Taste of Tech

EarthCast 2008 is a  webcast taking place on April 22, 2008. It started at midnight GMT, and continues for 24 hours. This is a continuous, day-long conversation about the Earth and taking care of it.

Matt Montagne has spearheaded this effort, with a great deal of support from Doug Symington, Jose Rodriguez, and others in the EdTech community. Jason Robershaw created an outstanding promo explaining what EarthCast is all about, and how you can participate.

Students and teachers are participating from the United States, Mexico, the UK, and Germany. You can listen live, participate in the text chat, or use Skype to call in and share your views.

While the project ends at 9PM EDT, much of the archived audio will be available afterwards on the web site.

World Have Your Say is a call-in radio program. There’s nothing special about that. Nearly every station on the AM dial has one. The hosts talk about current events, and people can call in to give their opinions. WHYS, though, takes the idea of talk radio several steps further.

First of all, it’s a global show. Originating in London, it actively seeks participation from the global audience. They regularly have callers from the middle east, and Africa, and Asia, and places where you’d think they can’t even listen to the BBC. And the perspectives of these people can differ drastically from the media we’re fed by CNN and AP and even Reuters.

The other neat thing WHYS has done is to embrace some of the interactive web technologies. They blog about the topics discussed on the show, and encourage site visitors to comment. They also solicit discussion and debate topics through the web site. And, of course, you can listen live to the show online or catch the podcast version later.

Recently, they’ve begun using Twitter to let people know about the topics they’re going to be discussing on the show. In addition to giving people a heads-up about show topics, it provides a nice, concise list of world events and issues. Here’s the recent list:

• Do you want your leader to go to Olympics?
• What’s it like being white in Zimbabwe at the moment?
• Are you worried about rising food prices?
• Should your boss know your family plans?
• Are protesters ruining the Olympics?
• Should women dress modestly?
• Can Muslims take a joke about Islam?

Nearly every day, they have a compelling question or two, and they seek input from the global audience. If we really want our students to have a global perspective, and to be able to work with people from different cultures, this is the kind of thing they should be listening to.

World Have Your Say is broadcast on weekdays at 1700 GMT. If you’re in the North American Eastern time zone, that’s 1:00 PM. You can listen online or find a station near you.

I attended a meeting last week that wasn’t a complete waste of time. A shock, I know. Sure, it did take 45 minutes to drive the 13 miles to the meeting. It was rush hour, after all. All told, the trip took me 4 1/2 hours, which included about 2 1/2 hours of presentations.

The presentations were mostly of the endless-Powerpoint-bullet variety. While they did contain a few nuggets of really useful information, that information was more than covered in the 150 pages (!) of printed materials provided. Still, the presenters had something to say, and they were well prepared. That made this meeting better than most.

The valuable part, of course, was the informal interaction with the other participants. In all, there were about 100 people in attendance. I talked to other tech coordinators about Internet filtering, and learned about a new method students are using to bypass proxy servers. We also discussed various approaches to professional development, online learning with Moodle, and e-rate filing procedures. None of these were on the agenda for the day.

It’s not new for the informal bits of meetings and conferences to be more valuable than the structured parts. Many people express the idea that the best part of a conference is the discussion that takes place in the hallway, or the person you meet while waiting for a keynote to start, or the breakout session you attended by mistake after getting the room number wrong. These serendipitous moments are the best part.

So why do we bother with the formal agenda? If the whole event were structured to take advantage of these informal moments, it would certainly save a lot of planning time, and everyone would get more out of it, right? That’s the concept behind an unconference. While the idea has been around for decades, they’ve started to become really popular in the last few years.

The concept is an acknowledgment that, in most cases, the expertise present in the audience far outpaces the expertise of the people on stage. Dave Winer explained it better than I can, but I’ll give it a shot. Everyone in the audience becomes a “participant.” The leader isn’t a presenter. He doesn’t have scores of Powerpoint slides prepared. He knows something about the topic (yes, there’s a topic pre-decided). He leads a discussion, asks questions, and encourages people in the room to participate. No one gets to dominate the discourse. Different points of view are expressed and challenged. At the end of it all, we have a broader picture of the topic, based on the collective experience of the participants, that is far more valuable than anything a single person could have presented.

Now, what if we take this a step further? Rather than meeting in a conference room at a hotel or convention center, why can’t we meet online? We have all of the tools. Combine Skype, Yugma, Skrbl, Google Docs, and Ustream, all of which are free. The session can be recorded, so people unable to attend can watch it later. I don’t have to sit in traffic, so a one hour meeting actually takes one hour. Plus, anyone in the world can attend.

It’s going to take a while, but this is going to change how we interact professionally.

A pdf version of this document is also available.

What is Del.icio.us and Why Do I Care?
One of the first things we learned about using the web is how to save bookmarks. You are visiting some web site, and you want to save that link so you can come back to it later. So you save it as a bookmark (or favorite), and it gets added to your list of saved sites.

