Alex Prager has a series of video portraits on the New York Times that is absolutely haunting and excellent. I love the idea of using a minute or so of film to capture an idea, a portrait, with stunning visuals. It adds a layer of cinematography to a portrait that makes for a really compelling artistic piece. I could see this as a ds106 assignment for sure. Make sure to watch them all!
One of the things I love so far about the P2PU course I’m taking is that it starts at the very basics and forces me to address things that I skipped over when I was self-learning HTML and CSS years ago. One of those tasks was finding the right editor. It seems like a simple choice. I used to take pride in building sites in Notepad back in the dark days of using Windows. Recently I’ve fired open TextWrangler for most of my editing work, which is nice because while it’s a freeware version of the more advanced BBEdit it still left me having to save files, switch to Cyberduck, and upload. Cyberduck would at least allow me to edit a file in place, but that’s not a great solution either. I realized with this task as I started playing with some of the great Mac coding editors out there that a more integrated solution was desired and available.
The first editor I tried out was Espresso by the folks at MacRabbit. From the site I could see it was going to be a beautiful editor and it did not disappoint. Tag autocomplete worked well as did server sync via FTP. I also liked how they would breakdown the heirarchy of tags on the sidebar to the right. When digging through code it’s hard for me to find certain areas so being able to contract and expand groups of tags is important. I have to say using the CSS editor I found more difficult than I expected. Visual tools for selecting styles was great, but when I used the color selector and dragged my mouse around briefly it spit out all of this code.
The other thing to consider of course is cost. If I want a decent editor I’m not going to get it for free without tradeoffs. Espresso is a 15 day free trial and $79 purchase on their site to buy (they are not available in the App Store as of this writing).
The next editor I was itching to try was Coda by the folks at Panic. I’ll say this much about Panic’s products: Jim Groom rarely spends money on software and he will say without a heartbeat that their FTP client Transmit is well worth the money. The company has a reputation for beautiful products that fit the Mac environment well and the Apple Design Award for Coda is proof of that. Coda is simply gorgeous and a treat to use for development. Editing the code felt fluid, the CSS Editor and live previews were great. Syncing with a server worked quite well (like I said before, these people wrote Transmit, so you can imagine how great it is to have that functionality in the sidebar of a great editor). However there’s one huge tradeoff here: Coda is $100 ($99 on their site, but $99.99 on the Mac App Store). Again not cheap, but no doubt it’s a quality product. Being on the Mac App Store is nice as well because I’d get updates automatically delivered through there and be able to download it again if I lost it without having to deal with license keys and such. They offer a 14 day trial download on their site as well, similar to Espresso.
So the goal of this task was to choose an editor, or rather have it choose you as you played with it. If I’m honest with myself I’d say Coda is the clear winner of what I tried. It will just be a question of whether I can afford to spend that kind of money on something that is only partially a part of my day job. For now I have a 14 day free trial so I’m going to stick with it and let it impress me more (or perhaps let me down in ways, we’ll see).
This was the next assignment in the P2PU Webcraft course. I can honestly say I didn’t have to much of a struggle with this one. Obviously writing with a pen is difficult. Which slash is correct, forward or back? I only know where the key is on the keyboard. I’m spoiled. But considering I only screwed up one time and wrote this out pretty quickly I’m pleased with it. A lot of that just has to do with my experience digging in to HTML code.
I was inspired by Alan Liddell’s latest post where he has started working on the P2PU course “School of Webcraft” and thought “Why the hell not?!” You see my experience with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc all stems from a DIY attitude of learning it myself and hacking along the way. At best I can wade through code and make a few edits to make stuff do what I want. At worst I’m completely lost most of the time. And I’d like not to be, so this is a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by learning more about how P2PU is delivering courses (and yes, badges) and also learn some real knowledge about all the acronym soup I use everyday in some way. I’m looking forwarding to learning a lot and blogging the process all the way.
Tomorrow morning I head out to the 2011 VSTE Annual Conference. VSTE stands for the Virginia Society for Technology in Education and is probably the largest gathering of educational technologists in this state. It’s hard to believe that this will be my 5th year at the conference. In many ways I got my roots in educational technology from VSTE.
In 2008 my wife was headed to this conference in Roanoke and I figured I’d tag along. I’d never been to the Hotel Roanoke and heard it was beautiful. When we got there she had to register and get her stuff and as I idled about I picked up a conference program and started thumbing through it. Google Earth in the Classroom, RSS Readers, Blogging, I had no clue people in education were interested in this stuff! My concept of education came primarily from higher education and even then only on the IT support side where I was working as a classroom technology support person. The themes in the conference resonated with me profoundly and I told my wife Emalee I wanted to pay the registration fee and go to. Keep in mind as a walk-in this would be over $300 of my own money out of pocket but it was that important to me. I registered and had a blast learning all kinds of new things.
