The Messing with MacGuffin asks you to choose a pivotal point in a movie and alter the plot with a single line. It turns out to be a hell of a lot of fun!
Collective Collaboration
These are notes we took at the DTLT office yesterday while brainstorming ideas for 2 courses we have the opportunity to create for the Spring Semester under the American Studies discipline of the History Department at UMW. But yesterday we did things differently. Rather than simply erasing the whiteboard and writing down our ideas, we fired up the video camera and started broadcasting on DTLT Today feed. I sent out the invitation for folks to collaborate with us by joining the chat and brainstorming live in realtime with our office.
We had people everywhere from Arkansas and California to Canada jump into the chat and start giving us ideas. It was a ton of fun and while live broadcasting is nothing new, this was an example where the technology had gotten out of the way to the point where we felt comfortable saying “Let’s turn it on and invite others”. It was living, it was real, and it worked. We got a lot of great ideas from that session and I know we’ll do this again.
Collaboration doesn’t have to be a roundtable discussion between you and your coworkers. It doesn’t even have to be a Google Doc with your network. It can be a personal, intimate live broadcasted conversation. Services like Google Hangout would even add the element of audio and video to the people participating with you. It’s an amazing time to be working as a collective.
Writing through Media
I was browsing Reddit and came across this image which I post here not because I think it’s so hilarious it’s worth a blog post, but rather it has my mind spinning on the realization of why an image like this exists. In the Age of YouTube why would someone spend the time to take screencaps of the same basic pose 8 different times just to tell the joke when the video clip itself was probably only 30 seconds long?
My first thought was that perhaps this was a sign of our youth rebelling against the media machine that has begun to systematically pull videos from Youtube for copyright violations. Faced with the option of attempting to pirate a copy of a video just to grab a 30 second clip to make a point or to simply retell the joke, they’re choosing door #2.
Another interesting alternative is that images are rising up as the new medium by which a generation communicates. In a world where text over an image implies a sense of authorship this new form of media provides people a way to usurp true sources and take credit for spoken word.
Or maybe there’s a much simpler explanation:
Last week I found out that a UMW professor, Zach Whalen is teaching a course called Writing Through Media which he describes below:
This course is about media and it is about writing. The operative preposition through comprises the key, two-fold premise of this seminar: that new media technologies offer new literacies and that these literacies depend to some extent on using media technology to communicate effectively. In this advanced writing course, students will balance theory with practice, and the successful student will leave with technical, working knowledge of some New Media technology.
One portion of the course I find absolutely fascinating is that he is running a Subreddit and having the students engage that community. As an assignment, the students will get a grade based on the “Karma” (votes) they get from the community for the original work they contribute up to 100 points. Yet another example of the experimental nature of teaching and learning at the University of Mary Washington that I love!
Media U
A few weeks ago when I started playing around with Wowza for streaming I started thinking about the value iTunes U offers for the University. We have an iTunes U server on campus that never really got much action, in part because it was nothing more than a Linux box running Apache. Users had to FTP to the device to send their media to it and then use links to hotlink to the content. No embeds, no fancy interface, just simple storage and serving.
UMW has an iTunes U account but getting that content into their interface is maddeningly difficult. It’s not as simple as uploading content, you have to provide specific media feeds to the system for it to feed in. Of course naturally 3rd parties have seen this as an opportunity to sell more software overtop of the “free” iTunes U interface. But what value does iTunes U give us in return? iTunes of course is an integrated platform for folks who use it for their media. As a podcast directory it’s a great central location. Ideally they want to be the central media hub for EVERYTHING but if you don’t have an iDevice or run their software you don’t get to play. That makes no sense for a higher ed institution and it’s not a space I’d like to see UMW investing time and money into just to say we have “a presence” there.
Ironically when researching iTunes U I came across this post by Jim Groom which hits the nail on its head. From 2007 he could already see that we had the possibilities with WordPress to do something better. I think he was right, and I think it’s time we built that. UMW Blogs has reached massive scale for a campus our size and it’s a shining example for the functionality of WordPress Multisite (now a part of WordPress Core). I envision this alternative iTunes U interface, which I’ll call Media U for now, running on this same system.
