I feel silly. I’m not sure how I missed it but it turns out Wikispaces did respond to my initial post. I guess I didn’t recognize the name and didn’t see the signature as I was reading the comments. I’m sorry about that..

Here is what they said:

Hi Chris,

We’re sorry to hear we contributed to what sounds like a very rough day. Here are a few things we’ve got in store at Wikispaces we think will help a lot:

1. Allowing guest page creations. This makes good sense. We’ll add it as an option in the manage space section, defaulting to “off”. The reason we haven’t had this in the past is that it’s something spammers pounce on — but with active space organizers and our spam protection systems, we think it will be useful for many wikis.

2. Account creation for schools. Every week, we create thousands of accounts on behalf of teachers for students who don’t have email addresses. Right now, we do this based on requests sent to us, but we’ve got plans to streamline this process for organizers. We want you to be able to create 20 accounts for your wiki in a heartbeat — ideally, in the time it takes to go from Plan A to Plan B while your students are in the room.

3. Our editor. We’ve got some frequently-requested formatting features we’re testing right now. We think you’ll love them, and find they fill some gaps without making the editor overly complicated (or slow!).

As always, we’re here to help and listen to any suggestions you might have: help@wikispaces.com. We’ve gotten to where we are thanks to thousands of passionate people like you — a huge percentage of them teachers — who tell us where we’ve gone wrong and what we can do better.

Best,
James
jbyers@wikispaces.com

Thanks guys! I’m glad to see that these changes are under way!

Chris

Tagged with: wikispaces
2 Comments »

On the official Get Satisfaction page, the founder and CEO of PbWiki responded to my inquiry.

Hi! This is a tough issue. We’ve had a lot of teachers emailing us asking for us to make sure an address gets entered before proceeding so they know which students are making which changes, so several months ago we started asking that *some* address be provided. It sounds like you’ve just discovered that that solution doesn’t work well for you. Can you help us think of a setup that would work better?

What do you think? I can understand the need for some teachers to record at least a name, but I think requiring an email address is too much.

My suggestion to him will be, require a first name (and I think it’s important to note first name only needed) and make the email address not required. I think if kids are not doing this appropriately then it’s more of a classroom management issue and one not necessarily designed to be handled by software.

Or, make it where the user can decide? In some setting somewhere, make it where I can say, “I do not want my contributors to have to share their email address”, etc.

My thoughts, what are yours?

Chris

Tagged with: pbwiki
3 Comments »

Oh boy has this been a heck of a day.

I had an amazing day planned for my kids, with two days of the computer lab blocked off for our use. I was planning for us to spend our time exploring Ancient Rome in Google Earth and making placemarks, adding descriptions, reading the included Wikipedia articles. Notice I said I was planning…

I got to the computer lab to find out that Google Earth was not available to students. My workaround to that had been “fixed” so now I had no workaround.

And 20 students with nothing to do.

I scrambled and put together a project where they research in Wikipedia (rebellious, eh?) and then put their information into a PowerPoint presentation.

Not much else they can access.

I made sure to talk about the basics of good PowerPoint design, I ruled out clip art use and cheesy backgrounds, and ended up teaching a good design lesson.

It’s still not Google Earth.

I then switched gears after lunch and decided to pilot a wiki-based research project and created a new pbwiki. It used to be that as long as I gave the kids the wiki password they could edit until their hearts were content.

No more.

The recent changes in PbWiki’s login procedures have made it where they have to have a wiki invite key and then enter a name and email address.

Sigh.

Even when I told them the wiki invite key and told them to make up a name and email address I was frought with problems with the software not allowing kids through. A lot of the kids simply didn’t know the basic syntax of an email address. Of course, you can’t not include a name and email address.

I asked for help in pbwiki’s Get Satisfaction page, but as of yet there’s been no answer.

So I switched to Wikispaces. I threw together a new wiki that didn’t have ads and had them go to work. I created new pages for each group and had them edit their own pages. Naturally, there’s a chance someone could edit someone else’s, but hey, it’s a reasonable risk.

Except that I wanted them to create a new page for each of the places I asked them to research.

They can’t create pages. Drat!

So back to the drawing board, they can’t create pages and I don’t have the brain power amidst answering a slew of questions to create five pages for each group (and there are roughly ten groups per block). That would be counterproductive.

They progressed nicely once we got up and running, although I had loads of trouble with them typing in the wiki address.

exploringancientrome.wikispaces.com

How hard is that? Most of them typed exploring ancient rome wiki spaces into the address bar.

This tells me more and more than they know how to play but basic operations are beyond them, at times.

So, I implore you, pbwiki, let my kids edit with only an invite key. Let that happen on the free version.

As for you, wikispaces, please let my kids create new pages. Or let that be something I decide in the manage space section.

And for goodness sake, Wikispaces, it’s time for a more robust WYSIWYG editor. One of the reasons I love pbwiki is due to their integration of FCKEditor. My kids prefer it, too, since it lets you control your text so much more nicely and more fine-grained.

Ok there’s my rant. Am I missing something here?

Chris

Tagged with: google earth • pbwiki • Wiki • wikispaces
6 Comments »

I got this idea from some tweets last night, specifically from watching budtheteacher backchannel a workshop. It got interesting, especially when D’Arcy Norman backed away due to the high volume of tweets.

What if we had a space to always use as a central back channel? What would this space look like?

What if we collectively create it on a space at www.edublogosphere.com?

I would say it needs a…

1. Chat room that archives chats and makes them searchable

2. Twitter feed so that folks can announce that they’re planning a backchannel.

That’s all I’ve got. Does this seem worthwhile? What else should be added?

3 Comments »

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.

