Howard Reingold webinar and books

Writer Howard Rheingold will be giving a free webinar on Thursday March 22, at 8:30 am. This is a Horizon Connect webinar launched by the New Media Consortium, "featuring thought leaders, game changers, and innovators who are making a difference right now in the world of educational technology."


Rheingold will discuss his new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. This is a great opportunity to learn how to more strategically think about and apply digital media in your own work.
   
He describes his book - “How can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers? In Net Smart, I show how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.
 
 Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. I outline five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts.”
 
He will also be giving away 5 books during the talk. RSVP on the Facebook page event and learn more about the March 22 webinar and the book give-away.

Pinterest - Sharing the Visual Internet

As much as social networking can suck your time, it can also bring some relief from information overload on the internet. Smart friends on Facebook can be good filters for discovering the news that are worth reading, links worth following and cat videos worth watching.

Something interesting has been happening with the ways that news and information are organized and distributed via social networks. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as folksonomies, where knowledge is organized and presented by collaborative activities of internet users rather than media professionals as gatekeepers of information. The merits and dangers of such information management are, of course, up for debate.

Meanwhile, there is a new social networking tool that is used for organizing images - Pinterest - but not just images. It's a visual bookmarking site that lets you place and share information visually, through categories that are created by users. Pinterest reflects the growth of visual culture and finally lets us map knowledge with pictures, not just links or words. It is an organizing method that can be a useful teaching resource.

While sites like Flickr let users organize and share photographs, Pinterest keeps the images attached to the context of their websites. The Ed Social Media article does a good job of explaining how Pinterest works and among some higher ed examples, links to various visual categories (boards) created by the University of Denver. Libraries are also leading the way in the adoption of this technology. Here are 20 examples of how libraries are using Pinterest to organize information on the web, including collaborative work with patrons, collecting learning materials by themes, showcasing digital collections and displaying book covers.

Along with visuality, the social networking aspect of the site is what makes it really useful. You can follow other people's visual bookmarks (pins), look at the categories created by other users and then repin their finds onto your own boards as categories that make sense to you. For example, you can take a look at Tiffany Ford's science curriculum ideas, pick a project that interests you and repin it on your own board under a category that fits your interests. If you are teaching a biology class, you can call your board "biology lessons" and pin other examples along the same theme.

Converting Multimedia Files

More faculty and students are making movies and recording audio files. It seems like our Flip cameras and audio recorders are constantly checked out of the library, and the circulation desk is asking for more recording devices.

One of the biggest problems in dealing with video and audio files when it comes to editing is the size and the format of the file. You record a movie with a Flip camera, which creates an mp4 movie file. You want to edit it in Windows Movie Maker, but the editing program doesn't recognize mp4 files.

Let's say you want to use VoiceThread to share a movie and have a discussion around it. The upload size limit in Voice Thread is 25MB but your movie is a 100MB, mp4 file created with a Flip camera. Here is a movie where I show you how we got around the problem in one class. It took three programs to resize and upload the movie to the web.

However, there is a simpler solution. My clever work study student Cory E, found Freemake, a free software that allows you to easily convert media files and re-size them as needed. Watch Cory explain how to do this.

What's the catch with free online texbooks?

Textbooks are expensive. So why would online textbooks be offered for free? It has to do with convenience and you see it all over on the internet. For example, Box.net offers you a few GB of free storage space, but if you want more security or more server space, you sign up for a paid account. Many other free web based services such as Surveymonkey, Flickr, NYT, Jing, etc. do the same, they hook you with their useful application and once you try it out and like it, you can opt to buy a more convenient (Pro) version.

So with free textbooks, it often works like this - you can read the text on your computer for free. You can also read some of the text and then decide that the convenience of being able to print it or buy the hard copy or get an eBook to put on your reader is worth the money and so you upgrade. The texts still tend to be cheaper because there is no upfront publishing cost.

Take this Writing for Success book on Flatworld, for example. Browse through all of the chapters on the left panel or buy the other versions. There is even a study guide. And you can choose between black & white or color printed textbooks, priced accordingly.

