This weekend I saw the future. Not that it’s the long term future by any stretch since things seem to be moving at warp speed anyway. But there were a couple of technologies on display at the “New Media Literacies in Learning Landscapes Conference” in Charlottetown, PEI that had me feeling like that giddy little geek that sometimes pops up when everything around me is feeling new again.

The first isn’t really all that “new”, but it was the first time I’d taken part in a live video stream of one of my presentations thanks to Jeff Lebow of Worldbridges.com (and edtechtalk.com) who was there to record the proceedings. I should say that on Friday when I gave a short tech pep talk to a group of about 50 7th graders who are embarking on a most excellent online archiving project about PEI, it was very cool to tell them that folks from as far away as Australia and Abu Dhabi  were watching us live. And then yesterday for the conference with about 40 island teachers, we had at one point about 25 viewers “in da house” to watch and take part by text chatting questions and having that more and more ubiquitous back channel chat going on throughout. (The best was when Jeff told me Clarence Fisher had been watching while doing his dishes as I raved about his work during my keynote. Kinda scary, but cool.)

Jeff used about a hundred miles of cables, numerous headsets, cameras etc., but he streamed the whole thing through Ustream.tv which, if you have a camera, a mic and a fast connection, you can start “broadcasting” live from wherever you are in like maybe 3 minutes. (And so of course the new model is to Tweet “Hey I’ve got a show starting in 15 minutes! Here’s the link! Come participate!” Mercy.) The mind reels with the possibilities, and I’m actually to do a first “broadcast” interview Q&A from the audience on Tuesday if I can set it up. (I’ll be sure to Tweet it from willrich45.)

Now I know that streaming per se isn’t all that bleeding edge any longer, and really neither is the whole Second Life in education discussion, though there is much there that still needs to be worked out. But what Dave Cormier (who with Bonnie Stewart were running both the archive project and the conference) showed us in terms of a new Second Life “hack” (for lack of a better word), was pretty mindbending. OpenSim uses the Second Life interface (which Linden Labs released to developers last year) but allows you (wait for it) to serve up your own world on not just the server of your choice, but (wait for it) even just your local computer. Want a world just for your classroom that isn’t “out there” on the Second Life server? Done. (Read more about it in Dave’s post here.)

And get this. Dave said that while this is all still in alpha and very thin, within six months we’ll probably be able to take our own local worlds and selectively connect them to other local worlds, building communities just among those that we want our kids to interact with. From our desktops. That’s what he’s working toward in the project he’s doing with the PEI kids. They are going to build their own archives in their own local worlds and then invite other school worlds in to show them around and teach them about the history of the island. Private tours, so to speak.

I’ve struggled with Second Life for a lot of reasons, and frankly, I haven’t stepped a virtual foot in there for about six months. But what I saw and heard the last couple of days just started my brain really exploding with the possibilities. OpenSim sounds like it’s building toward an easier, safer, more convenient environment than where Linden is going. And you can do it without the downside that comes with the open grid or even the teen grid to some extent.

We’re not quite there yet with either of these technologies, but this weekend, you could just feel it coming. That is what’s so much fun. Almost as much fun as spending time with Sharon Peters, Rob Patterson, Stephen Downes and Harold Jarche and some other great educators trying to make a difference. Good stuff.

Technorati Tags: technology, secondlife, learning, education, streaming

Laura D’Elia was in Boston a couple of weeks ago attending the Building Learning Communities Conference and she’s put together a VoiceThread presentation that she’s going to present to her colleagues. And the cool thing is that she’s invited some of the BLC folk to add their own voices to the presentation.

What a concept, huh? I wonder what would happen if every conference goer at NECC and BLC and where ever else went back and used one of these new tools to communicate what they had learned and to model the ways we can create and collaborate using the Web. Think we’d get a little further down the road?

I know I repeatedly say that creating and publishing is only half the opportunity here, that it’s the conversations and connections that occur around that content where the most potential for learning lies. But this is a great example of beginning to participate in the virtual community that is “out there” for anyone (with access) that wants to take part.

