Two amazing Web2OH apps

I have had the fortune to be introduced to two Web 2 Oh apps that have really inspired me.

The first is Wordle. Love it, love it, love it! Create word clouds on any text you copy and paste into the Wordle text box. Then use the other tools to arrange, rearrange, color, and change fonts. Very interesting what word clouds look like of particular passages. There's also a gallery where you can publish you Wordle creation and view those of others submitted to the gallery. In fact, here's a Wordle based on the text of this post:



And the other cool tool is JOTT. Use your phone to call JOTT (a toll-free phone number) and have it transcribe your voice into text. You can add various phone numbers so you can call from different phones. I still have to try it from my Tracfone, which sometimes gets a bad signal while in the car (I am not in traffic when I do this of course). JOTT has all sorts of potential uses. Memos, notes, thoughts, contacts, etc. Lots of stuff to try!

Are we having fun or what?!?!!?

Edutopia's coverage of using technology

Here's a pretty cool clip of how one school is using technology in the classroom. Edutopia is a good source of new and interesting ideas for accomplishing learning.

Edible Dinnerware

I'm sitting here at my desk eating lunch. Now that Spring has arrived, I'm getting back into having salads for lunch. I love Romaine. But that is not my point of this post - this is - it occurs to me that I don't need the paper napkin I have left over from a trip to Quiznos last week (let's not go down that road), to wipe salad dressing off my face.

I have a plain slice of bread sitting here (naked bread you might say) and I realize that I could dab the corners of my mouth with this slice of bread. At the end of lunch I'll just eat my napkin (the bread one, not the paper one).




This will work at home, too, where we use cloth napkins instead of paper. Even though we are one evolutionary baby step closer to reduce, reuse, recycle, we still have to wash the cloth napkins every so often. Thus using precious water and heat.

Why not bread instead? (That sounds like a good slogan). Bread companies of the world take note - advertise your slices as tasty, "recyclable" dinner-ettiquettable (I know, but somebody has to come up the the new words in our language!) mouth daubers.

This gets me thinking about all the other things we use at meals that don't have to end up in the dishwasher on a regular basis. Celery knives and spoons. Carrot stick forks. Zuccini bowls. Pumpkin bakeware. I'm not exactly sure how we could fry up some eggs for breakfast, but I bet somebody's got an idea!

Actually, I remember eating at an Ethiopian restaurant in NYC and we sat at a traditional table. The food was served on this humungous (it had to be at least 3 feet in diameter) round of flat bread that was our communal plate. The waiter served us right from the pot of legumes. A big dollop right in the middle of the bread. We then tore off pieces of our plate and sort of used it as pincers or tongs to grab a bit of legume paste (this was more tasty than it sounds in writing, I swear!) and sort of rolled it up to eat it. The fish stew was a bit trickier. I highly recommend going to an Ethiopian restaurant that serves food in a traditional manner. This is a very good exercise for the "been there, did that" crowd.



So here's to food - may we all be as adaptable and indispensable as a radish cup.

Spot the Croc

Can you see the crocodiles in these two photos?

They really are there! There's a young crocodile in the first photo and an adult croc in the second photo.

This isn't a test of your ability to pick details out of a couple of photos. It is to demonstrate that sometimes animals are pretty good at disguise.

Which is my lead-in to talking about how there are things in education that may also be disguised, appearing differently on first observation than they do if we look more closely at the details.

Games are one such creature. Increasingly, educators are considering games (a term that can carry many different meanings) as potential learning tools. There's also increasing research into gaming as a way to learn and it looks pretty supportive of the whole idea.

Recently in my ETAP 526 course, we took a look at several different types of game-like learning tools. I took some time to look at an electronic version of drill and practice software, a college course that was a simulation/game, and another simulation environment that required a level of interactivity.

If you're not "into" gaming, then you probably have never heard of Typing of the Dead. Based on a well-known shoot-em game called House of the Dead II, this has the participant shoot zombies by typing in words that appear on the screen.