We already plan on using a replacement media server to run Wowza for live streaming, but it can also do video on demand. This takes care of our storage, encoding, and serving. Institutions who don’t want to host in house could choose the EC2 route or alternatively choose platforms like Blip, YouTube, or Vimeo. Media U would be a separate network extension of UMW Blogs, allowing for the same users to access the system and create their own “Audio/Video Series”. The theme of these series pages would be standard allowing the user to choose their own album artwork and begin uploading each file, as individual posts. WordPress will handle the RSS feeds automatically and it’s possible that we could even feed all this into iTunes so we have our “presence” there, whatever that means, but it’s not the focus. Automated syndication of our content distributed from our servers to the web.
I began working on this with a standard install of WordPress and activated it as a Multisite installation. Right now I’m playing with the theme, which I’m building on the Skeleton Framework so it will resolve on mobile device sizes just the same as on the desktop (which I think is important since mobile devices are quickly becoming a key way to consume content from the web). You can start to see an example of all this taking shape with a generic page at http://timowens.me/dtlttoday. Noticeable right now is the lack of media files. Right now it really is more about working out a good looking theme that fits as many use-cases as possible.
This is already turning into a fun side-project at DTLT and it just one example of where being in this position gives me the freedom to choose a passion and run with it. Taking ownership of our media content is a natural extension of the publishing platform we built years ago and WordPress as the management system for it is, to use a Groom term, “a layup”. Freeing ourselves from the restrictions of a locked in media system used by few and opening up a wealth of media content to the world via the Web is an exciting prospect and I’ll be updating right here as the project progresses.
Kinect, 3D Printing, and Advanced Technology for Higher Education
Today after giving a standard talk to students about some great resources freely available on the web for their projects, Jim and I stuck around and chatted with George Meadows who is teaching the freshman seminar course. We got to talking about interesting technology that’s out there right now and George mentioned wishing he could justify the purchase of a Thing-O-Matic to fool around with in the classroom. Have you seen these things?! That’s a 3D printer that takes a plastic material, heats it, and then prints layer after layer from a computer-generated model to build a living version of that computer artifact. And the whole setup only costs $1,299! Continue reading
Design Matters
So often I have lengthy discussions on Twitter and keep telling myself “I need to be blogging this! 140 characters isn’t enough for my rage!” but to grab the bits and pieces of what was said on Twitter and codify it here on my blog can be difficult at times. So I’m going to give Storify a try here and see how well this works.
The digital storytelling “course” ds106 has relatively quickly evolved into a community in the past year. With entities like #ds106radio appearing and developing new ways to broadcast to internet radio and the website being a mismash of latest posts and course-specific content I wondered out loud if there was a better way of organizing the information for people who are new to the community. Radio has a document that is quickly becoming overwhelming in and of itself. Is a wiki the best tool for this?
| “ | Does #ds106 need it’s own wiki now? Typewithme seems to be overloaded with info and that’s just radio. Do people use wikis anymore? | |||
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| “ | @timmmmyboy Whaaa?!?! #ds106 DOES have it’s own wiki, and heck yeah, wikis are taking over the net! http://t.co/Az0Bp1b | |||
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| “ | @techsavvyed Yeah, ds106 has a tab to a wiki that no one uses outside of the “course” content. What about all this? http://t.co/hr5GyQX | |||
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| “ | @techsavvyed Or maybe that answers my question. The wiki on ds106.us isn’t used because people don’t like to use wikis. Typewithme wins. | |||
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I don’t want to discount the uses of a wiki here. I understand when it comes to rapid development of documentation collaboratively they’re a great tool. But it seems that more often than not wikis require you to learn an alternative programming language involving brackets and asterisks to format your content. Media Uploads can be a pain. The user experience is not inviting and often invites work training users and ultimately frustration. Sites like PBworks and Wikispaces have alleviated this to some extent, but they’re hosted solutions with a business model to unlock certain features. Whether they would work in this case better than MediaWiki is perhaps unknown.
