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Tiddlywiki

I’ve been getting into Tiddlywikis lately. I remember seeing one in use a couple of years ago but it’s only lately that I’ve been using them myself. It took me a little while to get the hang of the structure (and I’m still not sure about a lot of things) but I’m finding them very useful.

I’m keeping one with notes of what I need to do with KUAPress, things like- “Upgrade PHP over the break” and notes like – “How can we get students more involved? Is faculty use of the Press the kiss of death?” as well as links to support documents and time spent on things – you name it, it’s in there.

Then I have another that contains household hints (we define that loosely). I am compiling this for my son for a graduation present.
This tiddlywiki contains hints like how to easily clean saucepans that have had food burn in them (Put in a dollop of baking soda, cover with cold water, boil until its all foaming up everywhere and then let it cool. The scorched stuff will just flake right off) or how to cook a chicken or how to keep peeled potatoes from turning brown all organized into three sections: Cooking, Cleaning, Finance. I’ll probably add another section called Love.

A tiddlywiki is a personal wiki , one html document, that lives locally on your hard drive or, in the case of Chris’ Household Hints, on the USB drive on my keychain. It is billed as a “personal, non-linear web notebook” and that’s what it is. They are great for keeping track of small pieces of information. Here are a couple in action

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything
A Guide to Bolivian Politics
music and culture site (Portuguese)

heavy hitters

Let’s hear it for the heavy hitters! You know who you are…The harder you hit it the better it will act folks, the ones with the lead foot on the mouse button.

I turned into the corner at the end of the stacks of bookshelves at the library yesterday to see a long-time client of mine already at the big maple table with his laptop. I settled in kitty corner to him and after we exchanged greetings and related pleasantries we both settled in to our respective tasks.
The room was quiet. Charlie was watching “how to’ videos from the Experimental Aircraft Association. He builds planes in his garage up in Vershire and is a member of the Replica Fighters Association. (These guys build WWII fighter aircraft and then fly them around – these are ¾ or full size planes I’m talking about! I mean these guys are crazy.) He comes to the library to watch the videos as he is also on a last mile.

And then it began.

Like a dripping tap it became more and more noticeable with repetition.

Click. Click! CLICK! CLICK!

Charlie was pounding that mouse button, putting his whole body into it. You could see him gather himself as his eyes approached a clickable link, his back arching, his forefinger slowly rising and……. CLICK!

I see a lot of people do this, students included. It seems to have nothing to do with the digital native thing. Some people are just prone to it.
It makes no difference how hard you click that mouse button, it may be actively counter productive in fact. Yet people will put their whole backs into pounding on that left click. Why?

Even I do this when I’m really frustrated. I confess, here, publicly, that I am a mouse abuser and a keyboard pounder when a computer is doing what I said instead of what I meant.

Living on the last mile

The Last Mile

I’m writing this at the Latham Library/, no, I cannot tell a lie, I’m writing this at home to post later at the library.
Our phone line has been getting noisy lately and yesterday it finally became unusable.

We have dial-up.

Most of the time we connect at a fairly good clip for dial-up, anywhere from 49000 to 52000 kbps and before you tell me to eat cake that’s all we can get at the moment.
I live in a little hollow in the hills in Thetford, VT. There is no cable. There is no DSL I can’t get satellite reliably enough to justify the expense because the hill at our back – to the Southwest – blocks that most of the time. We get satellite TV when the leaves are off the trees. The TV starts to go in May and comes back in, well we started testing in late September and I believe in was mid-October when we finally got the Daily Show back. (Tangentially, I really think that works out perfectly. It’s like a higher power is telling us to get outside and enjoy in the spring when we lose TV.)

I live on the last mile and brother let me tell you it isn’t pretty out here. Our local town consortium, ECFiber is out there plugging away trying to get a loan to put a fiber network out here and to 26 other towns but it’s been an uphill slog to do that. It will be two years at the least I’d guess before it gets down Picknell Road.
There is a possibility, just a bit of a one, that I could now get wireless access. WaveComm has put up a tower on a large pine tree at the Gove Hill Retreat, a Baptist camp on top of Gove Hill. We aren’t really line of sight to it but we hear that a house halfway down our road is, if they put a repeater on their house we might be able to get that. I’ve been meaning to call WaveComm for the last couple of weeks to see if I could set that in motion.

