johnhendron.net: hendron’s digest - a weblog

Technology integration approaches that do not reflect disciplinary knowledge differences, and the corresponding processes for developing such knowledge, ultimately are of limited utility and significance, ignoring as they do the full complexity of the dynamic realities of teaching effectively with technology. Understanding that introducing new educational technologies into the learning process changes more than the tools used—and that this has deep implications for the nature of content-area learning, as well as the pedagogical approaches which teachers can select among–is an important and often-overlooked aspect of technology integration approaches to date.

– TPCK: Curriculum-based Technology Integration Reframed

(via Steve Hargadon):

Word has it David Thornburg used this video to help break the ice at a conference, speaking about reluctance to embrace open-source software.

In this video tutorial, I explore how (easy it is) to use drop.io a free “storage locker” for your media. Using RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it allows you to easily publish podcasts or documents to your friends, students, or colleagues.

drop.io and RSS from John Hendron on Vimeo.

While perusing Lifehacker before going to bed, I ran across this article with hundreds of comments.

In case you don’t want to read:

• person uses BitTorrent to download movies
• her ISP sends her a letter stating that what she did was illegal and for now she wouldn’t be sued.
• she asks for advice about downloading movies via BitTorrent…

I found the comments hilarious, but ultimately sad. A wide range of advice was proffered to the original poster. But what was funny/sad were the justifications folks had for being allowed or having rights to download movies or music for free.

I mean, you were sent a letter saying “We know you did this. It’s wrong. Don’t repeat!” –and then you’re going to do it again? Litigation, etc., is expensive. Yeah, maybe it was a “scare tactic,” but copyright/DMCA is the law. You might not like it, but that’s what it is.

You’ll run into advice like this:

A friend of mine ran into this kind of trouble. Try buying a copy of the DVD in question (PAY CASH!!!) and then if you need to you can claim you already owned the DVD and you were acquiring a digital backup.

Ha! Why not just buy what you want in the first place? Or rent it?

One guy claims he does his downloading at work:

consider that the reason why I now do 90%+ of my downloading through my job’s T1 line behind several secure firewalls…

And finally, yes, there are some wiser folks too that understand:

if you choose to break the law, be prepared to pay the price

I mean, isn’t this pretty clear?

The customer service representative stated that if my account was found to be transmitting and receiving copyright-infringing material in the future, then my connection would be terminated.

I am not sure why folks have such a hard time dealing with copyright. Yes, making digital copies of things at no cost then charging full price for each copy does feel like a scam. But that’s the reality of applying an old-world business model on the face of modern technology.

Tonight I bought three albums online. It took seconds to grab all three; I payed between $.89-.99 per track (average) between two online stores (namely Amazon and Apple). I payed for the privilege of hearing the music, and at any time I want, on any device I want. Do I wish the tracks were cheaper? Yes.

That’s me. I think I get it. But there are teachers and students I have interactions with that do not get it. Some of it might be economic differences between us. Some of it might be blantant disregard for the economic model that allows the music/movie business to work.

Or is it just me who wouldn’t risk their job by downloading this content from work? Where I work, it’s pretty clear. We make you sign paper work that says we reserve the right to fire you if you do x, y, or z, yet it’s happening elsewhere. Where people do get fired.

Amazing. That’s what it’s come to, the inabiity to resist getting something for free.

After writing my book, I was so focused because of ISTE’s suggestion, to aim the book at a particular reader/market, that I never once again thought about the super-advanced user/educator.

Even with RSS, was it possible to suffer from too much information coming out you, full, head on, in an aggregator?

I suspect if it’s student work, no. But if it’s news and blogs and podcasts and more of the above, then… maybe so. This blog post gives some sage advice.

• Make two “buckets” (i.e., what I call groups in the book)
• One bucket is for “must read,” the other is for “interesting fluff.”

Casually read the fluff like your significant other’s magazines when left in the bathroom; focus more attention on the first group. Not bad advice, at all.

When I’ve talked to audiences about the so-called remix culture of students, the so-called “digital natives,” it’s also worthwhile to share examples. It’s a culture that is labeled “prosumer” by some, and it shows the potential of creativity that connected folks have.

I am not sure the age of the creator of this video (it says he is 37), but it’s best described as the epitome of creative, prosumer culture. It uses the LineRider Flash-game to create quite a show. Enjoy!

Tonight in lieu of going to bed, I decided to draw in SketchUp. I’ve been meaning for weeks to design a restaurant.

Since I was looking at homes via realtor websites today, a “dream home” seemed easier.

I am ready for bed. I’m not really sure the best way to go about designing a home in Google’s drawing app, but practicing, I am sure, will only make me a better SketchUp artist.

For those interested, this is just the first floor. The large tower on the left is the multi-story fireplace. That back room will be multistory, too. Fun.

Great TED talk by Alan Kay; he provides some ideas for how I might approach using Scratch with students.

I’ve seen Scott McLeod online rallying support for CASTLE, an organization dedicated to technology leadership for school administrators.

There’s not terribly much there right now, but it appears to be a great gateway for an emerging tech-savvy administrator. Follow a few blog links, a few more, and you will have built yourself a nice collection of RSS feeds to stay on track with what others across the country (and world) are up to.

