Thanks to Tim, this blog will be echoed at the Commun-IT.org site. The setup was relatively easy to do. In theory, everything that I post at my Wordpress Blog, http://dougpete.wordpress.com should be piped into the Commun-IT blog starting with this post. You’ll have to go to Wordpress manually to read the previous entries.

You’ve got to love the concept of webbing and blogging and feeds and …

But, that’s the easy part. The difficult part is finding something to post about semi-intelligently.

The Commun-IT Blog will appear at: http://www.commun-it.org/community/dougpete/weblog

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Tags: blogging, feeds, wordpress

Alexander Wolfe asked the question and gave his opinion about the life of podcasting.

http://informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/01/is_podcasting_d.html

Not surprisingly, Information Week is a business resource and I would suggest that business has different expectations than education. He notes that podcasting came onto the scene 10 years ago and has not been the overwhelming success that many predicted. Heck, 10 years is just starting in educational adoption years!

In December, the Western RCAC hosted Will Richardson first as a keynote speaker and then secondly for a hands-on session on all things Web 2.0. (whatever that is) Here we have some of the most powerful educators in the province who were greatly appreciative of the insights to Blogging, Podcasting, Screencasting, RSS, etc. that Will shared. If this was an insight for these people, what about the general populace?

Furthermore, the Ministry of Education is bringing Will to a conference in February to share his message at the provincial level conference.

As with most things, I think that you need to put things into their perspective. If your outlook is that your business is going to make a gazillion dollars selling podcasting, yes, it’s probably time to move on.

But get past the business sense. In education, we talk about writing and publishing for an audience. In this case, the levels of citizen journalism open all kinds of doors for schools, teachers, and students to have their say within their own little sphere of influence. I really enjoy it when I hop onto a classroom website and listen to the student voices talking about what’s important to them. Therein lies the power of the technology.

It’s not easily done though. With locked down desktops, lack of a place to post your podcast, the need for a quality microphone, the teacher who really wants to make it happen has to jump a number of hurdles to do it. Kudos to those who have. I heard a keynote speaker last week talk about how Rip Van Winkle returns to a classroom and remembers it being exactly the same as before he went to sleep. Yeah, kind of a cute little story and educators always love cute little stories. There may well be classrooms like that, but not all of them.

Let’s celebrate those who take on the system, they make it work, they publish their student/class/school in an open world and make it happen at all odds and with a great deal of effort. These are the real heroes and I would submit that while they’re not getting listenership in the thousands, they are reaching their intended audience, they are addressing all kinds of curriculum expectations, and they have motivated classrooms who want to tell their story.

To them, podcasting is certainly far from dead.

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Tags: podcasting, web 2.0, classroom

My former superintendent dropped in to talk to me today about a number ot things. We chatted about reading and writing to Microsoft document format, talked about the new Apple computer offerings, the Apple iTouch and it was a great conversation. He always brings to the conversation things that make me think. We talked about computer repairs, challenges, and so on.

Then he talked to me about TED. I never head of this before. It’s a conference where some of the world great minds get together to talk and express their thoughts, sharing them with other. Like I said, I’d never heard of it.

We talked also about Symposium and the great keynote speakers that we had. He asked if I’d heard of Sir Ken Robinson. Not at all. Apparently, Rod had met him and they went out for supper and had a great time chatting about education and their views.

One thing led to another and Rod took me online so see a video of Mr. Robinson. His speech was entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity”? It was humourous, but moreover, it was right to the point. One comment is particularly noteworthy…”We are educating people out of their creativity”.

Think deeply about that.

The speech is available at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

This is but one in a rich set of resources. I’ll be digging around there for a long time.

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Tags: creativity, computers, education

My Google news gadget reported the death of Bobby Fischer about an hour ago.  We’ve lost one of the great minds and an artist in his field in the truest sense of the world.  From his early conflicts with Boris Spassky to his criticism of the US government, Fischer has been in and out of the headlines over the past 40 years.  To his credit, he changed the game of chess and elevated it to the status that you see it today, whether in formal competition or in individual clubs in schools. 

 I didn’t get a chance to do anything about it until now during a lunch break and I quickly did a Google search and the headline stories are flooding the internet.  I went to Wikipedia to read of his life and it was already updated with the date and as much details of his death.  In a responsible move, it is noted at the top of the page that this is a recent death and the details in Wikipedia may change rapidly as they are made public and the community reacts with this information.  I can’t help but think of those researchers who cling to their printed encyclopedias and wonder how long they have to wait for an update to make their reference correct again.

I would encourage you to read his Wikpedia entry. This is a chronology of a man who was brilliant in his field and you can get the details today.

