With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K-12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerful suite of free communication and collaboration tools like GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Groups, Sites, and others. While many of these productivity-focused apps have helped modernize the classroom toolset, schools have been secretly pining for a tool to help students, teachers, families, and administrators stay in constant contact the way we’re getting used to doing in Facebook. Several small players have offered Facebook-style social classroom apps– tools like Edmodo, Schoology, and HootSuite have grown up to fill the need for a full featured social network for schools. If Google gets this right, the socially linked classroom with be a reality before the year is out! This is exciting for me, as someone who has been looking at enterprise-level microblogging tools like SocialCast and Yammer as a way to make campus communications easier and more free-flowing. I think this type of technology can revolutionize organizations by making it easier for stakeholders to hold sustained, data-informed conversations with asynchronous tools.

Most social classroom apps I’ve seen organize course activities (like commenting on discussion questions or sharing relevant links) into a Facebook-style activity feed where recent events appear near the top of the home screen. Photos, videos, and links to outside websites are automatically previewed inline, making it easy for people to see where they’re being linked to. Users can send private messages or public ones, deciding how they want to communicate and with whom. Discussions can be formed around any kind of posting, from a quick status update to a long-form blog post or multimedia artifact. These conversations can last long after the original posting, only drawing attention to themselves when a new comment is added. Users can form friendships, groups, and organization pages to support the many different types of interactions that people have.

These features will come as no surprise to Facebook users– the social network has so thoroughly revolutionized the way we think of online collaboration that  its influence is felt in every tool in this category. Google Plus is no exception, but it also advances the form in a few key ways:

• It gives simple and precise controls to help users share information only with the people they want to reach. No more accidental overshares.
• It provides an integrated interface where chat, video conferencing, and RSS news reading intermingle with social status updates.
• Google has stated its commitment to integrate its many diverse services into G+, and it will continue to grow into a central hub for communication and collaboration.
• It remains to be seen, but a G+ for Apps could very likely help schools to keep communications inside the school community instead of defaulting to public status. This may allay privacy- and copyright-related concerns caused by the wide-open nature of Twitter and Facebook. This is a prime selling-point of these education-focused social learning apps as well as the enterprise microblogging apps.

Even this week’s announcement of Pearson’s OpenClass Learning Management System may be disrupted by a G+ for Apps, as it looks to be little more than a social “glue” to organize students and teachers into courses so they can share documents in Google’s suite of free services. If G+ provides simple tools for schools to organize students and teachers into courses, cohorts, programs, organizations and the like (maybe by interfacing with Student Information Systems?), it may give the LMS a serious run for its money.

What are your thoughts on Google Plus for Education? Please let us know in the comments.

Related articles

• Pearson adds free learning management tools to Google Apps for Education (betanews.com)
• North Carolina A&T State University goes Google (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)
• New Presentation Options in Google Docs (freetech4teachers.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google in Education and Chromebooks (Sept 2011) (speedofcreativity.org)
• Back to School with Google Chromebooks (hackeducation.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

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!

Related articles

• 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)

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.

Related articles

• 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)

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”.

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.

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…

Related articles

• 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)

Outputs: Showing What you Know

Not too long ago, I got an appointment with a new doctor, showed up, and was asked to wait in his office for several minutes before he could see me. I noticed that he had many objects in his office that were meant to reassure patients that “he knows his stuff”– his med school diploma and professional awards hung proudly above a bookshelf packed full of thick medical textbooks and antique decorative doctor’s instruments. As I looked closer, I saw that the med school textbooks were dated from the early 1980s and looked like they hadn’t been opened (or dusted) in years. The last of his professional awards was received last century, as the fading ink read 1996 on the yellowing paper. It made me wonder if this doctor was keeping his skills current or if he’s just been going through the motions since the mid- ’90s. Are those antique doctor’s instruments just for decoration or does he still use those?!? I grew more doubtful as my eyes scanned the dinghy artifacts. I realized that even though he had all these symbols of learning, there was no way for me to see what he really knows. I’m just expected to see those items and trust that he learned everything he needed to know to keep me healthy.

