EduGeek Journal

Happy New Year!  With a new year comes more buzz from Google.  Did you really expect anything less?  New York Times has an interesting article about the future of the Google Book search project and what it can mean for education.  Now that Google has settled various lawsuits surrounding the project and made all parties happy (for the most part), the whole thing can move forward.

Here are some of the higlights of the article:

• Over 5 million out-of-print books have been scanned.  This is a treasure trove for research purposes, as most of these will be available for free download.
• New releases will even be available for paid download, usually cheaper than the print version.
• “More students in small towns around America are going to have a lot more stuff at their fingertips,” said Michael A. Keller, the university librarian at Stanford. “That is really important.”  (Not to mention really important for distance education)
• Google wants to push access to the entire database to school libraries, making sure that they make it affordable.  Students at schools that purchase access will be able to get “full contents of all the books free.” (!)
• Paul Courant, university librarian at the University of Michigan had this to say: “One of the important things about this settlement is that it brings the literature of the 20th century back into a form that the students of the 21st century will be able to find it.”

So, will we one day see courses that use this project entirely for their textbook requirements?  Or maybe even a mix of current blogs and news sources with classic books?  Probably so, if not already.  To see the Google Book project, see http://books.google.com.

We change a lot around here at EduGeek Journal, so I decided to create a page for archiving the old looks.  See the Memory Lane link under the header banner to relive or greatest hits and misses.  Some of the functions on the v1.0 archive still need to be repaired, and not every link works, but you can get general ideas in this archive.  Other new pages and features are coming in the future, but probably after the Christmas break.

Speaking of which - Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the EduGeeks!  We’ll probably be back after the holidays…  depending on how much eggnog we consume….

Many people talk about the semantic web, where websites will begin to basically think smarter and give you better service and search results because they can understand the difference between, say, an edible nut and a crazy nut.

The nut example is commonly used to describe the semantic web, but is there more to that?  An article in the New York Times seems to think so, and also seems to think that we may be close to having these services.  Take this example in the article titled “A Software Secretary That Takes Charge” by John Markoff:

Imagine you are on a business trip and your computer discovers that your flight will be late. It automatically reschedules your dinner in New York, informs your three guests of the change and tells you they’ve been notified.

Basically, a website that can recognize “late = bad” and that “bad = do something.”  So, imagine if Learning Management Systems could do this?  A week before a paper is due, it notices that not even a rough draft has been submitted, so a notice goes out to the student about the deadline, or even starts a private discussion thread between the instructor and learner so they can dialogue about the paper, checks the registrar’s database to see if the student might have dropped the class, etc.  That is a pretty simple example, but there could be more to it than that.

Personal research assistants would be nice, of course - especially ones that can recognize specific articles and blog posts that match your paper’s topic.  What if you were working on paper in Google Docs or Zoho Writer and every day that you signed in you got a list of links to articles, news stories, blog posts, Flickr images, YouTube videos, etc that matched what you were writing about.  And not just billions of Google search-like links to anything that contains the same keywords your paper does, but a short list of specific resources that you could actually use?

As long as they don’t come up with a site that actually writes original papers for you, this could be great.

To me, the news of Google pulling the plug on Lively came way too soon.  Sure, Lively didn’t set the virtual world on fire, but there were some great ideas in there.  It seems like it was also starting to catch on with Educators.  And now they are pulling the plug?  How many other dead Google products are still in development?

A group called the Digiteen Dream Team is staging a protest to see if they can keep Lively afloat.  The really interesting thing about this team is who they are:

We are ninth grade students at Westwood Schools in Camilla and started this blog to speak out about the fact that Google Lively is shutting down.

Yep - not a bunch of geeky old people like us EduGeek moaning the death of some obscure tool that we never actually use - 9th grade students.  But that is not all -  they also blog about “Encouraging Corporate Digital Citizenship, Sharing How We Think Virtual Worlds Can be Used in Schools, and Creation of a Digital World to Teach Digital Citizenship to Students.”  Wow.  Even if you can’t make their protest (or don’t care about Lively that much - even though you should), at least check out their blog and read their thoughts on several virtual worlds - fascinating stuff.

In the current Web 2.0 world, many have predicted that “trends” will have a very short life.  Many have written off Microsoft already because they already had their five years of dominance.  MySpace and FaceBook have had their day and will die out soon, according to some.  Twitter never really caught on in the mainstream (AOL is dead now, and it has way more users than Twitter), so micro-blogging in general is going the way of the bulletin board according to some.  Pownce just decided to close their doors, and Jaiku just disappeared after all.

