Serendipity35

In the mail today:

Hi ronk53,

You have 184 photos stored on Flickr. Once you hit 200,
you'll need to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account or you'll
only be able to see your most recent 200 photos. Nothing
will be deleted, and if you upgrade, you'll have unlimited
space for all your things.

Perhaps you'd like to purchase a Flickr pro account? Its
unlimited and you get video and stats too!

Do I want to go pro?

I guess I'm like all the kids. I want all this online stuff to be free. So, I can just delete some old or stupid photos. I could create another account and get another 200 free. I could cough up the $24.95 for the upgrade.

What do you use? Do you pay to play pro? What photo sharing service do you use? How about Photobucket which advertises "Keep all your pics and videos in one place - room for up to 10,000 photos and hours of video! For free." Can that be true? 10,000 versus 200 - what is Yahoo! thinking?

Recommendations please...

So here's a plug for a little beta tool called del.izzy - a free service that lets you search through your del.icio.us bookmarks.

Why can't you just do that with delicious? (BTW, they did finally add the plain without-the-dots version of the URL, so you can just go to delicious.com). So what does del.izzy (annoying referential dot, but you can drop it when you type it in) actually offer you?

Delicious search only goes through tags, titles and descriptions, but not the the page content. del.izzy lets you search through all of it. Delizzy is still in beta and it shows in the simple design, but it serves a purpose until delicious gets it together.

The first version of delicious launched in late 2003, then grew with a 2005 injection of about $2 million in funding (some from Amazon.com), but after Yahoo! acquired Delicious in December 2005, it remained annoyingly the same. They finally launched an updated version recently, but it's still missing features. Sites like delizzy should keep them on its toes.

Blog Action Day 2007 last October had more than 20,000 bloggers with an estimated combined audience of over 15 million viewers, reading and discussing issues on the environment.

In 2008, the topic will be poverty. Bloggers who sign on will discuss that issue from the view of their own blog. Serendipity35 will try to cross poverty with learning and technology, for example.

Blog Action Day will be on October 15th. If you have a blog of any kind, you can sign up to participate.

It would also be a good classroom activity, whether you are a blogger or not, to look at he poverty resources and information that will be online that day on participating blogs.

An example is The Global Fund which combats AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria which have a crippling effect on the fight against poverty. Blog Action Day for this year encourages bloggers to donate their day's earnings to The Global Fund as their official Blog Action Day charity.

Two other resources for the classroom are the Causes of Poverty at the Global Issues site, and the Stand Up Against Poverty site.

Some of the world’s most popular blogs (according to Technorati) have agreed to participate in Blog Action Day this year, including: TechCrunch.com, ReadWriteWeb.com, Mashable.com, SmashingMagazine.com, GigaOm.com, Jauhari.net, Problogger.net, CopyBlogger.com,DailyBlogTips.com, ZenHabits.net, Inhabitat.com, VentureBeat.com, Mentalfloss.com, PronetAdvertising.com, TorrentFreak.com

Back in May 2007, Apple added iTunes U (the area for colleges and universities) to the iTunes Store and I blogged about the first 16 colleges whose podcasts were being included there. That was logical because NJIT was one of those "sweet 16" schools. I have updated that post several times and included the growing list of colleges with an iTunes U presence.

I think the posts served a purpose and they got lots of views, but this will be the last update. Apple now lists all the colleges within iTunes, so, as long as you have iTunes installed, you can access the up-to-date list there.

Along with the colleges and universities, they also have other organizations offering educational podcasts in the "Beyond the Campus" area.

My only reason to offer this particular update is to direct readers to the latest addition to iTunes U. Now there are K-12 offerings too. I'm very happy to see that New Jersey has the dominant presence in that category as of now!

These links will only open if you have the free iTunes software installed on your computer which will allow you to view, play or download content.

• Beyond Campus
• K-12 offerings including East Orange schools, Hunterdon Central Regional High School and Montclair Public Schools from New Jersey
• List of all colleges available in iTunes U  NOTE: There are also schools (such as Rutgers) that utilize iTunes U services for their own students but do not offer open, public content. Those schools are not listed by Apple.

Additional web links

• iTunes U information from Apple
• List of colleges January 2007
• NJIT on iTunes

Many U.S. college campuses operate on 4-day weeks during the summer. At NJIT, they lengthened the 4 work days. At PCCC, employees take half-hour lunches and need to make up 45 hours during the year in work outside their assigned workday. It saves on energy costs to be able to shut down for the longer weekend - not only air-conditioning, computers and lighting but the gasoline for the employees not commuting to campus.The $4 a gallon gas prices this summer brought it back into the media.

I read an article on eCampus Today that K-12 schools also looking longer days and shorter weeks. All these K-20 campuses are looking at what is already being done in the business world in longer days, flex scheduling and shortened weeks.

According to the article, some school systems in Minnesota, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah have eliminated Fridays.

All of us in higher ed know that it's often tough to fill Friday classes. Of course, these aren't energy-conscious students, just kids who want a longer weekend. In contrast, a growing number of our PCCC students are requesting early morning (7:30 AM, for example) classes to fit their part-time school, full-time job schedules.