Your resume (or your school transcript) isn’t too different from that doctor’s office– they tell others where you got your experience and when, but they don’t show what you really learned from those experiences. This is why many educators are recommending students compile ePortfolios, a culmination of their best work over the course of their educational careers. With an ePortfolio, people can actually look at the very best work you have produced and they can see the quality of thinking for themselves. You can use an ePortfolio to continually develop your ideas over time and engage others in a public discussion about the things you are interested in learning. As you may imagine, this is also good practice for professionals who have left formal education, so they can demonstrate that their understanding of their field is current, complete, and sophisticated. If that doctor had a blog discussing new developments in medicine or showing off the articles he reads, it would have gone a long way towards reassuring me that I would be in good hands under his care.

A personal blog is the perfect tool for an ePortfolio because it allows you to easily post almost any kind of work that you do– writing, videos, audio, photos and more. This gives your readers a clear picture of what you’re working on so they can see for themselves the quality of your work. Blogs also feature tools to help you organize your writing by categories, tags, and pages so your readers can easily find content that interests them. A blog can also be a place where your other outputs– like twitter tweets, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and flickr photos– all come together to demonstrate your many learning pursuits.

Make it Easy

Many of the tools we use for getting new information allow us to create a digital “trail” for others to follow without any extra effort. Google Reader, which we discussed last time, has a Share button that allows you to publish interesting posts to your followers as you read. Articles you share go up onto a special public page (here’s mine) which has its own RSS feed so you can feed your shared links into other tools. MY Google Reader list feeds into a widget on the right hand side of TedCurran.net so people can see what I’ve been reading. I also use the sidebar of my blog to show off my most recent twitter tweet, my Diigo bookmark collection, and the podcasts I listen to. I share these because the people who appreciate my writing would probably also appreciate the other articles I’ve been reading on similar subjects. By reading through and picking out the “best of the best” among my inputs, I’m sharing my perspective on what’s important with my readers without actually doing all that writing and reviewing myself. This helps me provide a valuable experience to my readers in a way that doesn’t add extra work for me.

I recommend this method to small business owners working in competitive fields (I do a little web design on the side) so they can demonstrate their expertise to potential clients. It also becomes a tool to educate your ongoing clients around issues that will help them get more out of the services you provide.

I did this as a classroom teacher too– I used a tool called Google Notebook (RIP) to clip little snippets of information that I would find as I was researching new lessons or units for my students. Sometimes I would clip articles expressly for them to read as assignments, but other times I would just add interesting readings to the feed for them to explore independently. Often they were readings that had informed my understanding of our projects but that I couldn’t find a way to work into the flow of our daily assignments. (If you’re interested in this sort of workflow, I’d recommend using Diigo for Educators nowadays).

Using these little tricks means that showing what you know does not require doing a lot of extra work– if you can’t find the time to write periodic blog posts, think about just sharing a steady stream of interesting articles with your chosen audience. Next, I’ll talk about another tool that helps make showing what you know easy.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is a great little browser plugin for most major browsers that makes it easy to share webpages on almost any social network you can think of. If you’re like me you have different types of friends on each social network– professional contacts on LinkedIn, close friends and family on Facebook, work colleagues on Diigo, and those people who still only do email– and Shareaholic makes it easy to share content on whichever “output” works for you. This way, you can create several different “channels” of information that can be customized to the different audiences and social networks that make up your Personal Learning Network.

Engaging with Your Networks

One mistake that many people make with social media is that they try to use it as  a megaphone– to post in as many different social networks as possible in the hopes of reaching more people.  Tools like Shareaholic and another favorite, Ping.fm, make it easy to blast your tweets into every social network at the same time, but I was surprised to find that this doesn’t translate into increased traffic. The same way you shouldn’t trust SEO gurus who will promise to get you to the top of Google searches in a week, you simply can’t game social networks to promote your content. The Internet has a way of rewarding content that is actually relevant and useful to people, so you have to put in the work to find out how your ideas fit into the larger conversation.
The best way to get people to pay attention to your blog is to genuinely engage in conversations with other people. Most of the traffic that comes into my blog now comes from comments I’ve made on other people’s posts– posts that are on the same topic as mine, where my blog can serve as part of the larger conversation on this topic. Finding like-minded people who are writing and tweeting about your topics of interest and asking questions, sharing ideas, and moving ideas forward is at the heart of building your Personal Learning Network. It has the added benefit of driving web traffic towards your work– traffic that you can then figure out how to turn into dollars and cents.

Please Share Back Your Experiences!