But I haven’t and this morning it is taking me five to ten minutes to send a plain text email.

Our dial-up connection generally runs around 49000 to 52000 kbps. My son and I have an older Apple Airport that has a modem in it, we use this to share our connection and although we can’t both download anything at the same time it serves well enough for email and most things. (Airports with modems aren’t manufactured anymore. We had to buy this one on EBay after the original one died) But this morning there is so much noise on the phone line we are connecting at 18000 to 24000 and at that rate Outlook Web Access just times out. I use a plain text email client from Dartmouth – Blitzmail – and even that is now almost impossible.
FairPoint, the little phone company that bought all the lines here after Verizon decided it couldn’t make a big enough profit here, is in bankruptcy court. I wonder how responsive the support line will be today…..

nb: when I called them from the bank parking lot, using my son’s Tracfone they were actually quite responsive, or at least understanding

So spare a thought for those of us living on the last mile. When you send us photos, remember that 100 dpi (dots per inch) resolution is plenty unless we want to print them out and frame them. Don’t send us links to cool videos; it only makes us feel left out. When you create your website, go easy on the Flash, puhleeze!

AutoZone are you listening?

Should we teach web publishing?

We do not teach web 2.0 tools or online communication mores at the school where I work.
I think this is very unfortunate.

We now have two platforms for web publishing here on campus, a media server, KUtube, and a WordPressMU installation.

The faculty who have set up blogs on our WordPress install have needed help to do so, they do not instinctively know how to use the tool even in a technical sense. Why would we assume students would? It is obvious, looking at one of the few student owned blogs, one for ModelUN, that this student had no idea how to use the platform – he commented on the example post from Mr. WordPress and then abandoned the blog entirely.

Yet when they go out into the world, our students will need to know how to create web content and how to join in the online conversation as a citizen of the world.

Even the Chairman of the Republican party has a blog, though I’m awfully disappointed that he changed the title from “What Up”.
I am not saying that students need to learn how to negotiate blogs in particular, the method is not so important I think. What’s important is that they learn the etiquette, the mores of web publishing.
I read in the Baltimore Sun that

In Anne Arundel County, an online course that began last month is required for staff members who want to create a wiki, said Val Emrich, the instructional technology manager. It includes an Internet safety component, along with how-to lessons on setting up the sites and using them for instruction, she said, as does another for blogging. For students, a mandatory digital citizenship curriculum was launched in social studies and health classes this year, Emrich said.

emphasis is mine

faculty workshops

There’s been a big push on to get faculty thinking about possible distance learning tools in the light of the H1N1 virus. We’ve all been asked to think about how we’d deal with either faculty or students being isolated for a period of time.
Our school website incorporates most of the things they would need to communicate class requirements like assignments, schedule. They can post links, upload documents and so forth, even embed audio and video. It does lack interactivity for the students – it’s all one way.

My colleague Steve and I have been doing workshops all the last week and a half and that’s been a LOT of fun. He’s done the ones on WordPress and I’ve been doing wikis and Moodle. We have a Moodle install on campus – we were actually planning on retiring it. It is enjoying a brief rennaissance. Why wikis, WordPress and Moodle? We have local installs of Moodle and WordPress and we were asked to do something on wikis. More to come if I have anything to say about it.
:)

I think I learn more at these things than the teachers do sometimes.
I had a really interesting project this morning – A teaching intern in the science department set up a wiki and then wanted to embed a spreadsheet of environmental data that students could update.

They are studying Blow Me Down Brook, a local stream, and its corresponding watershed. The obvious to me answer was to keep the spreadsheet in Google Docs, I could get that far.

