Crucial Thought

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! 

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!

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

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!

I am reaching out, here. I got the NECC Presenter Atomic Learning offer.

Is this something I should take advantage of? Or is this just them trying to sell me something…

They are offering NECC presenters six months free. Will I like it? Is it worth it?

I’ve blogged about my concerns about blogger transparency before. This time it may have taken its toll.

1. Read this post.

2. Read this comment.

3. Then read this comment by the post’s author.

Now you tell me, when your “head” (substitute “principal” or whatever) approaches you about a post like that, does it forebode bad things?

What do you think? Did Doug go too far? In a perfect world he (or any of us) could say what we want without fear of reprimand. I am sure most of us would appreciate that level of transparency. But with Doug headed for an Ed.D and a higher-level job, does his blogging affect his job chances?

Would your blog affect yours?

I’ve been using Google Docs since it was Writely. I liked it then and I still do. I get frustrated by the extensive formatting and weirdness when pasting, and boy would I like the page setup to be just like Word, but I won’t go there.

Anyway, I’ve been using the tag feature for a while, and have a tendency to use Google Docs as a backup. For example, I just finished an assignment for a new grad class and I did it locally in Word on my Mac. Just for kicks, and to have it available, I uploaded it to Google Docs.

What I then did was tag it with my course number (EDAT783 for example). Well I messed up. All my other tags were one way and I typed this one wrong.

How do I delete it? I looked and looked and finally found the answer in this google discussion thread.

Turns out once there are no documents tagged with a particular tag, it goes away. So I selected all the documents with the wrong tag (by Browsing using the green button) and then tagged them correctly and then removed the bad tag.

Poof. Gone. Sweet.

Maybe this tip will help someone else!

I’ve been using Picasa Web Albums primarily because of the sweet integration into Picasa, which I have used for some time for all my photo management. I simply prefer it over iPhoto (sorry Apple) and this makes me turn on my PC every once in a while.

I don’t use Flickr much because of the sweet integration I mentioned only moments ago.

I might change that, now.

Check this out, it’s a Picasa plugin that adds a button for you to upload pics directly to Flickr. It isn’t terribly pretty, but it sure does work. It’s Java and CGI based. I was able to authorize and upload a picture of ready-to-cook rabbit inside of one minute.

It sure does work, although it lacks aesthetically. Future versions may prove prettier.

picasa2flickr (sourceforge) (via lifehacker)

Technorati Tags: picasa2flickr, christophercraft

On-the-fly, browser-based, java-running screen capturing?

Oh heck yeah.

Here is a quick little playful piece I did, and I did it on my iMac!

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cihw2HjS

And since it’s Java-based, it is cross platform. I have to be honest, the entire process was super easy. I think this is a tool I will use a lot!

Screencast-O-Matic (via Lifehacker via Download Squad)

Let me begin with a disclaimer, I do not watch television. My wife and I do own one, and it is connected to a DVD player for occassional movies, but even that is not too terribly often.

That said, I was reading this morning that Google added a meme-like function to Google Trends, called Google Hot Trends.

I took this screenshot and quickly edited it in Snipshot.

What does it say about our world that the top trends are all about nonsense. I had to look up the first one to see that Andy Baldwin proposedto Tessa Someone. I am scared to find out who number 10 is.

I will save you the social commentary, and merely point you to tvturnoff.org.  I imagine my readers (all 12 of you) are not searching for this stuff, but chances are your students are. Let’s help them turn away from this and into a good book!