The trial version (free) gives you pretty good practice, but if you are a hard-core student of the keyboard, you might want to go for the full paid version. I found it heart-pounding as the zombies approached brandishing all sorts of weapons and bad breath. I also found out how REALLY BAD my typing is! I'm sure I've been hacked to death for misspelling togehter (see I did it again!).

Check out these two YouTube videos to see what I'm talking about:

English                  Japanese

More later on the other simulations I talked about above.

Greetings, Would you like to videoblog?

"Greetings Professor Faulken...wOUld YoU lIke t0 pLAY a gAmE?"

Quick! What movie did that come from?

Here's what I did with that little movie clip in videoblog form. I first created an iMovie on my Mac, saved it as a quicktime movie and then converted it to an mp4. I see that conversion takes abit out of a movie.

Quicktime movie:



MP4 format:

SurveyMonkey

Yet another wonderful tool for getting information. Visit SurveyMonkey for your own.

Click Here to take survey

Trying out Googledocs

Here's a Powerpoint presentation I did for ETAP 526. This is an experiment with Googledocs.

PowerPoint Basics

Buddhist Thought and Education

Teach your children well...

Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

To solve the problems humanity is facing, we need to organize meetings of scholars, educators, social workers, neuroscientists, physicians, and experts from all fields to discuss the positive and negative sides of what we have done thus far, as well as what needs to be introduced and what needs to be changed in our educational system.

Proper environment plays a crucial role in the healthy growth of a child. All problems, including terrorism, can be overcome through education, particularly by introducing concern for all others at the preschool level.

Living in society, we must share the suffering of our fellow citizens and practice compassion and tolerance not only toward our loved ones but also toward our enemies. This is the test of our moral strength.

We must set an example by our own practice. We must live by the same high standards of integrity we seek to convey to others. The ultimate purpose is to serve and benefit the world.

--from How to See Yourself As You Really Are by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.

This from:

Snowlion Publications

N. America: (800) 950-0313
Worldwide: (607) 273-8519
By Mail: PO Box 6483,
Ithaca, NY 14851 USA
By Email: tibet@snowlionpub.com
On the Web: www.snowlionpub.com

Why are Finnish kids so smart? Finnish-ing School!

As Monty Python fondly quipped: "Finland, Finland, Finland...the country where I'd like to be...going camping or swimming or just watching TV..."

Here's the article link.


Take a look at the video clip from The Wall Street Journal:

Experimenting with photos

Hi there,

Just seeing if I can properly upload photos and what they look like from a posting.

These from my personal collection: when Uma, our Finnish Spitz, was about 3-4 months old, we discovered how much she loved snow.

She prefers to be outside when it is really crappy - sleet, rain and snow are her favorites.

By the way, I looked up Uma in my handy-dandy "Goddesses of the World" encyclopedia and found that Uma is another name for Kaali the Destroyer. If you've ever lived with a puppy, you know how apt her name is!

LiveBlog: New Media Consortium

This is the unedited version of sitting in a conference with keynoter Larry Johnson of New Media Consortium. I hope to have an annotated version in the near future.

"The trick is not leading a horse to water, but to convince the horse that s/he's thirsty. They will find their own water." - Larry's dad.

I'm sitting in a conference and the keynote speaker, Larry Johnson, is talking about his work with the New Media Consortium. I'm trying a live blog just to see how it feels. Larry's upfront talking about using a machete to hack out the way early on so that others can come in behind him and build a road for the rest of us. In other words, he is in a position to search out new technology and then help others get to it and then create a way for all of us to use technology.

He's talking about how technology and that term, has changed over time. I remember seeing Larry at the CIT 2007 conference. He actually couldn't make it to the conference because of storms in Chicago or something, and so he came to us via Second Life. He had his avatar, looked a little like him give a keynote in SL with seats down in front of him where anybody could fly in to listen to his talk. Of course, it was open to everybody and so we'd see people fly in behind Larry instead of sitting down in front of him. We got to watch it on the big screen up in the front of the auditorium. Those in our audience who could catch a connection, would enter SL to talk with Larry directly while the rest of us watched the interaction.

