Month: December 2007

The Listening Project

During the past half dozen years, the book that has probably had the greatest influence on my thinking about education and many other issues has been Friedman’s “The World is Flat“. I carry the audio version on my ipod and still listen to sections from time to time. Part of the message is that all of us need to understand how we are interconnected. There is no way to isolate ourselves from the troubles that exist elsewhere or to worry that we are somehow being taken advantage of. The reality is that we must understand the flat world and adjust to its demands and opportunities. If you have yet to read the book, buy it for yourself as a holiday present.

Here is another suggestion. In the months ahead, keep your eye open for a documentary called “The Listening Project“. The film follows several Americans as they travel about and ask all kinds of people “What do you think of America?” The locations, the people, and the answers to the question are all interesting. Take a look at the trailer and some of the sample material. The documentary intends to create a dialog (see opportunities to contribute via blogs, Youtube) and it will be interesting to see what participation follows.

We are proud to say that our son served as an editor for this documentary.

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Posters as Presents

This is a reprint of a post from approximately a year ago. I like this idea for holiday gifts.

I have the newest version of iPhoto and was able to get the poster script to work with 10.4.11 OS. Here is a more recent post that explains the process. Follow the instructions carefully. I did encounter the “Error Can’t get item 1 of {}/ (-1728)” message” several times. When I manually selected the images to be included and not just the folder containing the images, the procedure worked.

MacWorld had an article describing how to use the Automator to generate a 20X30 poster from images stored within iPhoto. This article prompted me to generate a blog entry. The article provided access to an automator script that users can activate to generate the giant pdf poster.

Now this only works for those with access to a Mac, but if you are searching for a present your class can generate for each other or for friends and you have been collecting digital images throughout the year, this script does a great job.The idea is really that you would print out the pdf on a large form printer or send the pdf off for printing (we did this last year). However, the script saves the pdf back to iPhoto and you can then export the image in whatever size you like (see below for sample created from recent China photos).

Sample Poster

The script has been updated for a more recent version of iPhoto (Versions for iPhoto 5 and iPhoto 6 are available online). If you try this project make sure you are patient. The script may take 10+ minutes to reach completion. Read the MacWorld article (link above) for complete instructions.

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Spam for the holidays

Offer any opportunity to participate in a web application and it seems you must be prepared to deal with spam. For all practical purposes, the comment portion of this blog has been shut down because of spammers. The hoops one must jump through before you are allowed to offer comment probably eliminates all but my students.

I am now having to deal with spam on my social bookmarking site. I have a simple”Scuttle” site that allows registered users to add bookmarks. I have also modified the basic code to allow users to evaluate the quality of the sites that can be accessed. The site is intended to organize links to sites focused on educational applications of technology.

Recently, groups of users have signed up using fake names with what appears to be the intent of creating links to commercial sites. My site has some protection measures, but these individuals clearly know how to circumvent the protection. I am not certain I understand their motivation. I know that some attempt to spoof Google into thinking many sites link to a target site in order to boost the page rank for that site, but spamming Scuttle sites seems a labor intensive way to go about such a strategy. The spam appears to be added manually and once I notice the changes it takes me only a few seconds to eliminate inappropriate links. I keep thinking there must be something I am missing about this strategy, but nothing obvious occurs to me.

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PageFlakes for Educators

I make use of personal web portals and while I was aware of Pageflakes, I have always classified it as another personal portal. By personal portal, I mean a web page hosted on a remote server that users can easily customize with “widgets” (or whatever the host companies calls function specific modules that can be selected and positioned on a page) to serve as their browser home page. The idea is to bring together information sources (RSS feeds for news, weather, blogs, images), email, commonly used links, etc. in one location.

Now, I learn that PageFlakes can be used to create a “page” for sharing and some special flakes have been included in a version for educators/students (Mashable). If you don’t understand what this might mean, recognize that it allows a user (teacher/student) to create a page that can include powerful functions you don’t have to understand how to create yourself. Select a “”flake” from a long list of possibilities, position it on the page where you think it is most appropriate, and edit flake “parameters” to adjust the function of that flake to your own needs.

I have created a sample Page for your exploration (http://teacher.pageflakes.com/markgrabe).

Access control is an important issue when educators involve students with online resources. PageFlake can be private, public, or available to a designated group of participants. I have not included examples of flakes that might be among the more useful for classroom group (e.g., blog, notepad) because I must make my example public for you to be able to access the page. Unless I am missing something, I could not determine how I would turn off “comments” and similar response opportunities under these conditions.

One flake allowing personal content creation even under the public condition is the “anything flake”. This flake amounts to a simple web page authoring tool (see upper left-hand corner of my page). The tool is very easy to use and saves a fully functional html “mini” page that is really part of the full page.

Some have already developed simple tutorials for PageFlakes (e.g., PageFlakes for Education Wiki). The best way to understand this environment is probably to explore (http://teacher.pageflakes.com) as a personal portal and then, if this proves to be a productive experience, progress to the creation of pages for sharing.

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