Flashmeeting – does it hold privacy concerns?

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Posted on 29th August 2007 by Chris in Web Resources |nextgenteachers

Flashmeeting seems to be all the rage lately among some of the folks in my learning network. I agree, it’s a great service that I’ve had the pleasure to see in practice. It works well, and provides a free solution that works nicely.

I seem to recall having had a “booker” account that doesn’t work any more. I emailed Kevin and in his response was this paragraph. I am posting it because the information is also found on their website if you dig a bit, so I’m not violating any personal ethics.

Flashmeeting accounts on our server at the Open University are used for research purposes. Within this context all the accounts we host on our server have to fit within our research agenda with regard to use etc. and all activity (i.e. including video and audio) on the server is recorded for potential use in research publications etc.

Which makes me wonder what I’ve said will turn up in a research journal. Grant you, I may not make my display name my actual name, but there is still a clear record of it being me that said whatever was said.

Not sure I am actually concerned, but I did feel this was an interesting point to bring up, for those of us concerned with privacy.

What is instructional design

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Posted on 23rd August 2007 by Chris in Grad School

I was asked to answer that question in a Blackboard posting in a graduate class. My response is no doubt influenced by my newfound love for thinking about design, inspired by Dan.

Here is what I said. It’s off the cuff, so give me grace.

***Original post below:

These are prima facie thoughts about Instructional Design:

The word “design” conjures up images of advertising grunts trying to figure out how to best fashion a brand or a new product to make it marketable to the target demographic. Different design styles are employed by different folks with recent techniques bringing forth a more avant-garde form of minimalism and less forceful colors with a touch of existential angst. This design technique seems to reflect the emotions of a younger society writ large.

Instructional design, however, takes a tactic focusing much less on the idea of “selling” a product or marketing a lesson. Instructional Design must take the brain’s cognitive functions as well as solid pedagogical foundation into account. Tragically, the more aesthetic functions of design often take a back seat.

A good marriage of instructional design and marketing design can be created, as they are not mutually exclusive. Appropriate aesthetic design, for example, can decrease the level of cognitive load be reducing distractions and promoting a clean document design.

Instructional Design at its base is about creating a lesson/unit/spoken paragraph that relays the information desired while helping prevent an overwhelmed learner.

Life round here – our digital storytelling project

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Posted on 21st August 2007 by Chris in Life Round Here

Ok so it’s time for an official announcement.

I have been working with some amazingly talented educators on developing a digital storytelling project that seeks participants from around the globe. Here is how it will work.

If you want to skip this and head straight to the up-until-now-top-secret wiki feel free. Find it at http://chriscraft.pbwiki.com – apologies for my name in the title, but Ramit and those cool folks at pbwiki hooked me up with a gold wiki and that’s the one they chose.

The project is designed to really bring out the personal thoughts and feelings that often lie deep within our students. If I learned one thing from David Jakes, it’s that storytelling needs to be personal, and from the heart.

The goal is that students would be able to really analyze life where they are. This makes it wonderfully scalable.

From the wiki:

I am going to begin with a discussion about life in other countries and the stereotypes we have here in the USA about other countries. We will then move into a discussion about real life in our area, and about how it is not quite as rosy as the tourist brochures might lead one to think. I will then ask the kids to begin thinking of how to tell the story of what life is really like here in the USA, in the south, to be specific.

Participating schools will be required to publish at least six stories by October 31, 2007 using a template available on the wiki. One of the reasons I chose pbwiki over competitors is thanks to Howard Martin, a DEN buddy that tipped me towards pbwiki’s extremely easy video uploading feature. You can upload a video directly into pbwiki and it will convert it and show it for you. Youtube is blocked at my school so no publishing there. This reduces the number of steps and/or confusion when posting.

More details can be found on the wiki, but if you are interested in participating, here is what I need you to do.

1. Check the wiki for the requirements and age preferences. If you meet them and agree with them, proceed to step 2.

2. Use the contact form on this blog to send me a note telling me who you are, where you are, and that you want in. I will then send you a contributor invite.

3. Add your name to the list of participants on the wiki. We’re up to six already, and our goal is at least ten. Will you join  us?

If you cannot participate, please consider blogging this project with a link to this post. The official tag is:

liferoundhere2007

I would be remiss if I did not expressly thank David Jakes and Jason Hando for the hours spent planning this thus far. I also want to thank Lynne Crowe for spurring me on to create a FAQ list.

We are working on a scoring rubric. More details on the project to come, I want to avoid this being a tediously long post. If you want to see more, just seek the Life Round Here category.