| “ | @timmmmyboy This is a larger symptom of #ds106, you guys teeter so much on the edge of free-wheeling and the need to codify resources | |||
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| “ | @timmmmyboy It must be a challenge to have to make decisions based on those two very conflicting styles of communication | |||
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This is a very interesting topic and it’s definitely a balancing act that is different for each support person. I’m the type of person that immediately shoots for “Make it elegant and simple for users, because they’re the ones I’m relying on to make great things.” I can’t speak for others but there is certainly a backlash from folks who don’t want to “coddle the user” and rather throw them into the fire so they become better learners. Teaching someone to fish rather than feeding them. Tom Woodward clarifies this balance perfectly in a tweet:
| “ | @timmmmyboy @techsavvyed people are willing to learn things when perceived value > pain – so that’s why people need to toughen up. | |||
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So we have a few options here. We can increase the value of a product or we can reduce pain. Using #ds106radio as an example I feel like it has enough value that people have accepted the difficulty of getting online. However that hasn’t stopped someone like Grant Potter from working with more advanced methods of running a PBX server so users can use any phone line to get on the radio, rather than purchasing software and getting a long list of settings correct to get online. The problem I see is that in terms of wiki software, MediaWiki has an extremely poor user interface and it takes a lot of honest hard work to mold it into a product that removes that pain for the user. Apparently some folks disagree with me.
| “ | @techsavvyed @timmmmyboy @brlamb @sleslie ==MediaWiki is User Friendly!== *(mostly) | |||
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| “ | @giuliaforsythe @timmmmyboy There’s the crux…when do we draw the line in asking people to learn “one more tool”? #ds106 | |||
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| “ | @timmmmyboy @techsavvyed we just need one tutorial first about how to edit MediaWikis. Geez, it’s easier than GIMP!? | |||
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| “ | @techsavvyed @giuliaforsythe @timmmmyboy @cogdog User-unfriendly? http://t.co/57gLyc5 http://t.co/IYnLfNi @sleslie | |||
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| “ | @brlamb @techsavvyed @giuliaforsythe @cogdog @sleslie I’ve seen people do amazing things with Linux too. Still won’t see me recommending it. | |||
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Clearly UBC has done two-fold with its system. They’ve spent a lot of time working with MediaWiki to turn it into something that is easy to create pages and edit them. As someone who as installed MW before I can confirm their implementation is nothing like what MW is out of the box. And thats fine! But that’s not for everyone. It’s also very likely that UBC sees a lot of value in that wiki (or at least a subset of that group who may be very actively involved in it). But see those statistics don’t defend the product.
| “ | @timmmmyboy @techsavvyed @giuliaforsythe @brlamb give me a pressing problem & mediawiki over most wikis any day. “User Friendly” is a canard | |||
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| “ | @lottruminates “canard” likely not right word; of course it matters, but it gets brought out as FUD and dis-abling “helpfulness” too often | |||
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And here I completely disagree. There is not enough emphasis put on design in products. I was often told how much better Android would be as a phone platform because it was more “open” and users had more options. The opposite is true after 1.5 years of using and Android phone (with 2.5 years prior experience on an iPhone). Design Matters. Especially so when the product you are working with is one that will require the input and involvement of a large set of users. Users who are likely not the geek that you and I are.
| “ | @sleslie @lottruminates If a major project is implemented and no one uses it because the interface is a mess, did it really exist? | |||
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| “ | @lottruminates @sleslie Point simply being user-friendliness matters A LOT when you’re relying on users (and not you) to drive a system. | |||
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| “ | @timmmmyboy I shied away from MW for projects- hand coding markup not for non geeks. Potential via extensions, includes untapped | |||
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| “ | @timmmmyboy as I said, a “pressing problem” – in my experience, most failures less to do w/ tool/interface more with ill-defined problems | |||
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| “ | @brlamb @giuliaforsythe @sleslie To be fair, we’re talking about different audiences, and IMO many K-12 audiences would BALK at MediaWiki | |||
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Is it fair for us to say “K12 can’t handle this, but The University totally can.” If a product is designed well enough it can be adopted by anyone. Google Docs does this well. Facebook does this well. Why can’t wikis do this well?
umwbl.gs and DIY url shorteners
Shortening URLs has become a really popular service in conjunction with Twitter and text messaging growing in popularity. I’ve wanted to play around with URL shorteners for awhile now. To be honest I don’t trust that bit.ly or t.co or is.gd will be around forever and while I can’t guarantee that anything I DIY will be either, at least I maintain some control over it (isn’t the web an ephemeral space anyway?).
