Heading for Hanoi

Tomorrow I fly to Hanoi, arriving after an overnight flight, and then give two presentations the next day and the day following, and then return to Abu Dhabi, arriving in the wee hours, and teach bright and early the following day. More information can be found here:
http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/papers/index.html#071103

I have just published the slide show of the first presentation. This is the first time I have used Google Docs Presentation. I am blogging the slide show to see how it looks.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddkc6v4f_40cvxvjm

What do you think?

Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating

Hi Folks, I've just returned from a week in the states. Busy week, I settled my parents' affairs and bought their house off my siblings, so in a week I became once again a home owner. But my inlaws will move in there, so I hope not to be involved so much in home maintenance. Well that's another story. Meanwhile, back here in the UAE I'm waking up at 4 in the morning, which is good because it's a great time to blog. But I'm also falling asleep on the floor of my office at 4 in the afternoon, which is also good, because cat herders like catnaps occasionally.

This past week's activities in Texas made me miss the first week of the K-12 Online Conference. Our Writingmatrix project caught the attention of Wesley Fryer, one of my podcast heros. Wesley left this comment at our conference presentation node http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=162: "Wow, what a GREAT presentation on so many levels. This was the best example of a “blended” presentation I’ve ever seen," and he followed up with reflections on our presentation podcast here:
http://wesleypd.blogspot.com/2007/10/pd-reflection-on-motivating-student.html

Meanwhile Nelba, one of our Writingmatrix project members and co-explorer in the world of social networking, has gone down the path of exploring pingbacks and trackbacks. I've got mine activated, so let's see what happens if I cite one of her blog postings here, this one a brief reflection on the Writingmatrix participation in K-12 Online:

http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com/2007/10/webmatrix-in-k12-online-conference.html

There, a link to this post should now appear in the one above.

While I was flying, Nelba and Saša participated in a fireside chat on our behalf of Rita, Doris and I. Here's more information from http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/papers/index.html#071020

13:00 PM GMT Saturday, October 20 - The Writingmatrix group Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Saša Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer present “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating” at the K-12 Online Conference “Playing with Boundaries.”

Presentations at this conference are all asynchronous except for the live chat events. The presentation itself can be found at these web artifacts:

• A presentation teaser (5 min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHjlCY0BCNo
• iPod ready http://k12online.wm.edu/writing_matrix.mp4 (38:02 Run Time; mpeg4, 76.6 MB)
• Original http://k12online.wm.edu/writing_matrix.wmv (38:00 Run Time; wmv, 8.2MB - haven't checked, but I think they may have the file sizes reversed on these two)
• Audio only podcast version: http://k12online.wm.edu/writing_matrix.mp3 (38:01 Run Time; mp3, 34.9 MB)

Here's what our presentation was about ...

The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.

Now, I'll wrap up this post with a couple of discoveries. The first is the Jing project from http://www.screencast.com. This is a tool, free at present but perhaps for a limited time only, produced by Techsmith, the makers of Camtasia and Snaggit, which captures images or videos from your desktop in a very nice interface, easy to use, which allows you to save the capture either as a swf file which you can keep as a file on your computer OR as a hosted file almost immediately available.

To give you an example, I wanted to show Nelba how Technorati now allows you to calibrate the authority of the posts you view. The problem was that we would tag our posts 'writingmatrix', and have our students tag them the same, but only a few of those posts would appear when we would search Technorati for posts with 'writingmatrix' as their tag. In fact, the default search on tags with Technorati is to return hits on posts with 'some authority', and this returns ten posts at present on Technorati when you search on 'writingmatrix'.

The problem is that if you ask a student to create a blog and tag a post 'writingmatrix', that student's first post is vested with zero authority and at the default settings would not appear in hits returned by students searching on that tag elsewhere in the world. So Technorati added a feature that allows you to return posts with 'any authority' and if that setting is used, you get 1000 hits when you search on 'writingmatrix', which is what we want, because it means we can see the hundreds of students who are trying to reach one another through this mechanism. This also generates a URL which you can use to aggregate posts with any authority, and now I need to change out my aggregators on Pageflakes, Bloglines, and Google Reader with one's like this, which return posts with any authority:

http://technorati.com/search/writingmatrix?authority=n&language=en

Now, if you want a visual example of how this is done, here is my Jing screencast:
http://screencast.com/t/M33ixayEN2J

What a morning. It's truly the dawn of a new day out there. I've got to get to my more mundane daytime job now.

Talking Multiliteracies Webcast Sept 30, 2007

As part of my 4-week Multiliteracies course, and as a recent graduate of the Webcastacademy http://www.webcastacademy.net put on through the auspices of the Worldbridges Network, I have been broadcasting a program of 4 webcasts each Sunday morning at 13:00 GMT. The first two were recorded at over the top bit rates of 128 bps which resulted in 80 mb files and I haven't had time to tinker with them. However, by the time the third week rolled around I thought it would be unconscionable of me if I didn't make a credible effort to get at least one of these webcasts 'out there' in podcast form. So I took a day out of my life (editing mainly) to produce:



Click here to get your own player.

This turned out to be one of those challenging experiences. In the belief that the file could be no larger than 20 mb I chipped away at it in Audacity till the mp3 rendered down to 19.5 mb, but still couldn't get it to upload through the Podomatic website. I think it was uploading, it was just taking a long time, but in the process of working out what the problem could be I discovered that Podomatic allows you to FTP your files, and once they are at the site, you select from a list of the files you have there to post them to your podblog. That makes it much easier, so it was a nice discovery. As I said, I spent the best part of a day on the process but I feel I learned a lot and become somewhat more multiliterate in the process.

Hope you enjoy the podcast. Now that I know how to streamline things, I'll try and clear my backlog. Stay tuned (RSS would be a good way to do that).

Vance's first video production: A teaser for the Writingmatrix K-12 Online Conference presentation

The Writingmatrix group Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Saša Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer will present “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating” at the K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=100. According to http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=83 this year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote during the week of October 8. This year’s conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.” Along the lines of our presentation, content related to the conference can be aggregated at http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/k12online07.



The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.