Monthly Archives: December 2007

The 12 Web Tools of Christmas

If you are like me, you come across dozens, if not hundreds of new websites a year, each offering some new tool or web 2.0 service that is sure to revolutionize the way your surf the web or do your work. Most are just neat little gimmicks or don’t fit into your workflow. However, there are some I’ve run across this year that I found to be quite useful either for personal or professional use. And without further ado, I give you the 12 Web Tools of Christmas.

DropSend1) dropsend.com — Do ever need to email a large file like a high-resolution photo or video clip? Don’t want your email to hang-up for 30 minutes, only to reject the file and force you to start all over? With DropSend, you can send files up to 1 GB with ease. A free account also gives you 250MB of online storage.

Buzzword2) buzzword.com — Buzzword is hands down the best online word processor I’ve ever used. The interface is clean and elegant. Adding images and tables is easy, its collaborative tools are very slick, and it handles pagination and typography better than Google Docs and Zoho. Adobe recently acquired the company that developed Buzzword, so look for them to put their muscle into Buzzword’s future development. (I like Buzzword so much, I even used it to create the first draft of this blog post.)

EditGrid3) editgrid.com — What buzzword is for word processing, EditGrid is for spreadsheets. It’s the most “Excel-like” of the available online spreadsheets and if you are a power Excel user, then EditGrid is the only web app that could possibly meet your needs. Many Excel features, including sorting, charts, auto-fill, cell border, number formatting, cell formatting, import, export, freeze pane, text overflow, auto-fit row/column size, word warp, and cell comments, all work the same in EditGrid as they do in Excel with the exact same keyboard shortcuts. And since EditGrid is a web app, it’s easy to setup cells that retrieve data directly from the Internet. Also promising is EditGrid’s integration with the iPhone.

splashup4) splashup.com — Splashup is the closest thing to a web-based version of Photoshop—at least until Abobe releases the real thing. This little tool covers about 20% of the real Photoshop’s features, but they happen to be the ones I use 80% of the time. It connects directly to flickr and picasa for easy access to your images stored online. I just wished it saved working files as .psd instead of in its own proprietary .fxo format.

Scribd5) scribd.com — I hate websites that contain links to .pdfs and Word .docs. It’s annoying to have to download the file and open it another application in order to get one or two pieces of information. The more I have to repeat this process the more annoyed I get and the more likely I am to abandon the site and go on to something else. Scrbid prevents you from annoying me and other users like me. It allows you to upload your .pdfs and .docs and then provides you a flash document reader that you can embed in your webpage. Think of it as youtube for documents.

VectorMagic6) vectormagic.stanford.edu — This is THE TOOL if you need to convert bitmap images into vector formats. It actually works better than Adobe’s LiveTrace feature that is included in Illustrator. This little utility has allowed me to scale up logos for HD Video with a minimum of fuss.

ZamZar7) zamzar.com — Zamzar is another utility that has proven to be a real lifesaver. If you ever find yourself out of the office and away from your $1000 encoding software, zamzar will be your best friend. Zamzar is a Swiss-army knife of file conversion. It can convert from formats like DOC to PDF, PNG to JPG, and OGG to MP3. Name almost any two file types and Zamzar can convert one into the other. The quality of video file conversion is not the greatest, but when you are in a pinch, it’s good enough.

Miro8) getmiro.com — I love iTunes. It’s great. It’s the primary way I listen to music and find and download podcasts. However, iTunes was initially designed as an audio player and video has just come along for the ride. Imagine an iTunes that was designed from the ground up with video in mind. What would it include? Well, it would play multiple file types including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, and Flash Video. It would handle HD files with ease and efficiency. It would support and download bit-torrent files. It would connect to any publisher with a video RSS feed. Take all this, add in social-site integration with Digg and del.icio.us, and you have Miro.

Box9) box.net — Box.net provides simple and easy to use online file storage and sharing, but’s that not all. You also get password protection for all shared files and integration with web apps like Zoho, and Twitter. Plus, box.net provides one-click posting to WordPress and LiveJournal with more apps and services being added all the time The first GB of storage is free with a wide range of pricing plans for additional storage and bandwidth. A box account is a real asset when you are on the road without a laptop of your own.

