JAlbum: free web photo album

JAlbum (via Education Weblog) is a photo web album generator. From the site:

This gallery software makes web albums of your digital images. JAlbum aims to be the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category - and free!

With JAlbum, no extra software is needed to view the albums, -just your web browser. Unlike "server side" album scripts, JAlbum albums can be served from a plain web server without scripting support. You can also share your albums on CD-ROM.

Online free photo sources

Photoshop Tutorials blog (via digg) has a list of online free photo resources.

Crash course in learning theory

The blog "Creating Passionate Users" has a "Crash course in learning theory." Nicely done and useful in planning course activities.

Homeportals: a new extensible homepage

HomePortals (via TechCrunch) is a new personalized extensible homepage. TechCrunch has this to say:

HomePortals is really unique in that every module is customizable, and can interface with other web services. So you can create a new module (and allows others to copy it), and/or modify attributes of an existing one.

For instance, there is a pre-created module to show recent del.icio.us bookmarks for a given user, recent flickr pictures for a given user, etc. I have not seen this type of functionality in the other services I’ve reviewed.

HomePortals also has a very nice blogging tool module (see it in action on the HomePortals blog). Now this is getting interesting: I can see using the blogging tool, and adding in my flickr pictures and del.icio.us bookmarks to give visitors a really in depth overview of who I am and what’s going on in my life. It’s like SuprGlu, but the blogging tool is built in, not pulled in.

video iPods and unitedstreaming videos

At the Discovery Educator Network blog, you download Dennis Grice's instructions about using video iPods to download a video from unitedstreaming and then show it on a TV.

Tech Tools for Learning

Will Richardson has an article, Tech Tools for Learning, published in Access Learning, which you can download from his recent posting here. His opening paragraph reads:

Over the last few years, our relationship with the Web has been changing dramatically. Simple new technologies like weblogs and podcasts are allowing us to not only create content like text, audio, and video more easily, they are also allowing us to publish and share that content on the Web with very little effort. Instead of a “read only” Web, we’re entering the age of the Read/Write Web, where contributing knowledge is as easy as consuming it. Being able to publish worldwide this easily does raise legal and ethical issues for educators to be aware of, but it also facilitates a whole range of new learning potentials for students and teachers in the classroom. Here is a quick look at some of the technologies that are changing the way educators think about and deliver instruction.

He has quite a bit of information on technology tools for education (RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasting, and streaming video with links) packed into 4 pages. Recommended.

Blogging and audience

Bill Schachner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a nice article on blogging, "Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere" It begins:

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author "seems like a bitter man." In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

The article gives quite a few stories leading to real-world interaction, and although most postings do not lead to such interaction, the potential creates a forum of real writing for real audiences: another reason for incorporating blogs into writing classes.

Purposeful blogs and grading

How to grade a blog? For Ken Smith's rubrics, Aaron Nelson provides links here and here. Aaron also has his own summary of those grading guidelines focused on the purpose of blogging:

1. Grading around audience
2. Grading around freshness
3. Grading around developing a “house style.” - I really thought this was neat. Voice!
4. Grading around how well participants connected and built community.

All of these items make sense, but they're also abstract, which makes them difficult to grade and difficult for students to use in developing their blogging: the more abstract, the more understanding of the rubric can diverge among teacher and students. If the class discusses these guidelines and comes up with concrete examples, they could work not simply towards "purpose" but also in transferring to new contexts.

Aaron also cites James Mathew, who has his own article on purposeful blogging. Along the line of grading, James states,

Students should know exactly what is expected of them when it comes to blogs and the topics they blog about.

Performancing for Firefox

Performancing is a new blogging extension for Firefox 1.5 and above.

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

Performancing can allow you to post into Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and Live Journal, and guidelines for using Performancing are available from Jed Brown. Of course, one can simply go about posting the normal way.

Peformancing will eventually incorporate RSS feeds and Technorati tags, too. The advantage, I suppose, is the convenience of integrating all of one's web tools into one application, the browser. But I must add that keeping up with the greatest and latest in web technology takes a considerable amount of time. Right now, I'm trying to decide on which personalized web page to go with: Yahoo, Google, or Netvibes. Then, if something else comes along, will I take the time to investigate that one, too? Will Flock, the first browser incorporating a blogging editor, come back with something even better?

On a sidenote, Firefox has many extensions available, such as Flashgot and del.icio.us. One of my favorites is NoScript, which provides an extra layer of security:

Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site).

Blog on bilingual issues

bililingual NYC, a new blog on bilingual issues in New York City, has just started.

