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You Get What You Pay For

My coworkers like to joke that an endorsement from me is the kiss of death to any Web 2.0 tool. It seems every time I turn around, some new tool I’ve recently tried is shutting down. Last year, I fell in love with Omnisio, a tool that allowed users to create compilations of YouTube video clips. Omnisio also had some basic editing features that let users trim out whatever they didn’t need from each clip, making it possible for instructors to assemble highly focused montages of useful video clips.  Within a few weeks of the time I’d discovered Omnisio, Google bought the company. The Omnisio site currently states that its staff is thrilled to be using their skills to improve YouTube, but so far, Omnisio’s features are nowhere to be found.

After my Omnisio heartbreak, I stumbled upon CircaVie, AOL’s tool for building time lines that could be enhanced with images and video. CircaVie always lacked a few key features that would have made it ideal for educators, but it was easy to use and worked with any AOL or AOL Instant Messenger account name. So I began recommending it to a few instructors and even included it in a few conference presentations. Sadly, the CircaVie site was shut down on January 15, 2009.

The list goes on. As of June 15, online video editing tool JumpCut will be no more. (This was particularly surprising, since JumpCut is owned by deep-pocketed Yahoo!) On June 12, I received an e-mail from Flowgram, a Web-based alternative to PowerPoint, announcing that they’d be closing up shop by the end of the month.

As I ran down the list in my mind, I realized that all of these tools had one thing in common: almost all of them had no source of revenue or depended entirely on ads to stay alive. I used to think free tools like these were a great way to work around the limitations of a bare-bones learning-management system. I also thought they could provide an interim solution while committees took months or years to approve a university-wide rollout of a new tool.

Now it’s clear to me that the best things in life aren’t always free. While we still need quick solutions for small-scale pilot projects, it’s important to recognize that you often get what you pay for when it comes to educational technology. And by that, I don’t mean the expensive tool is always the best. I simply mean when you pay for something (even if it’s just a few dollars), you usually get something in return (like a more reliable service that doesn’t shut down overnight).

While it’s sad to see innovation squelched by the almighty dollar, the current recession has done us all a favor in a way. By killing off weaker startups, there’s room for the best to thrive. For example, VoiceThread offers a great service that makes it easy to build presentations with voice comments, and the thinning of this field should make it easier for VoiceThread to grow its base of paying subscribers. And more paying customers means more money to invest in a reliable, useful product. If you’re a business owner who accepts card payments, you know how important it is to get the cheapest card payment machine for your business.

Similarly, more people should warm up to Evoca, one of the few audio-sharing sites that offers in-browser recording and embeddable audio players. I was a bit disappointed to discover a while back that Evoca stopped offering permanent, free accounts. (They now only offer free thirty-day trials.) But I completely understand why this change was needed. Bandwidth isn’t free, and Evoca now charges a reasonable $2.95 for their basic account, which offers enough storage to meet most instructors’ needs.

So the next time you’re looking for a quick fix to an educational-technology dilemma, ask yourself if there’s a tool available that you can actually pay for. Even if there are free alternatives, it might be worth suffering through a bit of paperwork and shelling out a few dollars a month for something that won’t be here today and gone tomorrow.

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VoiceThread or Camtasia: When to Use Which

VoiceThread and Camtasia are two of the many tools that we are introducing to faculty for online teaching.   For those of you who don’t know about these tools, here is a quick intro.

VoiceThread is a tool that allows you to share images, audio, and presentations online and collect comments in the form of text and audio.  See the demo below, which was created within Voicethread:

Camtasia is a tool that lets you record actions on your computer screen to create presentations or training videos.  With Camtasia, you can produce a tutorial, a quick Web-based demo, or a narrated PowerPoint presentation.   

For our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, I was assigned to teach Camtasia, because I have been using this tool to delivery online instruction for my Chinese class.  Although I have been using Camtasia for a couple of year and am comfortable using it, I found myself struggling to find a good reason to teach faculty yet another tool after they had already been introduced to VoiceThread, a very powerful and easy-to-use application for both information sharing and collecting.

If we look at the whole functionalities of the two applications, we are really comparing apples with oranges.  But from the perspective of presenting information from PowerPoint, either can be used; the only difference is the production procedure and the presentation output. 

