We are in New York for the American Educational Research Association convention. I can’t say that I have anything new to report on the research front at this time.
At the end of the day, we walked to the Apple store on 5th avenue. We visit Apple stores on a regular basis, but the appearance of this New York store is unique and familiar to the Apple faithful. This had to be the busiest Apple store I have visited. Before I am accused of being a fan-boy, I should say I made no purchase.
Today, the Grand Forks Herald has an article on Cindy’s podcasting grant. The core idea is to offer customized content for English Language Learners new to Grand Forks and often the United States. The iPods allow students to experience digital audio and video content appropriate to their classroom and language needs. The mobility of the ipods allow them to work with the content anytime AND to share the content with family members. The story does a nice job of explaining core ideas from the grant
Excitedly, happily? “The journalist who wrote the story used these terms to characterize the narrative,” Grabe said, excitedly!
Not that I have given a lot of interviews, but I can’t imagine any journalist describing my style of interaction in this fashion. Cindy on the other hand generates this reaction. 😉
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Knowledge@Wharton offers an interesting analysis of what appears to be a competition between experts and amateurs as information providers. The piece notes many of the sources I have cited in previous posts (e.g. Revenge of the Experts, Cult of the Amateur).
The analysis notes that despite recent criticism of user generated content money is still moving toward sites that cultivate the generation of user content (e.g., News Corp purchase of MySpace). The Wharton analysis offers comments from business professionals reaching a variety of conclusions. Among the comments, the recognition that the desired for vetted information is one motivation and the desire to express one’s opinion is another (my interpretation).
Some conclusions:
Ultimately, the tug of war between professional and user-generated content will be resolved by their business models.
…
The problem: It’s unclear whether consumers will pay for content — no matter how good it is.
“The big challenge is the economic problem. What funded the traditional content model is falling apart,” says Whitehouse. “Ideally, I see Internet content being a blend of professional and amateur content, but how do we develop an economic model that supports both?” (Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of IT at Wharton)
After listening to an interview with Dave Winer on a TWiT (this week in tech #134) podcast, I became interested in a “service” Winer was hacking together called FlickrFan. You may not recognize the name, but Winer was involved in the development of RSS. Anyway, Winer was describing FlickrFan and it was my impression he was describing a method for acquiring high quality images from “services” for display on HDTVs using a device such as Apple TV. The description of the quality of the images caught my attention.
I don’t own an AppleTV or have a HDTV, but it turns out you can use this service on a Mac and if you want use the images it downloads as your screen server. I have found the ever changing display of great images quite captivating. Default image feeds include AP wire photos and Agence France-Presse wire photos. You can add whatever additional feeds you want.
I took this picture of my office workspace to give you a feel for what appears on the screen(s).
A one or two sentence description of each image is also provided.
I am a news channel (mostly CNN) junkie. This feed of images adds a new dimension to this hobby. You can use this software in other ways, but just using it as a way to access news images has been worth the effort.
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My students tell me I say some pretty funny things. The problem, they say, is they cannot tell when being funny is my intent.
I will save you the trouble of thinking too hard. I will now try to be funny. The comments that follow are absolutely factually accurate. I swear. It is my interpretation that is supposed to be funny.
Anyway, there I was at the end of a long week, at the club, working out. I was listening to Al Gore – Assault on Reason – on the ipod. After I was able to ramp the stairmaster up to a burn rate of a couple of calories a minute, I began to pay attention to my surroundings. Within my field of vision are three television sets each with a different show and all running closed captioning. On my left (told you this would be hard to make up) was CNN. On the right was Fox. I will get to the middle display at the end.
The individuals appearing on both televisions are the same. I know from experience that the spin must be going in opposite directions. What I can figure out from the closed captioning is that the word of the day is – Repudiate. There is a black minister and an older white woman and evidently both are racists. Some weird club they must belong to. The repudiate thing has something to do with these racists.
Then there was the image of Colin Powell. Not sure what he was there for and I don’t think anyone was trying to repudiate him.
You know, humor is a funny thing. Sometimes we try to be funny when life makes us nervous.
I hope the candidates get past this repudiate thing. I want to know if anyone besides me is worried about the stock market. I do repudiate falling stock prices and rising gas costs. Sorry.
Anyway – the television in the middle was playing a Bob Newhart rerun. Just what I needed – a pretend psychologist to help me deal with the schizophrenic situation I was in.
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I mentioned a few days ago that Cindy has been in Russia as part of a teacher to teacher exchange program. We had hoped to be able to communicate via Skype and when we finally connected today she had several of the teachers she working with her. I recorded the session to share some of the comments.
The discussion is probably little different than the banter you might hear in any teacher’s lounge, but there are still some subtle differences. The commitment to learning English is something we have encountered in several countries we have visited. I did get a chance to ask the students running the camera about filtering at their school.
Give the movie a few seconds to begin downloading before you press play.
[QUICKTIME http://studytools.psych.und.nodak.edu/wordpress/Russiacindy1.mov 320 257 false true]
For those interested in the software involved in this interaction, we were connecting using recent versions of Skype. The recording was done with Call Recorder For Skype ($15). I am using a wireless connection and speaking into the screen of my MacBook.
Cindy is now obviously in a location where she has higher bandwidth and she has added pictures to her blog. Her recent entries describe the content and methods of classes she has observed.
I wrote about the return of expertise a couple of days ago and today I encounter a new search engine roughly based on “human” expertise. Topicle is a new search site that allows participants to create their own search engines. You can search using existing search topics or create your own. There was not topic on “education blogs“, so I created my own. I simply copied a few URLs from my bloglines account to get it started. I admit this was not very original, but it would seem a search tool should cover some of the basics before moving on to specialized topics.
Topicle is supposed to function as a social search service. Participants identify topics, add URLs, and rate existing URLs. We will have to see if my little seed grows.