There are plenty of research studies that have been done on the benefits of the 4-day week (see summary here) including government research studies. It's a story that the media likes to cover. Unfortunately, I think that might be because it catches the attention to those who had to go to school five days a week, and for all those who already believe schools are not doing a good job, and students and teachers have it too easy.

I was interested to see the results of the 2008 Model Your Campus Competition that Google sponsored. They had put out a call early this year for students to submit 3D models of their college campuses created with their Google SketchUp tool.

They, of course, received worldwide submissions, but I was surprised at the number from Mexico - thirteen different campuses submitted. After some searching on Google's blogs, I found that they also ran a related competition with ITESM (The Technology Institute of Monterrey in Mexico), offering a separate prize for the best models submitted by their students. ITESM participants designed 111 buildings, representing 22 ITESM campuses. The winners are two students from ITESM's Santa Fe Campus.

Having students use SketchUp to create models is an excellent classroom design project. There are many objects along with entries and other projects in the Google 3D Warehouse which contains downloadable models made by the SketchUp community.

Mind mapping is a kind of graphic note taking system that teachers sometimes use with students as an prewriting activity. Since more people are using software to do mapping, it's easier to images, color and hyperlinks along with words & numbers. 

I'm big on graphic organizers for my own purposes, and I do encourage their use by teachers and students, but I know they don't work for everyone.My biggest gripe with mapping is that so many examples are overly complicated and perhaps only the creator can see any logic in them.

One thing that software allows you to do easier is play around with the way you organize your map so that the connections are perhaps radiant or hierarchical.

The term "Mind Map" is a creation of psychologist Tony Buzan, and he has his own software called iMindMap that you can try out.

Are mind maps the same as concept maps? No, and it's more than a matter of semantics. Mind maps are based on radial hierarchies and tree structures, but concept maps work by drawing connections between concepts. It's actually a good critical thinking exercise just to have students use both side-by-side and see what each requires of the users.

Mind Mapping is supposed to mirror the way our brain operates, but that doesn't mean that it comes "naturally" to people. Again, this is where software helps. Here are three that you might want to try out along with Buzan's iMindMap.

FreeMind is an open source mind mapping software from Softonic. Your finished maps can be exported to HTML, clickable XHTML, Open Office document, image file and other formats.

VUE is a free, open source concept mapping application written in Java and developed by the Academic Technology group at Tufts University. VUE = Visual Understanding Environment (licensed under the Educational Community License)

Edraw Mind Map is software that includes thousands of ready-made graphics that you simply stamp to create your drawing. It's vector-based freeware with lots of examples and templates for flow charts, mind maps, brainstorming diagrams and sketch maps.

I added this little widget called Wikipedia Finder to the sidebar of Serendipity35 tonight. No, I don't think that Wikipedia is the ultimate research tool, but it is the place that many of us turn to as a starting place, and bloggers in particular like to point to it rather than a static page as a reference.

Please try it out and let us know if it works, and if it is useful. Highlight a word or phrase in one of our blog posts and then click the Wikipedia globe icon in the sidebar and it should do a Wikipedia lookup for you.

I used to hear, in the days of Web 1.0, that email was the killer application. The past few years I have heard that email is dead. Our students prefer text messages, IM, Twitter and other social networking tools.

We added ShareThis to Serendipity35 this year so that readers could share a post or the blog with others using Facebook, delicious, Digg, Twitter or even that old time email. (It's that link & image at the bottom of this and every post.)

Well, ShareThis recently posted on their own blog the chart that I show here about the ways  people are sharing content using their service.

I don't know that their stats would match those for Serendipity35 (that information isn't available to us), but it's interesting to see that good ol' email is still getting the biggest slice of the pie.

65% of the sharing is happening with 2.0 tools (with Facebook getting the most action - 10% of the pie), but the results are fragmented with no other tool/service dominating.

How about you? Are you still most likely to share online content with others via email or some other application? Is this something that varies more based on user age?

The recent conflict between Russia and Georgia has had people going to their Google Maps to see exactly where the fighting is occurring. This would probably be a natural geography lesson if K-12 classes were in session.

But there was a little problem - Google Maps didn't show any cities or roads for Georgia. Why?

According to Google:

Google Maps doesn't show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan... because we simply weren't satisfied with the map data we had available. We're constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive data. Some of our customers have asked if we removed map data from any of these countries in response to the recent hostilities in that region and I can assure you that is not the case. Data for these countries were never on Google Maps in the first place.

But this has generated a lot of feedback that we are listening to and learning from. We're hearing from our users that they would rather see even very basic coverage of a country than see nothing at all. That certainly makes sense, and so we have started preparing data for the handful of countries that are still blank on Google Maps. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as other significant regions of the world will benefit from this effort.

By the way, you can access more data including cities in Georgia and other surrounding countries by installing and using Google Earth.

This summer at PCCC we have been looking at tools and platforms for having students put their writing portfolios online into what many people call an ePortfolio.

