February 2009 Archives

I dislike
the rich text editor
that is in
your blog software

and which
you were probably
using
to paste from Word

forgive me
markdown is easy
and the formatting
is not mismanaged

I have been keeping a google spreadsheet with the growing number of items in blogs@psu.

To sum up: as of 2/24/2009, we have 10,097 blogs, 39,717 entries, and 16,002 pages.

Big numbers. But what do they mean?

There has been a huge increase in the amount of pages. I might attribute this to the English 202 blog pilot, which mostly asks students create pages, as well as the increased use of blogs@psu as a general web publishing tool and portfolio tool. Really this is a sign of the growth of popularity of the professional template set. Every time a professional template set blog is created, three pages are created by default. This semester you see the amount of pages shoot up in a way it did not do this past fall semester (The first semester the pro template set was available). Seems like this template set might have caught on in a way it did not last semester.

Some digging directly with the DB might come up with some more interesting details.

Twitter, blogs, wikis, facebook, google docs. It is all just text on a screen with maybe a picture of video thrown in. What makes it all interesting and each one unique? Patterns of interaction. The Web 2.0 startup world was one huge experiment with new patterns of interaction. The old ones from print media no longer applied, so what then? It was in a way a grab. Grab each pattern of interaction you could find. Tweak a successful one slightly to see if you could create a more successful one. There was no way to predict what would work. I am reminded of the story of how Edison had a team that experimented with thousands of different materials until they found one that would work as a long-lasting lightbulb filament. Twitter sounded stupid to most people when it started. Maybe there was something there. But what was it? No one one knew.

Now twitter is in the process of reshaping how people communicate electronically. It is a service that is the basis of a revolution of instant notifications.

Really, all we need to do is perhaps reshape and redirect the way the text flows on a page, and we have a new pattern of interaction. Possibly the next step in an evolution or revolution of communication.

All this is to say to myself: Keep iterating on the communication services (e.g. blogs@psu) that I am working on. Keep offering different configurations of how pages are published. As we get more and more of the basic structure of the service settled, we can move to supporting more varied patterns of interaction.

Last week I was having lunch with a few friends and we started talking about an assignment from a photography class in which one had to take a photo every ten minutes during waking time for 48 hours. Why this assignment? Perhaps it was teaching the habit of seeing a composition in everything: wherever you are, whatever you are doing, there is an opportunity for creativity and mindfulness. And so it is also with a blog a day challenge. You may not realize it as first. But there is an opportunity for personal reflection and mindfulness in every day.

I have fallen off the blog-a-day wagon horribly this month. I won't make excuses, but I will keep blogging as much as I can for as long as it makes sense to do so, possibly, in one form or another, for the rest of my life.

The blog a day is a forced creativity exercise that will hone writing skills and also serve as a record, a way to remember the events of your life and to possibly realize what is truly important. Even if one keeps a professional blog, the blog could be a professional journey of discovery.

However, I may have to start getting more personal in my blogging if I am going to keep this running. Do I use this PSU blog that is aggregated into various staff intranets to do this? I don't know if I can stand to have two blogs.

All this is just to say that my appreciation of blogging practice has increased 1 level over the last two weeks.

Today I gave a five minute lightning talk at the PSU web developer's lunch. The topic? blogging for productivity and work communication. Slightly different angle than my usual edu-bent pony show. I was one of around ten people who gave lightning talks at the lunch. Christian manned the cowbell. Topics included trac, collaborative editing (I learned of adobe buzzword), twitter, svn, delicious, diigo, irc.

You can find my slides below, 22 slides that I put together in almost no time using keynote, then exported to ppt, then uploaded to google docs to place in the presentation along side the other lightning talkers' slides. I am so in love with keynote right now. Using it is like breathing slides.