This works fine. All of your bookmarked sites show up in a list in your browser, and you can return to them any time. You can even organize your bookmarks into folders, just like you would with your files. Use different folders for different topics, and you have a nicely organized collection of web sites that you can return to with ease at the click of a mouse.

There are two problems with this. Many teachers use multiple computers. At the very least, you probably have one at school and one at home. In some cases, teachers share rooms and end up using several different computers at school throughout the course of the day. But the bookmarks are stored on the computer you were using when you created them. That means you can’t get to bookmarks you created on another computer.

There’s also another problem. If your bookmarks are stored on your computer, what happens when the computer’s hard drive dies? Your bookmarks die along with it.

What we really need is bookmark portability.

Delicious (http://del.icio.us) is one service that helps you manage your bookmarks. Start by signing up for a free account. You will also need to install a toolbar, so you have access to the Delicious tools. Then, when you’re surfing the web and encounter a site you want to bookmark, use Delicious instead. You can add notes about the site and choose one or more “tags” for it. Tags are one-word descriptors for categorizing your sites. For example, I use the tag “profdev” for sites related to professional development. I use “2blog” for sites that I want to blog about. You can use any tags you like.

Delicious then allows you to access your links from any computer. Simply log in to your account, and you can manage your links. If you want, you can choose to share your links with others, too.

You can also search Delicious to see which sites other people have tagged in a certain way. Maybe you’re doing a lesson on photosynthesis. You can search delicious for items that other people have tagged with “photosynthesis.” The result is a list of hundreds of web sites about photosynthesis that others have found valuable enough to bookmark.

By sharing your links, you contribute to the global collection of annotated resources related to whatever topics your tags cover.

So How Do I Do This?
First, go to the Del.icio.us site. It’s at http://del.icio.us. There aren’t any www’s in there. There’s no dot com. They were being cute when they set up the site. Most people just find it annoying because they can’t remember where to put the dots.

Once you’re on the Delicious site, click the Register button in the upper-right corner. Fill out the information they ask for. The password has to be at least six characters, and it has to have either a number or a symbol in it.

Once you register, you’ll be taken to a page that allows you to install software in your browser to integrate with your Delicious account. This page should automatically detect your browser and operating system, and take you to the right tool.

Go ahead and install the buttons (or extension). In Internet Explorer, this will add a Delicious toolbar to your browser. In Firefox, it’ll add new buttons to your navigation toolbar.

If you want to install these buttons on other computers, you can find them in the “Bookmarking” section of the Help page on the Delicious web site.

It’s Installed. Now what?
When you’re on a web site that you want to bookmark, click on the new TAG button. When you do this, a pop-up window will appear, allowing you to add notes about this site.

You can also enter tags. Think of tags as being categories for your links. You can display lists of sites that are tagged a certain way. Because links can have as many tags as you want, you can organize your links in lots of different ways.

Your Delicious links are available by clicking on the Delicious icon, or by going to http://del.icio.us/username, where “username” is your username. This is great, because it gives you access to your links from any Internet-connected computer.

What Else Do I Need to Know?
Privacy
By default, your bookmarks are public. That means anyone can see the list of things you’re bookmarking. There may be sites you want to bookmark that you don’t want everyone to know about. When tagging these sites, just click “Do Not Share” and they won’t be visible unless you’re logged in to your Delicious account.

For this to work, you may need to enable private saving. From the Delicious page, select Settings, and then Private Saving under Bookmarks. Then, check the box to allow private saving, and save the change.

Importing
You can import your bookmarks from your browser. From the Settings page, select Import/Export under Bookmarks, and follow the instructions provided.

Sharing Links
If you want to share a link with another Delicious user, add an additional tag of “for:username” when you tag the link. Replace “username” with the person’s Delicious username. Then, the link will go onto their “Links for You” page.

Time is running out for you to sign up for your free Yugma Premium account. In December, Yugma announced that they were giving away free one-year subscriptions to their premium service to any blogger who requests one. The offer expires January 31, though, so you’d better hurry up if you want one.

Yugma is desktop-sharing software. It allows you to share your computer screen with others over the Internet. After signing up, you can create a session. You then start sharing your screen in that session, so anyone connecting to it can see what’s on your screen. You can invite others to participate by sending them the session id.

This is extraordinarily useful software for distance conferencing. I can use it to do a webinar, and show my presentation while I’m talking. Or, I can demonstrate software, with the participants able to see what I’m doing. Generally, you’d want to pair it with an audio conference, either through Skype or a phone system. There’s also a built-in text chat.

If you miss the premium account promotion, you can still sign up for the free version. It works just as well as the premium one, but it does require all of the participants to register before they can join your session. It also has fewer options in the areas of file sharing and recording, but it does meet most needs pretty well. After using it, you can upgrade later if you need the advanced features.