But is social networking getting ready to claim its spot in cyber history, or just getting ready to really, truly explode?  Maybe it will die, or maybe we will see a steady increase in the future instead of another explosion.  But there are some interesting developments.

Ning was started as a “create-your-own-social-network” service a while back.  While it didn’t exactly change the world, it is inspiring others to do the same.  Shout’Em is a new service that allows you to create your own micro-blog service.  Right now it is in Beta, but you can see the EduGeek Shout’em site to see what it is like.  It does have a few features that Twitter doesn’t.  You can also create a private network, or customize the look of your network.  This could be great for creating your own network for your class… except for one glitch.  After the private Beta, they plan on charge $10 a month for each upgrade you want.  So, if you want a private network for your class with a custom design, that would be $20 a month.  Probably a deal killer for doing this on a class level, unless of course you can be okay with having an open network.  Which sounds like a good idea to me, at least at the college level.  (If you want to join the EduGeek network, you can use the invitation code of “doneright” - thanks to Teach42.com for the tip)

With the fees that they charge, Shout’em seems to be targeting businesses more than schools.  Yammer is also doing this, but with a different approach. Yammer seems to  base their networks around your email address.

Another interesting development is Google FriendConnect.  You can see the widgets in the sidebars of this site to see what they are like.  Google is letting you create social networks based around a site that you own.  They say they are going to roll-out some more features in the future.  Feel free to join ours to see what it is like.  The only hindrance with this one is that it can only be used by the person that owns a site.  You can’t add this to, say, a class hosted on BlackBoard.  If your school installed BlackBoard on their server and also will install the two required files on their site, however - you could be in business.

And speaking of Blackboard, I will say that I liked the integration with social networking tools that I am starting to see in their software.  Not sure if I can say exactly what I saw yet, but they are taking that in to consideration.

For my day job last week, I was part of a meeting with a Blackboard rep.  He was a nice guy, but still a salesperson.  A good salesperson at that.  I know there are good sales people out there, but beyond the good ones that I have met, I find the rest of them tiring.  Of course, I know many of them have to spit out the required company propaganda line every where they go - whether they want to or not.  Because of this, I am sure they usually find solace in the fact that most people don’t know much about the truth behind what they are talking about, or maybe even that mots people don’t know if their product lives up to the hype or not.

Maybe they just should have never let me in to this meeting.  Blackboard rarely lives up to its hype in most cases - mainly because they have too much hype (that no one could ever live up to, to be honest).  So having me in a meeting, knowing this about Bb hype, and I have a bad habit of not keeping my mouth shut = not a good combination.

The meeting got off to sluggish start with the rep trying to tell us that Bb is not using the term “version” any more.  That in itself is not that bad of an idea… but terribly impractical in real life.  How do you communicate anything in the IT world without using the world version?  We found out just how impossible… and ultimately frustrating for the person pushing that idea… this can be.  Actually, it was quite entertaining for us… not so much for our rep.

Then, of course, we spent a good chunk of the meeting looking at “new” features we already knew and used.  Common sales rep mistake - assuming your people don’t know anything.  Finally, I was nominated to speak up and let him know he was showing us features of a version (what other word could I use there, really?)  that we were already using.  Of course, instead of switching gears to NG, this inspired him to find something we hadn’t seen.

I have to take a minute and point out that I don’t intentionally try to make people look bad.  Just be careful in what questions you ask me - I will answer you honestly if you ask me a direct question that puts me in a corner.  Here is an example: this sales rep then showed us the rating and feedback feature of the Bb discussion forums.  Then he looked right at me and asked “Bet you haven’t seen anything like that before, huh Matt?”

What I was thinking was “yes, I have… several years ago in Moodle and a few years before that in about every discussion board program like phpBB.”  All I actually said was “well, yes, in other LMS programs.”  Not that tactful, I admit - but really nice compared to what I could have said.  In my defense, I could have ate his lunch right there.

After this, there was the usual misinformed pitch about how open-source is really more expensive than Bb when you roll in support and maintenance (not true actually) and even some line about how Moodle and Sakai are really only good alternatives for smaller installations because of scalability (also not true).  I can’t blame Bb for taking that view - but I can’t agree with them either.  I tried to disagree with him but was cut off as he maneuvered to the next issue (good move, BTW).

