TedCurran.net » Web 2.0

An Open Letter to the US Copyright Office in Defense of Jailbreaking

tcnet — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:50:06 +0000

Image by xcode via Flickr

I would like to register my support for the practice of jailbreaking of smartphones, tablets, and game systems on the principle that these devices are fully-functional computers and should not have their functionality crippled to promote monopolistic business practices by their manufacturers. I believe that “jailbreaking”– or “freeing personal electronics to function properly as the computers they are”– is an essential condition for teaching and learning of 21st Century technological skills.

I was one of the enthusiastic Apple users who went out to buy the first iPhone in 2007. Though the iPhone has since brought the term “apps” into the popular consciousness, the first iPhones did not have an app store and could only run basic apps that were installed by Apple at the factory. A community base of enthusiasts started jailbreaking iPhones to allow that revolutionary hardware to perform new and useful functions that Apple had not built into it. This is what computers are supposed to be used for—enabling users to write and run programs that perform valuable functions! The first iPhone apps were all written by jailbreakers, and those of us users who jailbroke had access to a vibrant entrepreneurial community of people pushing the limits of the iPhone’s capabilities. The law-abiding normies had a crippled phone that couldn’t do many of the functions that we now consider “standard” for a smartphone.

For example: It was a minor scandal for the first two years of the iPhone that it didn’t have two basic and very useful features, Copy and Paste. While Apple put out two phones that didn’t have it (2007’s iPhone and 2008’s iPhone 3G), the jailbreaking community solved that problem in under a year and brought a fully-functional copy/paste feature to the iPhone. This is just one of the many examples where independent developers added value to the iPhone just because they could. It’s unfortunate that they had to violate their Terms of Service and invalidate their warranty to do so.

While Apple’s desktop operating system (OS X) has always allowed users to write, run, and fully own the applications they create, Apple have taken a much more restrictive and user-hostile stance with their smartphones and tablets on iOS. I believe that these excessive restrictions are less about security—they are designed to “lock” users and vendors into having to use Apple’s App Store for all commerce that involves these devices. Once Apple decided to allow user-created apps in 2008, they only allowed them to be sold through Apple’s own store, taking a usurious 30% of all profits from these sales. They rigidly control which apps can be sold in the app store and have developed a reputation for rejecting apps for questionable and contradictory reasons. While these monopolistic practices may be great for Apple, they result in higher prices, less innovation, and less choice for consumers.

I want to stress again that no desktop computer operating system like Windows or Mac has ever attempted to prevent its users from running third-party programs. We have never needed to “jailbreak” a device before because no company has ever been so brazen as to deny users the right to leave one internet service provider (AT&T) and use another one (T-Mobile). Now that Apple has crossed that threshold, other device manufacturers are following suit, hoping that they too can limit their users’ economic choices via technological means so they can squeeze greater profits from their captive users.

Please understand that Apple’s practice of “jailing” technology signals a historic shift—from computers serving humans’ interests to computers serving corporations’ interests.

I think it’s a negative development and I wholeheartedly oppose it.

As an educator, I am interested in empowering young people to actively explore technology. I have seen that open source tools and jailbreaking make it possible for students to “look under the hood” of technology so they can understand how it works. I encourage students to learn how open source tools like Linux, Android, and WordPress work because they are the materials from which a new world is being constructed. Closed and jailed technology tools separate consumers from creators in a way that hammers, nails, wood, and steel do not. Just as lumber producers should not be able to dictate who can build a house with their wood, a hardware manufacturer should not be able to dictate who can write a program for their system. Please continue to preserve people’s right to self-determination with the technology tools they buy. Please preserve our right to jailbreak our devices and learn to master them so we can actively participate in this new world that is coming into being.

Sincerely,
Ted Curran

Oakland, CA

If you’re interested in contributing your voice to keep jailbreaking legal, go to the EFF’s page and get involved!

EFF petitions to extend legal iPhone jailbreaking (tuaw.com)
Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon? (readwriteweb.com)
The EFF needs your help to keep rooting, jailbreaking legal (androidandme.com)
Jailbreaking to Become Illegal Again this Year (techcular.com)
Like iOS 5? Thank A Hacker (wired.com)
Untethered Jailbreak For iOS 5 is Coming Any Day Now (readwriteweb.com)
Is iOS the Future of the Mac? (mac.appstorm.net)
The iPhone 4S has been jailbroken (geek.com)

LMS Disruption– Free Web 2.0 Tools Can Co-Exist with the Centralized LMS

Ted Curran — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:16:50 +0000

[Question from a colleague] It appears that OpenClass has the same mission as Canvas – OpenClass: “disrupt technology for education”, Canvas: “disrupting the Learning Management System (LMS) market.” Does this new partnership introduce any concerns about Canvas’ future. Blackboard has to change if it’s going to survive. Canvas too? The thought crosses my mind – will we make this disruptive change (i.e. switching to Canvas) only to make another one in two years? Should that speculative thinking be a factor for consideration?