Students reading and RSS

A few posts below, I mentioned Netvibes, a personalized web page service that allows for RSS feeds. Actually, Google and Yahoo have the same service, although Hinchcliffe said Netvibes was much better than those and other existing ones. One advantage of Netvibes is its integration with Writely.com, an online collaborative word processor. Students working together on the same paper could do so at writely.com, and whenever someone updated it, they would receive notification at their netvibes site. Netvibes already have modules ready to receive feeds from Gmail, Flickr, the weather, a variety of blogs, bookmarks, and those of one's own making. And there's a module for notes. All in all, it's an easy-to-use web resource that can promote students reading, analyzing, and synthesizing (and thus writing) skills.

School of Blog

I just came across the School of Blog this morning, a blog on immigrant and bilingual issues. Quite interesting.

Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning

The All Ireland Society for Higher Education (via EduResources Weblog) has a free online book: Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning. From the foreword:

The purpose of this book is fourfold. F'irstly, drawing on Irish case studies and international perspectives, it seeks to encourage the enhancement of the student experience of learning, through the development of problem and Enquiry-based Learning. Secondly, it aims to share success stories while painting a realistic picture of the processes involved ...

It does this by discussing progress with initiatives and exploring difficulties, barriers, “mistakes,” improvements, alongside the strategies used to tackle these real emerging challenges. Thirdly, by drawing on many contributions from Ireland, it places Irish problem and enquiry-based practice in the international context. There are case studies from the seven Irish universities and the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Weblogs for teachers

From Weblogs: "Weblogs for and by teachers, educators, and learners. They contain ideas, resources, and tips that may be used in schools, universities, colleges, workshops and the rest of the academic world."

Press Plagiarist Award of the Year

Guido Fawke's Blog (via BBC via Slashdot) has solicited nominations for Press Plagiarist of the Year Award in a response to journalists lifting articles from blogs and passing them off as their own work in newspapers. Apparently, plagiarism is not limited to academia.

Writely for collaborative online writing

Brian Lamb at Abject Learning (via Educational Weblogs) recommends using Writely, an online collaborative writing environment, instead of Word 2004 for collaborative word processing.

Legal FAQ on student blogging

Electronic Frontier Foundation (via Stephen's Web) has a Blogger's FAQ concerning legal issues on student blogging, primarily on K-12 students, but also college.

Blogniscient and Memeorandum

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) reviews Blogniscient and Memeorandum, two news blogs that cover the most recent and most popular news and blog articles.

Flock: a new web browser

Flock is a new web browser that is a branch off Firefox. It has built-in tools for blogging, rss feeds, social bookmarks, Flickr, and so on.

Student blogs

My students have been posting to blogs for almost a month now. Some have personalized them in interesting ways. On "One Way Only," mickymice is incorporated images to complement the words, a picture of a birthday cake for, of course, a birthday, and an image of a young woman to indicate a state of contemplation (?) over leaking ceilings. JC uses a blue, italic font. These images seem to support VC's essay asserting that a blog "shows a little bit of the writer’s personality and life style."

Others (Francisco and Chiki) are incorporating quotations into their blogs, thus connecting to external sources. And the topics range widely from math to health to weather to attending a classical concert to relationships, and so on. The wide diversity of topics and approaches to posting is fascinating.

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Reporters without Borders (via Australian IT news) has released a downloadable handbook giving advice on setting up a blog anonymously. They write:

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.

Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

Citing blog sources

The Blog Herald provides excellent guidelines for referencing other blogs.

First day of class

School has begun, so this blog will focus more on my classes now. This semester, we are exploring "What is good writing?" We will research what it is, how to achieve it, and then create a web resource for future students of this class.

For right now, you need to post twice a week in your own blog. If I don't give you a topic, then write on anything of interest to you.

For the summaries next week, write about one paragraph. Include the title of the article, author, the source, the main idea, reasons for this idea, and your opinion about the article.

tag: 1430

ePortfolios

Matt Villano (in Campus Technology via Educational Technology Weblog) covers the development of electronic portfolios.

Driven by a variety of goals—including assessment and professional development— the electronic portfolio technology has caused a good deal of excitement in the academic world during the last few years; for some schools—those fully adopting the technology—it is dramatically changing the way they require students to demonstrate competencies.

It wasn't clear from the article how students changed other than from print to electronic with the ability to include a wider and flashier variety of data. Is there greater competenece in their major or career? Eportfolios needs to go beyond simply showcasing more of one's interests: They need to improve competence, if only in reflection.

What makes a strong post

From Weblogs in Education, a teacher lists student comments on what makes a strong post. As a group, students pretty much nail it on the head. One interesting comment, the author noted, was,

long posts create a community in the comment area / short posts not so much.