I have been very heartened and grateful at the way Part I of this post has spread across Twitter and the personal blogs of many of my own heroes on this subject. I’d love to hear your reactions as you try these techniques or compare my ideas to your own ways of managing your PLN. Feel free to use the comments below (which can cross-post to your favorite social networks as well).

Related articles

• Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
• Cultivate your Personal Learning Network (downes.ca)
• Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
• The importance of choice: Reflections on ePortfolios (ictenhancedlearningandteaching.wordpress.com)
• Teaching and Learning with Technology Blog: E-portfolios for Learning (teachlearntechblog.blogspot.com)
• Strategies for renewing eLearning environments – Melbourne University (slideshare.net)

Image via CrunchBase

Ge.tt is a great free tool for quickly and easily sharing files that are too large to send by email (up to 100mb). As a digital art teacher, I often had students trying to send me videos, flash files, audio, or big presentations. As a digital designer, I use this type of service to send clients high quality proofs of materials. Ge.tt is a copycat website of a service I used to use and love, Drop.io, until they were bought by Facebook. While Ge.tt has not yet matched all of Drop.io’s awesomeness, it is still the quickest and easiest way to send someone large files.

The beauty of it is that you can just drag & drop your files onto the website– you don’t even have to make an account if you don’t want to! Just post your files– Ge.tt will give you a short URL to send to your friend. They just follow the link and download the file– easy peezy!

How do you share large files with friends, colleagues, and clients? Let us know in the comments.

Related articles

• Ge.tt launches its ‘realtime’ filesharing service (eu.techcrunch.com)
• 3 New & Superb Ways To Share Files Online (makeuseof.com)
• The 50 Best Chrome Web Store Apps (appreaders.com)
• 60 social media tools and platforms you may have missed (commscorner.com)

As faculty, you likely spend several hours every week carefully reading, evaluating, and grading student work. Research shows that students report higher course satisfaction when they get better grades and when faculty exhibit “immediacy and presence behaviors”. This finding suggests that giving inflated grades on student work without reading it first may save you valuable time and dramatically improve students’ evaluations of your course. This method, called the “Rubber Stamp” method, consists of a few easy steps:

• Collect student work
• Randomly assign grades from a range between “A-” and “A+” to all papers
• Cavalierly sprinkle encouraging handwritten statements like “Good Point!” or “I never thought of that!” throughout the paper.
• Take up the hobby you always wanted to pursue but never had time to.

Students in “Rubber Stamp” courses report high satisfaction with the prompt turnaround times and unfailingly optimistic feedback they receive from faculty. They often report that they are “amazed” at their grades in these courses, and that their high achievement “almost felt effortless”.

Please note that the “Rubber Stamp” method is most effective on April 1st of each year.

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS’ DAY!

One essential part of human communities has always been a central meeting place– a location where the community comes to engage in conversations that are bigger than one-on-one interactions can offer. I call this space The Commons and I believe that online communities need to meet this human need to provide a sense of surprise, excitement, and shared purpose. The Commons is where the connected community shares, jokes, performs, questions, and accesses the shared creativity that lives in “the third mind“. It is a place where all are valued, all are heard, all are challenged. It is a place where serious ideas can mix with irreverent ones to make learning more enjoyable and fun more stimulating.

It is a space where everyone is actively participating– in that sense, it upends the traditional hierarchical relationship between an active teacher and many passive listeners. Through asynchronous communication, we can all be talking at once and still be heard by all.

Teachers often seem bewildered by modern [?] students’ tenacious need to interact, to perform, to talk out of turn, and to try every trick in their power to turn a classroom lecture into a communal conversation. Modern educational technology gives us asynchronous communication tools that free users to comment without interrupting, to listen and discuss with a community of learners regardless of time, space, or schedule constraints.

Tools like discussion forums, blog comments, twitter #hashtags, and email listservs enable users to add value to core readings and lectures by creating a “backchannel” communication stream (without disrupting the flow of the lecture). These backchannel discussions have become an important part of the value of professional conferences for me– I learn at least as much from the other people tweeting as I do from the presenters on stage! What’s more, the free (and somewhat chaotic) exchange of ideas adds a sense of excitement and serendipitous discovery to the experience.