I'm hearing much of what Larry's saying from his previous presentation. I'm guessing that many of the people in this room have also heard it. The only dif is that he's added a bit about being on/in Twitter and of course the little birdie sounds goes off while he's talking and we all laugh and smile and say isn't that cute. Not to sound jaded or anything but I could really use some new stuff. Not a talk on new stuff (I have a feeling I know what's out there or could find out), but a talk about how to apply all this stuff without losing any of the old stuff.

Maybe that's the wrong idea. Maybe we won't be able to hang on to the old stuff and still have the new stuff. Are we intellectually limited to only holding so much in our brains? In our minds?

Now Larry's talking about something I don't remember from the previous discussions. NMC has some new stuff out on the website. Using a community bookmark. One of their initiatives.

Initiatives

8 current initiatives

Emerging Technology

Dynamic Knowledge Community: trying to make it easy for people to share knowledge - find as many ways to share as possible

Each initiative is around 4 core competencies

Then each is linked to at least one project

Educational Gaming

New Scholarship Initiative - how you disseminate scholarly work, how do you even define it, how it affects the professional life of scholars, so many fields are moving so fast that things around scholarship are changing - peer review, how prestigious academic institutions handle things, etc.

"Call to Scholarship" - NMC asks universities to pose 3 questions. Try to narrow it down to a research agenda.

Look in del.icio.us for tags put out by the NMC, has to do with the Horizon Report. Horizon Project is looking for additional participants.

Ok, sort of losing my attention... watching my coworker check her email. We have a whacked out faculty member who insists that we fix things she's broken in her online course. This is rather frustrating.

Larry just talked about how there's a billion, a billion cell phones manufactured each year. Who is buying all these cell phones? What happens to the old ones? Repeat after me L-A-N-D-F-I-L-L. duh on us. we are pretty stupid. and we aren't teaching young folk to be much smarter!

The Hyper Cycle of Consumer Technologies (2007) or How Technology is adopted (Larry took this from Gartner research)

1. Trigger Technology
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity - until it gets to Walmart, we can only hope....

Here we go into SL. He gets a cabled connection, we are dealing with everybody trying to be on the wireless connection here in the hotel. Larry Pixel. According to his wife, sexy, he says.

So the NMC has a pavilion out on SL and each of the initiatives has a screen.

Project: Grassroots video by students, faculty, on YouTube, without any controls. Queensland U. no more streaming media servers needed any more. just go out and upload to YouTube. Encoded on the fly, Flash, stored on their servers.

Also on the new "Horizon" is Collaboration Webs. Good news for colleges. Good stuff, Google docs - NEVER BUY MICROSOFT products ever again!! Of course, my brother works for MS, so I won't say that too loud. He's working on business side apps, but still... I want to know he will be able to put my nieces and nephew through college when their time comes in 10-15 years.

Data MASHUPS - take two things that are very different and mash them up together. Take siesmic data from petro companies and put it together with something... don't know... lost where he went with that. But I think these mashups are that 3D thing databases were supposed to do. Only it sounds like it is in 4D - add an intellectual/critical thinking component.

Mobile Broadband - broadband networks are fueling an entirely new way of communicating - not just auditory 2 way communication over cell phones. In Japan, any cell phone must work with any network. the GSM networks are being built as we speak.

Collective Intelligence - is about datamining, search. Also about explicit kind of intelligence through tagging. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO RETHINK OUR DEFINITION OF WHAT AN EXPERT IS!

Social Operating Systems - google, facebook, fundamental change in the way we see... I wish I could rewind Larry, I lost what he said. Something about XONDI. Social network (your matrix I guess), having to reenter your social network everywhere you go. Social graphing. Now this sounds very new to me. I'll have to check it out. Make your "graph" visible or invisible to others. I guess it is a way to look up info about somebody.

What is really cool, the whole dynamic about how technology is not about isolation, it is about social networking. Going global.