But not all textbooks offer the paid upgrade. Some just make you suffer through poor formatting or advertising. Bookboon.com, for example, offers free downloadable PDF files of textbooks. Most of the books focus on business, science and engineering, but here is one on Media and Cultural Studies. Jaques Lacan, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Edward Said -- not a bad looking table of contents. The price? You get advertisements on every three pages of the "book". But hey, it's free Cultural Studies!

Other online publishers, like Project Gutenberg, are non-profits and only ask for a donation. Those, however, are more likely to have books for a literature class than textbooks.

Curriki has a list of 10 sources for free textbooks. Take a look.

Free Books

The SMU library is getting ready to put a Kindle into circulation. I've played around with it and downloaded about 150 titles that sounded interesting to me. All of the readings that are required in a current Shakespeare course were available for download, for free.

I downloaded a collection of poetry books by authors such as Emily Dickinson, William Blake and Walt Whitman and a number of other classics that are in the public domain, such as Moby Dick and The Odyssey.

The deeper I dug, the more amazed I became at the variety of free books that are available. I found books on just about any subject ranging from engineering, math, religion, philosophy, business, politics and folklore.

There was a decent selection of more current titles, not just the classics with expired copyright. For example, Anthony DePalma's City of Dust: Illness, Arrogance, and 9/11 was available for free compared to $25 for a hard copy. Other modern titles turned up, such as The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age by the MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning and a 2010 publication of Green Careers and Energy. And there were some pop fiction novels too.

There were also interesting obscure readings from various countries and cultures. I was especially intrigued by the Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen by A. Chodsko.

Here is a sampling of about 150 books that got loaded onto the SMU Kindle for free. Click on the image to make it bigger.


You can browse the Amazon Kindle store for the free books. It's not that easy to find them. There is no clear way to browse the entire collection of free books. I finally went to the Kindle store and filtered the books by lowest price first. The free ones came up on top.

There is also Manybooks.net. Check out their foreign language section.

And of course there is Project Gutenberg. The mobi format is compatible with Kindle.

Check out this post on more free ebook sites.

The SMU Kindle is now loaded with books and will go in circulation shortly. It will be interesting to see if students and faculty find it useful.

Wikipedia Assignments

I just came across an article in Wikipedia which suggests Googling the words "Syllabus 'no wikipedia' ". I tried it and turned up over 4,270 entries. Most of those entries seems to be online syllabi that forbid the use of Wikipedia.

I am not going to try and convince anyone that Wikipedia is the new bible of collective knowledge, but it can be a pretty cool tool for learning. Assignments that incorporate Wikipedia can help students learn the concepts of public scholarship, collaboration, author credibility and of course, some healthy skepticism when it comes to using Wikipedia as a research tool.

Here are some resources that I have compiled if you are considering using Wikipedia in class:

This page talks about Wikipedia's Public Policy Initiative . I blogged about this a few posts below.

Here is a sample of the courses that are being created through the Public Policy Initiative.

And some other examples of assignments, not necessarily policy related.

Wikipedia’s 10 Steps For Using Wikipedia In Your Course.

And some best practices.

And here is Jon Udell's Heavy Metal Umlaut movie that you might consider showing in class. It uses a fun example to explain how collaborative editing works in Wikipedia

What is Dropbox?

Here is a nice video created by Common Craft for Dropbox. It explains the cloud computing concept in non-technical terms. Basically, Dropbox lets you store files and synchronize folders on your computer with the Dropbox server. You can then share your folders across multiple computers, mobile devices and with other people.



I posted about the various file storage/sharing web applications a while ago. Each one has it's own perks. The biggest perk for Dropbox is that desktop folder that makes it really easy to place files for sharing without having to log in and upload anything. Another benefit is that there is no file size upload limit aside from the 2GB storage limit. This is a limitation that I came across with Box.net, which caps each individual file upload at 25MB on the free account, even though they offer 5GB of free storage space.

The other file sharing app that I wrote about was Google Docs. It works great for sharing Word, Excel and PPT files but I have had some trouble sharing video files. However, according to Vaughan-Nichols from ZDnet, it seems that Dropbox and Google Docs might join forces. Let's hope this will bring us something spectacular.

