I remember clearly the first online community I was a part of. In late 2003, just a few weeks after it had been built, I joined Monkeyfilter. Monkeyfilter was a spinoff of Metafilter which was closed to new membership at the time. I had been following Metafilter for a few months prior and when I found out someone had created a similar site I jumped on board. At the time I remember hoping that those who were seen as good contributors on Monkeyfilter might be awarded memberships to Metafilter. Although that clearly wasn’t the case, it shortly didn’t matter because I came a part of a tight-knit community of folks who were finding interesting things on the web. And I loved it.
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When a Course becomes a Community
Karaoke Friday on ds106TV
As is quickly becoming tradition (at least for Jim Groom and I), I decided to broadcast some karaoke tunes to ds106 on Friday. The idea of livestreaming and setting up a TV station for ds106 has been back on my mind a lot recently in light of the video assignments. You’ll recall perhaps that I experimented with this earlier on and even have a dedicated site for it. The biggest hangup of the whole endeavor has always been the amount of ads placed on several popular streaming services like Ustream and Livestream. Both services charge upwards of $350/month to go ad-free, which clearly puts the service in a completely different demographic than the community of DIYers we’ve built here.
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When In Rome: A Street View Story
I had been playing around with the idea of using a combination of Google Street View and sound effects from the Freesound.org project for awhile now. Today’s news that Google now has Street View inside of famous landmarks is all the prodding I needed to start playing. My recommendation is to wear headphones and watch this full screen if possible.
Crowdfunding an Education
It shouldn’t be this way. The ability to receive an excellent education shouldn’t require us all to stand on the side of the road and lay our hats down to catch the loose change from those that pass by. I’ve written before about my struggle to come to terms with advancing my education and the cost (both monetary and mental) of doing so. But this isn’t about me. This is a call to arms for someone I know very little of, and already admire a hell of a lot.
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Video Essay
My wife always laughs at me when My Girl comes on TV. Yes, I am a man, and yes I cry at this sappy movie. I can’t help it. To me there is something powerful about the way they frame a story of a girl that can’t understand death until her best friend dies. Anyway, it’s the perfect movie for me to talk a bit about, so here it is.
Technical Notes: I used iMovie with the Voiceover option to do this, but I’m not sure how much I liked that because I felt it made everything very quiet, even when I wasn’t talking. It does make it stupid easy, however, to overlay voice on a video track.
Broadcasting on ds106 Radio
Image Credit Brandon Warren
The combination of a few late nights with the wife and kid out of town and our newly installed high-speed internet connection have meant the ability for me to do more interaction with ds106 by way of broadcasting on the radio waves. I never would have expected such an ancient technology like radio to have such a viral effect on this course, but it’s completely addicting! I started rocking out some karaoke tunes on Friday night and I was joined by the Reverend Bava himself and Brian Lamb. I almost recall a late night Skype conversation to Afghanistan as well, but being quite a few drinks in at that point and with early morning obligations I can neither confirm nor deny.
I want to share my setup here because I think it’s worth seeing how easy it is to do something that on its head sounds rather complex (Broadcast online audio both from your computer and microphone at the same time). I am using a combination of two programs, Ladiocast and Soundflower. Ladiocast is a free streaming program that can handle multiple inputs/outputs and also has level control and monitoring. Soundflower is a free extension to pipe your computer audio into a program as an input, effectively making what you hear on Youtube or iTunes also be broadcasted through Ladiocast.
DS106 Radio uses the MP3 format for streaming, which unfortunately requires a bit of extra work with Ladiocast. You want to install the version from the link above, not the version currently in the Mac App Store (MP3 streaming seems to be completely removed in that version). We need to install the MP3 encoder located at this link which is meant for Audacity but with a quick change it will work with any program. Install the file, then open Finder and hit Shift+CMD+G and type /usr/local/lib and hit enter. That will take you to a folder with a lot of random files. The audacity MP3 installer actually installed the file we need in a folder here called “audacity”. Go into that folder, grab the file libmp3lame.dylib and move it back one folder to the main /usr/local/lib folder. Still with me? Great, we now have MP3 streaming support in Ladiocast, and I promise it’s worth it.
To save time I’m going to post a few screenshots that show what my inputs are set as along with the settings to get your stream up and running. You will need the password so ping @grantpotter on Twitter and let him know what you’re interested in streaming and he’ll get you setup.
As you can see I have a total of 3 different sources I could pull into the stream, but with this setup I’m just using my mic and Soundflower. The great thing about this is that I’m also able to plug in a pair of headphones and Output to them, so I can hear exactly what’s being broadcasted and adjust my levels accordingly. I would assume you could work some magic to use the Aux Outputs to push your broadcast back into another program such as Skype, but I haven’t gotten that far into it yet or had a need.