Also, I found it funny how they highlighted the FaceBook Sync app, which has proven to be rather unpopular (only a little over 5,000 current users out of tens of millions of possible ones).

If you have seen the NG example videos up at the Bb site, then you have see what we saw.  A lot of stuff copied from Google and other sites.  Stuff that I really do like, but have a hard time accepting from a company that is suing others for copying them.

(as a side note here, some rumblings are indicating that the concepts that Bb patented were actually in widespread use in educational circles as early as 1993.  Bb became a company in 1997.  You can do the math on that one :)

Strange things are brewing in LMS land, indeed….

(Edited to make this sound a little more positive - the meeting wasn’t as bad as I first made it seem. Also, needed to make sure I made it clear that this was a meeting at work and does not reflect in any way the opinion of my employer, just mine.)

Now powered by WordPress!  Moodle is a great tool for delivering online courses, but they really don’t do much with their blog feature.  We needed some more flexibility, so I have spent the last month or so transferring everything over to this new WordPress.  All that and a spiffy new theme, based on the Fervens - C Theme.  Most of the posts and comments have been migrated over - if you see anything missing, please let me know.  I migrated most users over that had at least 2 comments or recent (non-spam) activity.  You should be able to go in and request a password reset for your old username to get a new password (because the passwords wouldn’t transfer over).  If not, you can create a new account or contact me to transfer your old account over.

Old RSS feeds and permalinks should work just fine.  The RSS feed is the same, and there is a script that forwards old permalinks to the new permalink system.

This is just the first stage of some changes, with the basic old stuff being transgferred over.  You should see some new stuff in the side bars popping up soon, as well as some new pages being added to the top.  Also, hopefully I can coax the non-active EduGeeks out of hibernation and get some more activity here other than my own.  That may be hoping too much - but it is the season of miracles, right?  :)

Not only does Google own the future, they are starting to take over the past, too. But when it is this cool - who’s going to complain? Now you can visit a virtual re-creation of ancient Rome inside of Google Earth. Here are links to the official Google page and a BBC article about this project:

http://earth.google.com/rome/index.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7725560.stm

There was obviously some serious brain power and time behind this - but what a great educational opportunity for many different disciplines - not only history, but literature, art, cultural, and even religious studies. Hopefully, this will catch on and we will see more re-creations like this - maybe even ones tied to virtual worlds like Second Life? One can dream.

For those too busy (or impaired by archaic admin restrictions) to be able to go in and check this out, here is a video that gives you a preview:

We all like the companies that think of cool new tech tools for us to play with. For the most part, many of these companies still think within their respective box - even if the box is still out there and inventive. What I really like is when people that work for these inventive companies start finding inventive ways to use their inventive programs. Are you tired of me using that word? At least I didn’t use the work ‘maverick.’

I came across this blog post on the official Zoho blog describing how you could use Zoho Meeting to access a desktop remotely (and for free). Cool use of a tool, I thought - and then I came to the disclaimer at the bottom about this idea not being officially supported by Zoho - it was just a good idea someone there had.

Concepts like this are interesting, especially seeing that Zoho also works on mobile app versions of their products. Could remote access of a desktop through your iPhone or other mobile device be too far behind this? You never know. But think of the possibilities for “anytime, anywhere learning” if that does come true.

Oh, BlackBoard. I really do try to give you a fair break. You just make it so hard not to. Recently I linked to some videos that highlight the new changes coming in BlackBoard NG:

http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/

Chapter 2: User Interface… Something about that looks familiar. What is it… [stares off blankly at my iGoogle page] hmmm…. not coming to me. I’m sure it will soon….

Then, a friend sends me this link to BlackBoard NG ads:

http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/ads/

While it would be so easy to mock the acting, the blank stares, the stand-ins with the look of “will this come back to haunt me when I finally land that sweet job at Google?” on their faces… that would be too easy. I mean, with as much money as BlackBoard makes, couldn’t they actually afford actors and script writers? Probably even the real PC and Mac guys?

Nah - I won’t go there. The thing that gets me is the righteous indignation that surfaced when defending “the patent.” How they so defiantly defended how innovative and original they are. And then sued Desire2Learn for a system that basically comes close to their patent (but isn’t really a down right copy). So, sue those that kind of copy you, but then blatantly copy others? Brag about being an innovative and cutting edge company, and then follow others? Hmmm…..