I popped over to the U. of Minnesota today for a teleconference about podcasting in the classroom. Long-time readers may recall that I posted last year about the U.’s UThink blogging system that provides a free blog for every student and staff member. They’ve upgraded the system to support podcasting now and they will be tracking how the students and faculty take to it. More than 50 people showed up for this teleconference which suggests that there’s quite a bit of pent-up interest in the topic. The main portion of the teleconference is about Purdue’s campus-wide podcasting system called BoilerCast. The presenter is Michael Gay who was the main developer of the BoilerCast system.
Tag Archives: wiki
Inviting conference session input
I’ve created two wiki pages to collect input from folks who might (or might not) be interested in attending my sessions at the upcoming TIES Technology Conference. I could be wrong, but I think it’s pretty cool to be able to have this kind of input before a conference session. False advertising is my conference pet peeve, and, if nothing else, these pages should eliminate that possibility.
Wiki links:
- Introducing the Read-Write Web: Weblogs, Wikis, and RSS (Full-day workshop, December 3, 2005)
- Podcasting 101 (General session, December 5, 2005)
TIES 2005 will be here soon
The annual TIES Education Technology Conference is coming up December 3–6 in Minneapolis. I’m honored to be a “featured speaker” at this year’s conference. I’ll be presenting a pre-conference workshop on Saturday entitled “Introducing the Read-Write Web: Weblogs, Wikis, and RSS,” a session on Monday called “Podcasting 101,” and facilitating a session with some colleagues from schools called “Life in a One-to-One Computing Classroom.” Whew! A lot of prep, but it will be fun. I’m planning to podcast all of my sessions and I’m trying to get the TIES organizers to do some other official podcasting too.
John Pederson beat me to it when he suggested that all of us used the “ties2005″ tag for this year’s conference. Makes sense. He’s also trying to organize a blogger/podcaster dinner. Count me in!
Technorati Tags: ties2005 |
A Google Maps “wiki” for Katrina aftermath
Wired is carrying a story about a wiki of sorts that is being used to convey information about conditions in the aftermath of Katrina. A couple programmers have taken the Google Maps API and built a Web page, Scipionus.com, that allows people to add markers to the maps of New Orleans and other affect areas showing the extent of damage, depth of water, or persons located. The main programmer claims that he put it together in a couple hours. Isn’t it amazing that a programmer who’s not even there can provide a service to share information that’s great than what FEMA can accomplish? Maybe not given their performance over the last week.
Jargon watch: The Long Tail
It seems like “the long tail” is popping up everywhere these days so I guess this is a good time for a jargon watch post about it. The long tail literally refers to the general shape of a sloping probability function. Not surprisingly, the interesting part goes beyond the mathematical equation to a principle that seems to be describing elements of a new economy.
The easiest way to think about the long tail is to put it in terms of popularity. Consider the market for DVDs. The left side of the graph represents the Hollywood blockbuster movies and the extreme right end of the graph represents a home movie of the type you might find at ourmedia.org. The point is that without the Internet and the means to find obscure films, the right three-fourths of the graph wouldn’t exist at all. Netflix illustrates nicely how this works. I’ve rated 169 movies on the Netflix site over the last year or so and when I log in to Netflix now I get 243 recommendations. Within two clicks I find a film called Rashomon by acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa that the Netflix system thinks I will like based on my previous ratings and the ratings of others who’ve rating movies similarly. Now I’m not saying that Kurosawa’s film is equivalent to somebody’s home video, but I’m reasonable sure that I wouldn’t have found it at my local Blockbuster.
A couple key points:
- There are more “things” in the tail than there are in the left side. That could refer to movies, musicians, podcasts, or blogs.
- Most of the things in the tail aren’t very good, but the important point is that a few of them are really good.
- Thanks to easy information access it’s possible for bloggers, musicians, etc. to create content for a small audience…and that’s OK.
So let’s bring this back to the world of educational technology. The most obvious point is that there are a lot of great thinkers out there blogging and working in the long tail. If you restrict your students to using a traditional textbook they will never find the gems out there in the tail where so many fresh perspectives and new ideas can be found. We don’t need to wait for information to show up in dead tree form anymore. This blog is great example of the long tail. I’ve never published a book or an article in the education literature (…yet), but that hasn’t stopped me from blabbing on and on for the whole world to see. If you’ve ever found anything worth reading on this site, you’ve benefited from the long tail.
For more information about the long tail you can check out the Wikipedia article or an IT Conversations podcast of a presentation called Economics of the Long Tail by Chris Anderson, the originator of the long tail concept.
Technorati Tags: long tail |
DTV : television :: podcasting : radio
I feel like reprising my first podcasting post from last October. Just when you thought you had podcasting figured out, along comes DTV from the Participatory Culture Foundation. DTV, an acronym I have yet to find defined anywhere but I suspect stands for “Distributed TV,” is a system that mirrors podcasting almost perfectly. If podcasting has led to a democratization of radio, then DTV does the same for television.
The Participatory Culture Foundation, a new non-profit based in Massachusetts, believes (from their press page) that “Internet TV should be open-source and based on open standards, just like blogging and podcasting. We’re working to ensure that the new mass medium of internet TV is free, accessible to all, and built with independent voices.” Their partner list is pretty impressive already featuring, among others, former Vice-President Gore’s new cable TV channel Current TV.
DTV uses RSS enclosures just like podcasts, but downloads and plays video content within the DTV player. Not unlike Apple’s iTunes, DTV has a channel browser built in and allows you to subscribe to particular channels for automatic download later. The secret sauce here is BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing system that facilitates the download of huge files without blowing any one server out of the water. The BitTorrent technology is crucial because the size of video files makes it impossible for the average person to host any substantial files on a hosted server account. The bandwidth costs would be enormous. BitTorrent spreads the load among all users who are downloading and, theoretically, would allow almost anyone to create and host these files.
The DTV folks are also developing software that will help users publish video online. Their software, Broadcast Machine, looks a lot like standard blogging tools and will automate the process of creating the necessary BitTorrent files and will help manage multiple channels.
This is pretty exciting. The use of BitTorrent (and there’s really no other way to do this) will make it difficult for companies like Apple to jump in because their legal departments will have group coronaries at the thought of building BitTorrent into their software. But everyone thinks that Apple has a video iPod on way, and if they do it will take no time at all to add the ability to transfer files to the iPod from the DTV application. Then Apple will be able to keep its corporate hands clean while cementing their position as the mobile device of choice for audio and (maybe) video.
So in the meantime, take every application you can think of for podcasting and imagine how it would work with video.
Apple’s blog server reviewed
Rich Trouton has published his review of Apple’s built-in Blojsom-based blog server. I’m planning to entice a teacher or two to give blogging a try this year using the blogging capabilities of our OS X server. I love the ability to control access to the blogs using the server’s access control lists. I’ll have more to say about this once the year is underway and I can get a real look at the system in action.
Free curriculum by 2040
Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) is doing a guest stint at lessig blog while Lawrence Lessig is away. He’s making a top ten list of things that will be free someday and puts a free curriculum on the list at #2.
I’m not sure why there would be just one free curriculum. It’s not like teachers do all their curriculum shopping in one place anyway. Rather than a master repository somewhere, it seems much more likely that teachers will continue to look all around for the best materials available. Making it easier to find those materials sounds like a worthy goal to me.
Technorati Tags: curriculum | jimmy wales |