More software tools

From Educational Weblogs:

schtuff.com: a free wiki service

Schtuff is a FREE Wiki service. A Wiki is a website that lets anyone easily create and edit pages, promoting group collaboration.

photon: another free software tool.

Smart, intuitive, and highly configurable, Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

It's the missing link between the world's greatest photo management software and the world's favorite blogging platforms.

Gregarius, a web-based aggregator

(Via Educational Weblogs) Gregarious is an open-source, web-based aggregator for RSS, rdf, and Atom.

Tinderbox and coding

I got my first comment a few days ago, and surprisingly, it spread to every posting in this blog and in my other one. I was using the same account for both, and the postings were not unique. After creating another account for the other blog, I then used "id," which is unique to each posting. However, it didn't work. I put my problem on the Haloscan forum, and someone said "id" was apparently being treated as text. So, going back to the manual, I tried 117 in the template. Success! And for once, it took me less than an hour to figure something out with software.

Moveable Type is free

You can download for free Moveable Type, software for writing blogs, or you can get better support with a greater number of authors for a reasonable price.

FlickrExport for iPhoto

Download for free FlickrExport, an iPhoto plugin that lets you upload photos from iPhoto directly to Flickr.com. The software was created by Fraser Speirs, who has started a new company, Connected Flow, which has one other product, Xjournal, a client for the LiveJournal weblog (i.e., blog) service.

New technologies and software

Via Educational Weblogs, here are some new technologies:

MediaTuner: a rich media RSS aggregator/player that handles text, podcasts, videocasts, etc. (free)
Blog.mac: a weblog editor designed for the Mac ($29.99)
Free vlog tutorial
mefeedia: an aggregator for videos

From Sudeep Bangal at Brilliant Ignorance (via XplanaZine): a list of essential freeware for PCs

Blogs in law classrooms

For those interested in ways of incorporating blogs into the classroom, consider reading law professor (Ohio State U.) Dan Doublas Berman's Prawfsblawg posting (via Depraved Librarian). For one example, he has a link to Sentencing Law and Policy, a blog he used for one class.

Podcasting potential

For a variety of uses for podcasts, read Marc Fisher's "Podcasting Potential" in The Washington Post. Among the more unusual was the one for obituaries:

The need to have newspaper obituaries read to you via your iPod may not have struck you as an imperative for the new media technology, but audio obits nonetheless await your download at http://blogofdeath.com .

Life cache

From Will Richardson (via Jeff Davis), I learned a new phrase had been coined: Life cache. Life caching apparently means to tell stories of one's life, which has been made easy by electronic story-telling tools, such as Nokia's Lifeblog (to be used with its cell phones), which and HP's Storycast, a digital storytelling with photos and narration. See many more at trendwatching.com. A generation of storytellers is being born.

Blog resources for teachers

Annette Lamb (via Anne Davis) has two pages on using blogs in the classroom here and here, of which the latter has more than a few good resources.

Blogging mistakes to avoid

Kurt of "30 stories up" (via The Blogherald) writes about "7 mistakes [to avoid] your first week blogging." Kurt refers readers for a fuller treatment of the subject to postings by Darren at Problogger, called "31 days to building a better blog headquarters."

RSS Glue

Will Richardson, in his "RSS Magic" post, comments on RSS feeds being the "glue" that hold blog conversations together. He sums up the potential for class interactions (within and without) well:

And maybe that's the new strategy, get teachers and students rss-ing first. Give them a framework for understanding how disparate looking pieces of content really aren't as disconnected as they seem, and that there are new ways to find and collect and archive ideas from any number of previously unknown places.

The right blogging tool

Susannah Gardner (via Edublog Insights) gives guidelilnes on determining which blogging software is best for your purposes and also defines blogging jargon. She also has a related Blog Software Comparison Chart.

Exporting text in Tinderbox

It's difficult to get the text in Tinderbox, the software for this blog, to look like I want, and the text looks different on PCs and Macs. I found preferences for text export, but that doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

The photo touch

This weekend, I started to set up my new website, Second Language Writing, where I plan to move this blog. For starters, I used Yotophoto, a search engine for free photos, to collect pictures of writing in different languages, and then I put them into a Flickr badge. These software tools help to add a nice photo touch to one's website.

Digg: social bookmarking, RSS, blog and more

A new software tool Digg combines elements of social bookmarking, RSS feeds, blogs, and more. From their site (via Ulises Umejias):

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

This seems to combine all the software tools into one. But what's different is that the users decide which articles are the best.

Keeping up with blog reading

Nathan Matias (via Mark Bernstein) details how to keep up with reading lots of blogs via aggregating RSS feeds, along with describing popular RSS aggregating software.