2 Comments »

If you caught the link from yesterday and liked the stats plugin I mentioned, you need to read this…

Anyone hosting their own blog and running the WordPress.com Stats plugin should update the plugin to version 1.1.1 immediately or apply the patch below. A critical SQL injection vulnerability was found and fixed. The bug could allow an attacker to steal administrative credentials. (WordPress.com bloggers are not affected.)

Most users will want to download the latest version and simply copy the new files directly over the old ones. Subversion users may do `svn up`. Advanced users may apply the patch manually.

Thanks to Alex Concha who found and reported the bug to me. He also provided the fix.

So there you go!

From here.

No Comments »

I do enjoy twitter, and often find myself perusing the past posts at twitku, my twitter/jaiku posting tool of choice. Recently there was a bunch of activity regarding twitterfox, formerly called twitter notifier. It allows you to embed a twitter notifying popup in your firefox browser so you are immediately notified when someone updates (of course you can select how often, and you can decide to turn off the popup).

Personally, I keep a twitku tab open and check in when I want to. Which means, I am not interrupted. This works well for my productivity when I am sitting in foreign countries with slow internet connections. Sheesh.

Anyhoo, I am worried about your cognitive health. You see, each time the twitterfox notifier pops up alerting you that a new tweet has occurred you are distracted, not just inconveniently but also cognitively.

This type of interruption violates the split attention theory, which branches from the cognitive load theory. If I were involved in learning something (which is hopefully the vast majority of time I am sitting here), then I would have my cognitive train derailed more often than is necessary, negatively affecting my learning.

For me, that’s not ok. I need twitku to be on demand, hence the tab scenario.

Take this screenshot (did I tell you how much I love skitch?)…click for full size version.

It comes from the wikipedia article on Cognitive Load Theory.

If I am involved in reading this article, my working memory is going to be heavily processing information that will hopefully make it into long term memory. This process is halted by the interruption of twitterfox.

Twitter and Jaiku are useful tools for me, but I cannot afford to be interrupted, not because I am terribly important or busy, but rather because my working memory suffers and that derails learning. Twitter and Jaiku are useful tools at times, and at times pointless fun, but they have to be leveraged properly.

NB: I am not a cognitive scientist, and this is subject to my understanding of cognitive load theory. Please understand this is my take and is based on how I learn, I am not ragging on you at all. If you disagree, that’s fine. Just be nice about it! 

2 Comments »

This is a fantastic new feature for Slideshare, the ability to add audio files and synchronize slides to the audio.

They’re calling it slidecasting.

Jonathan Boutelle from Slideshare contacted me and asked what I thought, I told him I loved it. Here’s a brief intro, if you want to find out straight from them, hit up the slidecasting faq page.

It begins with a small little box on the bottom right, tempting you.

That leads you to this little nugget of info, good only if you’re uploading a new file.

If you already have a presentation loaded to slideshare and you want to add audio to it, you go to the presentation and hit the tiny edit button on the far right.

And then you’re off! At the top of that page, hit the create slidecast button and add your audio file.

It uploads it and preps it for synching. More on that part of the process later.

Congrats, Slideshare, for another great new feature!

3 Comments »

Ok so I went to work on my class website this morning. It’s been a nice lazy morning around the house. It will be a late night tonight so I’m relaxing on the mac this morning.

My class website is nothing more than a Wordpress site with no blog entries. I like the CMS concept and may use the blogs at some time, not sure. Anyway, that’s how I’ve done it, so don’t quibble with that, huh?

If you don’t mind, would you take a look at the site?

www.class326.com

I would love it if you’d really dig around and find possible areas of liability, trouble spots, outside links that I missed that may take kids to bad places, etc.

I’d love any counsel you’ve got to say, and also let me now if you even like it!

Thanks!

Chris

3 Comments »

I just got this in my email inbox..maybe you did too?

We’ve got great news. Evoca has partnered with Skype to let you easily record Skype calls, and it’s free to try! As an Evoca member, you are all setup to record your Skype calls. You will find the recordings stored in your Evoca account. Record interviews, sales calls, project management meetings, podcasts, or simply record your calls with friends!

To get started, make sure to add your Skype username to your Evoca account here:

http://www.evoca.com/myaccount/phone_edit.jsp

Then, follow the simple instructions in the link below to get started:

http://www.evoca.com/skype

Singing along to the tune of Skype,

The Evoca Team
www.evoca.com

PS: If you are not yet familiar with Skype, it is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. And even though the calls are free, they are really excellent quality. Learn more at www.skype.com.

Hmmm. Interesting. Looking at the evoca homepage, it shows this…

So I am going to try it. I clicked the link to add the evoca contact, and it asked me for authorization in skype. I said yes, although it still shows the grey question mark. Odd.

A reminder that I am on a Mac and using Skype 2.6.something Beta somethingorother.

So I am going to start a conference call with Evoca and our trusty friend Echo123, whose voice changed recently I think.

So let’s see how this works…

Ahh, didn’t work because I didn’t have my skype username inputted into Evoca under My Account. It sent me a text chat explaining it. Nifty.

Ok so it worked nicely. I ended up having to call the Evoca contact first, because it takes a few extra seconds to connect, and you know the test call lady, she’s impatient. So I called the evoca contact and then added young miss echo123 into the conference call. I timed it nicely.

When I finished, it sent me a text chat message with the remaining time (it looks like you get 60 minutes free), download links, and the like.

Here is a link to the mp3 file of my quick conversation, please remember you hear me twice because I am saying it and then echo123 plays it back. She cut me off at the right moment, too. The file comes as an mp3.

skyperecording.mp3

A fun new tool! Maybe I will try a screencast-o-matic out on this one!

No Comments »