My parents are stockbrokers, where the phrase “market correction” is used to describe what’s happening to the LMS market right now. Schools are realizing that we have been paying too much for a big, integrated system with many features we don’t use, and we’re exploring smaller, cheaper systems. Canvas is attempting to offer all of the services that Blackboard does for less money by using free and open source components. Other disruptive tools (like OpenClass, CourseDirector, and LoudCloud) appear to be flirting with offering fewer total features and encouraging educators to plug multiple free Web 2.0 tools together to provide whatever functionality they want to add to their courses. In this way, the LMS is becoming more modular—less “one size fits all” and more “make it what you want”.

For example, faculty can use Vimeo.com for their video streaming needs instead of buying a streaming video server. They can use Google Apps to post and collaborate on documents, and even to maintain a gradebook! Instead of dedicated clickers, you can get a free web application that uses the cell phones and tablets that students are already bringing to class. Truly, every function of a traditional LMS can be disrupted with freely available Web 2.0 tools. As a matter of fact, this is the norm amongst K-12 teachers—most of the teacher blogs I follow are all about harnessing the power of free tools, not enterprise ones.

This approach has many benefits—the teacher who strings together Web 2.0 tools can match the tool to the educational objective without worrying about the price tag. Most Web 2.0 tools are cross-platform, so students can use them on their home computers and mobile devices.

This approach comes with some challenges and hurdles as well. Teachers need to be highly skilled with technology (moreso than the average LMS-dweller) in order to master the different interfaces and feature sets of various Web 2.0 tools well enough to see how they work together. The DIY U and EduPunk movements are all about cobbling together free educational tools to meet the needs of modern students and faculty. This is great, and it requires us all to be cobblers as well as teachers/learners. When we talk of disrupting the LMS, we are talking about making teachers into the connective glue that holds their edtech tools together—a job that was previously handled by the LMS. Some faculty will be freed by that, and others will really reject that role.

From an institutional perspective, cobbling together disparate tools makes it very difficult to get data back to a centralized repository where it can be preserved, shared, analyzed for evidence of learning, etc. Web 2.0 sites have varying terms of service regarding the intellectual property of their users, and may not provide tools to get data back out of their systems. If every faculty member uses a different free gradebook program, then students have to look in several places just to get an idea of their progress. School administrators would have even more problems trying to get a sense of student learning by looking at various systems. As we move closer and closer to measuring learning outcomes across the whole institution, we need to have everyone in the same system so we can get good aggregate reporting on how users are performing.

Another drawback to cobbling together free tools is the challenge of getting everyone together on the same network. More tools means more separate logins, more forgotten passwords, and people just not being able to find each other. This was something I had to manage as a classroom cobbler, and was amazed when I came to SMU to see my one set of login credentials passed securely (via LDAP) between all the various tools I use. This makes it seamless for faculty and students to stay in contact online, taking that stress off of faculty.

That’s why I agree with the ideas of David Wiley and Jon Mott that the best system is one that provides a secure meeting space where faculty and students can easily find each other and share information from any Web 2.0 tool. Wiley and Mott were early consultants on the creation of Canvas, and it has become the best existing example of the kind of “Post LMS” they had envisioned. An ideal system is one where students and faculty can work in whichever 3^rd party free tool they choose, but that all work is easily captured and preserved by a central LMS so they can have secure conversations about grades. Canvas does this.

: Mott’s Open Learning Network

I think that the dis-aggregation of the LMS is going to happen whether we like it or not, and that Canvas provides the “training wheels” that we would need at this juncture to help faculty transition from the LMS to a constellation of 3^rd party apps. It also provides the secure aggregated “core” that the institution needs so we can make sense of the various learning activities that are going on under our roof. Hopefully, this will mean that in 3-5 years, our average faculty will have had more experience integrating 3^rd party tools into their teaching repertoire and might feel more comfortable “cobbling” together tools the way the EduPunks do.

Pearson OpenClass: Judge It As Disruption, Not As Status Quo (mfeldstein.com)
Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System (chronicle.com)
Brown University moving from Blackboard to Instructure’s Canvas LMS (mfeldstein.com)
ELI Releases New Brief on LMS (educause.edu)
ClassConnect: Rethinking the LMS (hackeducation.com)
Pearson’s “Free” LMS (hackeducation.com)
Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS (mfeldstein.com)

Secure Your Social Identity Across All Sites with NameChk.com

Ted Curran — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:51:05 +0000

If you are trying to create a branded online identity, it helps to have a consistent username across all of the major sites. With NameChk.com, you can search once and see if your favorite username is available on 159 different social media sites.

Just enter the username you want in the search bar and it will give you a graphic visualization to let you know if that name is available on your favorite social networks. If you see your name is available, just go to that site and sign up!

This is also great if you’re picking baby names and want to make sure that your future offspring has reserved the very best usernames on all the hot services. For example, young Genghis Curran will not have to worry about adding a “1″ to the end of his Twitter handle (though he may get picked on a lot!)

Thanks, NameChk!