Technorati Tags: voicethread, learning, education, blc07, necc07

I’m a big mind map person…just something about the visual tree effect that makes it easier for me to organize stuff. And I have loved FreeMind for a few years now. But the limitation has been that, well, it’s not very flexible in terms of social collaboration and stuff.

Enter MindMeister which has my mind a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that so far, after about an hour’s worth of playing, is really letting me do great stuff. You can check out the intro video on the site, but here are the key features I’ve found so far that I’m liking a lot:

1. Easy importing of my FreeMind Maps. You can do it with MindJet MindManager too. Nice.
2. Drag and drop and easy keyboard tools. I love Ajax. (This is Ajax, right?)
3. Sharing/collaboration. Just invite people in to play.
4. In the best wiki tradition, it has a history so you can track changes. (Awesome.)
5. You can publish your Maps to the Web, even embed them into a blog post.
6. And while they don’t have an RSS feed to track changes, they do let you configure update alerts to your…wait for it…Twitter account.

They even have this cool little extension for MAC users that puts a little app on your desktop that you can post ideas or links to your default map in a flash. Mercy.

This has been a great couple of weeks for tools…Skitch, Jing, and now this. And the thing I love about all of them is that they are solving that little publishing hump in a very easy way by making the upload piece a seamless part of the process.

Prediction: Google buys MindMeister within six months…

Technorati Tags: mindmapping, maps, tools, organization

“So let me get this straight…you’re just letting people know what you’re doing when you do this?”

“Right.”

“And you call it ‘Tweeting’?”

“Well, uh, yeah. It’s kinda like a bird letting you know where he’s at, I guess.”

“And you do this how often.”

“Depends. Maybe 4, 5…10 times a day. It doesn’t take that much time, really.”

“Like how much time?”

“Dunno…maybe 10-15 minutes, total.”

“And all you’re doing is letting your friends know what you’re doing, right? At any given moment.”

“Right. But they’re not all friends in the standard sense. I mean I’ve never met some of these people.”

“And they let you know what they’re doing.”

“Right.”

“Even people you don’t know.”

“Right”

“Why?”

“Dunno.”

“Like that guy teachanlearn is ‘Reading RSS’ and he wants you to know that?”

“Um, I guess. But he also wants me to click the link there too.”

“Well, where does that go?”

“Dunno…let’s find out…it’s a blog post about a new WordPress theme.”

“And he felt the need to ‘tweet’ that?”

“Apparently.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know. It’s kinda hard to explain. I mean I didn’t really get it at first…still not sure if I do.”

“You know all these people…how many?”

“Twenty-eight right now. They’re all in my network.”

“The network.”

“Right. My teachers…my classroom…remember? We talked about this.”

“Right. And these other people, these ‘followers’. How many?”

“Um, 209 right now.”

“209! And they want to know what you are doing?”

“I guess so, though I can’t imagine why.”

“But you only follow 28.”

“Right.”

“Does that upset them?”

“Who?”

“All those people who are ‘following’ you that you’re not ‘following’.”

“I dunno. I hope not. I can’t follow more than this many right now.”

“But I still don’t get it. Why do you want to follow them at all?”

“It’s just another layer of the connection, I think. I mean on some level, I like knowing that Chris missed his plane or that John’s doing a wiki workshop or whatever. It’s not important stuff on any major level, but it adds something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just…just…presence. Just this weird presence thing. And depth. I can’t really explain it.”

“Presence.”

“Well, more than that. I mean a lot of people post links and resources and ask questions and stuff. I learn from it too.”

“And people answer? So it’s like IM, right?”

“Um…no. I don’t do this for conversation, though it turns into that sometimes.”

“I don’t think I get it.”