My first experience with robots was with Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. Here was the perfect servant for the home. She did everything that you would expect from a maid and never tired. She had empathy with the family and a real personality. She had her down time too, but for the most part, she was a good character in a big cast of characters and also made you think that perhaps there would come a time when a mechanical assistant would be a reality and have human traits to add value to the process. Of course, that may happen years from now.

Time passes and we see real robots in action. I recall the tour of the Daimler Chrysler plant that was given to the RCAC group. Here we see the reality as robots are put to good use. They didn’t need safety glasses, could work in difficult environmental conditions and worked with pinpoint accuracy. The ones that traversed the floor had warning horns so that you knew to get out of the road as they came along. They had their own painted pathway on the floor too. Not for them to use, but for us to know that we couldn’t.

In schools, the lead up to robotic programming is interesting and really attracts a number of students. To be able to program a turtle or a movable device is an exciting prospect for some students. Some of us long timers had long been proponents of Logo (which I still regard as one of the highlights of my own Computer Science experiences) but there’s just something so intriguing about programming something that runs around the floor and performs tasks as opposed to running around your computer screen.

No matter what, you could always count on a robot to do exactly what you told it to do. Tell it to do the wrong thing and it dutifully followed your instructions. Tell it to do the right thing and your robot would do exactly what you want. Become good enough and you and your team just might win a robotics programming competition. With some programming, they could adapt their actions but always in a predictable fashion.

Until now.

At Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, robots now have the ability to learn about their environment and work together or they can lie to each other. http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/robots-evolve-and-learn-how-to-lie. What a fascinating concept. I had to read the article a couple of times to truly get a picture in my mind about what was happening.

In a robotic world where we have devices that are predictable, programmable, and with great precision — now they can be taught to lie?

Is man now becoming more precise in creating a mechanical image of himself? What next? Back stabbing, bullying, anger, …

Maybe the life of George Jetson isn’t that far off after all.

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Tags: Robots, Artificial Intelligence

This post was originally posted on dougpete.wordpress.com and mirrored to www.commun-it.org/community/dougpete/weblog/. If you want it elsewhere, just ask. I just might say yes.

I had a nice email from a person unknown yesterday in response to a blog post that I had made. I thought that a private email was a little out of the ordinary and so asked why the response was in email and not in a response to the original entry. The person got back to me and said that option wasn’t available. I thought that odd - so I quickly checked my wordpress and commun-it accounts and sure enough the comment feature was available. Now, I have long since stopped posting my blog to FirstClass because our current version doesn’t support commenting so I got back to the individual again for more details.

Well, it turns out that the post that he read was on a server that I had never heard of before. Here comes another time wasting initiative as I find the server, read the comment, scratch my head, and then do a whois to find out what the heck is going on.

Turns out — I’d been scraped.

Now, everyone who posts to the web ultimately gets scraped. That’s how search engines know who you are and where your content resides. When you do a search, the engine just works its way through its databases and finds your results using whatever algorithm that it employs and then returns the results in the fashion that it’s designed to do. If you want to check out evidence of scraping, check out the Wayback Machine. I’ve even had to use my favourite search engine’s “archive” at least once to recover a web page that I had accidentally clobbered. This is good and very much appreciated.

Now, we help out the cause when we post our content to a blog or we put an RSS feed on our web resources. We’re encouraging others to find us and stay up to date with the latest update on our thoughts. That’s how it’s supposed to work. With the appropriate tools, we can check out the latest so easily as a result of the miracles of RSS.

In the process, I even found out about the million RSS project. I did my quick acid test for my favourite news service - Reuters - yep, it’s there.

A scraper goes one step further though. It scrapes your content and places it on her/his own server and then makes it available as a public resource. The difference between this and the original is that you lose control over the content, your words may be attributed to someone/something else, and people who elect to comment on a posting may not even get the opportunity. In my reading from others who had been scraped, knew about it, and commented, the results go from indignation to appreciation for the free promotion of the content. I spent far too much time reading about this. It is free promotion but you do lost control over its presentation.

On the other hand, it’s kind of a kick to think that the ramblings from my keyboard in south western Ontario are now fodder for someone else somewhere else.

It points to the futility of copyright protection for the little guy. Scrape a big corporation and you’ve got a potential legal problem. Scrap me and what am I going to do? There are a couple more serious issues though. First, the comments might end up being seen as created by someone else. Secondly, if the scraper is selling advertising on their website, you might end up being a spokesperson for who knows what product.

So, do you go into silence? Do you include a sentence like I did above? I’m not egotistical enough to think that I’m being scraped by a person who actually likes my comment enough to do it manually. (It would be a hoot if it was though! <grin>) Do you report the abuse to the scraper’s ISP? Do you follow the advice of others and create a dummy RSS just for the scraper? Do you include copyright notices?

Or, do you just ignore it.