Identity and Internet Social Networking IDs (thorowit.wordpress.com)
I Am Fragmented – A Look Into Online Identity (kylelacy.com)
Tim Devane: Online Identity: Alone in the Car (huffingtonpost.com)
Check Username Availability (bloggingtips.com)
“A Lean, Mean, Social Media Fighting Machine.” (sweettomato.wordpress.com)

Switch from Teaching Word Processing to Teaching Web Processing

Ted Curran — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:56:22 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

If you’re like me, one of the first computer skills you were taught in school is how to use a word processor. We all mastered the art of formatting words for the printed page because we were still using computers in a paper-based world. As more business and education activities move online, we are spending ever more time writing in web-based text editors, where our ideas are being automatically encoded into divs, spans, ps and ems– a language that too few of us speak fluently enough to reset the margins or change the font size.

Still, the status quo is for people to write their documents in an offline word processor like MS Word, then copy and paste into the text editor of the web-based tools they use to collaborate. Though this sounds like an OK approach, I often see people wondering what all that weird MSOffice XML code that comes along is doing there. Worse, they save the word file and upload it, forcing others to download the file before they can see what it says.

I believe it’s time for students and mainstream users to compose documents using web design tools, not paper design tools. By using desktop writing tools like Blue Griffon or Scribefire, you can compose valid HTML documents using the same simple controls you’re used to seeing in your webmail, blog editor, or learning management system. If you pay attention, you will probably also learn the basic HTML concepts that help us create good looking, semantically valid documents for the open web. The controls on a web-based editor give you hints as to what’s happening in the code of a web page, and they allow you to go look at the code produced after you added blockquotes, an ordered list, or a heading 3 using the simple, intuitive buttons.

The WordPress Text Editor- Simple, Elegant, and a Great Learning Tool

Web Processors: Some Promising Tools

My favorite text editor to work in is the default WYSIWYG editor in WordPress– especially now that they have added the distraction-free writing interface called “fullscreen”. It is an uncluttered, minimalistic writing interface like WriteRoom or OmmWriter that allows you to focus on your work. The WordPress editor gives you as much or as little assistance as you need with formatting your document, but it also finds little ways to challenge you to expand your HTML coding skills. I find this nice balance between easy and challenging has kept me using (and growing with) this tool. The downside to this approach is that it’s really best if you have a WordPress site– it feels a little silly to fire up a website just so I can dash off a document to someone. [A note to devs: I would definitely pay a nominal fee to have the WordPress fullscreen editor in a standalone desktop app. Make it so.]

For offline writing, I am starting to really appreciate BlueGriffon, a free HTML5 authoring app along the lines of NVU or Kompozer. It can do sophisticated HTML5 and CSS3 formatting in a simple graphic interface that brings high quality, modern web design tools to the most technophobic. (OK not the MOST technophobic– more like newbies with a taste for mild adventure!) The tools in Blue Griffon go from underlining, bold, and italics to helping you work with div placement and styling without touching a line of code. This tool is truly the most user-friendly way I’ve found to make the difficult art of web design feel less threatening to non- coders.

Imagine all the hours of your life you’ve spent working in MS Word– if you had spent that much time in Blue Griffon while trying to bang out those last minute term papers, you would be a seasoned web designer before you finished high school! And that’s my point– the tools we are expecting people to use today support a 20th Century workplace, not the collaborative, computer literate populace needed today.

You will find links below to some other promising HTML editors for web-based writing. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on

Romantic vs. Classical Worldviews in Writing for the Web

Image via Wikipedia

This all reminds me of Robert Pirsig‘s discussion of Romantic vs. Classical thinking in his towering work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In discussing how different people approach maintaining their motorcycles, he touches on an interesting dichotomy in the way people look at the world. [excerpt] The “Romantic” is described thus:

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings
rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It
does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic
conscience.

He contrasts this worldview with the “Classical” which he describes as:

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws…which are themselves
underlying forms of thought and behavior…. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal… Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.

He uses these distinctions to contrast himself from his friend. He, a classicist, takes pride in understanding what makes his motorcycle work and performing his own maintenance. His friend, a romantic, doesn’t care how it works– just as long as it works and he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty fixing it! As you might imagine, his friend’s approach is put to the test when his motorcycle starts to malfunction.

This same distinction is alive and well among computer users today– most of us want to get into a tool and have everything “just work”. We don’t want to know anything about what’s going on under the hood, as long as we can drag and drop everything where we want it to appear. That was great in the desktop era where apps and the OS could protect you fom ever having to think about code. (Thanks Steve!) However, the web has some very rigid underlying rules for what works and what doesn’t, and I often see people suffering panic attacks because their romanticist attitude is coming in conflict with some real classical realities of the web. The worker of the 21st Century will be the one who can successfully unite an artistic viewpoint with the technical skills to bring it about, and there is no better way to learn that blend than coding for the web.

Your Thoughts?

