This is a story of failure. Not, at first, the good kind of failure, the kind that leads to growth. In this case, it’s the kind of failure that leads you to go back on the trail, to find that tree around which you tied the ribbon, and take the other fork in the road.
For many years, I did all my web stuff myself. This was before a whole lot of software or webware – it was all HTML, which I taught myself from a For Dummies book (Quick Reference, 1997). Oh, and we had Webboard 1 (they’re on 9 now) for threaded discussion. Geeks used IRC and other ways to talk in real time. The sound of the modem was music to my ears.
Then Web 2.0 happened, and it was so exciting and easy to use all the cool stuff. Flickr for photos! Blogger and WordPress.com for blogs! Twitter for microblogging! You could post all your stuff, even create stuff, and there it is, all for free. No need to know HTML!
I should have known better. I’m a historian.
Problems at Pedagogy First!
Most of our participants at Pedagogy First!, at our encouragement, have been using Edublogs or WordPress.com for their blogs. At first, these blogging services provided for free the means to upload the things our participants created as part of the class. But, as time has gone on, fewer features have been enabled for free accounts at these services.
The number of plugins that both services offer has also decreased. We have been exploring workarounds in response to the decline in services like embedding media. First it was Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, where you could just by typing the URL into WordPress.com but Edublogs wasn’t so easy. Then we couldn’t get Edublogs to embed Jing or Slideshare (and WordPress.com could only if we used Vodpod).
Now our intrepid participants are posting audio and sure enough, WordPress.com won’t let them embed audio on the free account using an upload. So the trick here is to upload ones audio “somewhere on the web” and put in a shortcode like [audio http://myserver.net/myaudio.mp3].
To upload “somewhere” means they really should have access to a web folder somewhere and know how to ftp to it, or try a service (I tried yourlisten.com, but it didn’t work). As they helped each other, they discovered Soundcloud could work. But this sort of thing is dicey and inconsistent, and it freaks out the newbies. Come on, everybody, let’s run all over the web looking for ways to do something simple!
Problems for Me
At the same time, I have been experiencing problems with my own free services. Posterous won’t convert my video to embed it, regardless of the codec used. I recorded the weekly message to my students in Eyejot, and it didn’t send it to me for four days. Flickr wants money to share my photos with others.
And then I look at ds106, harbinger of all things self-participatory. Jim Groom at UMW just raised money for a separate server, and they’re giving students domain names and web hosting so everyone can run their own blogs (not, you’ll note, using WordPress.com or Edublogs).
Going Backward
So is it time to go back to that tree? Back up (beep, beep, beep) the road of Web 2.0 “freemium” service providers, who (like insurance companies) are charging us more and delivering less, and get back to that DIY spirit? I always recommend some DIY anyway – keeping your files on your own computer to protect them from loss, never writing anything directly into a system. Now we may have to build learning units around it.
As we revise the syllabus for next year’s Pedagogy First! class, I’m asking my colleagues whether we should recommend some hosting, and teach everyone how purchase hosting space and create their own blog (as ds106 did last year). Our college’s super computer guy is happy to administer some WPMU blogs for MiraCosta participants, which is wonderful, but every plugin will have to be approved and updated, and/or faculty will need to be taught how to use their web folder and upload things, a whole different level of web comprehension. They won’t know why they should make the choice between uploading to their web folder and uploading into WP — too many choices is bad for newbies. And, if this year is anything to go by, 75% of participants won’t be from MiraCosta, or won’t want a MiraCosta-controlled blog. We’ll need to teach them how to not only set up a blog but get a hosting account (likely at Hippie Hosting for $12/year), install WordPress, and then set it up. It’s a year long class, but still…
This was the sort of thing we taught in 1998. Here’s some HTML. Here’s how to ftp. Now have fun. Blog platforms should make it easier, but in their current push toward monetization, they really are adding another layer, something else to be learned, instead of substituting for that back end knowledge. We didn’t whine in 1998 about learning the back end — you had to know some in order to teach online.
Walking away
As for me, I’m creating a new WordPress blog of my own and using Posterous Importer to transfer my ds106 blog. And I’m crawling through those php.ini files trying to fix problems, knowing I cannot expect novices to do that in the fall.
I also know, of course, that you can never really go back….
Posterous has refused to convert my video for the last time. It was bad enough that they started “Spaces” (adding extra clicks and not working in Firefox anymore), then they got bought by Twitter. But the whole point of my ds106 blog is posting my own audio and video creations, so this is the last straw.
I read at Lifehacker that the self-hosted WordPress plugin Posterous Importer didn’t work , but they’ve fixed it and it does, very well.
So to do this, I created a database on my hosted server and installed (another) WP blog from WordPress.org. Then I followed the 5 minute install instructions. Then I made a mistake.
At this point, what I needed to do was create a plain text file called php.ini that had the settings I want so I can upload big media:
Then I needed to upload this into the wp-admin folder before I imported my Posterous.
Next step was to get the plugin Posterous Importer and activate it, then give it the information to download my blog. It worked very well (except that it linked back to Posterous for the files that were too big because I didn’t do the php.ini file first!).