One more thing, if you are in a country where pbwiki is blocked, you may use any other wiki or web hosting solution you like, as long as you meet the requirements. Just contact me and I will send you the requirements in a different format so you can read them. We will accept other wikis and I’ll be glad to place links to them as needed.

Here’s to good stories!

Moodle upgrade from 1.7 to 1.8.2 broke editing – here is the fix

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Posted on 19th August 2007 by Chris in moodle

I posted this on the Moodle installation problems forum but I want to post it here in case someone finds it by search or otherwise. Here is the post in its entirety…

I am posting this for anyone else who might run into this scenario.

I upgraded from 1.7+ to 1.8.2 and when I went into my courses and turned editing on, it returned a blank page. Needless to say, I freaked out.

I combed the forums and figured out that a lot of folks have this problem due to incompatible blocks or activities. I didn’t think I had any of these installed.

Turns out I did.

It wasn’t one I thought it would be, but when I went into debugging mode it returned an incompatible block.

I deleted it from both activities and the blocks and the site works fine. Maybe this will help someone else.

Man is it ever hot

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Posted on 18th August 2007 by Chris in General

I thought the heat wave was going bye bye, until I got in the car this afternoon.

Man is it hot down here! I miss the Peru winter!

links for 2007-08-15

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Posted on 15th August 2007 by Chris in Feeds

  • Sweet little greasemonkey script that reveals the destination of any tinyurl so you don’t have to click on it to find out where it leads. Thanks to Steve Dembo for tipping me off to the existence of such scripts.

links for 2007-08-14

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Posted on 14th August 2007 by Chris in Feeds

  • This is a delicious new way to search flickr. I caught it from a tweet by Lucy Gray (elemenous). It’s all flashy and lets you search related tags at the same time. Not terribly useful for my needs, but tasty nonetheless.
    (tags: flickr Search)

Can flickr get me sued?

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Posted on 12th August 2007 by Chris in General

Ok so I am being a little silly with this title, but hey, I like a good title.

I am thinking through possible threats to my job, though, like slideshare.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about my uses of flickr for digital storytelling projects. I’ve got a doozy coming up that I will announce in a few days.

I will use flickr images because I want my kids to all use the same pictures and not have to go take them. It’s a time saver and also protects them from having their picture in a story later published and viewed on YouTube.

I am curious, though, about the nature of the creative commons attribution license. If I take a picture of a flower, I own that picture. I can decide to release that picture using this license and everyone is happy.

If I take a picture of a person, however, do I really have the right to release it using this license?

What if I release it and they don’t like that. What if I use that picture for something and properly attribute the photographer but not the person in the photo since I have no idea who he or she is. Can’t that person get upset?

I realize it’s a longshot and I cannot honestly say I am worried about this, but it’s good fodder for my brain these days. What if my students use a picture of a sad lady and the sad lady gets mad that her picture was released without her permission.  Surely I could remove the story or remove that picture from the story, and of course I would do so, but it’s interesting to think about. Well, for me it is.

I would imagine the burden is on the photographer to ensure a signed model’s release for each picture released this way, so I doubt it would come back on me, but I will tell you, this litigious society has got me thinking.

But maybe it’s just me, and maybe I should just relax. ;)

Seeking participants for a new project…

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Posted on 10th August 2007 by Chris in International Project

You may recall that I was posting while in Peru about a new project that was in the design phase. It still is, but I am much closer to “launch”. I’ve already got interest from several teachers in several countries, and the nice thing about this project is that it is designed to allow as many folks as want to participate. In other words, it’s scalable.

To be eligible, you’d need to have students from 10-13 years old, with the target age of 11-12 (US 6th grade) and be interested in digital storytelling.

Sound like you? Leave a comment on this post and I will get in touch and tell you more!

Just curious? More details to come as I get some more input during the planning process…

Google adds cross-service additional storage space

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Posted on 9th August 2007 by Chris in General

Ah hah! I’m not crazy.

Earlier today I tweeted that my Gmail storage space had increased to 9030MB as seen below.

I tried two computers and tried disabling plugins. No dice.

Just a moment ago, this post from the official Google blog rolled in.

So now it makes sense. You see, before I got all flickr’d, I paid $25 for 6GB of storage on Picasa Web Albums. That is the one program I would love to have for the mac, partly because of its tight integration with Picasa web albums. Yes I have the uploader for iPhoto, and I already ordered my copy of iLife 08.

Anyway, it looks like I am sharing the free space from Picasa Web Albums with my Gmail account. The numbers shown here are not accurate, which tells me they are still rolling out the updates.

Mystery solved, and I broke it quick tweet style.

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