I’m very curious to hear your reactions– do you think students need to learn HTML or do you think it is a dying art that will soon be done by machines? Do you think it’s possible to completely replace your Office suite with an HTML editor? Leave a comment and let us know!

Text Editor Anywhere Moves Text From Any Program to Your Favorite Text Editor [Download Of The Day] (lifehacker.com)
Full Screen Text Editor for Chrome (madrasgeek.com)
What are the defferences between text editor and wysiwyg editor (wiki.answers.com)
Elements 2 is a restrained and remarkable text editor for iPhone and iPad (thenextweb.com)
WriteRoom Takes iPad Text Editor Crown (wired.com)
Getting to Know Textile (maketecheasier.com)
Pillarbox: Distraction Free Writing in the Browser (thechromesource.com)
BlueGriffon EPUB Edition (bluegriffon.org)
BlueGriffon: A Cross-Platform Open Source WYSIWYG HTML Editor [Review] (techie-buzz.com)
Disruptive Innovations announces BlueGriffon EPUB edition software (teleread.com)
Ten WYSIWYG HTML editors for Mac OS X (tuaw.com)
BlueGriffon 1.1.1 (bluegriffon.org)

Take Dramatic 3D Screenshots of Websites with Firefox's Tilt Plugin

Ted Curran — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:40:27 +0000

If you do a lot of presentations or tutorials about technology, you probably have to take screenshots of websites to illustrate your ideas. I really like to add a “wow” factor to my presentations whenever I can do it gracefully, and I’m already seeing the possibilities with Mozilla Hacks’ new project, Tilt. It uses the very latest in HTML5 WebGL technology to render web pages in 3D, showing its internal structure (the DOM) visually. While that’s all cool and geeky, it also means that you can take dramatic-looking screenshots of websites to show in your presentations.

How do you do it?

Go download the Tilt plugin for Firefox.
Navigate to the website you want to screenshot
Pull down Firefox’s Tools menu and invoke Tilt
Position your website in the most awesome way possible
Shoot and edit your screenshot with your favorite screen capture software like Jing, Skitch, or good ol’ Grab in OSX
Drop that screenshot into your presentation, document, or whatever creative piece you’re working on!

It’s really that simple! I’d love to see what you do with this tool– please leave links to your 3D presentations in the comments!

See Web Pages in 3D with Tilt, a Firefox Extension (labnol.org)
Tilt: Visualize your Web page in 3D (hacks.mozilla.org)
Quick-Tip An Awesome Browser Plug-in – Awesome Screenshot (compete.com)
Review: Firefox 5 Web browser (macworld.com)
Firefox Joy…stick that is (geektyrant.com)
The Most Important Parts of HTML5 (n01se.net)
Firefox Gets A Massive Speed Boost; I’m Still Sticking With Chrome. (thechromesource.com)
Firefox To Get Better Third Party Add-On Security (ghacks.net)

Make a "Hard to Guess but Easy to Remember" Password for Greater Cloud Security

Ted Curran — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:42:41 +0000

Image by hardeep.singh via Flickr

In my last post, I recommended using a password manager like LastPass to help you create strong, unique passwords for all of the different sites you use. If you don’t like the idea of storing passwords in the cloud, the next best way is to create a mnemonic password formula. The way it works is to create an easy-to-remember “formula” that enables you to use a different strong password on each site. It consists of a strong password that’s the same on every site(so you can remember it) but with a different component for each site.

Here’s one method:

Take the first letter from each word in a favorite song lyric. I just happen to have “Panic” by the Smiths on right now. The first line is

Panic on the streets of London/ Panic on the streets of Birmingham

If you take the first letters from each word, you get:

PotsoLPotsoB

Already, that’s pretty cryptic because it’s not a dictionary word and it has both upper and lower case letters. It’s also easy to remember because I can just hum it to myself. Then you can add numbers and punctuation to make it stronger

PotsoL/PotsoB4220

I added a slash where it would come in the lyrics, and I put my dog’s birthday backwards. Now I have a very strong password that’s easy to remember. This is the part I commit to memory. Very strong, but it doesn’t solve the problem of having different passwords on each site.

Next step is to add the first three letters of the site into the password. We’re going to have [memorized password] + [first 3 letters of site name].

My Facebook password would be PotsoL/PotsoB4220+Fac

My PayPal password would be PotsoL/PotsoB4220+Pay

So what you end up with is a very long and secure password that’s different on every site and easy to remember. This is just one way of creating a mnemonic password, but it’s the best way I know to do this. Of course, the trick is that you have to be consistent in your formula. If you don’t stick with the exact formula it’ll be a nightmare to recall it. Not to mention what a hassle it is to have to type this every time.

Check your password – is it strong? (kozar.wordpress.com)
6 Password Protection Lessons Learned from the Sony Hacker Attack (savings.com)
I use only one password for all web sites (justmybloghere.tumblr.com)
The Password Problem (southwoodit.wordpress.com)
Protecting Your Online Life With Secure Passwords (lifehack.org)
Tools for Creating Strong Passwords (freetech4teachers.com)
Secure Passwords Sans Sales Pitch (securosis.com)
7 Tips for Creating a Secure Online Password (money.usnews.com)

Free Tools, the Distorted Web, Privacy, and Your Students' Critical Thinking Skills

Ted Curran — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 01:30:08 +0000

Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay for access to the many awesome online communication and collaboration tools they provide.