Hope this helps more people get rockin on DS106 Radio, it’s a lot of fun once you get the technical stuff worked out and Karaoke Friday shall return so bring your A game to the table!
Update: I decided a simplified flowchart might (hopefully) make the whole thing a bit easier to understand. Maybe it doesn’t but damn if it doesn’t look spiffy.
Therapy with Firebug
Martha Burtis posts an excellent assignment involving the use of a Firefox extension called Firebug to edit the contents of a website to create an interesting story. This is just genius, so much easier than photoshopping a site. I wanted to do something meaningful with it, mostly because the temptation is there to do something funny and fun, which is cool too, but I had bigger aspirations.
Fast forward to earlier this week I came across a Tumblr blog called Ignorant and Online. The person curating that blog is finding examples of people basically being complete trolls online. Fair warning: Read too many posts and you’ll lose all faith in humanity. The events of the earthquake in Japan are providing quite a bit of fodder for the ignorant among us apparently. It’s enough to make me sick to my stomach. But the great thing is with this assignment I have the tools available to change their story. Is it fiction? Sure…but a story can function as ointment to a wound and while it might not change the world, it’s the best I have for now. This is me making the web better, on my own screen, one pixel at a time.
I think I’ll do more of these.
Developing a Conference Website
Part of my role with the Board of Directors for VSTE is working with Laura Briggs on the Membership Committee to help drive publicity and membership. I end up getting to play with a lot of fun things and use social networks to help promote events and things we have going on. I’m also involved with the Conference Committee working on marketing for the Annual Conference they hold each year.
In the past years conference information has just been included as part of the main organization’s website. Speaker information, registration, it was all a subsection of VSTE‘s homepage. Last year we did something a little new by using a Google Site to collaboratively have a space where we could edit information and publicize things related to the conference. Registration and announcements were still handled on the organization’s main page, but (especially during the conference) the Google Site was the place to go for maps, presenter materials, keynote information, and all other conference-related items. This year I’m making a different push, to develop a brand new conference website running WordPress as a subdomain of VSTE’s newly redesigned organization homepage. The Mobile Learning Share Fair we’re holding in March has given me an opportunity to start flexing some of those muscles in preparation for the larger project, so I thought it would be worth it to blog about it.
I knew I wanted to use WordPress for a number of reasons, largely surrounding the fact that I’m most comfortable in that CMS, theme support is huge, and plugin support creates a lot of opportunities. Oh, and it’s all free and open source. Though I wasn’t involved in the main organization redesign (which actually runs ExpressionEngine), I developed the Edge Podcast subdomain for VSTE last year as part of a redesign for that property. A conference website brings a host of interesting challenges and opportunities. The annual conference will be bigger and involve a lot more work, but I’ll cover some of the smaller items I’ve been able to incorporate into the Mobile Learning website.
Design
Homepage
From the start I knew I wanted the design to reflect a few important items about this mini-conference on the homepage. Those items were:
- Date
- Time
- Cost
- Where to Register
- Sponsors
- Keynote Presenter
Other information could be included elsewhere but those items were deal-breakers. They effectively answered the question “Why does this event need its own website and why am I coming here?” I think the result is pretty great. The rotating featured item allow me to not only highlight the keynote presenter but rotate through a few presentations which I will swap out in the coming days to highlight some of the breakout sessions. The theme used here is SimpleFolio which is primarily used as an artist portfolio site, but I found that highlighting works of art was not a lot different from highlighting (visually) presentations for a conference. The lower 3 sections of the homepage are widgets. While the 2nd and 3rd are simple Text/HTML widgets, the first is an Ad Squares Widget which just makes it easy to adjust sponsor information and add/remove them.
Session Directory
Session Directory
The session directory is the portfolio backend of this theme. Based on posts tagged in a certain category (in this case “presentation”) we get a lovely designed directory of sessions. Sub-categories become a submenu to the directory, which worked perfectly for a one-day event by adding sub-categories based on the time of the session. So when going to the page we have a list of all breakout sessions and the ability to narrow down to all available at a certain time. Since I’m a visual person I love the featured images for each presentation.
Presentation Details
Presentation Detail View
Each session has its own associated post. Using the Dynamic Widgets plugin I can control sidebar items for presentations based on category. I’m using the QR Code Tag plugin to automatically generate a QR Code for each presentation. Combined with the Carrington Mobile theme it means users will be able to scan a page with a presentation and get a mobile version where they can download and look at presenter materials and links. For a mobile-centric event like this, I’m pretty happy with that little feature.
