By Lisa, on April 14th, 2012%
 No, I am not a big fan of the James Cameron film, mostly because of the awful script and the inability of the two leads to rise above it.
I have also not been a big fan of tweeting “history”, in historical reinactments done via Twitter. I critiqued the approach heartily almost exactly two years ago.
However, I have now been to two museum exhibits of artifacts from the Titanic (including the current one in San Diego), and tonight I sit here watching Twitter as the Carpathian steams in to pick up survivors, and I have to say, it’s ridiculously riveting to watch the disaster unfold on Twitter.
I have followed both Real-Time Titanic and TitanicVoyage out of the UK publishing house The History Press for the last couple of days. Both have done a great job in creating a suspenseful account of what professional historians like to call (often disdainfully), “popular” history, Real-Time Titanic using a third-person, journalistic style and TitanicVoyage marking posts by the type of tweeter (#captain, #crew, #thirdclass) for an even more harrowing first-person tone.
As with most of the popular history I’ve enjoyed, I was drawn to a single aspect of the subject, in this case the problem with the Marconi wireless radio just a day before they hit the iceberg.
Apparently, the transmitter went down.
And apparently, they broke the rules to fix it.
Naturally, this sent me on a hunt for rules about Marconi wireless, and the stories of the young men who worked the radios. I found a respected article by Parks Stephenson, a fascinating page on the wireless telegraphists, a website “specialising in radio aspects of the Titanic disaster since 1999“, and a recent article from Atlantic Monthly on the importance of radio to the survivors. None of the creators of this stuff are, to my knowledge, professional historians. They are enthusiasts, of history and radio.
Even if only parts of the stories are true, it is possible that a couple of young men took apart a radio against some sort of policy to make sure it transmitted, and if they hadn’t then a day later when Titanic hit an iceberg they might not have been able to send the distress call.
Conclusions can thus be made about the value of mechanical tinkering, and not being afraid to break the rules, and professional pressure to do your job (hundreds of passenger-sent messages were sent from the ship by radio).
It’s harder to explain, though, the emotional impact of watching it unfold, in “real time” 100 years later, as if it were happening now and we could hear the screams of the people freezing to death yards from the lifeboats. There was a certain War of the Worlds aspect to it, even though Twitter is not really the radio and one couldn’t unknowingly follow the Twitter stream the same way people unknowingly tuned in to Welles’ show.
And again this odd use of Twitter makes me rethink the role of stories and history and the enthusiasts who put it all together, and I’m filled with nothing but respect for their work.
By Lisa, on April 1st, 2012%
I guess it’s becoming a Cranky Post series.
My stuff is stashed in a few main places on the web that aren’t hosted by me: Slideshare, YouTube, and Flickr are the main sites where I “publish”, plus I have stuff at Screencast, Screenr, MindMeister where I create things. I have this blog, and a Posterous blog for ds106 and separate blogs for other classes, etc.
So the big three are places where I am really trying to share. I upload many tutorials to YouTube (if they still look ok when they’re compressed that much). I post all my presentations, often with audio, at Slideshare as slidecasts. And Flickr has lots of my pics. Well, 173 pics. Which brings me to the issue.
Flickr has decided that when I reach 200 pics, they want to charge me $25/year. To get analytics and remove ads, I have to pay Slideshare the educational price of $144/year (certainly an educational price, since it is educating me rapidly). If I want more space on Screencast (they tell me I’m almost full up), I’d have to pay them.
No, I do not think everything on the web is or should be free. But these are not sites where I’m marketing my products, selling my photos, or making my career. Nothing I post there makes me any money, and by posting I am contributing to everyone else. Everything I have up is Creative Commons licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
So, for example, all my photos on Flickr can be used, for free, by anyone. I post them there for that reason.
But these services want me to pay to share. I don’t think that’s right.
The business model for these sites relies on ads, and thus lots of eyeballs coming to their site. Users who post add value to the website – in fact, they are the website. If those of us who shouldn’t pay remove our stuff, then the only stuff will be from people who can afford it or are trying to sell things.
Why not charge the nominal fee to the people who treat their work as copyrighted, who demand that people pay to use it, or who post it to sell it? If the purpose of the content is commercial, charge a bit. If it’s just for free sharing, keep it free.
By Lisa, on March 4th, 2012%
Dear Professional Social Network / PLN,
In the beginning, although I was not interested in what you had for breakfast, I was interested in what you thought about things. And you told me, in tweets and blogs and comments on my blog. Things were good.
But as time has passed, you have turned to posting links, often without comment. Sometimes these links are very interesting, but I can’t know until I click on them, and either way I’m not getting anything from you except the link. And when I create a link-less post in Twitter, I don’t often get much response.
Now I understand that I am supposed to consider you as nodes in my network and as filters for my information. But to me, you were so much more. And now you blog less, if at all, and instead give me lots of links to works by other people. If you read my blog anymore (and the numbers indicate you don’t) you rarely comment. If I comment on yours, little conversation ensues unless you are a very big name with many people commenting to each other.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but I don’t want just links. I want you, your thoughts and dreams, your frustrations and successes. And I want that just as much from those of you who are big social media stars in educational technology as I do from my more intimate connections. And you all scroll by so fast these days, with all those links; it’s hard to find the comments you do make.
So I’ve been hanging less and less around our old haunts. Twitter is occasional rather than daily. I moved all my RSS feeds to Netvibes to get away from Reader, so I see your posts better now. Some of them are just RSS feeds of links. I was going to spend more time with you in Google +, where there seemed to be some Buzz-like conversation at first. But even there now it’s mostly links. And Facebook? We made a little corner for ourselves, where people feel comfortable to … post a lot of links.
