So I did manage to get the last 40 GB iPod in New Jersey right after Christmas and I’ve been starting to play with it in between family gatherings and big meals. Let me first say that I am very psyched about the Belkin microphone adapter I got which allows me to use the iPod as a recording device. I’ve been interviewing my kids, and I can see all sorts of ways to use just that piece of it in the classroom…recording classwork, oral histories, interviews for MovieMaker voice overs. The best part is that it automatically dumps each recording as a .wav file to your hard drive when you sync up with iTunes on your computer. That’s an easy import into Audacity if I wanted to include them in podcasts.

Problem is, I don’t know that I’ll be doing much podcasting in the future. While my two attempts were fun, I guess, I can’t help but wonder what anyone really got out of my droning on about my high-fallutin thoughts on the education world. No links to follow. No way to engage in the ideas. Nothing there that wouldn’t work just as well in a blog post.

And on the listening front, I have to say most of what I’ve heard so far has been pretty uninspiring. At the risk of being snarky, my reaction to today’s daily podcast by one of the A-listers was downright discomfort. References to the horrors in the tsunami stricken countries was peppered with questions about whether or not to each the cheesecake before the guests arrived. The “concern” was so gratuitous that I had to turn it off. And most of what I’ve listened to is either equally self-indulgent or doesn’t get over the would-be-just-as-good-if-not-better-in-a-blog bar. Talking through a list of links that’s posted somewhere else just seems kind of pointless. I have to agree with Alan when he says that most of this comes closer to yawncasting than anything else.

There are some podcasts I do enjoy because they are intended to instruct or make me think rather than spew personal interpretations of the day’s events. For instance, Rob Reynolds at Xplana does a five-minute essay on tech related issues that is obviously well-written beforehand and usually leaves me thoughtful. Or the IT Conversations recordings of tech events or special shows. Some of the Engadget shows are pretty interesting as well. And I’m sure there are others that I’ll find as I continue to dig through the list at iPodder.org.Not all of it is great radio, but at least I feel like it was time well spent.

Of course, as a faithful listener of NPR, my assessment of all of this amateur radio is probably a bit unfair. But I think podcasting should be an attempt to emulate the good stuff we hear on radio not just idle rambling about why one beer is better than another. There should be some reporting, some background work, some meaning.

I’m thinking about how to do that. One idea I like right now is doing some regularly scheduled 20-30 minute interviews with edubloggers to pick their brains about how best to make all of this work in schools and where it might all be going. Or maybe doing some interviews with teachers about what they see the roadblocks are. It would be like research shared through a syndicated MP3 file. I’m open to ideas.

I don’t want to dissuade people from trying the technology and seeing what it and they can do. That’s the only way we’ll see what podcasting might be good for, the old “see what sticks” method. But I’m pretty much finished with the personal podcasting meme. To quote Alan once again, “If I am absorbing content by audio form, it should be because it presents it in a way that extends the information in fresh ways.” If it’s just as good in text, why bother.

Took a little time during my weeklong break to do some minor updates to my RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators. My page count says the link has been accessed over 2,000 times to date which all in all is pretty amazing. Even if half of the people downloaded the .pdf, that’s a lot of rss-ducation going on. If you do use it and have any feedback, corrections, etc. please let me know.
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We’ve been making some inroads at my school into multimedia video projects using MovieMaker. It’s been slow going as we’ve had to work through the process of the most efficient ways to save and produce the video our students take. But in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had some really fine interpretations of Romeo and Juliet as well as some minute-long vids with a political bent. I think the teachers are starting to see the potential despite the added time it takes to create them.

Today, JD Lasica points to a couple of articles in Business Week about videoblogs and their growing popularity. JD has started a group called Ourmedia that will be supporting videoblogging, podcasting and other such forms in a big way with hosting cataloging. And as bandwidth increases, so will this meme.

Of course, there are all sorts of videoblogging ideas for the classroom if schools have the requisite equipment. The most obvious is a regular video journal of events. But I like the interpretive stuff more, and I think it could work across the curriculum. What about math students doing a regular “Math in Real Life” spot where they go to the supermarket, say, and show all the uses of algebra that we employ every time we go. And then create a uses of algebra video blog that kids who are struggling can use to help them with the concept. Or how about a video cooking blog in consumer class, or a video experiment blog in science or…

All of this would be focused on creating content that others could access and make use of. I mean now that we have the ability to share student work with the masses, shouldn’t almost all of it be work that the masses can find worthwhile to consume? This of course is where the biggest shift in thinking needs to occur. If it’s not just for the teacher any more, how do we assess it? And if other people are going to consume it and use it, what new standards does that create?

I know videoblogging is not a tool teachers are going to reach for very often, at least not yet. But it’s too much fun to think about what’s going to happen when they do.

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This New York Times piece says that blogs were “hard to beat” when it came to detailed on scene coverage of the awful tsunami disaster, and I have to agree. I spent an hour following links to first hand accounts and all sorts of images and video this morning. It’s amazing to me how little I even think about newspaper or television news any more…scary in fact. And this Tsunami Help Weblog that was cobbled together to keep track of the coverage is a pretty amazing thing all by itself.