In this talk, I learned that sites like Google and Facebook actually skew your search results to show you different information based on what they think you’ll like. The speaker shows how different people got different Google results when searching for “Egypt” in the wake of the politial protests there this spring. Rather than giving you an accurate view of hits relevant to your search, these sites favor certain sites over others in an attempt to show you content it thinks you’ll like.

Seeing this talk reminded me of the billboard I recently saw near the Bay Bridge in SF, loudly proclaiming:

The Experiment

I decided to go Google-free for a week and use DuckDuckGo for all my searching needs to see how different the search results would be.

I did a very interesting little experiment: I searched “income inequality” in DuckDuckGo vs Google (see links for results). I didn’t see much difference in the search results until I noticed a search result in DDG that I don’t agree with– that Income Inequality “doesn’t matter“. Anyone who knows me (and who knows me better than Google?) would take it for granted that I think income inequality is a problem. Of all the different things one could say about income inequality– I thought we (as a society) were all on the same page that it’s not a good thing. I probably fit squarely inside some Google framework of a Bay Area, liberal educated white middle-class NPR listener who would be shocked and horrified by such callous libertarian thought. I think this is part of what the speaker in the TED talk was getting at– that internet filtering removes viewpoints that challenge our own. My time with DDG is making me wonder if my search results help reinforce my certainty that my view of reality is the correct one.

This little revelation led me to try the mother of all divisive search terms: “Abortion”.

The Google Results Page:

The Google results seemed a little too encouraging for me to get out there and get an abortion– a large part of the page was taken up telling me where I can go to get an abortion in my neighborhood right now! I’m just hoping that these search results are calculated based on my liberal politics and not by some measure of my overall value to the gene pool!

The results were heavily oriented to my physical location, giving me news and vendors of abortion in Oakland. There was news about the political struggle around abortion, but they presumed that I had already made my mind up about the issue, and that I’m “pro”.

The DuckDuckGo Results Page:

By contrast the DuckDuckGo results featured a spectrum of search results from Conservapedia to ProChoice.org, RonPaul.com to the HuffingtonPost by way of a decidedly unfiltered mixture of different viewpoints along the way. It did not presume that I already knew anything about the subject, and so it gave a mixture of search results that offered several different ways to look at the issue.

If I had any uncertainty at all about this important decision, I would rather be looking at search pages that don’t make that decision for me ahead of time, wouldn’t you? Now of course abortion is an extreme example, but the fact that DDG returns such diverse search results gives you an appreciation for how many different perspectives there are on reality, and how that diversity can look in search results.

I used DuckDuckGo for a week as my desktop search engine of choice, replacing the default search engines in my Firefox, Chrome, and even my Android phone’s default search engine. Generally the results were relevant, complete, and quick (but not instant like Google Instant). I didn’t feel like I was suffering a performance drag– unless I was looking for something local. When I search for Oasis Market, Google just knows that it’s the one in Oakland, while DDG returns the one in Minnesota. This was especially annoying when searching it from my Android phone– the experience of trying to get directions to a spot in SF via voice search was enough to put me off DDG altogether.

I really fell in love with the !bang shortcuts– they allow you to search many 3rd party sites and topics from DDG just by entering a code like !g or !facebook before your search query. They have shortcuts for almost any major site you can think of, as well as great generic !bang searches for images, file types, and programming languages. The selection is staggering and has revolutionized the way I search the web period. This alone makes it an essential service and the very best way I’ve found to search various sites quickly, all within my search bar.

Eventually, despite its very capable service, I was relieved to get back to my hyper-relevant, instant-searching, location-aware overlord with a capital G. I’ve been playing with it and I’ve figured out a way to easily call up DDG with a keyword in Chrome so I can use it when I want it and skip it when I don’t. Using the technique that I discuss here I made a keyword for DuckDuckGo search in my Chrome Omnibar. This makes it so I can simply type “ddg” before my search terms and Chrome will search DuckDuckGo instead of Google. This is nice because while Google remains my default search engine for when I’m feeling googly, I can just append “ddg” before my search terms and I’ll get DuckDuckGo results. I really think this is the best of both worlds, and it’s the new way I search the web.

So What?

Like me, you may not worry much about the profiles that companies are amassing about you. It does seem to be a small price to pay for the incredibly useful tools like Google Docs, Facebook, and Google search. However, these services are making lots of money collecting and selling your personal data to advertisers– Lifehacker aptly puts it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“. While I have (so far) felt ok opening myself to this kind of vulnerability, it gives me pause to think that I’ve been recommending that my students do the same. Is this responsible for teachers to do when the real-world consequences of exposing personal data are not fully understood? Will we one day find ourselves regretting that we gave up so much of our personal data to cloud companies, and when we do, will we feel responsible that our students did it too? Should teachers seeking students’ liberation and empowerment be on the vanguard of software efforts that preserve and enhance user liberty and control such as Diaspora, FreedomBox, LockerProject, and Free/Libre Open Source software?

