Taste of Tech

Alvin Trusty recently pointed out the inefficiencies of synchronous chat rooms in online courses. The social protocol of the chat room does not always lend itself well to serious discussions. In a chat, people are constantly entering and leaving. Some people try to monopolize the conversation by responding to every comment made. Others take the discussion off-topic by following tangents. The result can be a confusing thread of thoughts which accomplishes little and frustrates everyone involved.While text chats can have their place (they work well as a supplement to an audio discussion, for example), I can see his point. I’ve always favored the asynchronous discussion (message board) approach, because it encourages people to reflect more on what they have to say. They’re not hindered by the immediacy of the moment. Sure, the discussion takes longer, but the product is a lot better.

TechSoup posted an item a couple days ago regarding the inefficiency of email. A 2005 study in Great Britain reported that electronic distractions, such as email, make workers temporarily dumber by 10 IQ points. The TechSoup item makes several useful suggestions for improving efficiency with email, including making sure email is the right tool for the job. They leave out one of the best approaches, though: turn it off. If I leave my email client running all the time, it’s going to check for new messages every 10 minutes or so. When it receives on, it notifies me with an audible sound on my computer. I’m trained to recognize that sound, and I have to stop whatever I’m doing and go read the message. As often as not, it’s a spam message, or a report from one of my backup servers, or something that can wait for a few hours. If I turn off the email program, and just check it a few times a day, I’m not constantly interrupting myself. But that’s easier said than done.

Last year, I started listening to The Word Nerds podcast. This show examines a particular aspect of our language and culture in each episode. If you know the difference between a mondegreen and a portmanteau, this is the kind of thing you would like. I found it interesting for a while, but after a few months, my interest waned. Recently, the show has shown signs of fatigue, changing from a weekly podcast to one that comes out approximately whenever they feel like it.

On the other hand, Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing is a more practical choice for integration into language arts classes. She takes a friendly, common-sense approach to many of the common points of confusion in the English language. Are you feeling badly? Do you know when to use “who” and when to use “whom?” And shouldn’t Sally lie down and rest you in my arms? Grammar Girl covers them all.

What about the old school rules? Is it still forbidden to end a sentence with a preposition? Are split inifinitives really so bad?  Does the punctuation really have to go inside the quotes? Maybe you should subscribe, or at least listen on her web site.

Grammar Girl encourages students and teachers to use her podcasts. According to her web site:

Grammar Girl believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Her arch enemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.

Over at TechnoSpud, Jennifer Wagner has been coordinating collaborative projects for nearly a decade. She started by collecting data for a science project, and reasoned that she could use the Internet to collect data from students all over the world. Eight years later, she’s coordinating five projects a year, involving hundreds of classrooms and thousands of students.

Registration is now available for the St. Patrick’s Day Project, where students in grades K-3 participate by counting and graphing the distribution of “charms” in Lucky Charms(tm) cereal. A number of related activites are suggested on the project site, and correlations with content standards are provided. After reading the instructions, any teacher can sign up for free between now and March 9. To be included in the totals, data must be submitted by March16.

This spring also marks the return of the Great Egg Roll project, a team project for multiple classes at the same school. While the project information isn’t online yet, last year’s results are.

We often forget that the Internet can connect people, not just resources. Too often, we treat it like a library, instead of a communication medium. Even simple projects like these can help kids learn that the Internet can be used to interact with the wider world.

Jennifer Wagner, by the way, is one of the Women of Web 2.0, a group of women who help others use the tools of the Internet in an educational and exciting way. They have a weekly show on the Worldbridges network.

I love optical illusions. It’s a lot of fun to see how we can play tricks on our minds by exploiting our understanding of how our brains interpret what we see.

Most of the time, I can see right through the illusions. We’ve seen the impossible trident, the Rubin vase, the Penrose Triangle, and the work of M.C. Escher enough to know when we’re being duped, and usually, we can explain why things may appear to be different than they actually are.

In this case, though, I’m fooled every time. I know that the squares marked A and B are actually the same shade of gray. When I first saw this picture, I checked the colors. I also know that the surrounding colors and the shadow make them appear to be different. But I still think A looks darker.

You can see this and many other of Professor Adelson’s illusions on his site. There are also some pretty neat illusions on Michael Bach’s site.

Maybe not. It was just the Sound and Video Catalog at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library. Despite the fact that there aren’t any cheetahs, the catalog does have an impressive collection of animal recordings, some of which date back half a century or more. Many also have video. As you’d expect from a lab of ornithology, there are lots of birds. But I also found whales, sea lions, various primates, and quite a few amphibians.

According to the site, they have the world’s largest collection of animal sounds, with more than 160,000 recordings covering 2/3 of the world’s birds. Their collection of sounds of insects, fish, frogs, and mammals is also rapidly growing.

While not all of the collection is available online, quite a few recordings are. Most are in RealAudio format. The site recommends using the Ravenviewer software, which allows you to view waveforms and spectrographs of the sounds as you listen. You can still hear the sounds with RealPlayer, though.
Oh, and the red-winged blackbird is here.