“I don’t either.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Technorati Tags: twitter connections networks

David Weinberger: “Open up The Britannica at random and you’re far more likely to find reliable knowledge than if you were to open up the Web at random. That’s why we don’t open up the Web at random. Instead, we rely upon a wide range of trust mechanisms, appropriate to their domain, to guide us.”
(Via George Siemens)

Technorati Tags: literacy, authority, trust

I have to say, I love Skitch. It’s a MAC only tool that makes it oh so easy to snip pictures from the screen, annotate them, play with them and then, and here’s the cool part, easily upload them to your “MySkitch” webpage where you get all sorts of code you can then use to publish it out. I used to love to make collages when I was a little kid. So to experiment, I did the above in about 15 minutes using Flickr Creative Commons photos (listed below) uploaded the result in one click, and then just snagged the code and pasted it in.

That, seems to me, to be covering the “last mile” in terms of some of these non-bloggy tools, the getting it online really easy part. If you want to see that done with screencasts, take a look at Jing. You capture your video, click a button, and it’s online for you to link to or do whatever. That publishing hump continues to get smaller.

Anyway, just a bit of play on a rainy Sunday morning…

(BTW, I’ve got four Skitch invites for any MAC users who may want one…leave a comment with your correct e-mail…I send ‘em if I got ‘em.)

Lights
The Veins of Bangcock
Jealousy
Dark Dangerous Moods
a loto stand
Sunset
Locking nothing
Orange jellyfish for orange day
Today is orange day
halcyon

Technorati Tags: skitch, flickr, art, collage, publishing

Bud Hunt was nice enough to throw up a test of the CommentPress theme that allows paragraph by paragraph commenting, and I posted some session descriptions I was thinking about for the Learning 2.0 Conference I’ll be at in Shanghai in September. Feel free to take the theme for a spin and offer up some feedback if you feel so inclined.

Technorati Tags: learning20, commentpress, blogging, WordPress

Just a brief on a development from the folks at Future of the Book. They’ve created a new WordPress theme that allows for comments to be left on each paragraph, not simply at the end of the post. Huge potential there from a teaching writing standpoint and from a focusing the conversation standpoint. If you want to see it in action, check out McKenzie Wark’s book “GAM3R 7H30RY” and you’ll get a great idea of how it works.

Now I just need to find somewhere to get the theme installed so we can play…

Technorati Tags: blogging, writing, wordpress

First off, I got an iPhone on Friday, and I love it. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty impressed. (I know…that doesn’t take much.) It’s just…um…smooth and easy. The screen is amazing, and I am loving the full web browser. And the camera was way better than I expected. Nice.

So yesterday, when we spur-of-the-moment decided to go for an afternoon hike on the Appalachian Trail, I threw the iPhone in the pack. I know purists will decry the mixing of technology and trees, and to be honest, I didn’t tell Wendy that I brought it. But I’m glad I did.

We were nearing the top when another hiker and his dog appeared coming down the trail. Suddenly, his dog stopped short and started growling at the bushes. The hiker said, “Whoa! Check this out.” Of course, my kids started running over there, until they heard him say “It’s a black racer snake.” They screeched to a halt until we slowly walked over and saw this beautiful, long, black snake slithering through the underbrush. “Is it poisonous?” my daughter asked. The hiker didn’t think so, and I surely had no clue. So we kept our distance and watched a bit longer as it gracefully moved further into the stand of wild blueberry bushes.

I sat down on a rock overlooking the Delaware Water Gap, buzzards and hawks catching thermals and spiraling up right in front. And I reached into my backpack and pulled out the iPhone. Within a couple of minutes, I was reading about black racer snakes on Wikipedia. Nope, not venomous. They eat crickets, moths and small rodents. And they are fast. Tess and Tucker took turns looking for other pictures, and we pretty much confirmed what we had seen. We were learning on the fly. And then, we zoomed in on where we found it using the satellite feature on Google Maps which the iPhone makes really easy.

I, for one, think that’s pretty cool. We’ve seen stuff on other hikes and said that we were going to go back and “look it up” but, as often happens, we never did. The immediacy of this was what was cool. The fact that we wanted to know now, and we could. I know you don’t need an iPhone for that. No doubt, we coulda brought the trail book that identifies a lot of the things we saw. But this gave me an interesting feeling all around. And what it made me really yearn for was to have my kids chronicle their find at the Encyclopedia of Life, when it comes into full use.

Now that would really be cool.