But here is the powerful part…I can follow this story through my aggregator just by creating a Google News feed for it. And I can use that to create a separate page just for that. And if I want a summary of what’s known so far, I just need to go to the Wikipedia entry on the disaster. In fact, if you haven’t yet figured out the power of Wikipedia, GO THERE NOW! I mean it. More than you could ever imagine being put together in one place in this short a time span.

We are witness to the future of news. Amazing.
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It’s no secret that Jay Rosen is among my five favorite bloggers, if for no other reason that I learn something almost every time I read a post on his site. To me, that’s time well spent. I could very well start my own “Thoughts About Jay Rosen’s Thoughts” blog and just respond to his ideas as a way of capturing and internalizing his best stuff. But that would no doubt lead to divorce.

Of late he has been working through his “Top 10 Ideas for 2004” looking at what happened to the media and journalism this year. It’s good stuff as always, and I’m eagerly anticipating his deconstruction of points 5-10. But as is my wont, I see a lot of edu relevance in his list, though, as usual, at least a year or more behind. So, with apologies, here’s some similar thoughts on what education might learn from journalism for 2005 and beyond:

1. The Legacy Educators–It will take much more than a year, but there is no doubt, at least in my feeble mind, that the shift to a very different concept of education is underway. The Read/Write Web has much to do with this, almost as much as a traditional system that just isn’t making the grade. Much of the hump is political, but I think the biggest change is in the transparency and active learning that these new models offer. We’re getting close to the point where technology will be easy enough for even those Digital Immigrant teachers to use. Don’t get me wrong, this is going to be decades in the making. But it is happening.

2. Teacher said, students did–I haven’t had a chance to write anything about it, but I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about the Social Constructionist Pedagogy on which Moodle is based and how it fits with all of these changes. Constructionism at it’s core holds that “learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience.” I’ve been living that idea for the last three years, and I’ve seen the effects in kids when they start doing the same. The Read/Write Web allows our kids to start constructing all sorts of relevant content in all sorts of interesting forms: blogs, wikis, podcasts, movies, Websites. And I’m sure there will be more forms a coming. The barriers to entry are dropping. What schools have to realize now is that we can have students create content that is meaningful beyond the grade and the teacher’s assessment. What a concept.

3. Open Source Education or “The Group Knows More than the Individual”–The delivery of curriculum is no longer the work of a single teacher. The collaborative construction of curriculum by many teachers using evolving pools of resources and shared “objects” that are selected and revised through reputation systems will make the most effective means of content delivery available to all teachers. Long sentence, I know, but powerful idea, and one that is already taking root. I really think over the next couple of years this might be where the biggest changes in education occur, in the sharing of resources. It not only articulates what works, but it also articulates what’s important to know.

4. Education turns from a lecture to a conversation–Ok, so this one may have been happening for a while, but the idea that student learning can now embrace all sorts of voices and viewpoints is pretty powerful. We can go far beyond the classroom walls and we can create all sorts of conversations among kids and the real world out there. The teacher’s role in all of this changes, of course, from content authority to conversation facilitator. But if we really believe that kids learn by doing, and that what’s important to know is largely socially constructed, that’s a shift we have to be willing to make.

5. What was once good or “good enough” no longer is–While I can understand that people fear the transparency that the Read/Write Web suggests, I also think that ultimately transparency will make for more accountability and better practice. On a small scale, that means that students who construct content for larger audiences will need to create quality, more so than when just creating for the teacher. On a wider scale, it means that schools who put their curriculum online will need to do the same. I don’t know how long it will take, but at some point I truly believe that our constituents will demand this transparency from us, especially if the power of public participation in other spheres like journalism and politics takes root. The public will become more demanding because it can.

Now, the standard disclaimer: I’m not saying that any of this will be easy or that it isn’t fraught with all sorts of potential abuses. But on the whole, I see some real opportunities for improving what happens to students in the classroom. The big question, to me at least, is how long it will take.
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Greensboro 101 seems to be the on everyone’s blog radar these days as it’s turning into an effective model for community journalism a la Weblogs. They have about 50 or so bloggers, but even more importantly, they’ve got t-shirts. I say this not in jest as the t-shirts, snappy as they are, tell me at least that someone has decided to actively market the meme. (This may be something to think about for edubloggers as well…)

The site is basically an aggregator of local blogs, and it’s easy to add your own. A quick scan of the aggregated posts from the last few days shows a heavy emphasis on local events with a bit of world news and links sprinkled in. At this time, they don’t allow comments, though the talk is they will and they do have a discussion board built in.