TokBox10) tokbox.com — TokBox is an online video chat client that you can embed in any webpage or blog. This has exciting educational potential, since a TokBox video chat session could theoretically be conducted from within a course in Blackboard.

wufoo-copy.gif11) wufoo.com — Wufoo let’s you quickly build pretty web forms and surveys and then embed them into your personal webpage. The data analysis tools look nice too. The free account gives you 3 forms with up to 100 entries a month.

Flock12) flock.com — Flock is the web browser for users devoted to their social networks. If I were a big Facebook user, Flock would be the only browser I would use. Flock’s ability to keep track of your contacts, online accounts, social bookmarks, and stored media and keep them all in easy reach is the best thing to happen to web surfing since tabbed browsing.

And here’s one more tool for a Happy New Year…

Twinetwine.com — What is twine? I have no idea. Apparently it is social bookmarking meets wikis meets YouTube with a layer of artificial intelligence keeping everything just a search tag away. It’s the first true semantic web application! (Whatever that really means.) I recommend you apply for a beta invitation because everyone will be blogging about it next year and you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. It’s 2008, the year of Web 3.0.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go: The Evolving Role of Instructional Designers

Recently, I finished reading Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 from the November 3rd, 2007 edition of Educause Quarterly. This article discusses the top-ten issues facing academic technologists/instructional designers and how “this is a particularly important time for the academic technology/instructional design profession, which is moving beyond the formative stages.”

For those of you who are now dying to know what the top-ten issues are, you can read them below:

  1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
  2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
  3. Translating learning research into practice
  4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
  5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
  6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
  7. Sharing content, applications and application development
  8. Protecting institutional data
  9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
  10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists.

It is interesting to note that these top-ten issues group themselves into the following themes: assessment, best practices, expectations, collaboration and ethics/privacy. Personally, I believe that numbers 1 through 9 are all parts of number 10. Part of the role of academic technologists/instructional designers is to assist in the issues presented in 1-9. All of this is in addition to being the “expert resource on best practices in educational technology” and maintaining “knowledge of online methodologies, instructional design, Web and multimedia design, accessibility and adaptive learning technologies, and learning styles.”

The article goes on to emphasize that academic technologists/instructional designers need to be more integrated into the institutional culture and campus initiatives as a whole in order to effectively help set directives. In addition to this, I see that individuals in these roles also need to be actively involved with other organizations at the same institution. The pieces of design, technology, assessment and accessibility are often handled by various individuals in various departments across the institution. In order for technology to be effectively integrated into the curriculum with the ability to assess exactly how effective it is, many different units need to come together and work collaboratively to make it happen. It is difficult to design effective courses if parts of the technology are not dependable or don’t work in a manner that achieves pedagogical goals. It is nice to create a lot of interesting curricular pieces, but if there is no broad assessment of its effectiveness, is the development of the content worthwhile? Are proper accessibility guidelines being followed which match the efforts of the institution at large?

In a field which is still finding its firm footing in education, it is good to occasionally step back for a broader perspective. It’s important to not only observe how far we’ve come, but to also look at where we are currently and where we need to go in order to provide the best education for our students that we can.

Too Cool for School Revisited: Second Life in Higher Ed

“Everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available without distinction of good or evil. This is the principal law of our age.” —Jacques Ellul, 1954

I just returned from Orlando, where I attended the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, and can’t stop thinking about Ellul’s views on technology. While I can’t claim to be an expert on his seminal work The Technological Society, my take on him is that he believed the advancement and implementation of technology as inevitable, but that we can choose how we respond and adapt. In essence, tech is here, tech is staying, more tech is coming. What shall we do about it?