Aside from privacy issues though, the Orwellian issue of how our experience on the web is distorted has implications for students’ development of critical thinking skills. Central to critical thinking is the idea that reality can be viewed from very different lenses and perspectives. If our search engines and social networks (for many, their web portal on the world) provide us with a distorted view of reality, do we lose the ability and the desire to consider divergent viewpoints from our own? If students’ online experience can be tailored to their tastes like an iTunes Genius playlist, what are they missing out on? Where is the chance to see the unexpected, the infuriating, and the serendipitous? Don’t we have a right to steer them towards experiences that push them out of their comfort zones? And if so, should we be starting with the search engines and software tools that they will depend on after they’ve left our classes?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

DuckDuckGo Brings Private Searching And Zero Click Results To Android (androidpolice.com)
Should Google and Facebook Be Filtering Our Content For Us? (webpronews.com)
DuckDuckGo Questions Quality, Accuracy Of Search Engine Traffic Numbers (searchenginewatch.com)
Google’s New Search Layout Test: Borrowing From Blekko & DuckDuckGo? (searchenginewatch.com)
DuckDuckGo: popular search engines don’t offer true search results (geek.com)
DuckDuckGo Zero-click Info API (mashape.com)

Chrome OS Netbooks: Can Your School Live in the Cloud?

Ted Curran — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:39:47 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

If you haven’t heard of Chrome OS, it’s Google’s attempt to do away with the desktop altogether and have everything that happens on your computer happen inside the browser. This means that instead of opening Outlook for your email, you go to Gmail or Hotmail on the web. Instead of opening Photoshop to resize that photo, you use Aviary.com. Instead of desktop apps, you switch to web apps. After Google’s recent announcement that schools would be able to lease Chromebooks for $20/student/month, educators have been wondering if they could depend on a laptop that doesn’t come with its own desktop, has the internal storage of a mid-range smartphone, and only works when it’s connected to the Internet.

Yaysaying

Some people are excited at the prospects of moving completely into the cloud and leaving expensive, slow desktop computers behind. After all, Educause has been warning us since 2009 that cloud computing was on the horizon. Chromebooks boot up instantly, run lightning fast, and cost less than half of what you can expect to pay for a Macbook. It truly is possible to keep up with most common computing tasks using only web-based apps. For the Chromebook to exist, there has to be a full suite of web apps that enable you to do most common computing tasks in a browser with no (or few) compromises. That suite of apps exists. Email, office docs, audio creation, image manipulation, vector drawing, video editing, productivity apps, social media– all of these can happen in a browser now. Don’t believe me? Type your favorite piece of desktop software into Alternativeto.net and find the many cloud alternatives that can take its place. For free. In a browser. If you’re the type of person who spends most of your time in a browser, these devices might be perfect for you. If you’re not, you probably fall into the next category….

Naysaying

Others think that we are simply not ready to cut our ties to the trusty desktop and plant our feet firmly in the Cloud. A netbook minus the ‘net is not much of anything at all, IMHO. If you often find yourself outside the reach of WiFi or 3G data connections (which many of us often do) then you know just how important it is to be able to work offline. If you depend on a certain piece of software that only comes on your chosen OS, you might be loath to leave it behind for a cloud alternative. Add this to the increased responsiveness and power of desktop apps over webapps (we’re seeing people’s clear preference for apps in the world of smartphones) and the wealth of free and open source desktop applications available and it feels premature to kiss our old friend the Desktop goodbye.

The Way Forward

I think the best thing about Chrome OS is that you don’t have to actually use it to get the benefits it offers– you can choose to go “all webapps” in whichever OS you happen to prefer. This fact also means that you don’t need a CR-48…. you can still get a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer (or build your own!), install Chrome browser, and enjoy all of the pleasures that Chrome offers PLUS the offline desktop apps you love and depend on. I’ve long been a proponent of software that has online/offline syncing capabilities like my beloved Evernote, the amazing Dropbox, or the venerable Thunderbird email from Mozilla. I’ve also been patiently waiting for a day when I could get a powerful laptop for under $400 that does everything I want it to do. The fact that Google has been working so hard to bring us a computing experience that doesn’t depend on the OS you’re running means that these dreams are becoming a reality.

Now, you can get a cheap, powerful laptop computer, install the free open source Ubuntu Linux OS on it (to get all the goodies that a true desktop OS with real apps brings), and then run all the webapps I want– right there in the browser. The fact that we have viable choices on the desktop and the cloud changes the conversation from an “either/or” to an “also/and”.

For schools trying to offer a high quality- modern computing experience to students on a budget, this represents a viable vision of how to make that happen.

