So much simultaneous joy and WTF
@giuliaforsythe Here’s @dkuropatwa…
@giuliaforsythe Here’s @dkuropatwa talking with @mburtis and @timstahmer
Farts
Farts
Educon and Bridging Communities
This weekend I have the pleasure of heading up north towards Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit the Science Leadership Academy and be inspired by the many folks I follow and converse with on Twitter. It’s my first year at Educon and I love their philosophy of focusing on “Conversations” rather than traditional sessions that have a tendency to take the form of standard lectures. Mostly I love it because it means instead of preparing weeks in advance I get to ask you for help and input.
Educon is heavily focused in K-12 which is interesting because while I don’t work in K-12 I’ve always had a vested interest in it both because of my work with VSTE as well as the connection from my wife who teaches Kindergarten. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with plenty of great folks doing work in the public K-12 school system. Folks like Tom Woodward, Frank Fitzpatrick, Tim Stahmer, Ben Rimes, and surely many many more I’m forgetting. I strongly believe that for folks like me that want to see higher education succeed and grow, we’ve got to continue to collaborate with fellow educators in K-12. Often that relationship has been tenuous and forced.
This year I’ll be speaking at a session conversation along with Tim Stahmer, Martha Burtis, Tom Woodward, and Jeff McClurken entitled Building Bridges – Communities of Practice from K-16 where we hope to talk about these relationships between the two sectors and how we build them. And here’s where I’d love to have you involved.
We want to bring in voices from our personal network and beyond. To that end if you have a few moments I’d love for you to head over to this Google Doc and add your experiences having collaborated across these sectors. We welcome both positive and negative contributions recognizing that it’s a little of both (probably with a bias towards the negative). We will use information in this Google Doc to guide the conversation on Saturday. If you’re coming to Educon I look forward to meeting you, if not I hope you’ll participate and be engaged through these online lenses.
Clearly I can never leave the office…
Clearly I can never leave the office for lunch again.
Can I get that unicorn in another color?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnlpnsk/235597944/
I’m truly honestly sick of the town mob grabbing their pitchforks as soon as anyone holds a press conference for any new educational offering. Is there a more thankless job than the people who dare to try to change any aspect of education? Mozilla got shit on for taking a hard look at our outdated idea of credentials. Apple is even worse because if you’re not with the hate mob you’re a fanboy that hates freedom and “openness”. What is it about educators in that we ask our students to think critically but then we’re absolutely justified to voice our uninformed opinion half way through a keynote announcement of a product?
Today Apple announced a few things specific to Education and textbook publishing in particular (although the tools have a broader reach to interactive texts of any genre). We have a new pricing model that drops the barrier of cost for textbooks to $15 (compare that with the ~$60/semester I priced when the iPad came out and I looked into digital textbooks, not to mention those would expire). We have updated books that include interactive elements that few publishers outside of PushPopPress have been capable of producing. And we have a new authoring tool that allows you to create these interactive books. It removes yet another barrier of self-publishing by giving any person the power to create visually stunning books and publish them to the iBooks store. It has the potential to do for indie writers what the App Store did for independent developers.
But there wasn’t all gold in today’s announcement and I don’t mean to write it in rose-colored glasses. The iBooks marketplace remains iOS-only and these new textbooks would be no different. The authoring tool is only available on the Mac. Export formats are limited to iBook, PDF, or TXT, no sign of ePub and no way to import a Pages or ePub document into the authoring tool. It appears right now there is language in the EULA that indicates all books built in iBook Author and sold in the iBookstore must be exclusive to that marketplace. I’m sure I’m missing many other criticisms but you get the idea.
And here’s the thing: I’m not discounting these arguments. Do I want these books to have HTML5 publishing capabilities? Hell yes. Do I want to be able to grab an ePub version of any of these $15 textbooks for my various devices? Of course. Is that EULA language bullshit? Absolutely. I want it all to change. But am I disappointed in what I heard today? Nope, not even a little bit.
With every new product announcement by Apple we here the chorus of people that wanted “Revolution”. They read the rumors and came expecting the multicolor unicorns to fly in from the rafters pooping gold coins. Turns out the unicorns are limited to a few colors and pooping currency may or may not be coming in a later update. And they’re all pissed. How dare you attempt to change the status quo without consulting us first? $15?! We want it all for free. You mean these won’t load on the $75 Lookreader I got on sale at CVS? Greedy pigs!