Because I’m using Quicktime files, I also needed to get the QuickTime Embed plugin and use its shortcode to create a player for the files I uploaded, so I did have to clean up a few posts, but overall this is going great.
Robert Therrien, No Title (Blue Plastic Plates), 1999
I’ve made many small changes in my classes, and am pleased with the result. (It’s especially pleasing because so many times I make big changes to little effect!)
1. Lotsa Quizzes: I got rid of the textbooks for most of my classes and wrote factual quizzes based on my lectures, giving the quizzes weekly instead of every two weeks. There are more questions but fewer points per question, and they get hints for each question because they can change their answer (I actually didn’t intend this, but I kind of like it). This format helps them keep up and review during each quiz.
2. Separate Multiple Choice and Essays: I’ve separated the multiple choice lecture/factual questions from the essay questions. The quizzes used to be a small number of factual questions plus one essay, given every two weeks. Students would have to wait to get the results until I graded the essay. Now they get the quiz results immediately.
3. Three Essay Exams: Instead of having a short essay due every two weeks as part of the quiz, I’ve instead created two major essay exams plus the final exam. They seem to be spending more time and effort on these and the quality is much better. And I grade less often but it’s more in-depth so I hope my comments are more helpful.
4. Grading Criteria Inside the Exam: Instead of just relying on a Grading Information page, I’ve included the criteria for essay grading as part of the essay question itself. That seems to be helping the essays also.
5. Seminar Hybrids: For my San Elijo hybrid classes, I’m using a seminar format. Some would call what I’m doing “flipping” the classroom, because all lecture reading, forum postings, public writing, quizzes and essay exams are online. We meet an hour and a quarter a week, and spend most of the time talking together about primary sources and how they fit into the era. It’s so wonderful to work in this seminar setting — I learn as much as they do. I will miss it very much. (It’s unlikely I will be able to do it again because hybrids are new and thus enrollments were low.)
6. Encouraging Late Source Posts: Each forum is one weekly topic, so I normally encourage moving on. But students will need the sources they post later for the essay exams. So now I encourage those who want more sources for their essay to go back and post them. This way everyone can use them, and the source collection is bigger.
7. Grading Late Quizzes By Date: I close each quiz with a password after the due date, but students may take them up to a week late for reduced credit. I’ve always reduced the score the same amount for a late quiz. But now when they email me for the password, I tell them I’ll take off less if they turn it in as soon as possible, and email me the minute they’re done (so I can change the score manually). This encourages them to finish up the quiz so they can move on to the next week’s material.
These changes were labor intensive to set up, but actually save me time and effort during the semester, so I have more energy to actually talk with students and tend to their learning as we go along. Far more of my time is spent encouraging and teaching rather than grading, and this is true of both my hybrid and online classes.
Oooops. Some of the things we were asking people to do wouldn’t work, even though we tried to be helpful with the how-to. These were things that were second nature to those of us running our own blogs on our own servers, like embedding video, audio and slideshows. We’re used to full access to a myriad of plug-ins for doing fun things. But these just aren’t available on the free services, and we didn’t know.
It’s audio, video and screencast time, and some people can’t embed to show us their stuff.
So I tried things that can’t be embedded that simple way. Vodpod was the answer to two issues:
1) Slideshare, a slidecast with music. Vodpod said it wouldn’t accept the embed code from that site. So I just put in the URL. And it worked.
2) Jing. I used the URL http://www.screencast.com/t/gL1VF7SS2 and no problem. (It wouldn’t work with a Quicktime upload I put in Screencast, but it worked fine with a standard Jing in the Flash format.)
(Vodpod kept saying it was uploading to Facebook instead. But I told it WordPress, and it can’t load to Facebook because it doesn’t have my account.)
For Edublogs
In Edublogs, this Vodpod trick doesn’t work. You get an error code in Vodpod saying you need XML-RPC services, which you can’t enable without Edublogs Pro. That makes Slideshare and Jing a problem for Edublogs. Know any workarounds?
My hybrid classes are such a delight to me, but enrollment is low and gets lower as students discover they are real classes and they’ve overloaded their schedule. Trouble is, that means that fewer sources get posted in the forum each week. Since the writing in the class is all about creating and proving theses using the evidence posted by the whole class, when fewer people participate, there aren’t as many sources to use as evidence.
Right now I have several sections of the same class in Moodle, but I set the forums as Separate Groups. These are separate sections of the class, each with their own dynamic and needs. For two classes, one of each of the sections is the hybrid I see at San Elijo each week. A student stayed after class today, worried that there wouldn’t be enough sources since not everyone is posting.
Going back to my office to solve the problem, I was hoping there was an easy way to have my hybrid sections see what the online sections were posting, so they could use their sources also in their writing. In fact, now that no one is lost, and everyone knows where to post their work, there’s no reason why all sections of the same class can’t see each others’ sources and use them.
This proved to be a really easy fix. I simply changed each forum from Separate Groups to Visible Groups. But I needed a way to let everyone know what was going on, so I used Screenr.
Total fix time? Less than an hour, including the screencasts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recent Comments