Jay Rosen calls this “Open Source Journalism” which, when you take out the allusion to software means the journalism is really getting back to what it’s supposed to be doing which is using open sources of information. Add to that Online Journalism Review’s Citizen Media piece and it paints a pretty clear picture, I think of what 2005 will hold for journalism. I know I’ve said this before, but I just feel very lucky to be aware of this and watching it firsthand as it happens. My journalism teachers, who have subscribed to my Furls about journalism, are slowly but surely getting their brains around this as well. We are becoming more active consumers of news, becoming more engaged with the content and the process as we actively create that content as well. As more and more people understand the power of this, the more it will become a model for staying current.

Now it’s not a short leap to argue that our kids have to become more active consumers of the curriculum too…

With any luck, if I can find one in stock, later today I’ll “cash in” my “gift certificate” from Santa who couldn’t find one of these in the pre-Christmas scramble. You’d think the Apple store should have them in…right? We’ll see.
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My sincerest best wishes for a great holiday for everyone in this most interesting and inspiring community. I hope the holiday brings you peace and joy, and thanks to each of you for your continued readership and support. All the best!
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Ok…so I think I have an answer to my recording question, but I need a volunteer to try it out. Unfortunately, this isn’t a solution for everyone since it revolves around the program Camtasia which goes for $299. (There is a free 14-day trial, however.) But it’s E-Z. Here are the steps for those of you who might have the software or something comparable.

1. I started Skype and called the test number just so I could get some voice data coming into my computer, and I used Camtasia Recorder to capture both video and audio.
2. I brought the .avi file into Camtasia Producer and used the “Save Audio As” function to strip out the audio track as a .wav file.
3. I brought the .wav into Audacity and from there exported it as an MP3 file.

That’s it. Now, if you wouldn’t mind me testing this with real voices, Skype me at willrich45. And if that works, then maybe we can try to set up a quick edblogger conference Skype around, say, 1 pm EST. Let me know if you’re interested and maybe we can have some pre-holiday podcasting fun.

Pardon the really bad title, but this Skype thing is just way too much fun. Just got off the Skype with Ian Yorston from who Skyped me up from England and sounded like he was just down the road. Earlier today I chatted with Jim Wenzloff in Michigan. And I got contact info for Tim Wilson and Joe Luft, who with any luck will be back to blogging here real soon.

So yes, this has the potential to be all sorts of disruptive, but it can also be productive. I mean Ian and I chatted about the possibilities of collaborations among our kids; hopefully we’ll get back in touch after the New Year. And what about author chats or classroom interviews or… I mean, how easy (and cheap) is this? Just get a microphone and a set of speakers and there you go.

And goodness, what about Podcasts?!? Next Skype I get, I’m going to see if I can record it. (If anyone’s got the how to on this, let me know. I’m thinking I can make it work with Camtasia…maybe? Audacity?) And if I can do that, then the first edublogger-conference-Skype-podcast is scheduled for right after the new year. I call moderator. (Am I strange that the thought of that gives me chills? Really. Am I?)

It used to be fun to check my Manila referrer logs on a regular basis because I always used to be able to find a link or two to sites or people that were writing about blogs or other tools in schools. Nowadays, however, it’s a nightmare. Aside from the long list of porn sites that are spamming the logs, now it looks like some potentially “reputable” businesses are showing up as well, like academyofmusic.us and slatersdvds.com and donnasrentacar.com. Of course, if you should click on one of these, you get, guess what? A porn site. Oy.

I think I get that this is all Google’s fault since they rank their results by who has the most links on the Web. What I’m not sure I get is what possible benefit a porn spammer gets from using and address like donnasrentacar.com. The logic just escapes me but I’m sure there is some twisted reason. I’m sure that the Spam Hunter has some ideas.

This has been and continues to be the one aspect of all of this that we as educators using these tools need to get a handle on. And it is without question the biggest fear that most people bring up when we start talking about how to use them in the classroom. I think I’ve got Manila set up so that our student sites won’t get spam comments left on them by some bot. But I’m not sure how I can stop these links from showing up in their referrer logs. They haven’t yet, to my knowledge, probably because their sites aren’t on anyone’s radar. But we’ve got to find a way to make sure it never happens, because as we’ve already seen, some schools will look for reasons not to go down this path.

So ironically, just as I saw that Alan was looking for some Skype experience, I had just downloaded the app myself thinking it might be time to give it another try. It was great fun to hook up with Alan this morning for a short little chat about the wonders of technology and my stress of the holidays with two little kids. Anyway, it worked pretty well, a little echo, but what the heck. It was a free call to Phoenix, and a fun chance to push into another new place on the ‘Net.

And it seems that Alan had some other calls this morning which led to some potential collaborations. Hmmm… Nice idea. My Skype handle is willrich45, so if you want to chat about the Read/Write Web in schools, just…um…Skype me up, I guess. Or, just call me!

Have I mentioned lately that Anne Davis is an amazingly inspiring teacher when it comes to blogs, both to her students and to me. It’s rare to find someone who can make it all seem as fun as she does, and you just know her students are going to fall in love with writing because of it. Her kids have published a whole page of Blog Art to inspire me and, hopefully, some others as well. Very cool!
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