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Tags: RSS, copyright, scraping

There are huge potential when all of the elements start to come together. When people talk about the Read/Write web (sometimes called Web 2.0), they get excited with the potential of anyone becoming a potential publisher of information.

Witness the explosion of blogs. In a previous life, people posted web pages and those of us who were connected and starving for information would devour the content that people took the time to post.

Next up though is the chance to post to a blog and afford those who were inspired to do so the chance to comment on your thoughts.

Time waits for nobody though and the next logical step lets you record yourself and publish audio and video and let people enjoy your efforts and comment back to you by clicking the response link. So exciting.

But, we now can go even further. Imagine adding audio responses to the original. I’ve been following this technology as an interested consumer for some time.

I’m talking about VoiceThread. It’s got your basic Read/Write web requirement. Post and allow people to respond, but this time you do so by speaking the response.

It had to happen.

But, the “new” is a real wow to me as I follow the Clever Sheep’s rants about cell phone banning. Guess what? The “new” feature is that you can now comment on an ongoing thread via cell phone.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together and all of the parts fall into place?

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Tags: Read/WriteWeb, Web 2.0, collaboration

I wish I knew the original attribution of the above quote.

Straying from my usual comments about technology and education, I just want to complain about the weather.  I’ve had it with winter here in the “Sun Parlor”.

I figured out why yesterday.

When I was growing up in Huron County, winter was winter.  The snow started mid-November and stuck around until after the March Break hockey tournaments.  You knew that it was winter; you wore winter boots; winter jackets; gloves; and a hat.  We had a snowmobile and it was a primary source of winter transportation.  The town streets got narrower and narrower as the snow banks grew.  It was just a fact of life and we lived it.

Now, in the “Sun Parlor”, we have many winters.  It starts in earnest usually right about the RCAC Symposium in December.  Then it warms up and the snow goes away.  Then it snows again.  Then it warms up and goes away.  In fact, if you are supposed to have 40 winters by the time that you are 40, I would suspect that Essex County people enjoy at least 4 or 5 times that many.  You can wake up to snow in the morning and then a balmy snow free drive home at night.  Or, vice versa.  Yesterday, for example, was a beautiful morning.  When I left after doing a workshop at 6, it was cold and there was snow everywhere.

To really get the effect, you have two sets of attire in your car.  You may not need snow boots in the morning but you might later on.

Even the dedicated folks who work on the roads have a difficult time.  We don’t experience much of a sand/salt mixture.  We got right to straight rock salt it seems.  So, to defy the laws of nature, when you’re driving in -18 degree temperature, there are salt puddles on the roads.

So, I figure that I’ve had at least 4 winters since the first of December and I’m tired of it.

As it says in the time, nobody seems to be able to do anything about it but I figured that I’d just add myself to the list of complainers.

Have a nice, snowy, wintery, warm, blustery, cool, frigid day.  Take your pick.

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Tags: Weather, ranting

I really enjoy the Mac versus PC commercials. They’re very funny and well crafted.

They would also lead one to believe that everything that Apple computers touch turns into gold. If you’ve followed the product line, you’ll realize that not everything has turned to gravy for the company. In a bit of nostalgia, Wired Magazine talks about what it seems as some of the biggest flops that have happened in the past 24 years.

It’s a cool walk through memory lane. I remember Lisa being the showcase of a MACUL vendor floor in Detroit when it was released. Sadly, I remember buying some of this stuff. Remember the puck? A mouse where the tail was were the head should be and you always had to look down to make sure that you were oriented? It made the list.

Check out the rest at: http://tinyurl.com/2r9oab

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Tags: Macintosh, computers

One site at a time.

Ever wanted to egg a website that you didn’t like. Perhaps it’s got a different political view than yours?

Maybe you’re just bored?

http://www.netdisaster.com/

There might even be an educational application to it!  Try the vacuum cleaner and suck the words off cnn.com and see what you have left!

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Tags: Justfor fun

I’m still wading my way through the implications of this but I see school boards who block websites shaking over this announcement.

On Saturday, Facebook announced that it was releasing a Facebook API that will allow you to host Facebook applications on your own website. If this plays out like it might, you could be hosting your own favourite application just a quick click away. This would, in theory, allow your application to share the wealth of information that Facebook apps collect about its users.

This potentially extends the power of the social network to areas that we may not have anticipated. Suppose the world all of a sudden embraces the concept of OpenID. If you’re a marketing type, just think of where this might take you. Create an online educational application using OpenID and there’s no stopping you.

Fully understanding Facebook’s Beacon may well be a learning that we all have to take.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/hightech/facebook-beacon.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_(Facebook)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140182-c,onlineprivacy/article.html

OSAPAC’s recent announcement of its licensing of the Media Awareness Network’s Webworkshop is timely. The lessons contained therein are good resources for school districts.