These slides don't really say much on their own. Or maybe they do. I don't know. It is nothing but a bunch of screen shots. If you are bored you can try to make up the story that goes along with this series of images. Here is the story I tried to tell with the images: blogs are a simple web publishing tool whose ease of use has turned web pages into pieces of a conversation. Blogs are personal content repositories, but also a piece of a social network and communities of practice. Blogs can cut down on the amount of info that must be broadcast via email. RSS allows you repurpose content in a ton of ways. Look at these examples.

Five minutes goes a lot quicker than you'd think when you are standing at the front.

so long, rooster.

This morning blogs@psu was upgraded to MT 4.23. It is thanks to the hard work of TK Lee and James Vuccolo that this upgrade went smoothly and that existing users shouldn't have even noticed.

In addition to the upgrade to MT 4.23, this update included several new features developed here specifically for the way we use blogs here at Penn State.

This update includes the Pack-It-Up tool that is being piloted by Carla Zembal-Saul and her students this semester. The pack-it-up tool creates a zip file of a student's blog/portfolio using a custom index page template that allows the portfolio to viewed offline. This allows the students/faculty to capture snapshots of their portfolio at various points in time. This zip file could also be uploaded to an assessment management system used for accreditation and reporting.

There are two things that have changed for new blogs created after the update.

First, there is a new default banner image on the professional website template set. Instead of the rooster, we now have a wonderful image of the lion shrine created by Dave Stong. If you'd like to use this banner in your blog, it is available in the style catcher.

Second, in the search widget, there is the option to search tags for full text. The option of searching tags allows you more flexibility when it comes to filtering your own content. For example, now you can search on "ethics + media" to find posts tagged with both "ethics" and "media". I feel this will be an important feature for those that use the blogs@psu as a personal content repository.

All blogs created since the update will have this widget. You can add this in your existing blog by doing a template refresh.

I love having a complete photo workflow in hand with the iPhone. Not only can I take photos with the iphone, I can do any combination of:

stitching them together into a panorama with Pano:

Apply effects that mimic various cameras with camerabag (This is really cool, you need to try it out):

I also use mobile fotos to upload directly to flickr and night camera to try to take less shaky low light shots (although I am not sure if this really helps).

The best is that you can save your pics to the iphone's photo roll, and let each app do their thing. So, I could use night camera to take a low light photo, apply an effect with camerabag, then upload with mobile photos.

Another example would be below, where I took three photos with camera bag, then used the 12seconds.tv app to put them together, add some audio, and upload it to the 12seconds.tv site.

[iPhone] hymn on 12seconds.tv

The 12seconds.tv app alone has some wild potential that I feel I haven't been able to fully take advantage of yet. It's really a mini digital storytelling app. I'll be playing more with that in the near future.

I love having an end to end creative workflow right on my phone.

Most of my thoughts around blogging at Penn State have centered around the idea of blog as learning portfolio. You can find a post of mine from last August in which I conclude by wondering if the notion of class-blogging is dead to me.

Then there is Chris Long's post about his experience using a blog as part of course he is teaching this semester which pulls me back into considering the class-blog view. He is going the class blog route, rather than having students each keep their own blog. This approach seems to lead to discussion and community in a way a collection of separate students blogs don't. And while I have focused on the power of student ownership of their content in blogging, I have neglected the idea of shared ownership from a group blog. Dr. Long calls this class blog, "Our Document".

Dr. Long says talks of the shared blog and weekly podcasts as "a common endeavor more than as a unidirectional process in which knowledge is transfered from teacher to student." I view this as obviously a credit to Dr. Long's capacity to create an educational experience and not so much a by-product of a technology, but we must make sure the technology is able to support this kind of teaching and learning in the best ways possible.

It does make me start thinking more of how we can foster community. I always viewed the community element of blogging (community that transcends classroom - lifelong learning community) as one of its main benefits. Dr. Long has helped me realize I need to think more about how the blogs@psu can be arranged to promote this kind of community.

The new gmail feature of multiple panes is awesome. I am using it to separate discussion from a certain listserv from my main stream (while still forcing it enter my attention) and see items I starred as important all in one view. Already I feel it will be a great productivity boost, helping me not lose track of important actionable emails, but also helping me make sense of the constant incoming stream.