The following year I submitted a proposal to speak about mobile devices in education. At the time the iPhone was starting to pick up a little steam and there wasn’t a lot of other competitors but Openmoko seemed like it had some promise. Still I could see that with the power of a computer in your pocket and the near ubiquity of these devices being predicted, there was no way we could ignore them. It was my first time speaking in public and it was amazing. Now I was hooked. My wife and I presented the later on 60 iPhone apps in 60 minutes to a packed Washington Lecture Hall, and the year after we did 60 iPad apps in 60 minutes to an overcrowded room in VA Beach. These experiences shaped my understanding of educational technology and ultimately provided a foundation for how I got out of an IT support role and became an instructional technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington.
This year is shaping up to be one of the best conferences yet, and I don’t just say that because I’m on the Board of Directors and Conference Committee. I’ve helped them build a brand new domain for the conference and we’ve integrated an amazing online program to allow users to search and find sessions, take them on the go with their mobile device or print them out, and connect with other people through social networks while they’re there. We’ve got a whole day of virtual sessions, a brand new IT strand, and I’ve been working with several other Board members on a new space called the Digital Sandbox which will be a community-driven unconference-style space for presentations and discussions. Not to mention the conference is back at the Hotel Roanoke during the holidays, which is just awesome.
I could write a book on all the great things coming out of this organization but I’ll just leave you saying if you haven’t dove in to what VSTE has to offer, you are truly missing out on an incredible network of dedicated and innovative people with a passion for technology in education. I’m incredibly blessed to be a part of it.
Back in July shortly after starting my job at UMW I began talking to Jim about the possibility of doing a video podcast. It would have to be something that wasn’t relatively long, but a daily thing where we’d reflect on all manner of subjects. I had no idea that we’d already be close to hitting 100 episodes on what has become DTLT Today. It’s an incredible testament to the perseverance of the department and will become an excellent volume of the collective knowledge and concerns we were facing at the time. It’s a visual group blog and an amazing example for other departments and institutions.
But we’re not done yet. Andy Rush and I share this vision of a network of shows coming from our office. Publishing has become to easy not to do it, and with pioneers like Leo Laporte and Dan Benjamin lighting the way we have big dreams for what we can accomplish.
Martha has already tested out a pilot episode on DTLT Today of a possible spinoff show called Ask Martha. I had hoped to start my next show, TimeOut, a few weeks prior but have gotten caught up in other things. But the logo and intro video are set. That show will be a daily (or weekly) reflection of the blogs posts you missed, very similar to this show but edited down to no more than 5 minute episodes. Other concepts we’ve talked about is a show completely dedicated to WordPress (hell, we use it every day!), Andy has 2 episodes already on the web of his “favorite things” here and here and I could easily see that as its own show, and we’ve even got the first episode of a script written by a former ds106 student for a fiction show!
If YouTube has proven anything in the past few years it’s that people rally around good web video, and we believe at UMW that it will be one of the defacto ways that people continue to consume information on a daily basis. Get ready for the network to light up!
The more I use Gravity Forms for WordPress here at UMW, the more I am constantly impressed by such a full-featured and flexible plugin. This is not some shill paid post. I’ve used WordPress for 5 years now developing sites and themes and my discovery of Gravity Forms this year has blown my mind by the possibilities it opens up for flexible web systems using WordPress. Here are just a few cases where I’ve had the opportunity recently of implementing that plugin with some other great tricks:
The department of Economics wanted to have a form on the homepage of their website where they could ask people to submit their name and e-mail address to become a “supporter” of the cause. Then they wanted to have these names scrolling across the screen in a widget. Because I’ve enjoyed implementing Custom Posts recently to solve some of these odd database items I went with that here, creating a custom post called “Endorsements” and then using the awesome Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin to create a new custom post for each form submission. Last step was employing the Vertical Scroll Recent Posts plugin (and doing a custom edit to it to look at that custom post type instead of regular “posts”) and throw the widget on the site. The result is an awesome dynamic scrolling list of supporters who have entered their information on the site. Check it out here!
The College of Arts and Sciences is starting some preliminary discussion on how to collaborate on their syllabi with the local community colleges and perhaps glean some information about learning is directed across these campuses. To that end Jim and I recommended a UMW Blogs site (naturally) and I set to figuring out how to easily allow folks to upload their syllabi to the site and collaborate. Gravity Forms was an absolute breeze because it allowed me to assign the uploaded document to a custom field and then use that URL however I saw fit. What I did here was made use of the template https://docs.google.com/viewer provides to automatically display a post template (again, a custom post type called Syllabus) with an embedded version of the syllabus right in the page. I also made use of just a few custom taxonomies on that page like “Institution” and “Subject” that will allow for some flexibility in drilling down sets of syllabi later on. Much more to come on this site but check it out here!