We’ve known for a long time that internet content blocking is marginally effective.

Is it time for a universal internet curriculum? Should a consortium of social networking developers be on the writing team?

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Tags: Internet, privacy

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6227419.html?tag=nl.e539

You sure hear enough in certain places about the joys of these less expensive computers. How much longer before they become mainstream and students show up at your doorsteps demanding to use them in their classes. How long can an educational system say no?

Want to try it out? Before you throw our your old outdated computer and spend big bucks to upgrade at home, get yourself a Linux distribution and throw it on the machine.

My old MDG machine which was getting progressively slower and more sluggish with Windows Home Edition is like a brand new machine with Edubuntu on it. It’s got my required suite of applications: Flock, FirstClass, OpenOffice, NVU, Python as well as lots of other things that I use on a rotating basis.

The cool thing is that there is no shortage of support should you need it.

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Tags: Computers, Linux

The Airbus A380 is one of Airbus’ latest and greatest entry into their fine line of aircraft. It is touted by the company to be Greener, Cleaner, Quieter, and Smarter. The Airbus website outlines the details and the specifications of this marvelous machine. It’s spectacular from end to end.

Read all about it at: http://www.airbus.com/en/aircraftfamilies/a380/index2.html

I got a whole new appreciation for the aircraft, the design, and certainly for the pilots who make sure that you get from starting point to destination.

However, with the wonders of computer technology, I have a whole deeper appreciation for the job of the pilot. It has been a long time since I’ve seen a virtual reality simulation that engaged me this deeply.

Strap yourself in and head over to: http://www.gillesvidal.com/blogpano/cockpit1.htm

And before you take off, check out the cup holders!

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Tags: Aircraft, virtual reality

If there’s any question that “Search” is big business, it’s solidified in this report in Business Week.



http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8UFR6K00.htm

The report indicates that internet search giant Yahoo! will lay off 1000 workers.  The number 1000 is a large number and gives a sense of the size of the corporation.  But, the more telltale indicator is apparent when you read that revenue is predicted to be up to $6 billion dollars with profits in the millions.  This is huge and almost surreal to think of something that big.  And, you access it with your $39/month internet account.

You’ve got to believe that when you’re talking business of this size that you can’t rest on your laurels.  There was a time when you could count on your hand the big areas.  Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos but there has been so much growth in other areas of search.  Search also has evolved to the point where you may need or want to search from wherever you are.  There was a time when you went to a website to do  a search.  In attempts to corner the search market, access to search engines reaches into your browser with its search windows and your search bar add-ins. 

Not willing to sit at the back of the bus, APIs are available that will allow people to perform their searches right from your blog or wiki or webpage.  In the demand for universal search, those of us who are web producers must add as much functionality to our websites as others.  Search engines provide this functionality to us to incorporate this into our own productions.

In this mode, search is big business and viral.  It reaches into our desktops, our favourite webpages, our toolbars, and yes, even our bookmarked pages.

Search is no longer use something that you do; it’s everywhere; and it’s big business.

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Tags: internet, search

If you have an hour, here’s an interesting presentation to listen to.

http://ptbed.org/downloads/BigIdeas.mp4

How do you create knowledge? It’s about conversation and how should libraries embrace conversations and promote active participation.

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Tags: socialnetworks, participation, library

I follow Will Richardson on Twitter (among others…) It’s interesting to read the comments and track the updates as you can follow some of these leaders as they go about doing what it is that they are doing. Today, he made an interesting observation.

Barack Obama is on Twitter.

So, I hopped over and sure enough, he has a Twitter presence. I checked out the history of his updates and it’s fascinating reading. It’s a virtual timeline of major happenings in his attempt to become the next president. Within the hour, I get the notification that he’s now following me.

I’m trying to get a grip on how a politician would use social networking and it makes a great deal of sense. Follow your candidates and get a sense of what’s really happening and not just what makes the 6:00 news. From a candidate’s perspective, you can control what message that you get out and it doesn’t go through a network producer/editor. And, unlike a major speech, the candidate has to get the message across in 140 characters. Best of all, it’s free.

I’m sure that someone must have taken the time to do a mashup on an internet mapping service of all of the candidate’s public appearances. You’ve got to believe that they are getting with the program and understanding another aspect of their constituency. Now, we’re not talking about millions of followers so the presence isn’t necessarily going to put the candidate over the top. However, it does serve to show that he’s trying to connect with voters and I’m sure the efforts will make a piece on a major news source as they take a turn at showing how candidates try to be young and in touch.

Flip back and Hillary Clinton is there as well. I’m not quite naive enough to think that these major candidates are doing the twittering themselves each time. It’s interesting to read and insightful however it is created.

Unfortunately for them though, this follower is Canadian.

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Tags: Twitter, presidential candidates