I am talking about my personal gmail account here. I do not use gmail with my psu.edu address. And I can set up colors and filters in apple mail, but it does not give the nice one page dashboard view that gmail is providing here. It forces me to see everything. I don't have to click around.

Another new feature I found in gmail labs is the "Send and Archive" button. Now I can reply to an email and have it moved from my inbox all in one-click. Great for somebody trying to keep up with inbox zero.

Really, gmail is my favorite email program. It is a web-based app, but I like its functionality better than all the desktop-based alternatives I have tried.

I am really into 12seconds.tv these days. I really like watching the public stream. It's one thing to watch 12 seconds of video from a random life on planet earth. It is far more interesting to watch one 12 second one right after the other seamlessly the way the front page lets you do. It feel there is an added impact when they are all joined together, moving from talking head comments, to small snippets of art, to who knows what. I do watch it for a while. Too bad it only seems to do this if you are not logged in. They are missing a killer feature in my estimation. If you are logged in you have to click on each video you want to watch. I just created my account, so maybe I am missing something.

While the pubic stream is wonderful and sublime, it would be cool to see a stream of your social network. Maybe check in once day, make a video, and watch the stream magic art formed of people you know. Again, it doesn't automatically combine videos of those you are following.

I am sensing a strong community vibe from this place. The constriction of 12 seconds is not a bad device. Limits push creativity.

This user has made some really cool 12 second videos. Two of my favorites are embedded below.

12erator: The Most Confusing Movie I've Ever Watched on 12seconds.tv

Episode 1: Kendra Ku on 12seconds.tv

I have also come across what seems to be some sort of High School History class activity on 12 seconds

What about a short video kiosk at the tlt symposium? We did the photo booth in the past. Maybe we need to use the video feature of photobooth this time? If we could enforce the 12 second rule, I bet it might be cool to see them all together. It would become greater than the sum of its parts.

update: There is a "play all" link on the video listing pages (your followers', everyone's), so you can play them all in a row. Awesome. Thanks to the equally awesome uservoice tool for helping me find this.

Just a short realization I had today when eating lunch with my friend, Dean, who I had not seen in about 2 months: We realized that with Facebook, Twitter, et al., we really have a sense of what is going on in each of our worlds. Social proprioception was made very real for me today.

In past we would have said, "We need to have lunch and catch up.". Now, we say, "We need to have lunch and move forward".

I am typing this on a Dell mini 9.

The Dell Mini 9 is a Dell netbook (netbook= inexpensive, small, basic laptop, used mainly for accessing the web). As the name implies, this is the 9 inch version. There is also a 12 inch version, and I believe there is a 10 inch version with updated hardware on the way. This netbook starts at $299 (With 4GB of storage and Ubuntu). The model I am using has 16gb, is running Windows XP, and has the optional built-in webcam. I believe is cost around $550.

It seems that netbooks are hot right now. Many manufacturers are producing a netbook model. As a sign of the mainstream marketing push for these types of devices, there is a large endcap display built around the eee pc netbook at Target. There was also a story on TechCrunch yeserday about data revealing the growing netbook sales.

I have heard data cited repeatedly that says students who have laptops tend not to bring them to class because they are too heavy, and the battery doesn't last long enough. Netbooks are smaller, lighter, and they tend to have longer battery life. So here is the question: will more students come to PSU with these small netbooks? If they do, will they be more likely to take them to class? If we see more students using some kind of web-enabled device (netbook, smartphone, laptop), how can we take advantage of this to improve teaching and learning?

The first step is getting a netbook in hand and using it to understand what the experience is like.

Here is what I installed so far:

• firefox with foxmarks extension (for bookmarks sync. This is now the fourth computer I use on a regular basis. Have all my web apps lined up really helps)
• Thunderbird for psu email with IMAP
• Evernote
• VPN client for getting on the PSU wireless network.
• chrome (I haven't really used this yet)
• iTunes (I figure I'll try out iTunes U)

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should test out with this? I am going to start taking the mini to meetings instead of my normal laptop to help me become more familiar with it.