We're not breaking any new ground with this project. Writing portfolios have a long history, and putting them online has been done for longer than there has been the Internet since people were using network servers at schools.

The first product we looked at is eportfolio.org, an obvious choice for us because it is a platform offered by the same consortium that we belong to for our eTutoring. We piloted it with a group of 20 faculty this summer and, unfortunately, they found it confusing to use and unattractive. Attractiveness shouldn't be a prime consideration, but that's what showed up in our surveys, so...

You get more interesting things with portfolio websites but the learning curve is steep. Here are a few from my students last fall at NJIT: Stephanie, Orna, Paul, Catherine and Sandra. My students are studying visual design and building sites is part of the course content, so it makes sense for them to create portfolio sites.

I don't think building websites will work for us at PCCC. Our students don't have the technology background, we don't give them server space, and we don't want the creation of the portfolio to outrank the creation of the pieces of writing.

Montclair State University (NJ) has been using Pachyderm which creates an attractive Flash site automatically from template choices.

Middlesex County College (NJ) has a homegrown portfolio product. It's also a template-driven website that they give students to use. (See eportfolio.middlesexcc.edu) I like the simplicity of the MCC solution, but I know that I can't expect PCCC to have the IT support to create such a tool. So that leaves "products."

What are we looking for in a portfolio for our small cohort of students this fall?

• hosting
• IT support
• very simple user interface
• "starting place" (template) that works as is, but is also
• customizable if students wish to be more ambitious
• ability to upload files
• ability to scale over the next few years This fall, we will be working with 75 students, by fall 09 we will have 275 portfolios.
• some attractiveness

We looked at many products this summer from obvious ones like the portfolio from Blackboard, the new one in Moodle, PebblePad from the UK, Epsilen and Digication which has versions for K-12 and higher ed.

We actually started back in January looking at many of the sites bookmarked at electronicportfolios.org. (If you are starting down that path, this document from JISC may be helpful.) And a group of us attended a portfolio conference at La Guardia Community College (NY) last spring and were impressed with the wide adoption of portfolios they have with a similar student population to PCCC. They have a gallery of some "basic" portfolios online

And where are we now? The product we decided to use this fall is eFolioWorld from the Minnesota State College and University System. MnSCU assumed the role of managing partner for the ePortfolio software in 2007. At present, the eFolioWorld system supports the portfolio needs of their system and other non-MnSCU institutional and organizational partners. You can see some samples in their showcase.

There are many reasons why schools are asking that ePortfolios be mainatined - a record their educational progress, personal achievements, for institutional accountability, accreditation, for mentoring & tutoring purposes, to assess student competencies, and as career & professional showcases. It's not only students. Some schools ask teachers to maintain portfolios as part of the tenure process.

There's a nice group of eFolio examples from students in a Masters of Public Health degree program from San Francisco State University. These portfolios are used to monitor educational goals and academic achievements, with artifacts such as a professional mission statement, evidence of work across national competencies in public health, community-based and professional experience, and a culminating experience report.

Our own portfolio project is to follow students taken our first writing-intensive courses which launch this fall. Beginning with the incoming class of fall 2007, students who enroll at PCCC and intend to obtain an A.A. degree are required to take-and pass with a "C" or better two writing-intensive courses prior to graduation.

We define a writing-intensive course as one that incorporates discipline-specific writing extensively into the course, and the writing contributes significantly to each student's grade. The instructor uses writing assignments to promote the learning of the course content, as well as to increase the students' critical thinking and information literacy skills. Instructors use both formal and informal writing assignments.

In our Writing Initiative, we are designing twenty distinct Writing Intensive, General Education courses across the curriculum. These courses will be supported by an instructional development component that will collaborate with faculty in developing writing assignments for their courses, and students in those courses will be supported by the writing center that will open this fall.

It's an ambitious project, but the portfolio component this fall is only to get our first 75 students to create an eFolio, upload the writing from the writing-intensive class and then select a few pieces to showcase and write additional reflections on those pieces. At least half of our reasons for using the portfolios have to do with the program accountability and assessment we need for our grant. The other half of this is to pilot the portfolio process (more than a single product) for possible adoption by the entire college in the next few years.

The course management software Blackboard is currently at release 8 of its Academic Suite software. Many schools, including PCCC and NJIT, are moving forward in versions carefully. In some cases, like NJIT who is still on version WebCT 4.x, they don't want to deal with the upgrades to servers and courses, and the retraining of faculty. PCCC is using Blackboard's hosted service this year and using WebCT CE6, but both schools know that the time to ultimately decide what to do about their enterprise CMS is getting short.

Release 8 of the Academic Suite is getting closer to the merged WebCT + Blackboard product. (Nearby Seton Hall University is using 8 and you can look at some of their information on 8 online.) That product is being called Project Next Generation (NG).

Project NG is being touted as "a combination of the best of Blackboard and WebCT features and functionality." I have to say that the company has put a lot of preview information out there, including starting another flavor of its blog for NG, and has posted extensive video presentations online that walk through the product with a lot of talk about the simple user experience, flexibility and openness.