In my classes, Dropbox is especially handy when I want students to record audio or video files and share them with the class or to collaborate on projects where students need to share or exchange large files with one another.

Free Documentaries

Are you looking for a documentary film to show in class? Take a look at SnagFilms.com. This is a site that helps filmmakers distributes their films online. These aren't just YouTube clips, but full feature films that have aired at film festivals and come from known sources such as PBS and National Geographic.

You can view the films on the site or "snag" the film for your own blog or a social networking site. This is easily done without any technical knowledge. If you are wondering what the catch is, there are some ads. Documentary filmmakers usually struggle to distribute their content and this is a pretty ingenuous way to distribute films. The filmmakers and SnagFilms.com split the revenue from advertising.Filmmakers also get a chance to sell DVDs of their films from SnagFilms.com .

Take a look at the Top Rated films on the site. These include such titles as The Times of Harvey Milk, The Future of Food and Refrigerator Mothers. All highly rated films on the Internet Movie Database.

You can either link directly to the film and watch it on the SnagFilm website. Here is the one about a search for the infamous Afghan girl who appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1984.

Search for the Afghan Girl - Watch the Documentary Film for Free | Watch Free Documentaries Online | SnagFilms

Or you can snag it and watch it on your own social media site. Here is how a snagged film looks like on my blog. All I had to do was copy the code and paste it into the blog.

Watch more free documentaries

Note the "Create one" link at the bottom of the window. It allows you to create your own playlist of multiple documentaries in three easy steps. Here is my list below. You can scroll through all of the documentaries that I have selected to watch by sliding the blue button to the right, at the bottom of the screen.

Watch more free documentaries

Trip to Wikimedia - the culture of sharing

This Tuesday, my friend and colleague David Silver invited me to a meeting held in San Francisco's downtown offices of Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia is the non-profit organization that supports the creation and delivery of free digital media content. Its most famous project is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

The purpose of the meeting was for us to get a peek behind the curtain and to discuss ways that wiki-folks might support professors and students in creating public projects to be shared through the Wikimedia platform. I had the pleasure of spending my morning talking about teaching and technology with Wikimedia campus coordinator Annie Lin and professors Melissa Meade, Crispin Thurlow and David Silver.

We discussed several things that students (and faculty) need to understand when working with such a platform.
1. the technical aspects of publishing,
2. media literacy and accuracy, and
3. the culture of Wikimedia: co-creating and sharing media.

From the technical standpoint, publishing to a platform such as Wikipedia presents a barrier. Die-hard Wikipedians may bulk at this idea, but this is a real issue that prevents professors from using the tool in class when we don't want to spend too much class time on learning and troubleshooting the technology.

To help overcome the technology barrier, Wikimedia folks treated us to an excellent printed guide that is also available on the wiki bookshelf for a free download.



In addition to technical help, the guide addresses issues of media literacy also valued in academic writing. The twenty page booklet offers useful tips on what makes a quality article and answers the questions such as, what is the typical structure of a Wikipedia article? What content should be included to give the article credibility? What footnotes, bibliographies and references should the author include?

But even if students overcome the technology and literacy barrier, there is another force to be reckoned with and that is the Wikipedians themselves, who can be...as Wikipedia describes "less agreeable" than most people. J. M. Reagle's recently published book Good Faith Collaboration looks like a very interesting ethnography of Wikipedia culture and may be a good read if you are considering using this platform in class.

During our meeting, everyone in the room seemed sincerely excited about the potential of Wikipedia based assignments. We embrace the idea of encouraging students to contribute to collective knowledge, to collaborate across space with students on other campuses and to become more critical consumers of information.

Wikipedia publishing still feels like quite an undertaking, but it is encouraging to know that the folks at Wikimedia are interested in supporting those of us who are willing to explore this platform for public scholarship.


David with his daughter, talking about teaching in the Wikimedia office.

Exploring Controversy at the Library

This September, the Digital Journalism class at Saint Martin's University explored the controversy surrounding Olympia Food Co-op's decision to boycott Israeli products. Over the span of several weeks, the class conducted research and designed Power Point slides that represent various perspectives on the issue.