Basically, I see this device as a firefox terminal, even though a few key cloud enabled apps (evernote, thunderbird) are making the experience smoother. I do find the trappings of windows XP do kind of get in the way. Although I am not used to XP, so maybe I would say this no matter what manner of computer I was using.

How was typing on this? So far, It has been painful. I mean physically painful. The small keyboard is forcing my fingers to move in what I consider unnautral ways. Plus, I am constantly hitting the up arrow instead of the shift key and the apostrophe is in a non-standard location. Both of these add to my difficulty.

I am going to continue to use this netbook, and see how it goes. I'll be sharing more observations in the near future.

I just installed iLife '09 on my personal mac. I am watching iPhoto's faces feature crunch through the pictures. Even though cheap consumer point-n-shoot digital cameras have the ability to pick out faces from an image, I am still astonished as I watch my computer do this. I haven't even gotten to the part where it starts to group faces together based on person. I have reached the point where technology appears to be magic.

Come to think of it, I see new magic all the time. It is good in that I love seeing the new opportunities and new ways this stuff can get used. I love seeing how a tool, when in the hands of many people, can end up being used in way not intended by its inventor. I frequently use the example of when narrative filmmaking jumped from just long, static shots of plays to using close ups and cross-cuts. Podcasting is another example. I don't think many (anyone?) were thinking of podcasting when personal media players came on the scene. It is not the invention of technology that moves me. It is how it makes us think differently. (Not a mac ad, really). How much of the manner in which I process my environment owes itself to the visual syntax of motion pictures? (Bolded as a question that I must elaborate on at a later date)

Along the lines of changing uses of technology:

As I think of blog-a-day challenges from the past, they seemed to focus on the mundanity of everyday life with a little splash of color to dress it up. These were cool. These were times when the blog life was new and sharing the mundane was almost an act of rebellion. It was done just because it could be done. And if you were doing it, you were part of the internet jet set. It was a secret alternate life as a blogger.

Well, the times change.

Now, with the twitters and facebooks, it is seemingly commonplace for people to share the details of their lives. And they are sharing it with people they know in the real world. And people are consuming it, people who have interest. It is a conversation. The blog is something else now. Strangely, what was once seen as a the most trivial penny-ante immediacy is now THE PLACE to reflect, THE PLACE to slow down. Twitter, facebook - They move at the speed of light. Blogs are where you write at length. This is isn't to say what once was considered superficial is now considered deep. It just that the wrong tool was being used. Facebook is a better tool for social connections and twitter is a better tool to share the RIGHT NOW. The blog is where it can all be sorted out.

This NY Times article talks of this same idea.

Blog-a-day meta info:

If it was not for the blog a day challenge. I would probably never post this as I do not feel I am expressing myself clearly at all, and am mostly rambling. Is this a good or bad thing?

Still getting the juices flowing.

I am only as good as my last blog post.

The posts here have been relatively sparse. I am going to try to change that for February. Allan has revived the notion of the one blog post a day for the month. A group of people did this last August. I did not participate then, but I am going to try to do this now. I do have a tendency to struggle with writing posts. I don't think this is related to the notion of "perfection" that I hear keeps some from blogging. It is just moving thoughts to words is hard, at least for me. I am hoping engaging in this activity will clear out the cobwebs and scramble my hard boiled egg brain.

Cole came up with some rules for himself. In general, I am following the spirit of these rules. I think I am going to post on weekends, but these posts will be of a different consistency. For me, I think the basic rule is that each post must constitute an act of creativity. For now, that can mean whatever you want it to mean. I'll try to define it for myself by demonstrating with my posts over February.

Will this exercise lead to me posting more after February in a way that is more helpful to myself? That is the question I am looking to answer. We'll see where we are at the end of March.