Chrome OS Launches in June, Only on Notebooks (pamil-visions.net)
How to install Google’s Chrome OS (zdnet.com)
Meet The New Chromebooks (appreaders.com)
So.. Chrome OS has no Desktop? (thechromesource.com)
Chromebooks Take Us Closest So Far to a Post-PC Era (customerthink.com)
Will the Google Chromebook Replace Your Laptop? (pcworld.com)
Google Chromebook, Do You Consider Buying One? (ghacks.net)
Google Chrome OS: Too secure to need security? (go.theregister.com)

Cultivate your Personal Learning Network

Ted Curran — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:28:29 +0000

John Ward, RIP

This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place….

This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Ward, who recently passed away after a long career of distinguished service at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara. He took me from being a hopelessly poor math student to a very capable one in three years of instruction, despite my deep and abiding dislike of the subject. He did this by consistently providing me with high quality materials, challenging problems to solve, and then expecting me to put in the work– or “plug and chug” as he would say.

Think of your favorite teachers over the years– they presented you with challenging, thought-provoking material and then asked you to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. By the time we’re in college, we get used to writing thoughtful essays about challenging ideas several times a week. When we leave formal education, many of us get out of this familiar rhythm, and instead focus on “getting things done”. When we’re in this frenzied state, we are not taking the time to reflect on new information and experiences we get from our work.

The process of taking information in, meshing it with what you know, and breathing it out again forms something of a “learning loop” that fits with a Constructivist idea (ed theory, sorry laypeople) of what high quality learning looks like.

You can think of building your own Personal Learning Network as an attempt to create this “learning loop” for yourself using the tools at your disposal. Instead of a bunch of teachers selecting challenging information for you, the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention. All they ask of you is to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. You can participate in this conversation by writing your own blog, tweeting, organizing sources, speaking, and teaching others in the way that works best for you. This is all part of what we educators call “Life-Wide Learning”, where you are continuously gaining knowledge and building skills that help you stay professionally competitive, personally empowered, and connected with a community of people who share your interests– even after you leave formal education.

A Game of Inputs and Outputs

You can think of building your PLN as a game of Inputs and Outputs. You need to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. You also need to get in the habit of “adding value” to the information that comes in to you in whatever way works for you. That could mean writing your reactions to an interesting article you read, making lists of bookmarks you find to make it easier for others to find relevant information, video yourself demonstrating a skill you learned, or sharing resources with people you think could benefit from them. What you do is as unique as your skills and interests are, but the focus should be on sharing your learning with others who could benefit from it. Though this practice can benefit you and your business, think of it as doing well by doing good first. Most people don’t like being marketed to, but everybody likes getting free, relevant information about things they care about.

My Inputs and Outputs

To give you an idea of what my PLN looks like, I included an incomplete list of my inputs and outputs. Take a look. Next, I’ll show you how information flows from my inputs, through my brain, and out my outputs.

Inputs

Social Media
- Google Reader
- Podcasts
- Blogs
- Google Alerts
- Twitter
- Recommendation Engines
  - GReader Recommendations
  - Twitter Recommendations
IRL (“in real life”)
- Meetups
- In-Person Connections
- Conferences & Trade Shows
- Professional Organizations
- Events/Parties

Outputs
- Your Blog
- Tumblelog/ Buzz
- Status Updates
- Bookmark!
- Videoblogging
- SlideShare
- Present in Conferences or Trade Shows
- Podcasts

Inputs and Outputs: A Workflow

Inputs

A first step towards forming a PLN is to start getting good quality information flowing in to you in an organized way so you can easily consume it at your convenience. My favorite tool for this job is Google’s free RSS reader, titled simple “Google Reader“. Reader allows me to collect RSS feeds (think of them as real-time updates from several different news sites, blogs, and other continuously updated websites) in a simple digest format. It enables me to quickly scan over headlines about anything I’m interested in, read what I feel like reading, and skip the rest. It takes the place of a newspaper for me– in fact, it’s a paperless newspaper where I’m the managing editor who decides what I’ll see! You can choose to include a mixture of “established” news sites (like the New York Times or the BBC) alongside updates from less established sites like your neighborhood activities committee, an industry-insider blog, or vegandad.blogspot.com. You can also organize them into folders like I have so you can switch between your many interests quickly.

Over the years I have collected RSS feeds from major thought leaders, news blogs, and even wiki site updates about information in my field, and this makes sure that if it’s happening in education technology, I’ll see an update in my Reader. I can honestly say that the time I have spent building my Reader into a well-rounded reflection of my interests has made me a more marketable and able worker, and a more empowered individual.

Enough sales pitch– let’s get started!

Get a Google Account.
Go to Google Reader.
follow the steps in the video “Welcome to Google Reader“.

After those steps, you should have a Google Reader with at least a few feeds in it. You might also want to check out these celebrity GReader reading lists by popular bloggers and intelligentsia types that you can simply add to your Reader.