SMU's O'Grady library displayed the slides on a digital monitor in the library alcove. Close by, the librarians set up a display of books for visitors inspired to further investigate the topic of Israeli and Palestinian relations.



The library was pleased to see that the ALA's American Libraries magazine took note of the project in an article by Greg Landgraf . In addition to the library installation, the class also published an online version of the slide show posted above.

Using the slide show as material for their own class assignment, students from PHIL 301, Ethics: Theory and Practice reviewed the slides and wrote responses to the project, which they plan to share with the Digital Journalism students later in the semester.

This installation was inspired by the The September Project. For more details about the assignment, see the post below.

An Assignment in the Library

This year, students in the Digital Journalism class co-taught by myself and Prof. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis, are participating in the September Project. The September Project is a grassroots effort among libraries all over the world to organize events that explore and exercise freedom, justice, democracy, and community.

Journalism students are researching multiple perspectives about a controversial topic and then creating an installation of those perspectives in the campus library.

Here is the assignment:

ENG 302/SOC 395: Digital Journalism
Exploring Controversy: The Olympia Food Co-op Boycott of Israeli Products
Co-taught by: Professors Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis and Irina Gendelman

You will create a visual display for The September Project. The project will be jointly and publicly presented at the O’Grady Library during the last week of September in the form of rotating slides on digital monitors.

For this assignment, you will explore a controversial topic using library resources and digital tools. You will research the controversy surrounding the Olympia Food Co-op’s decision to boycott Israeli products (on a local scale) and the related issues surrounding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (on a global scale).

As you do this, you should ask yourself the following questions: Why has the Olympia Food Co-op's decision been so controversial? What are the possible perspectives that exist about the topic? What are the research resources that are available to journalists today? How can journalists explore and represent multiple perspectives? Which sources are legitimate? Are there biases that you encounter as you conduct your research? Do modern journalists succeed as agents of the democratic process?

Your tasks:

1. A librarian will visit our class on Thursday Sept 9, to talk about the different ways that we can research a controversial topic. Come to class prepared to ask questions.

2. Find at least 10 credible sources about the topic (online and in the library). Your collection of sources should represent multiple perspectives related to the Olympia Food Co-op’s boycott of Israeli products. You must find a minimum of the following types of sources:

• 6 online articles (such as: credible online versions of print papers, blogs, websites, etc.)
• 2 books
• 2 database articles

3. If you need research help outside of class, ask the reference librarians at O’Grady Library to help you research the topic. Likewise, if you are not sure which sources are credible, ask a reference librarian.

4. Create 10 slides in Power Point. Each slide must represent one source and include the following:

• headline
• lede
• quote from the article
• citation of the source
• you may also include an image (optional)

5. Bring a sample slide for class discussion on Sept 14. We will review the slides, agree on some standards and decide on the final look of our slide show.

6. The final project must be submitted in digital format (uploaded to class forum) in class on Sept 16. Selected slides will be displayed as a digital slide installation in the O'Grady Library by September 20.

First Assignment in the Garden

This was the first in-class assignment in my Digital Ethnography class.

The goal of this assignment is to develop your skills in observation and description. These are key skills in ethnographic research.

1. Bring a notebook. leave all other distractions in the class, including your cell phone and other digital devices.

2. Go to the campus garden.

3. Spend 30 minutes in the garden. Observe, pay attention to all of your five senses and describe the space in terms of how it feels, smells, sounds, looks and perhaps even tastes. What evidence of human culture do you see there? What are the signs of human organization and interaction in that space? In your notes, describe the space in as much detail as possible from a physical perspective as well as from a social one.

4. Come back to class and type up your notes.

5. Reflect on how you felt completing this assignment. Did you feel anxiety over not being able to be near your digital tools? Was it difficult to observe the space that had so little activity? Was it difficult to take notes? What did you learn while doing this?

6. Submit your notes via Moodle.

7. We will discuss your observations in class.

Creativity and Generosity

Internet theorist Clay Shirky talks on TED about the phenomenon of creativity and generosity on the Internet. He argues that this comes from a "cognitive surplus" that the web affords us and in this 13 minute lecture, he makes a connection between LOL Cats and civic engagement.