I’m a cheapskate and don’t like to spend money on plugins when I don’t have to, and I’ve tried plenty of standard form plugins (which are fine if you just need someone to submit a form and get an email from it). But Gravity Forms is amazing in the way it can be used for so many other customized functions. Also the support folks are incredibly helpful (special shoutout to Carl Hancock), even to the point of responding on Twitter to advice when they found me complaining and figured out my problem. The plugin is an incredible tool to have with WordPress that makes this platform that much more powerful for building customized websites and applications on top of it.
2 weeks ago I just happened to be thinking about items you could buy that would end up “paying for themselves” in some way. You always here about items like programmable thermostats that end up saving enough money in the short term to be worth the investment. I asked this over at Reddit and received a TON of responses (1750 comments total on that post! Madness). One of the suggestions was a SodaStream which particularly interested me because I love soda, as do many of the folks in my office. I had never used one and asked about it on Twitter and folks who had one unanimously loved it. Then GNA Garcia replies back to me with this:
I figured that sounded like an awesome idea to give a shot. I e-mailed their PR department asking about the possibility of showing one on the show and they agreed! Early this week the SodaStream showed up at the office and we began thinking about how we could have fun with it on the show. Leanna Giancarlo in the Chemistry department at UMW hooked us all up with lab coats and googles and we even had student volunteers join us on the show. We had an absolute blast! Some folks (who probably need a bit more soda in their life) felt like we were selling out. But honestly, the fact of the matter is that I pay quite a bit of money to run DTLT Today out of my pocket between the streaming costs and pro Blip account and happily do so, but if every now and then a company wants to throw a bone are way and it’s something we think is actually pretty damn cool, you better believe we’ll consider it. Check out what ended up being an epic episode of DTLT Today!
Image Credit: Bre Pettis
Have you ever heard of a MakerBot? It’s a 3D printer that basically “prints” melted plastic onto layers, building almost any digital model into an actual product. This technology was the stuff of scifi novels years ago and companies like MakerBot have brought the cost down dramatically to bring this technology into the mainstream. The company has created a community around this technology called the Thingiverse where anyone who has built these digital objects can upload them for anyone else to download and print themselves. People go on here and upload their pictures of their prints and comment on ways they can improve it. There’s even a section for variations of a build! My favorite? Behold this amazing structure:
How crazy is that? And I could literally download that file and print a figure of my own. It’s a powerful way of conceptualizing 3D models in a physical space. Naturally that leads to some powerful educational contexts as students can learn not only to build their own digital models but also now print them on the fly and hold them in the palm of their hand. That’s exactly the direction we’re headed at UMW working with George Meadows in the Education department.
On Friday, December 16th we will hold a “MakerBot Party” gathering all who are willing and able to come together and help us build this device (The DIY kit we have is cheaper but more involved to put together. The company actually sells a more expensive version that comes assembled, but where’s the fun in that?). We will stream the process of putting this device together live to DTLT Today all day and possibly be able to begin printing items that day as well.
It’s the start of something big in my opinion. The New Media Consortium is already looking at this technology as a possible trend for the Horizon Report. MakerBot has a site dedicated to educational curriculum devoted to the use of this device (sparse right now, but hopefully will grow with work from the community and us), and every day more schools, museums, and libraries are seeing the potential this provides. Kudos to George Meadows at the University of Mary Washington for having the idea and working with DTLT to make it a reality. There’s no doubt in my mind there is much more to come!
You are cordially invited to attend a midnight showing of a 1987 Christmas Classic, “A Muppet Family Christmas” in honor of the holidays. IMDB gives the storyline as follows:
When Fozzie and the Muppet Show gang drop in unexpectedly on Fozzie’s mother, she is forced to cancel her winter vacation plans and entertain them all. Soon the Sesame Street gang comes by as carolers, and then Kermit and his nephew Robin discover a Fraggle Rock hole in the basement. A snow storm blows in, stranding everyone at the house, except for Miss Piggy, who arrives just in time for all the Muppets to celebrate Christmas together.
Here are the details on how you can join is this movie extravaganza. The movie will be streamed live to DS106TV. If you are shy and just want to watch the movie but not participate, this is the best way to do that. If, however, you want to participate with the rest of the crew please plan on calling me (timmmmyboy) on Skype at or around midnight Friday night. In “Mystery Science Theater” style we will provide ongoing commentary while drinking wine, eggnog, or whatever vice you might imbibe in as we enjoy the holiday movie together. An audio-only crosscast to #ds106radio will be provided as well.
I do look forward to seeing and hearing both old and new faces. It is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year.
Sincerely,
Timmmmmyboy