Ellul came to mind as I thought about the heated arguments against Second Life I heard at Sloan. Some people are angry—really angry—about the idea of Second Life in education. I found myself wondering what it is about Second Life that’s so threatening. Is it the learning curve? The time and money it takes to develop a viable presence in-world? Or maybe it’s the fear of losing an old and trusted way of teaching in the headlong rush to embrace the new and unproven. No matter. That Second Life and the technology it represents and exploits will be widely implemented in education despite our fears is given. How thoughtfully we’ll use this technology and to what ends are the things we should be researching and debating, not casting stones about in an attempt to forestall the inevitable.

I think I understand the objections some educators have to Second Life. It’s often difficult to point to a sound pedagogical reason for having a Second Life campus. It’s expensive to purchase, develop and maintain an island. It’s still relatively clumsy to navigate and interact in-world. It’s still more a novelty and a pleasant diversion than a proven learning tool. And just how do you justify the expenditure of resources for a virtual campus when your physical campus has its very real needs? Are we going to build virtual campuses just because students think Second Life is cool?

Well, yes. That’s exactly why we will. We will build institutions in Second Life because online learning students in the near future will demand it. They’ll insist on access to it for social connections and interaction and a palpable sense of user presence that smashes the psychological walls of distance; a presence, connection and interaction unmatched by cost per user or ease of use by any other technology currently available. We’ll build them to market our institutions, to strengthen our brands, to compete for students and prestige. We’ll build them for many of the same reasons we fund and field sports teams and build student unions and fitness centers for our on-campus students; because it adds to the social experience of higher education and because that experience has value in and of itself.

And we’ll build them because we must be prepared for the inevitable. The technology that Second Life exploits will become cheaper, more stable, easier to use and impossible to ignore. I’d bet that we’ll see some kind of 3D virtual environment incorporated into Blackboard et al within 5 years. Will we make creative use of its potential? Will we maximize its benefits and mitigate its drawbacks? If we use Second Life and its descendants merely to deliver the same old course content and methodologies, we’ll fail our students and ourselves. We need to think now about how we’ll use this technology, how we’ll exploit its strengths, and how we’ll create new learning methodologies and possibilities for experiences and connections. Second Life is here. The rise of the virtual campus is inevitable. Will we be ready?

Lessig’s Last Copyright Rant: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law

A friend sent me a link to a great twenty-minute speech by Stanford University Professor of Law Larry Lessig. The speech, “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”, was filmed in March at the TED Conference but was posted just last month at the TED site. I’m posting it a bit late by blogging standards, but it’s a “better late than never” type of thing. It’s a must-see. A twenty-minute cultural moment, like Scorsese’s homage to Hitchcock.And even though many of you have seen this much-forwarded video already, I believe that Larry Lessig deserves as much bandwidth as possible. You won’t be disappointed with this presentation. Lessig is an incredibly engaging speaker who has gained a reputation of being quite a PowerPoint virtuouso. He’s passionate, incredibly brainy, and skilled at making an issue sound extremely pressing. Lessig gives a forceful speech about on how in our Internet-driven age, overly-restrictive control of copyright will truly stifle and stagnate creative expression in the youth today. Youth not only speak in a different way, but create and distribute knowledge in a completely different format. The older generation (music and movie execs included) need to stop and listen.

This presentation has some additional significance. This speech is probably the last public one Larry Lessig will probably ever give on this topic. In June, Lessig stated that he was shifting his academic focusfrom copyright and intellectual property issues to fighting the corruption that’s in the political process. As a founder of Creative Commons, an organization that helps artists, authors and scholars give others the freedom to adapt and build upon their works and improve their creativity without having to bring in any sort of legal counsel, Lessig has given creators a serious, concrete way to share information and build upon ideas without having the pressure and worry of the law breathing down their neck.I’m excited to see what Larry Lessig will be able to bring to the fight against political corruption. I hope he’ll speak with Jeff Tweedy regarding this cause. But I do know that there is still a lot of work to be done regarding Creative Commons, particularly at the higher educational level, where academic publishers seem to have their own stranglehold on creativity with their copyright regulations and such. But that’s a blog post for another day. Until then, enjoy the video. Share it. Remix it. Just don’t remix it with a Prince song.