I think we need to talk.
By Lisa, on January 31st, 2012%
 In light of behemoth Google’s new privacy policies, which go into effect March 1, I have some decisions to make. Most of the info about what’s happening is available here if you don’t want to read through the Google-ese.
My colleague Ted Major is going to delete his account, which I completely understand. What should I do?
The YouTube connection I’ve seen coming for some time. It is already impossible to sign in to YouTube without a Google account connected. This can lead to multiple Google accounts. Really, anything can. Which means that to prevent every-Google-thing you have from hooking up with every-other-Google-thing you have, multiple accounts would seem to be the way to go. But would it work?
One could seem to have a professional account that you only use for work, one for fun, one for something else. However, I wonder whether this is really possible. I have several different Google accounts. I’ve noticed that Gmail, mysteriously, seems to know about all of them. I’m not sure why, and that makes me suspect multiple accounts may not be a long term solution.
So I’m thinking: what do I use right now that’s Google?
 YouTube. With multiple accounts, I can use Favorites and/or Channels to connect anything I actually want together. Eventually I assume, however, that you won’t be able to sustain any account that has a non-Gmail email address as the contact. This will likely be a problem with anything Google has eaten. If Gmail somehow knows about other Gmail accounts, the only solution will be to use YouTube only for professional stuff, and save my personal Favorites as lists of links in a text file on my hard drive.
Docs. I could separate the kind of Docs with different accounts, but don’t think this will work given the above. Most are professional anyway. For this one, I think I just need to clean up and delete things.
Hangouts, Calendar, Reader. Professional anyway, so no problem.
Picasa. I can take down whatever I don’t want there.
Android. No phone, no problem.
Looking through everything, I realize that all of it I’m using for professional or teaching only anyway, except that other accounts I have feed into Gmail with POP or IMAP. So that’s the security gap for me. I will remove those accounts, and use a different mail reader.
 Then there’s Chrome. No one is talking about Chrome. Search is Google’s main service; it defines the company. Chrome is already not possible to use anonymously. I am quite sure that will be the case here – it will be a hub connecting everything you do. In all the stories about the privacy change, “search” is in lower case, like it isn’t as important as the other programs. But it’s the heart of the matter, and Chrome is its henchman. It’s too bad, since Chrome works well. But I’ll be heading back to Firefox.
I guess I’m good then till they Engulf and Devour the other services I use, like Diigo, Vimeo, Livestream and Slideshare. I have always lived by the premise that nothing you put on the web is truly private anyway, so I’ve used it mostly for teaching and professional use, and relying primarily on my hard drive for anything personal. I am now very, very glad I’ve done that.
I recommend that everyone using Google (and who isn’t?) engage in this kind of analysis and decide what you want to do.
By Lisa, on January 9th, 2012%
Having abandoned my search for an easy way to save pdfs to Diigo, it happened accidentally by just using Chrome. Chrome opens pdfs inside a browser tab, where my Diigolet works comfortably. However, there are some problems.
The biggest is that I cannot highlight. So I can save but not annotate. When I try, this happens:
Also, it can’t grab the title of the work, so I have to title it manually.
But it’s a step in the right direction, I think.
By Lisa, on December 8th, 2011%
Today a group of us met in Google Plus Hangout. Everyone from the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class and Facebook Group is always invited, and it’s an open session. Today we had Todd, me, Walter, Norm, Maha, and Ted from POT Cert, and we were joined by Zack and Scott (that’s geographic representation from Arizona, northern and southern California, Dubai, New York, Alabama, and Japan).
Run by our Captain of Synchronous Sessions, Todd Conaway, the sessions have fallen into a Thursday pattern. Although originally envisioned as question and answer sessions for POT Cert Class participants, or maybe even a training or how-to opportunity, the fact that more experienced people tend to join has transformed the format into something more exploratory. The past few times people have shared sites they’re working with, in particular those focused on collaboration, mirroring what we’re doing in the sessions. As a result, we have spent several hour-long sessions following each other into various collaborative environments and trying things out together in real time.
 Image cc E. Chris Lynch on Flickr But sometimes we’re awfully silly. Maybe it’s the Google Hangout moustaches, or the way we all go into somewhere and one (always one) of us can’t get the damn thing to work, or the serendipitous arrival of people we’ve heard of but never met. Maybe it’s how I can say, “I don’t know if this works on a smart phone” and everyone whips out their phones to try. We all have our little foibles (Ted won’t do anything Facebook; I won’t do anything that costs money). Anyhow, it’s quite fun.
So I said I’d take notes today, which we had designated a POT Luck — everyone bring something to share. Walter shared how he uses instapaper‘s “read later” feature to stay organized, and showed us the resource page for Curtis Bonk’s The World is Open and his popular video series about online teaching. Ted shared how he used Zoho Sheet‘s embed code to embed a formula-based assessment worksheet into a Posterous class blog. We talked about apps we played with last time, particularly Qikpad (for instant collaboration with polls and features), and tried to watch video together. We looked at ifttt so we could Put the Internet to Work for Us and, although fascinated by the variety of conditional activities, weren’t sure yet that we had a good way to use it.
Other failed ideas included: FERPA t-shirts that say “It’s OK – I am not doing this in records maintained by the school”, having everyone pitch in for one Livescribe pen and mail it around, and actually reading instructions on a $6 bar of salted chocolate. We were enchanted by Scott’s use of a fancy radio microphone that made him sound wonderful despite the early hour in Japan, and he contributed a site for transcribing mp3 for captioning if used in Chrome.
We’ll do it again — all our distributed activities like this are posted on the … Distributed Activities page at the class site. The class is open, the synchronous sessions are open — won’t you join us?
|
|
Recent Comments