Following Sandy

It's no secret that social media have been useful in spreading information (and sometimes misinformation) during times of emergency such as natural disasters and revolutions. Here is a TED Talk by Clay Shirkey where he gives some great examples of this in recent history.

Although major news outlets are important in distributing official information and fact checking, social media provide the kind of immediacy and collaborative reporting that would be impossible to accomplish for any centralized media source. As hurricane Sandy moves in, the most current flow of information is coming from East Coasters, holed up in their apartments, waiting for the storm to arrive. Use the hash tag #Sandy and see updates every few seconds on Twitter. People post messages of concern, share humor and photographs shot out of their windows and in their homes with their phone cameras. They also share links to useful resources, such as tips for emotional care for children in a disaster.

Fake images of the storm begin to appear even before the storm has reached land. These images are spreading through social networks like wildfire fueling our imaginations of the apocalyptic New York City.

But almost as quickly, people are researching and debunking the images. A Tumblr page titled, Is Twitter Wrong?   published this information about the above image, "(That’s from the well-known cinéma vérité documentary The Day After Tomorrow, in case you hadn’t spotted it. Here’s what it actually looks like at the Statue of Liberty right now. It’s… a bit grey and blurry. And very noisy.)"

For another chronological folk reporting, check out the Hurricane Sandy Liveblog where people send in their reports and texts to be published by two bloggers. The stories are mostly evidence of how people cope through humor. The images and short accounts are haunting as the storm gets closer and the gravity of the situation begins to sink in. One of the blog administrators, Brandon, writes that he is having a hard time keeping up with the incoming posts and suggests that people just post to the comments section to speed up the publication.

Sending good thoughts eastward and hoping the storm will pass with minimal damage to read about.

October Symposium on Teaching and Learning

Symposium on Teaching and Learning: Listening for a Wider Narrative - October 19, 2012

8:30am Breakfast and Invocation (HH110)
Fr. Kilian Malvey O.S.B., Saint Martin’s University

9:00am Keynote Panel
David Levy, University of Washington, Information School

Susan Harewood, University of Washington Bothell, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

Elise Krohn, Northwest Indian College, Traditional Foods and Medicines

11:45am Welcome
Dr. Joseph Bessie, Saint Martin’s University Provost

12:00pm Lunch and Conversation (lunch provided)

1:00 - 5:00pm Individual Presentations
David Goldstein, University of Washington, Bothell
Holistic Listening and Radical Student-Centeredness

Sheila Steiner, Saint Martin’s University
Listening as a General Education Outcome

Jennifer Berney, South Puget Sound Community College
Try to Keep Your Mouth Shut: Teacher Silence as a Powerful Tool

Jennifer Jamison, Saint Martin’s University
Listening to the Written Word: Communication in the Online Classroom

Julia Chavez, Saint Martin’s University
Listening for the Authentic Voice in English 101

Arwyn Smalley, Saint Martin’s University
Chemistry in the Community: Listening for Science in Our Lives

David Price, Saint Martin’s University
An Old Dog and New (Old) Moodle Tricks: On Moodling the History of Anthropology

Joli Sandoz, The Evergreen State College
My View of Disability has Totally Changed: Knowledge Maps and Narrative as Tools to Assess
Learning about Oppression, Privilege and Diversity

Leslie Huff, Saint Martin’s University
Perceived Effects of an Urban Practicum Experience on Teacher Candidates

Amy Ryken, University of Puget Sound
Listening to Children’s Spontaneous Questions and Remarks about Gender Identity

Jeremy Newton, Saint Martin’s University
Tackling the Senior Thesis Through Listening to Peers

5:00 - 6:30pm Hors d'oeuvres & Saint Martin’s University Poster Session (HH109)
Scot Harrison (Library)
Olivia Archibald (English)
Margaret Olney (Biology)
Aaron Coby (Biology)
Scott Norris (Business)
Suzanne Porter (First Year Seminar, Service Learning)
Lynn Villella (Learning Garden)
Asa Garber (Law)
Sanford Anderson (Business)

Questions? Contact Dr. Gendelman.

How to Movies

Movie tutorials -- "How to" in Moodle:

Create an assignment (faculty)

Make comments on an assignment (faculty)

How to create groups (faculty)

How to create items and categories in the gradebook (faculty)

How to add online evaluations to your course (faculty)

How to upload multiple files to Moodle at once (faculty)

How to upload your asssignment to Moodle (students)

How to download Camtasia Relay Recorder (everyone)

How to crop an image (everyone)

How to single space paragraphs in Word

I finally got fed up with the way that Word automatically spaces paragraphs and figured out how to reset my defaults so that all of my paragraphs are single spaced. If you find the default spacing irritating too, here is how to fix that problem.(click on the image to enlarge.)

how to fix Word spacing

1.Open Word and right click on Normal style (see illustration) and select Modify from the window that opens

2.Select the button next to New documents based on this template at the bottom of the window

3.Click on Format drop down menu and select Paragraph from the drop down box

4.Set spacing to 0 in the After window

5.Click OK in the Paragraph window

6.Click OK in the Modify Style window.

From now on, Word will single space all of your paragraphs. Hallelujah!

Educational Videos - Ted-ed

Take a look at TED's newly launched educational video project. This is a library of educational talks illustrated by animators. You can browse the video library by subject and customize (Flip) lessons with existing questions or with your own questions and additional resources.

Teachers can also upload their own videos or videos from sites like YouTube and create new lessons.

There is also a way to track student progress. When a teacher logs in, they can see who viewed the video, how many questions students attempted and the answers that they provided.

TED-Ed video with supplementary materials

For example, here is a popular video about the origin of franchises.

It is a talk by journalist and writer Sir Harold Evans illustrated by Sunni Brown. It comes with a multiple choice "Quick Quiz" about the video as well as two open ended questions of varying difficulty "Think" and "Dig Deeper."

By clicking on the "Flip This Lesson" button, the teacher can customize the lesson by deciding on which of the existing materials they want to keep. They can also create new open-ended questions and add additional readings or activities to the lesson.
 
Watch the website tour below to learn more.

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.