Monthly Archives: October 2004

Information for the masses

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When I was a high school physics teacher I envied by social studies colleagues every time a presidential election year rolled around. Many high school students, even ones who aren’t old enough to vote, feel strongly about politics and public policy and love to share their views. There is nothing more satisfying than working with a class of students who are interested, even passionate, about the curriculum.

The best teachers encourage critical thinking about the election issues, the candidates, and the candidates’ positions on the important questions. When I was in high school we had various periodicals and television as information sources, but nothing like what is available in the Internet age. Google News, the Bush and Kerry blogs, blogs about the election, and sites like Project Vote Smart that attempt to aggregate critical information about the candidates, their campaigns, and their positions. The Project Vote Smart site seems especially interesting. From their homepage:

Project Vote Smart, a citizen’s organization, has developed a Voter’s Self-Defense system to provide you with the necessary tools to self-govern effectively: abundant, accurate, unbiased and relevant information. As a national library of factual information, Project Vote Smart covers your candidates and elected officials in five basic categories: biographical information, issue positions, voting records, campaign finances and interest group ratings.

Sites like Project Vote Smart are a gold mine for teachers who want to have their students dig into this election and do their own analysis. If I was envious of social studies teachers before these resources were available, I’m really green now.

The laptops are coming

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I placed the single largest order of my career today. Within hours of Apple announcing the new and improved iBooks we placed a nearly $670,000 order for 650 of them. Now we need to find a place to store them while we get them inventoried and imaged. Pretty exciting. Our second training session is coming up next week and I’m really fired up to get back together with these teachers and do some intense curriculum and technology work.

I’ve decided to use a blog as the main Web page for the project. I thought it would offer an ideal way to engage some of the one-to-one participants in telling their stories. If all goes as planned we’ll have some really interesting stories to tell.

Podcasting: A Case Study of Internet Time

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If anyone doubts that the Internet has forever altered communication and the pace of change, let me suggest that they have a look at the podcasting phenomenon for proof. Podcasting didn’t exist two months ago and now there are hundreds of podcasts available for download.

As of RSS 2.0, a syndication feed can include a URL for each article that points to an “attachment.” The attachment could be anything, but most commonly it’s an MP3 file. Podcasting, then, is simply recording some audio and converting it to a common format like MP3, posting that file somewhere on a public server, and linking to the file in an RSS feed. Several RSS aggregators specifically designed to handle these MP3 attachments have emerged in the last month. Adam Curry, formerly of MTV fame and sort of the father of podcasting, wrote the first such application, iPodder, and released it as open source software. Other developers have since taken over the project. Several other applications have since been developed and more are released almost daily. All of these programs function similarly, but the key feature is the automatic downloading of the RSS enclosures and transfer of those attachments to an iPod via iTunes. Other platforms such as Windows Media Player are often supported, but the vast majority of podcast listeners seem to be using iPods.

In the week since I discovered podcasting, I’ve listened to many great interviews and panel discussions at IT Conversations, Leo Laporte’s radio show on KFI AM, and Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, to name a few. All of these podcasts magically appeared on my iPod, making my 90 minute daily commute and various chores around the house just a bit less boring and a lot more educational.

So where are the educational applications? I’m still thinking about that, but the most obvious ones are for teachers podcasting key lectures, important explanations, or class discussions. The similarities between podcasting and radio broadcasting are obvious. How about students creating their own podcasts? Just like blogging turns student authors into “real” writers by giving them an audience, podcasting makes it possible for students to create audio programs that communicate in new ways. At the very least, the podcasting explosion illustrates how none of us can afford to stand still and stop learning in the digital age.

Assignment Calculator to the rescue

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If you’re like me (and I know I am), you may have discovered that the best of intentions aren’t always enough to avoid the last minute rush that accompanies an upcoming deadline. Even as a graduate student who’s supposed to know better, I sometimes find myself up too late the night before an assignment is due. The University of Minnesota library’s Assignment Calculator is here to help.

Once the user enters the assignment’s due date, the Assignment Calendar prints a 12-step plan to get the assignment done on time including links to resources that are available at the University and offers to email reminders to the student as the due date approaches. Now that would useful on its own (especially since I’m a grad student at the U. myself), but the best part is that the source code is available at the Assignment Calculator Blog. The software is designed to use PHP and MySQL and, once installed on a school’s Web server, can be customized to provide links to a school’s own writing and research resources and to use a different formula to determine the timing of the 12 steps.

Our schools subscribe to a variety of online research tools, and we promote the Big 6 information literacy model. It looks like all of those things could be incorporated into a customized version of the Assignment Calculator.