Blog Assignment

Writing in a journal is a fun kind of writing. In part, this is because a journal gives legitimacy to our own voice and frees us from the tyranny of formality. Most of us who are teachers now, probably wrote our journal entries in personal notebooks when we were college students. Today, most college students spend their creative, journal writing energy on social networking sites, writing in a much more public way. College professors assign journals to help students engage critically and creatively with course material and to practice writing. Last semester, we experimented with creating an assignment that makes use of the journal-like nature of a Blog and allows students to think critically about their writing that is also public.

Dr. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis and I designed this assignment for a research and writing course - English 102:

Prepare
1.Assign students to write a draft that can be used in a blog post. We asked students to document and describe an experience at a restaurant. See the full assignment here.

2.Have the students share their writing with one another. We use the course management system, Moodle at SMU and had students post their writing in a Moodle forum.

3.Sign up for a blogging service (we chose Blogger, which is very easy for beginners) and follow Blogger's prompts to setup a class blog. Then invite students to be authors on the class blog.

4. Remind students to accept the invitation (they will get an email from you) and sign up for the blog service before they come to class. Most students will have no problem doing this but they will need several reminders.

Have a Discussion
Discuss and establish guidelines for students going public with their writing. Suggested readings, A false wikipidea ‘biography’ by John Seigenthaler or a handout on online reporting and law and ethics from Tim Harrower's Inside Reporting .

Example discussion points:
1)Who is John Seigenthaler and why and how is his story problematic?

2)What do you know about the wikipidea and why is this a controversial site?
What issues does Seigenthaler raise about the wikipidea?

3)According to Harrower, what is a blog? How does he define it?

4)What’s our relationship to an audience and what are our rights?

5)According to Harrower, what should we consider when it comes to libel, copyright and privacy?


Model blogging
Discuss criteria for blogs. What makes a good blog?

1)Bring examples of effective and ineffective blogs to class. Here are some:
Froggie’s Lilypad
The very official best worst blog ever
Damn I’m cute
Pie of the tiger
silver in sf
my life in food

2)Ask students to study blogs in relation to the following:
Audience
Content
Message
Visual

Recap with students on fundamentals of blogging
1)Ask students to edit and then copy and paste their original blog drafts to the new class blog

2)Have students add images to their post

3)Show students how to add links to text

3)Discuss the virtues of tagging content for organization

4)Ask students to leave comments on the posts of their classmates

What we learned from the blog assignment

1. Strengths of the assignment

It created a focus to the writing assignment

It was a familiar medium, practical and relevant to students. Students got to think critically about writing publicly.

Students really enjoyed it

2. What we would do next time

Create more of an accountability system and build this into the assignment. The blog is collaborative and so everyone's post affects the collective blog. So, if the post is riddled with spelling errors or is not complete, we will remove it until it is finished.

Talk more about copyright issues and sites like creativecommons.org, where students can access content that is not copyrighted

This post was written in collaboration with Dr. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis

You Can't Read this Blog from China

Censorship in China means that much of what we take for granted is not available to internet users there. For example, since this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google, if you are in China right now, you won't be able to read it.

Here is a chart that shows which Google owned services are blocked in China. Click on it to make it bigger.



This brings me to some wisdom gleaned this morning at breakfast, while reading The Stranger's Last Days piece about the R-71 controversy of whether names on a signed petition should be protected political speech or public documents.

Justice Antonin Scalia: "You can't run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known... The fact is that running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage, and the First Amendment does not protect you from criticism or even nasty phone calls when you exercise your political rights to legislate or to take part in the legislative process."

Scalia's statement rings true. Democracy relies on public debate and we should not be afraid to express our political views publicly. Civic engagement is our right and privilege. Relating back to all of the discussions about Facebook and privacy on the Internet, we should not forget about the benefits of publishing publicly. Sometimes it seems that we get overly protective of our content, acting as our own censors, worrying about ways to block people from seeing it. So I guess, the question to ask is what of our content could really serve as a contribution to the public sphere?