Find free pictures online

Anne Davis (Edublog Insights) posted about Yotophoto, the first search engine for finding free photos and images on the Internet.

Design theory for new bloggers

The Blog Herald has an article on guidelines for designing blogs.

"KISS theory equates to keeping an idea simple: literally keep it simple stupid, and it should also be a theory that is best applied to new blogs by new bloggers, because although design is not a major factor in determining the success of your blog, bad design actually works against future success by driving readers away before they can become hooked by your content.

At the same time though new bloggers should consider customizing their blogs to some extent. Whilst the days of Blogger Blogs all having the same generic orange heading are gone, I still find that amongst free services that one blog tends to look the same as the next blog on that service."

The article gives the 4 C's of blog design as: Clean, Concise, Color, and Customize.

Question: How well do the 4 C's of blog design integrate the rhetorical principles of pathos, ethos, and logos? What else might we add, if anything?

Turning blog text into podcasts

A new software, Talkr, transforms blog text into podcasts. Talkr states:

"Our pitch is simple: we will convert your text-only blog into a podcast for free. We will monitor your blog every hour, and convert each new article into an mp3 audio file using the best speech synthesis software on the market. We will host those audio files and provide you with an RSS feed (and bandwidth) to make it easy for your readers to get access to your podcast."

According to Jeff White on Kairosnews,

"I took the couple minutes register, and the next thing I know...I was listening to posts from kairosnews.org being read to me in a quite pleasant voice. I was actually pretty impressed by the intonation skills the synthesizer had."

The Internet and persona

Although I've mentioned articles that talked about the downside of blogging with respect to academic search committees, Michael Bugeja in The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about how an Internet presence can aid one on the path to tenure and promotion:

"For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books and in promotion and tenure evaluations. It is commonplace for external reviewers to Google Web sites or troll databases before rendering their decisions on behalf of publishing houses and institutions.

Search committees also are using the Web to evaluate the writing or scholarship of job applicants before inviting them to on-campus interviews."

The disagreement between the articles is only an apparent one. Those against blogging were against blogging that presented a less-than-professional ethos, while the article in favor of an Internet presence recommended establishing a professional persona.

Appropriate ethos is determined by audience, of course. What's interesting is that the job applicants were unaware of what was an appropriate ethos, even though they had a Ph.D. in their discipline.

Question: If such unawareness of audience is present at that level, then what level of audience awareness should be teachers aim at for first-year composition?

Social bookmarking and safe blogging

In today's posting, Will Richardson mentions that Rob Slater is developing a social bookmarking program for teachers called scuttledu and wants test drivers.

In yesterday's postings (Edu Blog Hosting), Will listed some possibilities for those wanting to begin blogging in their classrooms in safe ways, including features "that offer the teacher preapproval of student posts/comment moderation capabilities."

Blog content theft

Duncan Riley of The Blog Herald writes about content theft. (This seems to go far beyond plagiarism. Perhaps bloggers need character education?) It seems that quite a few, Duncan says perhaps millions, blogs are using RSS feeds to steal content for posting on their own blogs, at times for profit. In fact, some sites even advertise that ability. Duncan posts this ad from an anonymous site:

Never hire another writer again and always have fresh up to the minute news and articles from your industry on your web pages. Add one line of code to your website and your pages will update themselves forever.

I don't think I'll need to worry about content theft, at least for the near future, but I like one solution posted by Paul Short in a comment to Duncan's entry. He says to add a copyright comment to the content itself:

(C) 2005 Blogherald.com If you’re not reading this in your news aggregator, this material has been stolen. Please contact editor at blogherald.com so we can take immediate legal action.

I imagine that once the thief notices it, they'll just delete it, as Rob Lewis in another comment to the entry said.

Tinderbox agents and categories

I've just figured out (it only took 90 minutes plus reading the manual carefully) how to do categories for my entries with Tinderbox, the software I use for my blogs. Tinderbox is great for querying words in a text and then gathering those notes into one category. The only problem I had that took another hour was how to exclude items from the sidebar and other places. I tried the simple code in the manual, but it didn't work. Finally, from the Fortran course I took in 1983, I remembered to group the included items and excluded items as hierarchically equal.

Increase in malware

Louisa Hearn (in the Sydney Morning Herald via The Blog Herald) reports a large increase in malware targeting computer uses. Moreover, hackers are becoming more innovative by residing on blogs and community sites like wikis.

"Photo albums, scrapbooks, blogs, screensavers and free greeting cards are all becoming potentially dangerous destinations as hackers and cyber criminals take advantage of a lack of security features on many of the hosting sites where they reside."