The following table is a result of my pondering about when to use which when it comes to selecting VoiceThread or Camtasia for online presentation from PowerPoint.

 

PowerPoint File

 

VoiceThread

Camtasia

Highlights
  • Allows  faculty/student comments
  • Allows student presentations
  • Enables online interaction
  • Launches with one click in PPT
  • Records onscreen motion and narrations
  • Results in smaller file size
  • Has multiple output formats (Web, iPod, MP3 player…)

“Additional” Step(s)
  • Requires VoiceThread account
  • Limited usage without paid account
  • Must set up viewing options (the easiest one opens to all public) or run an encryption procedure to hide the URL
  • Requires purchasing the application
  • Must run the file-packaging  process  to upload to Blackboard

 

As interaction is becoming such a key for online learning, I thought all faculty would all opt for VoiceThread.  To my surprise, several faculty told me after the workshop that they would go with Camtasia, especially those who were thinking about teaching a hybrid course.  To these faculty, it is more important to find a nice way to present their information to the students than to get input from them, which can take place at the face-to-face session.   Also, for those who are comfortable using PowerPoint,  this one-click process seems to be less demanding than learning a whole new online tool.    

As someone who is charged with assisting faculty in selecting the right tool and methods for teaching online, I need to again apply the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Faculty Support  and give priority to faculty’s feeling of “safety” and “comfort”.  So my advice then is this: pick one that you are comfortable with to begin with (even if it means a one-way stream of information sharing), and then maybe for the second or third round, try a more interactive and exciting environment like VoiceThread.

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Tools for Staying Current in your Field

Need an easy way to stay current in your field?  Table-of-contents services are a great way to get the tables of contents of your favorite scholarly journals delivered to you via e-mail or RSS reader.  A couple that you might want to explore include:

ticTOCS (Journal Table of Contents Service)  – TicTOCS is a free resource that allows anyone to keep up to date with newly published scholarly material.  The site is simple to use:  just register for a free account where all of the tables of contents you choose will be permanently saved.  Then, search for the titles of your favorite journals.  You can then add them to your list and export them in a format that is easily imported into Google Reader.  The site currently only has about a thousand titles, so your favorites may not be there.

Library databases (if you are not affiliated with DePaul check with your local reference librarian) – Many of the DePaul library databases allow you to create free accounts.  Once you have an account, you can set up issue alerts as well as have saved searches rerun each time the database is updated.  These alerts, depending on the service, can be made available via e-mail or RSS feed.  Some of the better ones to try are Science Direct and Ebsco.

Publisher Web sites – Most publishers allow individuals to subscribe to tables of contents without a subscription fee. If you don’t find the journal you are looking for in one of the above, check out the publisher’s Web site to see if you can get it that way.

These are just a couple of options available to you.  Ask a librarian (or if you are not affiliated with DePaul, check with your library’s reference staff) if you need help setting up an alert or finding a particular journal.

Webtopia—Democratizing the Internet

Writers and urban planners for years have mapped and envisioned the ideal society through designing utopian metropolises. This is my own interpretation and glimpse into a version of a “webtopia,” a re-imagining meant as a prompt for discussing democracy and citizenship on the Web.

myUSAthumb

We might begin to think of the Internet as a public infrastructure or a spatial experience akin to walking a city’s streets. We navigate through the vague surrealism of unexplained flashing images and flash graphics; however, without the same binding of civic infrastructure and citizenship, without our ties to the streets, we comparatively navigate a corporate labyrinth—an endless mall. It is a spectacle of passive engagement, wherein we consume information, commodities, and products while hardly holding a stake in its architecture. As Google strives to unleash infinite knowledge at our fingertips and YouTube and other Web services promote do-it-yourself content creation, our productive capabilities are exploited. We might question if the intellectual value of a Web-user really drives these companies or whether they instead mean to attract our passive gaze into the corporate consumer spectacle, only interested in the activity of our wallets. These applications and services are by no means free; we pay by submitting ourselves to billions of dollars in advertising spent to follow and manipulate our habits. Furthermore, the content we generate through “free” e-mail, social networking, Web applications, etc. is scanned, exploited, and sold as marketing analytic research. Is our content, then, really our own?