From this point, you can be on the lookout for RSS feeds on your favorite websites, blogs and wikis. The RSS symbol

will appear in your browser’s address bar whenever you are on a website that features RSS feeds. Just click it and it will help you add updates from that page to your Google Reader!

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically RSS-powered blogs which contain audio and video files and are usually consumed on an iPod or smartphone. They are another very important part of my information intake every week. Just like my blogs, I line them up in a podcast player for when I’m ready to hear them (driving, walking the dog, etc.) and I don’t worry about it if I miss them. It’s like a DVR for interesting audio and video shows on a whole range of topics.

Most people subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, and then let iTunes sync the media to their player. I recently discovered that my Android phone’s Google Listen podcast player can actually use a Google Reader folder as its podcast subscriptions folder and download podcasts over the air! Here’s my list of favorite podcasts– all organized by Google Reader. If you prefer listening to news rather than reading it (or a mix of both), check into the top 50 podcasts on PodCast Alley.

Twitter

Twitter is another very valuable place where I can queue up challenging and entertaining ideas from the world’s best and brightest until I’m ready to read them. Some people dismiss Twitter as a frivolous medium– saying “it’s only people talking about what they had for lunch”. I’ve found it to be a vibrant community of smart people in my field giving real-time updates and discussions about newsworthy links, reactions to the news, and thoughtful quotes.

If you’re interested in Twitter, don’t concern yourself with what you’ll write first. Unfortunately, people do tend to write about lunch before they’ve had a chance to see what can be done in Twitter. The best thing to do with Twitter (at first) is to search it. Ask Twitter what’s going on with a topic you care about, and I think you’ll be surprised to find a compelling mix of formal and informal perspectives that you can’t find anywhere else. I watched Obama’s 2008 election on Twitter, and I saw a mix of people from all over the world giving their reactions to that historic event.

As you start to find people whose perspectives and voices you get some benefit from, follow them. It’s a great way to form relationships with people you can learn a lot from. (It might also inspire you to contribute your own voice to the conversation!)

Twitter organizes conversations around topic tags called #hashtags. You can make any word into a hashtag by adding a pound sign to the beginning. Twitter turns these into links to all of the postings on that topic. Website Whatthetrend.com can help you find conversation topics that are relevant to your interests.

To learn more about Twitter, check out the great Twitter Guide Book from Mashable.

It’s worth noting that Google Buzz, the Twitter-like thingy from Google, can subscribe you to updates from your friends in Twitter and/or Google Reader so you can see both in one stream. After you get to this point, take a look in Google Buzz and see if it shows a good mix of news for you.

Next Step: Outputs

In Part II of this post, I will discuss the “Outputs” stage, where you can show off your learning and use it to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
Twitterers To Follow (gfulibrarian.wordpress.com)
Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt) (weblogg-ed.com)
Tearing Down Your Classroom Walls (freetech4teachers.com)
The Downtime Learner theory (deangroom.wordpress.com)

Take and Annotate Screenshots with Open Source Tools: ZScreen and Paint.net

Ted Curran — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 01:25:37 +0000

Online teachers and instructional designers need access to good tools for capturing screenshots and annotating them. These tools are invaluable for giving step-by-step computer instructions to students and faculty, and can really help you communicate information visually.

If you’re new to screen capture, the idea is simple– these tools allow you to take a snapshot of your desktop and save it as an image file that can be emailed or posted to the web. You can type text directions onto the screenshot and/or draw arrows and shapes to help your viewers understand how to work with a piece of software.

When I was teaching in a Mac ecosystem, I used Skitch for this purpose, but Snagit is the dominant tool in my new Windows-based world.

I recently made the switch from the very capable Snagit to an open source alternative called ZScreen. I like supporting the open source alternative whenever it can effectively fit my workflow, and this definitely has the chops. It features a staggering array of options that allow you to customize

The hotkeys you use to invoke it
The free image hosting services or FTP server you want to upload to
Characteristics of the screenshots like their file type, watermark, and cursor visibility
whether you would like to save a copy to File, Clipboard, a hosting service, or multiple locations
If you’d like to auto-open the screenshot in an image editor once it’s created
and more more more that I haven’t delved into yet.

Though I was overwhelmed by all the options at first, I waded through them and was able to craft an awesome workflow that fits my needs. I made it so ZScreen invokes with a keystroke, allows me to draw a capture window on my screen, then opens my new file in Paint.net for editing before saving it to file.

The open source image editor Paint.net handles all the annotation functions I need while remaining light and snappy on my system. It works so well, I’m looking at the open source CamStudio as an alternative to our regular video screencast software, Jing. Updates to come….

Related articles

ZUploader Uploads Text, Images, and Files to Almost Anywhere [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
Mac Screenshot App Showdown Plus You Can Win a Copy of Snagit! (trishussey.com)
Mac Gems: Skitch 1.0.1 (macworld.com)
My blogging toolkit (ictineducation.org)
An Uber-Collection of Open Source Resources, Guides and Projects (ostatic.com)

An Uber-Collection of Open Source Resources, Guides and Projects (ostatic.com)