The first step, getting the domain, was probably the easiest. I don’t want this to sound like an ad, but I ended up using 101Domain and especially with a foreign domain it couldn’t have been easier. Very straightforward, no attempts to add-on tons of needless extras like Godaddy, and a simple management interface. If you hate Godaddy and especially if you’re interested in purchasing a less-common international domain (which is popular for URL shorteners like this) give them a shot. Or don’t. Whatever, but get a domain. One thing to keep in mind is that while you might have that perfect domain picked out that plays on certain letters to form a nice short word, some top level domains have specific restrictions on their usage. For example, you cannot use a .de domain unless you have a residential address in Germany. And some international domains take longer to register and may require more paperwork. Luckily that wasn’t the case with .gs and within 24 hours we were registered and ready to go.
I added the domain to my current hosting with Dreamhost not because I like them at all (in fact due to recent annoyances I’ll probably be shopping for a new host when my annual service with them comes up) but I didn’t want to put a heavier load on UMW Blogs and I didn’t yet know what effect a url-shortener would have on server load.
To handle the URL shortening I’m using a package called Lessn More which is actually a fork of a project started by Shaun Inman called Lessn. It’s straight-forward barebones PHP with a MySQL database to store the shortened URLs. The nice thing about the Lessn More fork is that it also offers the ability to create custom slugs (like a vanity URL ie. umwbl.gs/tim) and uses some character detection to not make difficult URLs by avoiding things like lowercase ls and 1s.
Installation was a breeze but how to get started using it? The admin interface will give you a bookmarklet to start generating your own but for this project I wanted this to be the URL shortener that all of UMW Blogs used for URLs. WordPress has it’s own url-shortener (wp.me) and integrates a “Get Shortlink” button on all posts now with 3.2. I came across an excellent plugin by Matt Wiebe which is perfect because it simply ties in to your Lessn install via a few options setup in the PHP file and quietly switches all shortlinks in WordPress to use your URL shortener. No extra settings screen or tons of options. I put in the information and dropped it in the must-use plugins area and all 5,300 blogs were now powering it.
I don’t yet know how the URLs get generated (when someone logged in asks for one via the admin bar? Automatically by crawling all sites and pages?) but as of this writing with less than 48 hours of usage, the install has shortened over 20,000 links and counting! It’s a great test to the scalability of the software and frankly it’s just awesome to personalize such a large space. If you have a site on UMW Blogs anytime you’re logged in you can grab a shorturl for any page on any of the sites hosted there from the admin bar up top.
Streaming Live Video without Ads for Pennies
I’ve been in search of a decent low cost video streaming solution for a long time now. It doesn’t take long playing with Ustream and Livestream to realize that while the software running those systems is extremely user friendly and convenient, the ads they run are obnoxious and intrusive. The premium subscription for both of those services also totals over $10,000 a year, so I’m not their target market by a long shot. I blogged a bit about this when I was setting up DS106TV and we eventually settled on Justin.TV, forgoing the attractive offline rotation of Livestream because Justin was the only service that had just one single ad at the beginning of the stream and no interruptions thereafter. Continue reading
Encouraging Gravatar Use in WordPress Multisite
We’re in the process of redesigning the layout and look of UMW Blogs and one of the features Martha Burtis has added is a stream of the 5 latests posts from the entire network. The plugin is pulling the user’s Gravatar along with the title, author, a character-limited description, and link to read the full post. Gravatars are built into WordPress and have been for awhile and it’s adds quite a bit of personality to the design to feature them in the stream. Continue reading
The Myth of DIY U
It’s *hard* to learn this way; in fact, it’s *harder* than going to college. The educational system as it is currently structured is intended to offer a set of short cuts – access to qualified practitioners, creation of custom peer networks, guided and scaffolded practice – for a certain price. The system isn’t (as suggested in Kamenetz’s booklet) about imposing sets of restrictions and making things more expensive. It’s about offering the greatest reach in the shortest time. It allows those willing and able to invest themselves full-time to master the basics of a discipline relatively quickly, so they can obtain employment and begin the real learning they will need to undertake in order to become expert.
Stephen Downes has an excellent point by point dissection of the inaccuracies and fallacies of Anya Kamenetz’s new e-book The Edupunk’s Guide in response to a discussion on the IDC listserv. I urge you to go read that critique right now because it’s incredibly thoughtful and comprehensive. Continue reading