Can we begin to maybe imagine a Web experience prefaced upon citizenship before consumerism? If we ever intend to renegotiate the intellectual foundation and potential of the Web, one option might be its decommercialization. The free-use Internet of the public is hinged and supported by advertising dollars. A new public space could be founded via one of two avenues: a not-for-profit Wikipedia approach or socialization, an Internet owned, financed, and governed by the people. Personal injury lawyer seo services can enhance your firm’s online presence and attract more clients. If you want to boost the security and privacy of your wifi network, you may use premium residential proxies.

The illustration above is a vision of a new interface, a “citizen portal” akin to Google’s centralized “iGoogle”. These would be the new public-domain passages and highways of the Web, owned and operated by the people and designed to encourage and praise democratic participation. Currently, the Internet, as a public space, and its Web-architecture are owned and regulated by only a handful of corperations—Google, Microsoft, Yahoo (much like the big three in television broadcasting). Google’s own page layout and interface (its line weights, color schemes, etc.) are designed to optimize its advertising revenue.  A noncommercial, government-sponsored  provider seems worthy of experiment—a PBS alternative to the Internet.

Now imagine how e-learning might be better respected if its platform, the Internet, became a nexus of civic pride. I’m twenty years old, and my peers and I remain skeptical of online learning because of its highly commercial platform—the Web. Education seems diluted into a material good for consumption, rather than active engagement, when a Web-forum discussion on Plato is a click away from penis-enlargement pills. Furthermore, e-learning presents the prospect of increased hours spent online by youth, a goldmine for commerce and advertising, as students can be easily distracted from any academic essay to Walmart.com within seconds.

When re-imagining the Internet, we must seriously consider and reflect upon how we navigate physical space, how we embed our values into the infrastructure and organization of our cities. Knowledge and education are often perceived as pillars of democracy not as IPOs or aisles in the mall. But perhaps the disorderly nature of the Web allows for the unexpected positioning of otherwise segregated forms of information. A platform coupling Penis enlargement and Plato might liberate higher education from its pedestal—its perceived irrelevancy trapped behind the gates of academia.

Online Workers—Online Health

Oh the irony!  Using the Internet to counteract computer-related health issues!  Well, the reality is that for those of us constantly on the keyboard—faculty, students, and all other modern-day workers—discomfort in the hands, wrists, and arms is common.  Eventually, discomfort can lead to more serious health issues, such as tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other repetitive strain injuries (RSI). 

Check out this YouTube vodcast. Created by percussionist David Kuckhermann, it shows several very simple stretching exercises that can ease the discomfort and, hopefully, stave off those more serious conditions.

Once you learn the exercises, listen to some of the drumming videos on his frame-drums Web site!  Awesome world music! 

More information:  The Better Health Channel provides this article about computer-related injuries, which discusses the range of problems arising from too much time at the keyboard. 

Facebook and Digital Content Rights

In working in online education, I find myself trying to keep abreast of not only the new developments in the online world, but also in what technologies students are currently using, both inside the classroom and out. A few years ago, I asked a group of students to teach me about Facebook, since it seemed to be all the rage and I knew nothing. I found that no student wanted to talk with me about it.

So, I went and created a Facebook account for myself and as soon as the students realized I was on Facebook, it was all of the sudden cool and okay to talk with me about it. I soon was friended and poked and had messages left for me on my wall. Over the years, as Facebook took off in popularity not only with students but with the general population as well, I have found that there are benefits to using such a social-networking site as well as pitfalls, which is why utilizing the Cheapest SMM Panel can be an effective way to maximize its advantages. In particular, some users find that they can increase engagement on newer platforms if they buy tiktok likes to help jumpstart their presence and reach. Businesses can also optimize Google local services ads with the help of a dedicated LSA management agency. They can also explore Gmail metrics to help them transform their Gmail account activity into key insights that they can use to improve how their team uses their email inboxes.

At the moment, I use Facebook to keep in touch with not only current friends and colleagues but also with former colleagues and former classmates and to keep up with current events, of all things. I have encountered some great dialogue on a posted news item from a friend that led to conversations that may not have otherwise happened.