Overall for a one-day event and something I pulled together in less than a week, I’m pretty happy with it. I think it’s well balanced between not having too much information but also collecting it all in a neat package. As I said, the Annual Conference will be a much larger affair so I hope to take what I’ve learned from this process and apply it to that. Any feedback would be extremely helpful to that end.
That fleeting piece of paper…
At some point in my life I became a hybrid, someone who could fit a ton of different roles and never own a single one. I graduated with a B.F.A. in Studio Art, joined the I.T. department at my alma mater, and then got sucked into instructional technology vicariously through my wife’s work as a technology resource teacher in a K-12 environment. Who does that?! I could have been an artist (although the career options aren’t exactly pretty unless you prefer “Starving Artist”). The IT angle comes easy, but Christ. I’m better than that.
Where do I stand and where do I want to be?
Instruction comes easy to me. I can relate to people and explain high-level concepts like cloud computing and project-based learning on a level that the crazy woman on the corner of the street missing teeth might actually grok. And the nutso thing about it is that I actually kind of like that process of explaining complex things. Clarifying topics for people who want to understand but don’t have the luxury and affordance of time to try and figure it out on their own. I’m a teacher. Stuck in an IT role repairing computers, but it’s what I am.
At my current role, I’ve done just about anything to take opportunities to teach faculty, staff, and students. I’m charged with training our student technicians on the various ins and outs of cleaning off spyware (and that’s not really much fun, the virus crap, but the teaching is). I’ve developed opportunities to provide professional development to faculty and staff on mobile devices. Meanwhile I’m taking my yarn and sewing together the fabric of an online system through Twitter and ds106 that is allowing me to grow, learn, and process all of this in new and meaningful ways. The opportunity to take 60 minutes of my time and chat with students about design in the context of digital storytelling was like a shot of adrenaline. I’m addicted. I need this.
3 years ago I began a program to get my Masters in Instructional Technology. It was completely online, which worked with my current situation of being married with both of us having full-time jobs. But it didn’t take long to become cynical of the entire program and plan. Outdated material that I was paying top dollar to be fed by a TA who often didn’t respond to email was not the best way to win over this nagging feeling in my mind that everyone was doing it wrong.
And yet the value put on that piece of paper is something I can’t get past. Without going into many details, I attempted to interview for a position and wasn’t even considered because of a lack of “advanced” degree. My response was the middle finger as I left the institution and found other places to bide my time. A year later I found myself back at the institution wondering who was wrong and where we go from here.
You see I love the institution. I hate the mistakes it makes, the value it puts on medals and certificates, but I love the mission, the goals, the heart behind the institution. This is where I belong. Not as a hybrid, as an agent of change to help steer this ship into greater waters. It has taken me a long time to get to this point, wasted hours pretending I could ignore this inner urge and be satisfied with what I’ve done. But it’s not something I choose, it’s an inner sense of self that finds me and forces me to wake up and take no chances at grabbing that golden ring.
I’m jumping.
I don’t know far I’m going to have to fly.
But I’m going to fly to those attractive heights, where I can grow into the agent of change that my institution needs. For a long time I thought that meant I had to disappear, to learn, labor, and ultimately jump from the ashes with that magic degree that would earn my credibility. But now I realize my growth comes not just from the institutions that offer the degrees, but from all of you. You build me up and prompt me to create, to challenge, to change. I won’t be leaving, I’ll be growing alongside you all.
This is my story.
60 Apps in 60 Minutes
I’ve recently been doing this presentation in several different venues from VSTE to Longwood. I got a guy to record it at Longwood recently and he did a fantastic job of editing the video to include a screencast of the apps I gave him separately. I’m really pleased with how it turned out. I’ll be giving a similar presentation in an online format through VSTE‘s Webinar (God I hate that word) series on March 10th and in person at the Mobile Share Fair on March 26th.
On a related note, I’m going to be leading a group on iOS development throughout the month of March. No cost to be a part of it, but I am going to use the Lynda tutorials which has a $25/month subscription fee. Normally I’d steer towards free stuff online but these videos are too good to pass up and I figure instead of spending $25 on a dry book spend it on the Lynda subscription and even if you find you’re not liking iOS development there are plenty of other screencasts and tutorials on their site to make it worth it. We’re collaborating in this Ning group and I imagine we will probably jump into an Adobe Connect room a few times throughout the month for open session stuff to bounce ideas off each other and answer questions. If that sounds appealing to you please join us!