That meant a quick tutorial on Google Docs (which I have used sometimes but really am not that familiar with). Then he had to set up an account at Google, and upload a spreadsheet (he could have created a new one there of course) into his brand new Google Docs account.
Then we shared the document. We ran into a snag here because as test students we were getting prompted to log in to Google to edit the embedded sheet. We didn’t want them to have to log in of course.
With a little tinkering with permissions, now all his students can edit the spreadsheet and have the embedded sheet update dynamically. Very cool! I started telling the teaching intern how his students could work with google maps to add markers to the Google map of the watershed area they are studying, with photographs, overlays and all the rest.. He said I was making his brain explode and we would have to talk about it later.

Oh, I love this stuff!

we do not serve them well

Two of the faculty asked me to sit in on classes while they introduced the blogging platform we’ve set up. I really enjoyed getting a taste of what the school is supposed to be about – learning, education. I think that often those of us in departments that do not teach tend to forget that this is the raison d’etre of our employment. I do at least. So it’s been good for me to hear the students in the class discussions, and see how good teachers teach.

It’s been pretty disturbing though, to see again that so many of our students are woefully ignorant of the tools that they use – the internet, software and the computer itself. In the last week I had one student tell me that he supposed that the reason he could not access a certain web address was because his battery was low. Another studiously typed a full internet URL – the whole thing beginning with http:// into her Google Search bar, coming up with search results every time.

Many of our students have no idea how to double-space a document or center text in Microsoft Word. I see kids that put a return after every line to double-space or center using the space bar. As for using the interactive web – creating web content instead of mindlessly consuming.. forget it.

In one of the classes a teacher asked the students – “how many of you feel comfortable with technology?”

Out of the class, three or four hesitantly raised hands. Yet over and over I have faculty and administration blithely tell me how kids today have no trouble with technology, that they just naturally pick it up, that there isn’t any need to teach them anything about it.

Bull. I disagree strongly. We are sending these kids off to college with no idea how to use these tools and I really think we are doing them a disservice.

wikipedia won’t kill the cat

Curiosity killed the cat they say, and from what I can see for most people partipating in the creation of online content, rather than simply consuming it might have the same result.

A month or so ago, my sister in Oregon emailed me me in great distress. “Grandpa Redfield has a Wikipedia page” she wrote” and they mention Uncle James on it but not Mom!” she wrote.
“Why don’t you fix it?” I wrote back.
“I haven’t any idea how to edit a Wikipedia page!” she replied.

How is it that people can be such incurious sheep? They just take what they are given don’t they?

Well, everyone knows that Wikipedia can be edited. That’s the whole idea!

That’s why teachers don’t like students to use it, because it can be edited by anyone. I even had Mr. McIntyre tell me once that Wikipedia was “evil”. I asked him if he trained his students how to edit it and he acted like I was asking if he trained his students to rob banks.
The whole idea of wikipedia was that it would be self-correcting, that if you saw something was wrong, you could correct it.
So they make it pretty easy to do. If you look at the top of the page there is a tab that says Edit this Page. Says it right there at the top.

There is also a tab for history, if you edit something your IP is recorded as well as what changes you made. It’s good manners to leave your name too so if you look at the history tab for Robert Redfeild’s wikipedia page you’ll see that I added my mother, my aunt and another brother Tito ( who died at 12 from injuries in a sledding accident) as children along with my uncle, James Redfield in May of 2009

Putting Hartford, VT on the map

I read with great interest an article in the local paper, the Valley News today Creating Hartford on the Web about a course at a local high school

Designed and co-taught by social studies teachers Mike Hathorn and Woody Rothe, the course marries the Internet and cutting-edge online mapping technology with more traditional research and communication skills.

View the result at Creating A History of Hartford
This is very very impressive! Imagine how these students feel having their imagery and research integrated into Google Earth. This is the kind of result schools can get when they are not afraid of letting students engage with the world audience available.

WordPress.com Introduces VideoPress for WordPress.com users

WordPress.com Introduces VideoPress for WordPress.com users

Posted using ShareThis
On the way down to lunch I had a curbside discussion with one of the faculty on the subject of our video server, KUtube, and our new WordPressMU install, KUAPress and we were asking ourselves – why can’t one platform do everything?