Questions from the audience: the issue about security/privacy and putting your face out on facebook. Old school - email. Zombie - new school. How to get past the fear that faculty have about security.

When Bullying is More Than Name Calling

In my online graduate course at University at Albany, we had a discussion about "digital bullying" among grade schoolers. It seems that bullying just went online along with just about everything else young people do.

My thinking, which I shared with my classmates, was that sometimes young people just have to work things out for themselves. They have to figure out how to best handle a bully. Why not ask the child/young person who is being bullied how they wanted to handle it.

That seemed like a way to handle things, let the person in the position of victim take control and find their own internal control and power. It seemed fine that is, until I watched CNN and learned of the death of a young gay boy in Oxnard, California.

On February 12th, Lawrence King, 15, was shot to death by another boy, in the middle of the day in the middle of a class. Lawrence King was, by the sounds of it, in the process of coming out at school. A brave and scary thing for an adult, let alone someone in high school. According to the LA Times, King and the murderer and a group of boys had a verbal confrontation the day before the shooting.

To those of us living as lesbians, gay men, and transgendered folk, it is not a big surprise that gay teens are harassed. LGBT youth face verbal harassment and physical violence on a regular basis at home, at school, in the streets.

Neil Guiliano, president of the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) said of the crime, “This senseless act of violence is deeply disturbing and a reminder of the climate of harassment, bullying and violence that so many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students face across the country.” said Giuliano. “It is imperative that the media shine a spotlight on bullying, violence and hate crimes based on real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Calling attention to such issues is critical if we are to address the hostile and sometimes dangerous environment that LGBT students face all too often.”

It is too easy for me to forget what LGBT youth go through in high schools and colleges across the nation. Standing guard, being vigilant, remaining in a state of hyper-awareness because those who want to do you harm will wait, will lay traps. Who could focus on learning in such a state? What is academic freedom, if not the freedom from the threat of violence?

I was glad to see that the DA prosecuting the King case did not hesitate to say that what had happened was a hate crime. It is only too bad that the penalty is an extra 1-3 years. And some may say that is better than nothing at all.

We get what we settle for. It is time to stop settling for less than what we deserve.

Freedom from violence, harassment and threat of violence should be at the top of the academic rights agenda. It should not be something we have to fight for, but it is. Along with the rights of LGBT people not to be discriminated against in employment, housing, insurance, or any other right or privilege given to others.

If you are a resident of New York State, I hope that you will join with other LGBT people as we take a day to speak to our legislators about the rights of LGBT people. Included on the agenda is the protection of young people in our schools. It is the right of all young people to an academic environment free of violence simply because of who they are beginning to become. The date is April 29, 2008.

If you would like more information about going to Albany and meeting with representatives of ALL people, visit New York Pride Agenda about Equality and Justice Day.

One last thought - since this is an election year and the unprecedented is taking shape - picture if you will a young person, free of the threat of violence and harassment, free to discover who they are, growing up to become our first transgender or lesbian or gay president of the United States.

That can only happen if we start act now to make sure our youth grow up with both their intellect and concept of self fully intact.

Stumbled Upon

So you found your way here. Is that good or bad? Good and bad of course being twins and not opposites. You should read some more. More of this blog and also more Thich Nat Hahn. I'm tellin' ya, the guy is Mr. Insight. That is strictly meant as a compliment (or is it complement? There's that twin thing again). There are more connections than meets the dendron!

Welcome to Synaptic Leap where I will try to be inspired enough to write something that you would actually like to read.

The purpose of this blog is to leap the gap in thinking and learning. Mostly though, to record my progress as I learn about learning and about learning about me learning to learn. About learning. Is there such a thing as meta-metacognition? Or would that be meta (raised to the power of 2) cognition? Fascinating, simply fascinating.

The name Synaptic Leap came about as I contemplated some of the new cognitive neuroscience ("new"-roscience) research and how we deal in a practical way with learning, especially in holding pens, er, I mean schools.