When the iPhone first launched (and it strikes me this post is very Apple specific but hey, it’s Soup du Jour. Insert any company doing anything to disrupt education) many people were highly critical of it. No MMS, crappy camera with no flash or autofocus, no ability to run flash, no Bluetooth stereo audio headphone support (yes people are actually very specific about these things), no support for Exchange, no ability to publish native apps, etc. It was a laundry list of reasons why this phone would fail. Over the years Apple has checked off a ton of things on that list (every single one I mentioned there and that’s just a small sampling). But let’s take native apps for example. When Apple launched the phone they told people they believed in the power of the web and HTML would bring enhancements to make amazing web apps. They even made a few impressive ones themselves to get folks started. Awesome, right? They were crucified. You’re locking us out of native app development because you want to control your device! You have access to things like the camera and GPS that we can’t get! This isn’t fair! So they build an SDK and the ability for developers to create and publish applications. And now the token line is that they’re creating a walled garden ecosystem that you can only be a part of by developing for iOS and dammit this unicorn still doesn’t come in my favorite color, which is brown.
I’m not saying don’t fight for what you believe in. I’m not even saying you’re wrong. What I’m asking you to do is to look at these things not as a zero sum game, but rather as parts of a whole. Instead of expecting Apple to save education, why don’t you appreciate the waves they’re making in the water and use that momentum to keep the conversation focused and moving? We got a lot of interesting things today and all I hear are people unhappy. When we set the ship on fire before it has even made it out of the dock we’ll never get to sail..I don’t know where this metaphor is going but thanks for reading.
The Walking TED
I’ve got a little “zombie fever” with season 2 of The Walking Dead having started up last fall. If you haven’t watched that show you’re really missing out on some excellent quality programming for a channel that’s available to most cable packages. I decided to give my Fantasy TED Talk a go with a rather young zombie teaching about effective diet balancing. The young undead are our future innovators in this space! Thanks once again to Ben Rimes for not only creating this awesome assignment but providing the perfect Photoshop template to get folks started!
Building The Daily Create
Last year a lot of us in the ds106 group were shocked when we found out the Daily Shoot website would be taken down by the end of the year. Unfortunately the developers of the site were moving on to other things and didn’t feel it would be worthwhile to release any of the code for others to build on. What a waste. I don’t want to go on a rant here but I can find no reason for a developer who has no plans on ever updating a line of code again to let a popular website die on the vine like that, and then to stubbornly claim that the code is worthless to anyone else and therefore would not be released. I had great respect for the developers of that site, and then I watched them kill that community that was built around their site and they lost that respect from me. But that’s another blog post for another time perhaps. This is about something new.
Last semester when the Daily Shoot closed its doors a few of us talked for a bit on Twitter about how we needed to build our own clone. Obviously we have plenty of people in the WordPress community with the chops to make it happen. And the great thing is we wouldn’t be restricted to photography, it could house multiple disciplines. We talked and ruminated but nothing really came of it until early this year when I started talking in earnest with . He had seen how I was pulling in Twitter posts to DS106 via the hashtag using FeedWordpress and combination of restricted tag searches and started thinking this would be a good method to pull in info for the daily create. As happens most of the time all I need is permission to run with an idea and I’ll do it, and so I started working.
I initially thought I’d do a lot with FeedWordpress for this, grabbing RSS feeds from the various third-party sites like Flickr, YouTube, and SoundCloud. I had also played around briefly with IFTTT (If This, Then That) which is an incredible site that makes it easy to hook up channels that apply actions to certain triggers like posting a photo to website when you favorite it on Flickr. But it turns out IFTTT was too restrictive and I had issues with pulling in RSS feeds with FeedWordpress and getting all that content to look proper. And then I realized I was making things too difficult.
I’m not a programmer, I’m more of a “hack away at something and make it work” type of guy. In the end The Daily Create is very simple in how it works. I’ll break it down here for anyone else that wants to build a similar site, as I’m sure the idea of pulling in visual and audio content based on tags has a lot of potential for a lot of people. Here’s the nuts and bolts that make it work.