Understanding linking

On The Blog Herald, Duncan (via Anne Davis) has an excellent article on the role of links in "building traffic and gaining exposure for your blog." On accomplishing these goals, he makes some recommendations, the last one being,

"And the best of all: Link to others. Lead by example and link to sites and provide credit where credit is due. You’ll find that sometimes you get a link back! There is nothing worse than a blog or blogger that doesn’t give credit on posts where the idea is taken from elsewhere."

The notion of not giving credit resembles that of plagiarism in academia. Perhaps the concept comes to life naturally when ownership of writing is real as opposed to course requirements.

Which language to use for blogging?

Barbara Ganning has written an interesting article on choices of language in blogging, whether to blog in one language, across languages in one blog, or to keep multiple blogs, each one for a different language.

Write online and get fired

Writing, at least publicly online, can be dangerous to your career not only in academia (see July 10 entry) but elsewhere. In a NY Times article, ex-NYPD police officer Polstein claims he was fired for comments on his website criticizing NYPD.

Others over the last several years have lost their jobs, too. Joe Gordon was the first blogger to be fired in the U.K. The U.S. has a considerable head start, going back to February, 2002, when Heather Armstrong was the first to be fired for blogging, coining the word "dooced," meaning losing your job for something you wrote on your website. Even those working at innovative high-tech companies are not immune. Mark Jen was fired from Google for his blog, and Joyce Park was fired from Friendster, a company "known for breaking new ground in online social networking and promoting self-expression among peers."

On the legalities of blogging about work, read Jaime Weinman's article. To the point, Robert Scoble says you need "be smart" about what to publish online and "don't piss your boss off."

More on RSS feeds

On RSS feeds, Elise Bauer has a good introduction to them and lists some software that can do it easily. Although I can do a single RSS feed with Tinderbox, I haven't learned how to aggregate them all into one document yet. That will be an going project. For now, I will use iBlog to do it. iBlog, although blog software, is also an RSS reader, and a good one at that.

You may have noticed in the previous posting on Blogging controversy that the font in the quotes are different from my writing. I haven't quite figured out how to get them the same. I'm using HTML codes blockquote and font. The blockquote worked, but it made the font too large, so I inserted font, trying to control the size and style, but for some reason, I can't get it to be just what I want.

Blogging controversy in academia

Yesterday, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, an anonymous humanities professor published an essay on how blogs could derail an academic career. He frowned on academics who posted personal items for a "therapeutic outlet" (including "air[ing] departmental dirty laundry"), wrote"way-out there opinions that are not peer reviewed, and spent too much time in the computer lab:

"It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job."

Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at U of Maryland, responded, and these are my reasons, too, that academic blogs also helped to network and to motivate:

"The idea was to keep myself motivated. By writing in a fishbowl, I reasoned, I would have some real, external pressure to keep at it. I would never know who was reading (watching)."

RSS feed problems

Today, I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to make an RSS feed in Tinderbox, the same program used for making this blog. For those unfamiliar with this term, it's a way of having the news from your favorite websites sent to you automatically instead of you going to them. It's supposed to be a time saver--not including the time in setting it up, that is. Anyway, I went into the manual and followed each step carefully: create a note, put the news web address in the document preferences, set the attributes to fetch, and then just open up the note. Well, I followed those steps and it didn't work. I double-checked, quit the program, double-checked again, and it still didn't work. Finally, I gave in and emailed Mark Bernstein, the creator of the program. I dislike querying him until I've done my best to figure something out. I imagine he's busy enough as it is. Even so, he emailed me back in 2 hours. (I need to add that a quick response from Mark is the norm.) I had placed the web address in the wrong place. It should have been in Attributes. Tried it, and it worked. One word from the expert is worth a 1000 attempts by the novice! Thanks, Mark!

Technology: some success

Well, after spending four hours yesterday and two today trying unsuccessfully to figure out how to add titles and taglines to my weblog, I decided to go to the academic technology lab for help. Three of them tried to help out even though they had no experience with Tinderbox. One, Kim, who had more experience with web pages after about 30 minutes finally came to attributes, and noticed that we simply needed to type in the name. What is strange is that I had already looked at the attributes window and somehow didn't understand that I could type in the values for title and tagline. That's a lot of hours for such a little piece of information.

The next few hours, I spent figuring out a problem with assigning URLs to my blogroll. For some odd reason, when adding a new site and then the URL, it would overwrite the previous blog, so that they both would have the same URL. I figured out some awkward retyping workarounds and Mark Bernstein suggested using the browser for reassigning the old URLs.

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