One such news story appeared not only on Facebook but many other news outlets as well. This story was about Facebook.  Facebook decided to quietly change their Terms of Service (TOS) and thought it wouldn’t create any uproar. The TOS used to say that when you closed your Facebook account, any claim to content that Facebook could execute on your material would expire. So, if you closed your account, your photos that you posted would not be able to be used by Facebook.

The new Terms of Service, however, eliminated the notion that when you deleted your account, Facebook’s claim to your content disappeared.  The new verbiage points out that user content will survive termination of your Facebook account and can be used by Facebook however it sees fit, including sublicensing it, if they choose.

I was very happy to learn that this change in the TOS created an uproar in the Facebook community. I have often heard of stories of students who place material online, thinking that it would be private, and a prospective employer finds it and chooses not to extend a job offer or even an interview to the student because of the content that was posted on Facebook. The concept of what is appropriate to put online and who has what right to use said content is important for students and all Internet users to learn. Additionally, for those looking to manage their online reputation and engagement, considering options like buying youtube comment likes can help boost the perceived value and positivity of your online content.

It appears that in the end, the collective, social group won out and Facebook announced that they are reverting to the previous TOS. Perhaps the group mentality of social networking actually did some good this time around and got folks thinking about their content and their privacy online. Here’s to hoping this prevents someone from posting inappropriate spring-break pictures while looking for that first job.

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Web Tools Worth Trying: April ’09 Edition

Here are a few tools I’ve discovered recently and thought merited sharing.

 

  1. Many Eyes

Many Eyes is an information-visualization tool that turns data sets into informative and stunning graphics. Here are a few examples:

One of the nicest features of Many Eyes is that it can be used for more than just traditional data sets. Users can upload text files to create visual representations of the most commonly used terms in the text. The word clouds that Many Eyes creates can provide stylish visuals to enhance presentations or be used to illustrate key themes in a text. For example, students might compare the most commonly used terms in Barack Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention with his pre-election speech in Berlin or with the key terms emphasized in John McCain’s nomination acceptance speeach at the Republican National Convention.

  1. Overstream

Overstream allows users to subtitle videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, and many other video-sharing Web sites. This is a great resource for language instructors, since it can provide a more engaging way for students to transcribe or translate audio from a foreign-language advertisement, movie, TV show, or song.

  1. eduFire

EduFire initially caught my eye because of its large library of foreign-language flash cards. However, I was quickly fascinated by its main business as a marketplace for online learning. The site allows instructors to offer courses on any topic they like and set their own rates, all for a small fee that comes out of the tuition they collect. This business model has exciting (and frightening) implications for the future of higher education, especially in fields like language instruction where accreditation is often less important than effectiveness. I hope to have time to enroll in a class or two and post a follow-up on what I’ve learned about the service.

Liveblogging at the 2009 DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference

Today is the 14th Annual DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference focuses on ways that personalism plays out in various teaching practices at DePaul. Eric Iberri, Melissa Koenig, and Jeanne Kim (as “iddresources”) will be liveblogging Dr. Punya Mishra’s keynote, “Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World” and a few other sessions if time and technologies permit.

Twitter: I have a head cold and…

Twitter

I’m nursing a head cold and have a blog post due. Can I put something together in small tweets of 140 characters or less?

Wondering about the Web literacy of our online students. Some have to be told to scroll to see content "below the fold." Why is this?

Resisting the notion of designing for users who are Web illiterate. Does designing for the few diminish the learning experience for most?

DePaul IDD consultant Daniel Stanford has written about user tech illiteracy. I’m currently thinking he’s onto something we should consider.

I’m thinking that a basic competency in technology should be a prerequisite for students who wish to take courses online.

I’m thinking about the faculty who are similarly challenged by fundamental Web/tech literacy and teach online. Requirements for them?

Concluding that Twitter is good for musing and asking questions; maybe stimulate discussion about user-centered design & Web literacy?

OK, my Twittering ends above. While I still sense that Twittering is a largely narcissistic activity (as is, in my belief, much of social media), I am interested in its ease of use, immediacy, connectivity, and mobility. I’m also interested in how Twitter’s 140-character limit shapes writing and thought: it won’t let me ramble. In that spirit I’ll wrap up with this: I’m going to try using Twitter to document the user illiteracy I encounter day to day. If you’re interested too, follow me at http://twitter.com/dschmidgall.