidelines for making screencasts, if you know of any great products, or you have any questions about screencasts please leave a comment.