Technorati Tags: iphone, learning, snakes, hiking, wikipedia

So this is just a fool around test of Splashcast that I’ve just never gotten around to trying. Just a test. All about how last Sunday the four of us ran a 5K race and both of my kids won medals. Beautiful moment. And scary. My seven year-old ran it in 26 minutes. Oy.

Technorati Tags: video, splashcast, tools, 5K

Tom posted that with Google Gears you can now use Google Reader offline. And here I just bought NetNewsWire for my long plane rides…darn. Works great, and now I’ll really start posting out to my Shared Items page which will also be collected in my new RSS goodness filled Pageflakes portfolio. Have I mentioned lately how much fun this stuff is? (Take a look at Screencast-O-Matic if you don’t believe me.) Anyway, when Google Gears works with GMail and Calendar, I will be a very, very, very happy man.

As you can tell, it doesn’t take much…

Technorati Tags: google_gears, tools

So I’ve been meaning to get a chance to play with the Zoho Notebook beta but, as you recall, I’ve been working on balance. Somewhat. This morning I carved out 24 minutes to play, and here is the result.

Now I gotta tell you, while there are still some little glitchy things going on, (like this embed function doesn’t seem to be doing the trick) I think this has some major po. Here’s a direct link to the “book” where you can see there are page tabs down the side to add more information and create some wild kind of portfolio.

I’d love to hear/see what other folks are doing with this…

Technorati Tags: zoho_notebook, learning, tools

So I plunked down about $100 for a Flip Video camera that holds 30 minutes of decent quality video and have been playing with it for the past week trying to figure out if I like it or not. Right now, I think I do, just because it is soooo easy to use to get videos online fast. The quality from camera to the local drive is good enough to bring into iMovie or whatever editing program you like and make use of it. The quality of the video once you get it up on YouTube is about a 6, the sound is pretty bad, but passable, and in general, you get what you pay for. But, did I mention that it’s just very easy to use? And these days, that’s worth a lot.

Here’s a quick sample of my wonderful daughter making her pony purple:

Technorati Tags: video, flipvideo, tools

As if I don’t have enough time to get my first life in order, I’ve been spending a bit of time exploring Second Life of late. As with anything else new like this, it helps to have a mentor, and mine has been Kevin Jarrett (aka KJ Hax) who has been kind enough to take some time to show me some very cool places. (If anyone cares, my SL name is Blogsar Lumpen…don’t ask. And that’s Kevin in the picture, not me. I need a serious wardrobe adjustment. And some hair.) Anyway, there are a lot of people who are putting some serious time into creating education spaces, and some of them are pretty provocative. I’m still waiting to sit in on a live presentation to get the full effect, but the guided tours of a couple of the islands that I took Saturday night were pretty incredible.

Anyway, today Kevin is up at Suffern Middle School in NY getting a first hand look at their use of Second Life.

In a few short hours I will be walking the halls of Suffern Middle School … as well as cruising their teen-created digital world, Ramapo Islands. With Victoria as my guide (she has been there before) today promises great things. I will meet new people (virtually and in person), experience a middle school language arts classroom actually USING SL as an instructional tool, and I will get to see the Ramapo Islands build in detail for the first time. I’ll get to meet Peggy Sheehy, the leader of the SMS initiative. And, I’ll also get to finally meet Victoria (Catherine Parsons in RL) – an educator, mom and Ph.D. student whom I have gotten to know very well with via SL over the past month or so.

 I’ll be interested to see what he finds out.

Technorati Tags: learning, education, secondlife

Attention: This is just a test…and it doesn’t seem to be going to well, in fact. I’m playing with Mojiti, the site that lets you annotate videos with all sorts of cool stuff, including, um…video. (What a concept.) Anyway, when you click play below, you’ll hopefully see Karl Fisch‘s “Did You Know?” video and eventually see me talking over it. Seems there are two of me at some point, so when you hear the second audio kick in, just restart the video and it should work from that point. Take a look:

Let me know what you think of the tool, and, if you actually managed to see and hear the video, what you think of the idea…