I realised recently that my Twitter addiction has weaned me from my YouTube addiction without my knowledge. Sneaky Twitter. As I was reminiscing about my forgotten video friends I got to thinking about videos that I would happily watch again and again – and why. I think some videos are just good for you. So here is my pick of 3 videos that educational technologists should make time to watch every so often. I am sure you will have seen all of these before, but take 5 mins or so to watch them again now and think about why. If they don’t make you smile even a little then consult a doctor – you may be dead inside.
1. Michael Wesch’s Students: A Vision of Students Today
Great video which I first saw when he was a keynote at a Blackboard conf. I’ve heard many reactions to this video – some saying that it scares them, that they worry about how fast HE is changing, that they feel sorry for students today. Personally, it makes me happy, it reminds me that I’m glad I do the job I do. I’m glad there are others out there too, trying to make universities grow and change. Watch this and smile – you’re doing a good job.
2. Mrs Palin: Song for Sarah
I first saw this after a friend of a friend on facebook posted it, saying that it was two Russian students that they had taught. In the midst of the biggest election campaign in history they produced this video themselves, in response to Sarah Palin’s infamous interview about her foreign policy credentials (which seemed to centre around the fact that America used Alaska to launch planes into Russian airspace). Watch this and remember that your students are ingenious – you would be daft to underestimate them.
3. Dancing Matt: Where the Hell is Matt?
I can’t remember where I was first linked to this video. Matt dances all around the world, and finds some friends to dance with along the way. A great reminder that it is in our nature to build communities as soon as we have any common ground at all. Watch this, and think about how many more ways we could find to really interact with each other.
Any others?
A while back I asked around on twitter about the best way to take notes digitally. I was curious whether people use digital pens, iphone apps, netbooks or anything else. There was a reason I was asking….
For the last 5 years I have kept hardback notebooks at work to take notes in meetings - a common system amongst developers. I’ve never felt it suited me - realistically its about the only writing that I actually do with a pen. My particular concerns were that I didn’t have access to my notebook at home or around campus, I couldn’t easily search for anything in it, and I had no real reason to refer to it. In short, it was non-digital. Everything else I interact with is, which means I am used to being able to search through text, access things from anywhere, and integrate across tasks to increase usefulness. My notebook was effectively useless - I constantly took notes that never became useful to me, and that I didn’t tend to read once I’d written them. It makes sense to me that I rid myself of the final bit of paper and become a paperless person.
Anyway, most people that left me comments said that netbooks were good (and didn’t take as long to boot as I’d thought), that digital pens sounded cool but no-one had one, and that mobiles provide good spur of the moment note taking.
I thought I’d share with you the solution that I came up with, and am currently trialling at work. After much searching, I found an online service called Evernote that lets you create an account, take notes online, save them and search them. You can tag them, group them, add URLS, clip webpages and include snippets. Poifect. But here is the cool bit…
- They have a Mac app that you can use as a client, and sync online
- They have a Windows app for the same purpose
- They have an iPhone app that also syncs with the online service, lets you take images, and can tag notes with your geo-location
Awesome. I have digital notes on my work mac, my home PC, my iPhone and on an Asus eeePC for meetings. I take the eeePC when I think I’m likely to need to take notes and the rest of the time I have my iPhone. If needed I can use any web-enabled PC to access my notes. I think I’m paperless…
Tweetie is my preferred twitter client for iPhone. I have about 4 others installed (including Twitterific and Twitterfon) but use nothing but Tweetie. I therefore had good reason to be excited about the release of the Tweetie Mac client a couple of days ago.
I expected it to be good, I didn’t expect to love it. And I do love it.
At first, I thought this was because:
- It has proper customizable show and hide commands
- You can easily do searches without switching client or using twitter’s webpage
- You can ‘tear off’ searches and keep them running
- It displays conversations as conversations
- You can retweet, and you can post webpages using a Tweetie bookmarklet
- Easy access to @ replies and direct messages
Then I realized something – those are the things that make it good, not the reason I love it. I actually love it because it is simple yet does advanced things, its smooth, it’s well laid out, it flows, it looks pretty. It has streamlined things I didn’t even realize I did regularly until I can now do them with less hassle. In short: it is well designed. You can never underestimate the power of something that is well designed - its what moves software from being useful to being a real pleasure to use.
The Twitterific client has been removed from my Mac dock. Not only has Tweetie taken its place, but I’ve actually designated some screen real estate for it to live in. It deserves it. A reminder to us all that thoughtful design is worth more than the sum of any number of features.
I was lucky enough to see an advanced screening of ‘State of Play’ this weekend – a new movie with Ben Affleck and Russell Crowe. It was a good movie; not big action or anything but a good conspiracy plot and worth a watch. However, what I thought you might be interested to hear about was the sub-plot about blogging versus newspaper publishing in an internet era.
A theme ran through the whole movie questioning whether publishing a story immediately is the right thing to do. Just because you can publish straight away, should you? Are you doing it justice? Do you have all the facts? Can opinions really be formed that quickly or do they need to settle, be reviewed, slept on and formalised? This made me think about the recent #amazonfail tagging frenzy on twitter, where an outpouring of rage erupted within hours of the apparent removal of books with gay and lesbian references from the search ranks. Amazon have since cited an error as the cause, and much has been blogged about the initial online reaction and the way in which Amazon handled it. It confirms that we don’t yet have answers to the questions raised in the film – did people react too quickly just because they had a forum to do it on? Should they have waited for facts to emerge?
The online world needs to be careful that it does not become stereotyped as a hot bed of overreaction and scare-mongering. There is no benefit in a reputation for being the fastest off the blocks with news if the news always turns out to be over-hyped. That said, we cannot ignore the huge potential that instantaneous opinion gives us. Instead of a battle between print and digital news media, it would be good to see a complementary alliance between the two. Online, opinion can grow and change without fear of reprimand if it is understood that this is the purpose of this media. The printed word by nature is a slower beast, and as such is the perfect medium for measured reflective opinion. Both have value.
Ironically, because I saw the film early I am choosing to post this prior to the general release of the film in the UK. I did wonder if I should wait a while. Anyway, go see the movie – it is food for thought with a few geek jokes scattered around.
