iSean

okay, i’ve used Moodle daily for a week now and it’s growing on me. i started using Moodle after many years of using Drupal and phpBB together. i erroneously assumed that Moodle would be similar to those other 2 tools. with regard to customizing the site, i think it is similar so my prep work was pretty much what i am used to when starting a new course. however, when it came time to have my students join my class that’s where i hit my first problem. Students can just sign up on Moodle like they do for Drupal, phpBB, and most other open source tools. this was a problem for me as i had to individually add each student. i have 16 students in this grad class so i had each student email me so i’d get their critical info to join them up. however, thinking ahead to a semester where i have 75 students potentially and that’s a huge deterrant to me.

next, i was trying to set up the forums to use and i wanted 2 groups of students. with phpBB the permissions issue is very clear and the process seems very intuitive to set up (at least to me). with Moodle, the forums originally get configured out in the main Moodle site above the individual course level. you then go in and configure each specific forum in the course. i did what seemed natural to me and my students could start a discussion and respond to each other, but they couldn’t reply to threads i started. i eventually figured it out while my students were away at lunch so that i could have some forums for whole group discussion and some for individual group discussions. i’d still like a way to make a discussion starting post and have it automatically start a disucssion in each group rather than repeating the process for each group i have.

the grade book is not intuitive. i have to physically add an assignment resource in order for a field to get added to the grade book. so, how do i add participation, for example. i also have a blogging activity using blogger.com . . . how do i add each blog assignment to the grade book? i am sure there must be a way to do this, but currently it seems as though i need to physically add an assignment called blog 1 and another that will be called blog 2, etc. — and each time i do this a page will be created that will look like my students are supposed to submit a file on the assignment page and that’s not what i want them to do as i use blogger.com and Google Docs for all assignments. hmmm.

finally, i like creating a folder of resources for each day and topic in each day (this is an 8:30 – 3 class each day so it covers much). however, i can put resources in the folders, but i cannot put links. that sure would be nice just to make things more organized. unfortunately, links cannot be places in folders — only files can go in folders. maybe i’ll get used to doing things the right way, but i would prefer a tool that i am not forced to compromise on what i think is the best way to present the curriculum. that being said, i am going to use Moodle for the next week to finish up this class and then i’ll have the rest of summer to decide whether to switch full time to Moodle or whether to switch back to my old tools.

i am teaching a 2 week graduate course starting the week after next. considering that it’s just a 2 week course, i figured i’d try a new tool. so, instead of my typical combination of Drupal and phpBB . . . and even the gradebook in Blackboard, i am going strictly with Moodle to see how it’s working these days. i fiddled with it back in 2006, but that was 3 years ago. i quickly installed it last weekend and i have been playing around and it seems much improved over what i was trying back in 2006 (and i ran it on my own server back then — no more of that). a nice thing about Moodle versus my other tools is that much of the settings stuff i did with my current tools took me much time to tweak just so for an education setting. with Moodle, the default settings seem ready to go — that is, permissions for my students are already set and groups are easy to create, etc. Moodle is obviously education friendly (duh).

i plan to write about my adventures with Moodle keeping a keen eye on how it differs from the current open source tools I am using. i might even throw in some comparisons with the new Blackboard NG, which my university is testing this spring. i am using the Assignments, Assessments, and Gradebook features in BB, so i’ll have a little bit to compare with Moodle. i worry about how much i’ll figure out in the next week+, but i also expect that i’ll have a student or two in a district who uses Moodle and i’ll use those students are resources. if not, that’s what the documentation and trial-and-error are for, eh? ;~)

i have 2 Twitter accounts. one is a professional account that has a focus solely on what i do in my career (largely ed tech stuff). the other account has nothing to do with ed tech stuff so i figured i’d just have a second twitter account for it. on this other account, i am just silly. i post infrequently but what i do post is intended to be funny. i have 62 followers and i follow about 12 comedians and folks i find interesting. this account is for entertainment only. my professional account is used to follow 23 folks who post about ed tech stuff. i am very careful about who i follow on both accounts and i don’t automatically start following someone just because they choose to follow me — i try and control the feed i get.

now, the problem i have with Twitter is that it’s very difficult to use this tool professionally. i can try and follow folks who add interesting ed tech stuff, but that doesn’t mean that the people i follow will stick to ed tech stuff; they don’t. some people view their Twitter participation as an invitation to tweet professionally and personally all on the same account. fine — there aren’t any rules against that, eh? but this kind of participation means that for me to get the ed tech stuff i also have to sift through learning about what is being cooked for dinner and how little Tommy Jr. is flying a kite. Twitter doesn’t have a feature that allows me to only get the professional stuff. i could fire people who choose to post whole life tweets, but then i’d miss the valuable ed tech tweets. so, for the time being i’ll continue sifting through the tweets about someone sitting at the airport, but i’ll keep my fingers crossed that Twitter is exploring a way to make Twitter more friendly for professional users. i am not holding my breath . . . the bottom line is that it’s probably up to the users to police themselves. then again, maybe i am in the minority and everyone else loves reading tweets that run the gamut from professional to personal???

