Technology
Entries related to technology.
I Get My News on Twitter and How to do it Better
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/27/2008 - 11:03At the journalism conference at Central Connecticut State University, I told one of the organizers that I had heard about the conference through Twitter. She was pleased to hear that and mentioned it in part of the introduction. Twitter is changing the way people gather news. As I sat there, it occurred to me, “I Get My News on Twitter”.
When major events, or even minor events happen, I usually hear about it first on Twitter. Yesterday, Colin McEnroe talked about Twitter on his radio show, and I heard about that via Twitter. I heard about the attacks in Mumbai via Twitter. When there have been earthquakes or tornados, I’ve heard about that first from Twitter.
One problem is that I currently follow over 900 people on Twitter. It can be hard to keep them straight. One tool that I used to try and help with this is FriendFeed. FriendFeed aggregates information from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Identi.ca, Flickr, and many other services. Beyond that, it allows you to set up rooms where people can gather. I’ve set up rooms for various groups that I’m part of and that has been helpful.
Another site that I’ve really liked recently is My Social Chatter. It brings up a Twitter screen in half the page and a FriendFeed screen in the other half. Every two minutes it refreshes.
It was watching the FriendFeed section of MySocialChatter, that I learned about PeopleBrowsr. When I first started playing with it last night, it was very slow, perhaps because Robert Scoble had just mentioned it. It is still listed as being in Alpha testing; as I write this, it is listed as version 0.691.
This morning, I went back, and started to use it to tag people that I know from EntreCard. It was very easy to find a lot of friends from EntreCard on Twitter using PeopleBrowsr and to tag them. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way to see a stream of all the people with a specific tag. I hope this is coming soon.
As I write this blog post and continue to test PeopleBrowsr and post tweets about it, I received a message from NutureGirl about PeopleBrowsr being in Alpha and a new version coming soon. In a subsequent Tweet, she talks about PeopleBrowsr as one of her clients. She describes herself as a ‘Community Flow Catalyst’; a great title. If the folks launching PeopleBrowsr have a ‘Community Flow Catalyst’ working for them on Thanksgiving morning, while they are still in beta, I have very high hopes for the project. Other sites should learn from PeoleBrowsr and make sure they have ‘Community Flow Catalysts’ in from the very beginning.
Another site that I’m keeping an eye on is tarpipe.com. Unlike PeopleBrowsr, they claim to already in be in Beta, but their beta seems much less reliable than PeopleBrowsr’s Alpha. What I like about tarpipe is that it uses OpenID for authentication. However, the signup process just isn’t working, at least for me. I’ll check it again some other day.
On the topic of OpenID, many people are lauding the Obama administration for including OpenID support on change.gov. I’m also very excited about it. They are using intensedebate to handle the OpenID authentication. The one problem I have is that intensedebate does not appear to fully support OpenID v 2.0.
In particular, OpenID v 2.0 supports xri. So, using one of my inames identities, I can log into sites that support OpenId v 2.0. The two inames identities that I use are =aldon.hynes and @ahynes1. They use different inames services, but what is really cool is that if the site supports OpenID V 2.0, like identi.ca does, then I can login simply as @ahynes1. Pretty cool for microblogging services. I just wish I could login a =aldon.hynes on Change.gov
Dad, Can You Give Me the Phone? I Want to Take a Picture?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 13:59The other day, my seven-year-old daughter asked me, “Dad, can you give me the phone? I want to take a picture.” My only hesitation was whether the cellphone or the digital camera would be best for the pictures she wanted to take. In the end, I handed her the digital camera and she walked around the room taking pictures.
This afternoon, I will go to a meeting at our public school library to add my input into our district’s three-year technology plan. The State Board of Education provides a very useful template to help schools develop their three-year technology plans. I’d encourage everyone to find out about the technology plans in your district, and how you can get involved in helping shape them.
I mention my daughter’s question first because I believe it illustrates quite nicely Marc Prensky’s article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Mr. Prensky’s article was published in October, 2001, the month my daughter was born. Not only does my daughter “represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology”, she is part of a generation where educators have been talking about the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants.