The Homepage
The homepage is a WordPress loop that is restricted to a certain category called “TDC Assignments” and only displays 1 post along with a link to the previous post underneath. The rest of the homepage is static content blocks describing what the project is about. We have schedule these assignments to automatically post each day at 10AM EST. When the new one is posted, the old one becomes the previous link and Twitter Tools fires off a tweet to the TDC Twitter account. Basically it’s all automated and makes it look like there’s someone behind the scenes doing a lot of work.
Photography
For photography assignments we’re restricting people to using Flickr. I’m perfectly OK with this because we’re not programmers and Flickr is extremely simple for people to use. We use a plugin called Awesome Flickr Gallery and despite the hyperbole it lives up to its name. You can create multiple galleries, restrict them to a specific tag, and control how they display. Each assignment gets its own gallery which gets put into the post as a shortcode. The only edit we made to the plugin was Alan figured out how to link back to the original Flickr photo so folks could go there to comment. The feed for this pulls in very quickly, with the longest I’ve seen taking no more than 15 minutes and many times photos showing up instantly.
Audio
For audio we decided to use SoundCloud which I have a love/hate relationship with. They’ve built a great social network around sharing audio and they’ve got a dead simple widget for groups that we’re using on The Daily Create. We create a group, anyone can upload an audio file and add it to that group, and the widget automatically puts them in the playlist. If you play audio on the Daily Create site it will automatically move to each new file when the previous is finished. What I hate about it is SoundCloud is very restrictive with free accounts and very expensive for paid features. Free users only get 120 minutes of audio total and can only create 1 group. This means I have to find folks to create these groups for each assignment. Ultimately it may not be sustainable but for now we’re using it and it works really well.
Video
For video YouTube was an obvious choice since so many people already use it and I just needed to find the best way to visualize a tag. The answer to that was TubePress with allows you to build shortcodes with TONS of options. Each video comes in as a thumbnail that uses Lightbox to display the video in an overlay. It looks and works perfect with the only exception being that YouTube apparently has incredibly long and random delays on their tag search. Not only is it not immediate, there were times that users videos took 14 hours to show up on the site. The annoying this is this part of the process is completely out of my control. I experimented with Vimeo to see if that would be a better option because TubePress supports it, but Vimeo had similarly long delays. We’ll work through the long delays because ultimately the site is archiving these posts and keeping them available anyway, so if it takes awhile to feed in that’s not the end of the world for now.
Submissions
The last piece of the pie was allowing folks to submit suggestions for new assignments. Normally people would probably go to a Google Form for something like this, but we’ve already found a better solution which we currently use on the DS106 Assignments Site. We use a plugin called Gravity Forms which I’ve raved about before here that allows us to create a form whose submission automatically creates a new post in draft. The user assigns it a category. All we have to do is decide when it should be published, add the widget/shortcode for visualizing it, and give it a tag. The more submissions we get the more posts will be scheduled in advance and there’s very little turnaround work for us. It’s yet another amazing way we’ve taken advantage of Gravity Forms. Obviously if someone didn’t want to invest in that plugin and wanted to do this on the cheap Google Forms would be a decent alternative and just require you to manually copy and paste the submission into a new form.
After a lot of testing this past week and a fun weekend of people participating in telling jokes to each other, the site is now live and rolled back to Assignment #1 for today. I’m excited about TDC as a way for daily creative prompts to allow us all to quickly find some inspiration in the world and work with it. I hope you’ll consider joining us (no registration involved, just read the assignment, complete it, and tag it) and maybe consider submitting a few ideas for future assignments that people could complete.
Citizen Yam
I’m not going to pretend to understand the Yam Yarn but if it’s yams the people want, it’s yams I’ll give them.
Learning at some schools is like drinking from a firehose.
I’m already blown away by the amazing programming chops being show by Cogdog and now John Johnston who created this awesome Flickr Quote Visualization Tool that allows you to grab random images, remove the extra stuff, and visualize a quote in as few as possible. This was my first go at it and it’s a ton of fun, not the least of which because everything loads almost instantaneously.