DI recently discussed different synchronous communications tools.

The ones I find myself using most often are:

• iChat A/V (in and out of (our all Macintosh environment at) work
• Skype (for making phone calls, doing podcast interviews)
• GTalk (within the Gmail interface)

I find a lot of folks don’t like to video-chat. Sometimes I get lazy and can’t type all the stuff out that I’m trying to communicate, or else, using my voice feels more comfortable for the thoughts I have to convey. And sometimes I need more time to think about what I need to say, and e-mail is the better tool.

In my book, I talk about the power of synchronous voice communications as a powerful addition to your teacher’s toolset. I recently watched an “interview” between two people where they used video + audio. I had mixed feelings about the experience.

a) the video chat recorded as video did convey more information than audio alone would have (i.e., I know what both folks looked like, I saw a bit of the one person’s computer/room and where they work), b) The quality of the video capture was not great; I am not sure the extra information influenced the discussion much.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting video covering “lifecasting.” I still think synchronous tools make for a convenient means for time-delayed media, too!

Tim at Assorted Stuff recently wrote about the power of the inexpensive digital camera. He thinks we should put one in every classroom (he says as much, in how, for the elementary classroom).

He feels it’s one of those technologies that’s personal, handheld, and emphasizes what you do with it, over the object itself.

I agree with Tim. How many of us take the time (and have the fun) of playing with our cameras? To photograph water, change speed settings, and see what we can come up with? If they aren’t learning about photography doing that, they are learning something, the properties of water, the effects of exposure time, etc.

Which got me thinking about all the cameras we have now in our schools. Apple puts a reasonable digital video camera into every computer. I recently asked a teacher for a photograph, and they told me they’d get someone to take one of themselves… I suggested they take their own.

• “How?”
• “Your built-in iSight?”
• “Oh!”

Got a laptop cart? You have 15 cameras! Sure, you’re not going to pick up the computer like you would a point-and-shoot; but there is still quite a bit of utility built-in to that little guy.

The other day, I was trying to explain to someone what a microblog was.

This example via Tumblr is a great example. A blog about puddles!

If you have come to Hendron’s Digest after buying my book, RSS for Educators, then welcome!

I wrote the book roughly 2 years ago–it takes a long time to see things published. I made updates to the book one year ago. And today, there is a growing number of Web 2.0, Read/Write, and RSS tools.

One in particular that’s easy to use–for making feed widgets for your website–is Grazr.

I hope to soon publish an ongoing list of some of my favorite RSS tools here on the website, to continue the appendix in the book.

Update: I plan to add book-related updates and resources at the book link, top of the page, in the right sidebar.

Tim Lauer notes a new plugin for Flickr that can show your photos (or someone else’s) in 3D and in full-screen mode. Looks pretty cool.

The tool is called PicLens.

This week I’ve had some good interaction with two of our directors at work for planning a staff development session for the entire county.

It’s focus will be on 21st century literacies, and be a continuation of my presentation to the school division this past August on “Digital Kids.”

Not only will we be talking about some of the issues, we will also be doing some of the things that will help our students attain literacy and fluency with digital technologies.

The first part of this endeavor will be to ask each teacher to read an article and reflect upon it in their blogs; they will later have a discussion about it in an online space.

If you’d like, you can subscribe to my list of potential articles via RSS.

I’ve noticed a few suspect things with the iPhone. First, looking at two this morning, our weather widget/app was broken. The temperatures are different for Richmond (they were updated 3 minutes apart, yes). But they were updated during the 10 o’clock hour, and they indicate nighttime icons. Other cities appeared in daylight with sunshine. Incidentally, it was very bright sunshine when these were taken.

Also, on the stocks widget, sometimes the graphs are messed up: the range is off, or the stock is headed in the wrong direction despite the day’s rise or plummet of one particular stock. Quizzical.

I haven’t made it through all the posted days yet, but check out why you should be using a wiki!

Since NewsGator made their premier news aggregators free, others are now following suit.

The beautiful NewsFire for Mac OS X is now being offered to Mac users for $0. This was one of the first aggregators I began using, and always enjoyed its compact form factor. Now I really have some tough decisions to make today… picking a GTD application and a favorite news aggregator.

This morning I ran across a little microblog outlining bad apostrophes. I like humor like this, and the level of detail that folks are willing to drill-down to make critical remarks.

This reminds me of a situation at work this week where I poked fun at a colleague who misused quotation marks. In fact, she wanted to draw so much attention to the title of her document, she

• underlined it,
• italicized it,
• made the font larger, and
• put it in quotation marks.

And there are now too many good Flickr pools and websites devoted to the quotation mark stuff.

But if you had visited that link above, do you see what’s wrong in the photos? The apostrophes are not real ones: they are tick marks, or straight, and not curved. Despite my Apple Bluetooth keyboard showing quotes and the apostrophe at an oblique angle, when I hit that character, it appears too as a straight, up-and-down mark in my copy of MarsEdit.

How do they appear curved in the correct typographical way here on JohnHendron.net?

I used two text filters on my blogs: one is called Markdown, which translates special codes into XHTML. The second is SmartyPants, which translates my quotes and things like double-hypens into true dashes. You can install these into WordPress for typographically sound results!