Yet not all educators are thinking about how significantly “the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century” has changed our children. Many continue to lag behind even first graders when it comes to understanding digital technology.
Perhaps no one understands this better than Julie Amero and the people that have followed her case. Ms. Amero was a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT. Four years ago, her classroom computer started popping up pornography sites. She did not know how to handle it and some of the students saw the pictures. She was charged, and convicted of four felony counts of endangering minors. It became a nationwide cause celebre, as experts around the country weighed in and deplored the travesty of justice. If anything, the liability should be the school districts for not having properly installed anti-spyware software.
On Friday, with her health deteriorating, Ms. Amero agreed to a plea bargain where she would plead guilty to one misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, pay a $100 fine, and lose her teaching license. According to Rick Green’s column, “New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan …remained convinced Amero was guilty and was prepared to again go to trial.” I join with many people who question whether or not State Attorney Regan is fit for office, but that is a whole different issue.
School districts may be tempted to write defensive three-year technology plans to protect themselves, their students, teachers and administrators from fiascoes like the Amero case and I worry that the technology plans in Woodbridge may be too restrictive for numerous reasons.
Yet the template provided by the State Board of Education takes a positive approach to technology. It quotes the Connecticut State Board of Education Position Statement on Educational Technology and Information Literacy, 12/4/04, which says,
Literacy in the 21st century requires more than the ability to read, write and compute. The State Board of Education believes that every student must develop strong technological skills and continually use them in order to function adequately in our 21st century world. Connecticut schools must ensure that technology resources are integrated across the curriculum in PK-12 and become part of the fabric of instruction.
It goes on to quote the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents Technology Position Statement, 12/14/01, saying, “technology must be a vital link among the staff, students, parents and the expanded community”.
It seems as if that link, talked about a couple months after my daughter was born and after Mr. Pensky’s great article on digital natives was published, is not yet as vital as it should be in many school districts. Cases like the Amero case, if anything, may have weakened that link.
So, how do we re-establish technology as the “vital link among the staff, students, parents and the expanded community”? Perhaps we start by giving our seven-year-old daughters our cellphones, so they can take some pictures. Perhaps we go beyond that and help them set up their own radio shows online.
My daughter’s interviewing skills still need a lot of work, but if people want to talk about technology and how it could be used to meet the goals of Connecticut State Board of Education and the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, they could call Fiona’s Radio Show Sunday’s at 6:30 PM.
If you have other ideas, join the discussion. Drop me an email. Add a comment here. Set up your own Internet based radio show. Let’s work together the strengthen the technology enabled links within our communities.
Another Random Day, IPv6 and NaNoWriMo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/10/2008 - 23:21Today was another day of random geeky and NaNoWriMo stuff. I helped configure a Windows 2008 Server. It provided a good opportunity to test out some more IPv6 stuff.
Out of the box, Windows Server 2008 seems to be working with IPv6 and I briefly connected via IPv6 from the Windows Server 2008 server through a couple IPv6 tunnels to my Linux box. I access both web pages and used SSH. Google Chrome and Firefox both connected to the Apache web server that I have running and PuTTY, a windows client that supports SSH and IPv6 connected to the sshd on my linux box.
Unfortunately, the IPv6 tunnel that the Windows 2008 Server seems to be using is slow and flaky. I kept dropping connections. I want to see if I can find a better tunnel for the Windows 2008 Server.
This took, traveling, and random house keeping tasks took up much of the day. I did manage to visit my quota of blogs today, but didn’t end up leaving as many comments as I normally would. I also managed to get a little farther in my novel. It is going well, but today I didn’t even make 1,667 words, let alone what I figure I need to do to make up for lost time. Tomorrow, I have some personal issues to deal with, but hopefully I’ll get more interesting writing done, both here and in the novel.
Making Better Use of Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/24/2008 - 11:29More and more of my friends are using Twitter, and now Media Shift on PBS has an article on How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It. So, I thought I’d share a few of my tips for making better use of Twitter.
Adding material to Twitter
There are plenty of tools for accessing and adding content directly to Twitter. I have a Twitter Gadget for Windows Vista on one of my machines. I run Twirl. I run TwitterBox in Second Life all in addition to simply sending material directly from the Twitter Web page or to Twitter as an SMS message from my cellphone.
However, there are some other tools that I like to use as well. One is Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed will subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog, or other sites, such as BlogTalkRadio feeds, and submit them to Twitter under your username. I use this to send messages to Twitter when I add a blog post to Orient Lodge.
BrightKite works essentially the same as Twitter, but is focused on your location. It can feed Twitter. I use BrightKite sparingly. If I’m going to meetings or a conference in New York, I’ll use it, but I don’t use it for more mundane activities, like stopping at the gas station. Other sites also feed Twitter. I like to use Utterli.com to send audio messages from my cellphone. Unfortunately, Utterli sends indecipherable messages to Twitter and I think it has driven away a follower or two.
If I want to leave a voice message that people are more likely to receive, I like to use TwitterFone. TwitterFone uses voice recognition to take an audio message and leave it as a text message on Twitter. The voice recognition can be hit or miss, but then again, my typing on my cellphone is also often hit or miss.
Two other tools that I like are ping.fm and hellotxt. Both of these sites, as well as some others allow you to send one message that then gets sent to many of your microblogging at status update sites.
Reading and sharing information on Twitter
At the other end of the spectrum is FriendFeed. Friendfeed pulls together all of the material you publish online. If you are using both ping.fm and FriendFeed, your FriendFeed can get overloaded with duplicates, so be careful about how you arrange things.
One thing that I really like about FriendFeed is the rooms. You can set up a room to show all the activity of a group of people. Currently, I’m following 835 people on Twitter and it can be hard to keep track of all the different discussions. So, I group people into rooms. I’m in a couple rooms for that contain my political friends on Twitter. Other rooms are dedicated specific online communities, like the EntreCard Room.
Another tool that I use a lot, for various reasons, is TwitterLocal. It allows you to find recent Tweets from people around a specific zipcode.
Sometimes, I like to look at Tweet 2 Tweet. I stumbled across them quite accidentally one day. What they do is allow you to put two Twitter names in and see any discussion back and forth between these users.
On last organizing tool that I recently heard about is My Social Chatter. It displays Twitter on one side and FriendFeed on the other side and updates every two minutes.
Dealing with Followers
Currently, I’m following 839 people on Twitter and have 1,408 followers. Obviously, I’m not following everyone that follows me. I do get emails when people start following me, but when my email box gets really full, I don’t always see or follow up on those emails. With LessFriends, you can go out and see who is following you, whom you are following, and when you and someone else are mutually following each other. They do note that it can take a long time, especially if you have lots of followers or are following a lot of people.
I grabbed the report and threw it into Excel and it seemed to miss a lot of people. It only returned 859 different people, and I have more followers than that. However, I was surprised at the number of people that I’m following that are not following me back. Some are national organizations which I can understand that they don’t follow me back. Others are friends that use Twitter only to highlight their blog entries. Some, on the other hand, are friends that I would have thought would follow me. Perhaps they aren’t following me for the same reason I’m not following others, simply because we didn’t get the email, or the email got buried.
When I started checking people that are listed as following me that I am not following, I’m finding that it is inaccurate, and I’m actually following them.
When I discovered this, I decided not to take the report all that seriously, and, for example, unfollow people that it lists as me following, but not following me.
It does seem, however, that other people are using this strategy. Recently, I found another interesting site, Qwitter. If you sign up, it will send you a message whenever it finds someone that has stopped following you on Twitter. Each morning when I sit down to my email, I find many new people following me and many old people qwitting following me. In many cases these are sites about making quick money online, and I don’t follow them when they follow me, and I don’t mind when they stop following me. However, at times, I find people that I care about stopping following me. It makes me sad, but so far, I haven’t contacted people to ask why.
There is a lot you can do with Twitter and related sites. You can simply keep friends informed about the moment to moment events in your life. You can publicize your other content, and you can join in fascinating discussions. To do this, there are a lot of sites worth investigating. If you know of some other good sites, please tell me.
The Effect of Technology on Education Meetings
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/21/2008 - 09:41There is a lot of talk about the effect of technology on education, but not a lot of it focuses on the effect of technology on meetings about education. However, last night, I observed three different meetings about education that provided an interesting contrast of how technology is affecting these meetings.
The Woodbridge Board of Education met last night for their monthly meeting. Yet this meeting was different. It was the first time that they used a program called Emeeting from the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE).
“CABE-Meeting is a user-friendly online service specifically designed to assist the board and superintendent, in preparing and running board of education meetings. “
At the beginning of the meeting, Nick Caruso from CABE, together with members of the technology staff at Beecher Road School assisted school board members get connected to Emeeting and learn their way around.
Superintendent Stella spoke about the importance of the board adopting new technology and modeling the appropriate use of technology for students, teachers and staff. He also discussed a committee being formed, headed up by Rick Wood, the technology educator at the school. The committee will include members of the Board of Education, and parents from the community and will address the three-year technology plan.
Dr. Stella also discussed the Connecticut Educators Computer Association (CECA). They are holding their 2008 CECA Conference today, “Surviving and Thriving in an e-Literate World”.
It was noted that Nancy White and James Crawford from Beecher Road School will be attending as 2008 CECA Award Winners for their work in Digital Storytelling.
This digital storytelling project involves a sixth grade class, a general education teacher and a special education teacher. This project integrates various elements of Language Arts, Social Studies and digital media to express the students’ thoughts and ideas on various subject matters. Students gain the necessary skills to produce their digital stories through a four-tiered approach in which the special education teacher is incorporating the teaching of successively sophisticated technical skills in a series of four mini projects. In this tiered approach the students learn how to take digital still photographs, create music soundtracks, record narration, use digital video cameras, and import these media into the iLife suite of software on their groups’ computers. Students then publish and/or present their work. Students are asked to evaluate their movies as they would for their writing for ideas, organization, voice, word (picture) choice, fluency and conventions. Digital Storytelling exemplifies a project that showcases how technology can be used to enhance learning for all students.
As part of the Superintendent’s report, there was also a discussion about the Connecticut Mastery Test and how the school is working on improving the already high results that BRS students receive.
I am not a big fan of standardized testing, the CMTs or No Child Left behind, and the presentation did not hold my interest. So, I checked on Twitter to see what some of my friends around cyberspace were doing.
This is how I observed a second meeting about technology in education. Christine, a woman I met through Twitter and Podcamp goes by the username of PurpleCar on Twitter. She was at some meeting where Katie Kessner was speaking. (For a brief bio of Ms. Kessner, check here.)
PurpleCar’s first Tweet about the talk said, “waiting for a 'the dangers of webkinz' talk to begin. If this woman has no facts and spreads panic, I'm politely gonna go BOOYAH on her.”
I noted that Fiona is working on her reading, writing, typing and math skills by using Webkinz. PurpleCar reported that the speaker talked about “the students denied access to college because of their facebook pages”. Another Twitter user, nazgul, noted “@dulceamargo got a scholarship to study motion picture arts at Interlochen because of an ad on Facebook. Life-changing.”
The discussion, both where PurpleCar was, and on Twitter, continued on and on, with many of us on Twitter coming to the conclusion that Ms. Kessner is an ill-informed fear monger.
The contrast between the Board of Education members, learning their way around a new system and talking about how technology is being used at BRS to improve education provided a sharp contrast to the meeting PurpleCar was at. It also provided an interesting insight into the standardized tests.
Standardized tests, like information technology can, and too often are, used to instill fear which thwarts education. However, they can also be a valuable tool to improve the educational process. It was clear from the presentation that the staff at Beecher Road School understood the benefits and dangers of standardized testing and were working hard to make sure they are used to the students best benefit.
The folks of Woodbridge should be proud of all the efforts that the teachers, staff and administration at Beecher Road School are doing to make sure that all tools, information technology, standardized tests, and so many other tools are being used in the best interests of students. I know I was.