i previously had a blog post explaining that i didn’t really get Twitter and the attention it was receiving. well, that was before i had played with Twitter enough to start seeing some of the application potential it contained. i am rapidly enjoying my Twitter account. let me explain how i use it and how it’s becoming helpful to me. first, i am making it a point to only follow people who i think i can benefit from following. so, as people start following me, i don’t automatically start following them. and folks who i follow who dominate the my feed with tweets might get dropped as well if their tweets aren’t of use to me. i control who appears in my feed so i might as well cater it to what i want and that’s largely ed tech related content. little life updates (e.g., “am thinking of grabbing some lunch”) is a quick way to get removed from my feed. i also won’t post that kind of meaningless stuff either. so, i have tweets coming in that direct me to new ways to use particular software or tools (e.g., Drupal) or direct me to a helpful web 2.0 tool or news item. that’s great. unlike an RSS feed from blogs, the tweets are short and succinct and i can scan through bunches in no time at all and then just choose the most interesting to follow up on. good stuff.

but the real benefit of Twitter occurred this week. my wife was using Blackboard 9th generation, which is the latest version of Blackboard — perhaps in beta. Our university upgraded this spring/summer and I think we’re beta testers. i barely use Blackboard, but my wife relies on it pretty extensively. she had a class discussion set up and went to use Firefox to view student posts. something was way off and the current student’s post was appearing as text written over the list of responses. so, she couldn’t really read the overlapping text and she also couldn’t click on many of the discussion responses. she quit Firefox and switched to Safari yet the problem persisted and she still couldn’t participate. the next morning things were looking better but the the problem was still slightly apparent, so i took a screen shot. i posted the problem and then the screen shot to Twitter in a series of tweets. immediately, IT at my university who is following me responded and an email follow up came to me as well as many other IT folks. at the same time, engineers from Blackboard also responded almost immediately. interestingly, the guy from Blackboard noted that i had posted a screen shot that also contained student names. i was so blinded by the error that i wasn’t even paying attention to what was beneath the overlapping text. here’s a bit of the screen shot i posted; however, i had failed to blur the student names in the tweet:

Blackboard error - students blurred

i was able to immediately take the picture down and get things fixed (as i’ve done above with the student names blurred). i’ve now had follow up discussions with my university IT folks and the problem is being addressed. and the twitter exchanges happened within seconds at night. i have changed my mind on Twitter — it can be very useful. ;~)

okay, so wolframalpha is not a Google killer after all. heck, it’s not even a search engine; rather, it’s a “computational knowledge engine.” i spent some time playing with it today. it doesn’t know who i am even though Google has me #1 on their results page. fine, i am barely a blip on the internet radar and it’s not likely that anyone other than me will ever search for me. so instead i decided to see how Grand Rapids, Michigan compares to Seattle, WA in terms of annual cloudy days. i got nowhere with that. so i tried precipitation — again, not recognized. i then tried [ Grand Rapids, Seattle, rain ] and it gave me my two cities but also added the city, “Rain, Bavaria, Germany” instead. hmmm. i can apparently compare cities, but just not on my terms yet. that being said, the service does appear to be valuable if what you seek fits into their parameters. to get an idea of what those parameters are, check out their exmaples page: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

so, i was on the IT Oversight Committee at my university for a number of years until this year. and about 2 years ago, i argued that we should be using Gmail instead of our current student email system. the discussion lasted just a few minutes and it seemed unatainable. well, come to find out . . . my university is moving all students over to a Gmail account starting later this summer. very cool. i wish i was still on the oversight committee so i could see how the decision was made, but the fact that it was made is encouraging to me. from my perspective, i would think that most k-12 schools would be wise to switch to Gmail for student and even teacher and staff email accounts. 2.5 GB of free space is quite a bit. students could store all papers in their Gmail account quite easily. they also allow attachments to be sent that are to 25 MB to accommodate about anything students would be sending teachers. You can turn on Tasks to have a decent To Do list, etc. uptime is great and students can keep their accounts as they make the transition away from school. now if i could just get the powers that be to move the faculty accounts away from Groupwise and over to Gmail then i’d be quite happy.

so, i installed a plugin that should automatically post a tweet to my twitter account each time i post a blog entry. it’s call Twitter SP2. all setting stuff is in another language but it’s not hard to figure out what it means. then again, i haven’t tested it yet . . . And, it worked. neato.

T.H.E Journal has a recent article (or the 3 page version here) that notes the top 10 Web 2.0 tools for young learners based on a presentation by Gail Lovely at a recent conference. not surprisingly, i recognized less than 1/2 of the list. color me unimpressed with this list. as a person who spends hours a week in an elementary school, i don’t think some of the stuff on this list is very practical and certainly isn’t worthy of being “top 10″ over stuff like Google Docs, which isn’t even on the list. Lovely lists some apps (and 1 that isn’t even a web 2.0 app), but she also mentions some generic tools (e.g., #2 on her list is blogs, and #1 is wikis). i think i’ll release a better list next week to put this one to shame. stay tuned . . .

i am trying my first post using a new tool called apture. it’s a plugin for Wordpress, Drupal, Blogger.com, and many other tools. their about us page notes:

Apture provides the first rich communication platform that allows people to intuitively experience the web.

With just one line of code, publishers and bloggers can quickly and easily turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience. Apture gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages.

Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience.

probably the easiest way to explain it is just to demonstrate it with the 2 links in the next sentence (very easy to do, mind you). the Jayhawk is the mascot for the University of Kansas.

apparently so. i stopped using turnitin a few years ago because i thought submitting my student’s papers seemed a bit unethical. a federal appeals court has ruled that turnitin storing student papers is just fair use. i guess i was wrong.

The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes here (commercial uses can be fair uses), here (a use can be transformative ‘in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work,’ citing Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.), and here (fact that turnitin.com used the entirety of the plaintiff’s work did not preclude finding of fair use). And it turned back a lot of other, small-bore challenges to the district court’s fair use finding.

while it still doesn’t feel right, i suppose i can take some solace in the fact that “fair use” is getting a win.