Many people are getting used to having a semi-controlled stream of conversation data flowing by them every day– in the form of a Facebook wall or a Twitter feed. Some posts are more relevant or interesting than others, and you can choose to engage with the threads that interest you and ignore the others without the guilt we feel at missing an email. This is why workplace tools like Yammer, Presently, Salesforce Chatter, and Status.net have customized those tools for business environments where you can tune into different conversation groups– between your own workmates and other group organizations you’re interested in.

These backchannel tools– seemingly a distraction from the “real” information of the lecture– strike me as being a new version of Cornell notes. The idea behind Cornell notes is that your mind can think faster than a lecturer can lecture, so you need another space to doodle, comment, and daydream to help you internalize the content.

Collaborative documents like wikis and GDocs enable groups to share the work of building knowledge. Sharing access allows stakeholders with diverse perspectives to affect the outcomes of shared products.

Polling and Classroom Response Systems enable class communities to gather data in real time about members’ opinions, understanding, and ideas. Using data about us is intrinsically more interesting than using data about strangers and helps to engage the community.

–notes—

Commons

• Group discussion lists
  • ubiquitous commenting
  • twitter hashtags, event feed, like Edmodo or my CAT DD Blog
  • Facebook-style community Activity Feed
  • email [meh]
• Collaborative shared documents
• Group chat
• Methods for Consensus
  • Polling/voting
  • Ranking and Discussion (Google Moderator/ Digg)
• Collaboratively annotating core readings “writing in the margins”
  • GDocs
  • Diigo
• Synchronous Meetings
  • Video chat
  • Whiteboard
  • Webinar presentation

Related articles

• Engaging students in collaborative learning (ask.metafilter.com)
• 7 Tools to Build a Social Network for Your School (freetech4teachers.com)
• Edmodo: A free, secure social networking site for schools (edreformer.com)
• Corralling Your Online Herd (worob.com)
• How to Effectively Use Internal Collaboration and Social Networking Technology (socialmediaclub.org)

Image via CrunchBase

The recent explosion of great tools that simply run in a web browser has been amazing. From tools like Google Docs, Evernote, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Prezi, and Rememberthemilk and the venerable Gmail– you can access powerful tools for free wherever you are. However, sometimes a web browser is not the best interface for the kind of work you want to do. This is where desktop clients for webapps really shine. Here is a great article from Mac.AppStorm.net about 60 great Web apps with strong desktop clients. Am I missing any? Let me know in the comments.

Related articles

• Milkify – Desktop application for Remember The Milk (milkify.com)
• Get Instant Desktop Notifications From Your Web Apps With Notify.io (makeuseof.com)
• Google Brings Bug Bounty To Web Apps (informationweek.com)
• Coming Soon in Google Docs: Third Party Apps, Cloud Printing and Sync (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• 5 Great Reasons To Use Seesmic Desktop 2 As Your Twitter Client (makeuseof.com)
• Twitter Client For Your Browser – TicknTalk (mindjumpers.com)
• Ditch Desktop Apps for Webapps, Free Up RAM, and Enjoy the Best of Both Worlds [Webapps] (lifehacker.com)

There’s no denying that the iPhone has become an amazing tool for taking your internet connected life mobile. However, many of its functions are available to even the lowest tech "dumb phones" on the market. This post will show you how you can use your dumb old RAZR phone to blog, tweet, podcast, facebook, HTML browse, listen to music, and Google Map just like those other iPoseurs.

Twitter/ Facebook/ WordPress/ Blogger/ Flickr via SMS or MMS?



Facebook allows you to keep up with your peeps via SMS. Twitter has it built right into the service. But my favorite way to post to several websites at once is Posterous.com.



Posterous

is a blogging tool that will auto-post to your WordPress/Twitter/Tumblr/Flickr/Facebook and many many more. People are

starting to use it as a first step in blogging because it’s so easy and reliable. Just send an email to post@posterous.com or send an SMS text message to 41411 and posterous will set up a blog for you. From that point, you can send images, video, photos, audio, and text (and probably a whole lot more) to the email address and Posterous will figure out how to post it for you. It’s an amazing service and might just help you participate in more online communities.










Podcast from your phone?



Drop.io is a great service which allows you to set up "drops" (which are basically blogs), each with its own email/SMS address, phone number, twitter ID, etc. You can set up a drop like I did at http://drop.io/smartdumbphones and then call it to record an audio voice mail. This voice mail becomes an audio post with an iTunes-ready RSS feed. Just send the feed URL to iTunes and you are in the podcasting business! Here’s mine: