U Tech Tips

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Technorati Tags: edtech, MAC, podcasting

Why should we put our work on the Web? Give it a Creative Commons license so people can share it and remix it? Why? What’s the use? Attribution? What for?

I’ve struggled with questions like these for years. Whether asking myself or responding to a colleague, my answers struggled to establish the value of sharing creative works beyond the peers in the classroom or school. I knew the value was there. I just couldn’t articulate it well.

But now I have two real-life stories to tell. Looking for a light read this drowsy Saturday morning, I chose The Story of the Fail Whale by Sarah Perez. Sarah captured my attention with her recount of the Fail Whale’s rise to stardom. But her story about the unknown Fail Whale artist’s work turning into a social media brand really woke me up. In the beginning, the artist of the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu, did not profit from Twitter’s use of the Fail Whale. Twitter grabbed the image from iStockPhoto and did not link to her. The more Twitter crashed the more Fail Whale grew in popularity. Strange, isn’t it? Anyway, a homemade Fail Whale t-shirt appeared at a party one night. It gained a lot of attention, so after the party the owner contacted Yiying Lu and encouraged her to open a Zazzle story where she could sell her work. She did and fans tweeted its arrival. What ensued, Perez describes as a “torrent of social media cooperation” that uplifted Yiying Lu and her work to high levels of recognition that gain her profits from sales and, most likely, some future design work.

Yiying Lu put her creative work out there for free. Eventually, it became a social object. The art work and the people who rallied around it built her success. Yiying Lu made it happen by sharing her work on the Web.

The story of Yiying Lu resembles that of JIm Gourley and his CCTV photos. Jim is an avid photographer, writer, and inspirational member of our school community. On December 4th of last year, Jim began to take photos of the CCTV construction project.

CCTV Headquarters Bldg., Beijing, China — December 5, 2007 Photo by Jim Gourley.

He now has thousands of photos in his Flickr collection called Beijing and Architecture. You can see his CCTV photos in its set called Cite Chaillot. He tagged them and opened them to all with a Creative Commons license. Eventually, some architects interested in the unique CCTV Headquarters rising above Beijing neighborhoods discovered Jim’s photos. In his blog post Footnoted, Jim seems reluctant to tell us “This obsession of mine has seemed to have gotten some notice. A few weeks ago the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (CAPA), Paris, contacted me to use 120 of my photos of the CCTV Headquarters project in their upcoming exhibit “Dans la ville chinoise,” which includes an exhibition on Chinese contemporary emerging architecture. The show runs from June 18 to September 19, 2008.” Link

This is another example of a person’s creative work becoming a social object, helping to develop a community, and fostering creativity. How? He put it on the Web and leveraged the power of crowds.

The next time I’m challenged to defend a decision to put creative work beyond the classroom walls and bulletin boards, I can talk about the Fail Whale and the CCTV photos. They’re not Sputniks, but these successes can dispel the fear and doubt and cause change.

Note: I also posted this on Watch Your Bobber.

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Technorati Tags: "fail whale", "social object", cctv, cooperation

• Wikis in Education - Wikis in Education

  The home of Wetpaint Wikis for Education.

  tags: education, wetpaint, wiki, wikis

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I recently listened to the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast #110 which focused on teaching students good presentation skills. Joyce Valenza pointed to their efforts to get students to think about their message and the importance of using images over text whether one uses Powerpoint/Keynote, video, PhotoStory, etc.

This reminded me of an exercise that our 7th grade students did this past year. They were prompted to choose an emotion to then use images and music to express. They could use any digital delivery tool as the focus would be on the message and the audience understanding the depicted emotion. The students used GarageBand to create their own music and ArtRage to draw the final slide that named the emotion.

It was a starter assignment to get the students thinking about how to improve the design of their presentations and to prepare them for upcoming projects where they would take their persuasive, position and autobiographical essays and create image and musically rich interpretations of each.

With almost all of the 7th graders being ESL learners, this was an especially important music and visual literacy learning opportunity. Take a look at an abbreviated version of a student’s video on sadness.

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Technorati Tags: design, musical literacy, visual literacy

To celebrate their 1,000,000 site creation Wetpaint is hosting the Golden Paint Can Awards!

The prize:

• Custom “Award Winner” badges for your site
• Promotion of your site on the Wetpaint homepage
• Mentions in the Wetpaint e-mail newsletter
• Lifelong bragging rights

I’ve been spending the last 30 minutes browsing the categories and looking at different layouts of sites to get ideas in helping teachers design good looking wikis. It’s a great way to get familiar with Wetpaint and at the same time get ideas on how to use Wetpaint in your classroom or school.

Of course you’ll want to stop by the Education 2.0 category and cast your vote for the best Education 2.0 wiki site.

Wetpaint is such a powerful wiki program and these top sites really showcase the versatility of the software.

(Full Disclosure: I am a paid Educational Ambassador for Wetpaint)

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I entered my poster session last night intending to share the story of four students searching for sustainable solutions to the water problem in the Changmu village in the Qinghai province of China. In fact, I did tell visitors how these students are using collaborative technologies to learn how to approach this problem and implement a sustainable solution; how they came to learn about what life is like for villagers without easy access to water for their daily needs; how technology is set to transform their learning into a real-world problem-solving experience. And that’s what bothers me this morning. There was a lot of telling but little questioning.

The crowd flows into the poster session gallery last night at the end of the opening keynote speech by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

I now see that I let great opportunities walk away from me. I shared my story with visitors, but visitors had related stories to share as well. I wish I had had the insight to draw them out last night. Next time I will do what I didn’t do this time. I will interview the visitors. In our conversations I will ask more questions about who they are, where they are, and what they do. I will ask about their experiences and get their opinions. Their stories can only enrich my own.

My time at table 36 last night challenged me to tell my story in compelling ways. Sometimes I succeeded and people, like Gary from CP Software, shared with me some fascinating solutions, based on the process of transpiration caused by solar heat energy, to the water problem in Changmu. Sometimes I stumbled, like when Dr. Idit Caperton, the closing keynote speaker, interviewed me on camera. My incoherent rambling will probably end up on the cutting room floor.

During my poster session last night, Dr. Idit Caperton interviews me about GIN ‘n Water.

I realized last night, that I was getting as much from presenting as I was giving. I thank all the people who stopped by last night. From you I learned to tell our story in compelling ways, to consider our experience from different perspectives, and to inquire more. I hope we can meet again and collaborate to help students take advantage of technologies that can transform their learning.

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A couple of different friends are in the market for purchasing digital cameras this summer. Tough calls: Just too many features and variations to make a decision. Standing in various Camera markets in Hong Kong, the selection is simply overwhelming. All my friends immeidately gravitated to the megapixel rating, thinking that higher megapixels equates to better pictures. On teh surface, this makes sense: Each Megapixel represents detail. So more megapixels gives more details. Breaking the Myth of Megapixels - New York Times

Furthermore, the Megapixel Myth explodes with simple math:

It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.

The Megapixel Myth

One needs at least a doubling of linear resolution or film size to make an obvious improvement. This is the same as quadrupling the megapixels. A simple doubling of megapixels, even if all else remained the same, is very subtle. The factors that matter, like color and sharpening algorithms, are far more significant.

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• Summize Conversational Search

  tags: twitter, tools, aggregator, Search, toolbar

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