Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I learned today (from the EFF press release “RIAA Lawsuit Campaign Losing Credibility”) about the September 2008 EFF report, “RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later.” I wholeheartedly agree with the final sentences of the second introductory paragraph of the report:

…suing music fans has proven to be an ineffective response to unauthorized P2P file-sharing. Downloading from P2P networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of lawsuits. And the lawsuit campaign has not resulted in any royalties to artists. One thing has become clear: suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma.

Many of the lawsuits filed by the RIAA appear to be “grown-up versions” of schoolyard bullying behaviors taken into the courtrooms of our ridiculously litigious U.S. society. This report includes stories which put a touching as well as disturbing “human face” to these discussions over file sharing and lawsuits.

Take, for example, the case of the Tammy Lafky, a 41-year-old sugar mill worker and single mother in Minnesota. Because her teenage daughter downloaded some music—an activity both mother and daughter believed to be legal—Lafky faced over $500,000 in penalties. The RIAA offered to settle for $4,000, but even that sum was well beyond Lafky’s means—she earned just $21,000 per year and received no child support.

Or consider the case of the defendant who faced the $22,500 judgment discussed above, Cecilia Gonzalez. Gonzalez, a mother of five, was hit with the judgment just two weeks after she was laid off from her job as a secretary—a job where she made not much more than that amount in an entire year. Ironically, Gonzalez primarily downloaded songs she already owned on CD—the downloads were meant to help her avoid the labor of manually loading the 250 CDs she owns onto her computer. In fact, the record companies were going after a steady customer—Gonzalez and her husband spent about $30 per month on CDs.

Gonzalez is not the only good customer the RIAA has chosen to alienate. The organization also targeted a fully disabled widow and veteran for downloading over 500 songs she already owned. The veteran’s mobility was limited; by downloading the songs onto her computer, she was able to access the music in the room in which she primarily resides. The RIAA offered to settle for $2,000—but only if the veteran provided a wealth of private information regarding her disability and her finances.

Like a schoolyard bully, in my estimation the lawsuit campaign of the RIAA has been carried out with a singular focus: To inspire FEAR. In this case: FEAR in the hearts and minds of computer users who are or might become P2P file sharers, to change their behavior to prevent further sharing of music on P2P networks. In a society and political climate already rampant with fear and the rhetoric of fear, I personally find the RIAA’s tactics as well as overall campaign distasteful and repulsive.

What about legal music downloads from sites like iTunes, you might ask? I’ve wondered about this lately as well. According to the EFF report:

…the volume of downloads sold to date continues to pale when compared to the number of files swapped over P2P networks. The recording industry’s own international industry group, the IFPI, estimated in 2008 that there were 20 unauthorized downloads for every legitimate download purchased—in other words, as of January 2008, 95% of all digital music downloads were from unauthorized sources. In short, all of the authorized music services together do not yet amount to a drop in the digital music downloading bucket.

I think iTunes is and has been a great success in our evolutionary journey to become a more digital information society. It is clear, however, that just as RIAA lawsuits have not curtailed or “solved” P2P file sharing behaviors, neither has iTunes or other legal music and movie purchasing sites fully resolved these issues. What, then, is the best path forward?

According to the EFF report authors:

There is a better way. EFF advocates a voluntary collective licensing regime as a mechanism that would fairly compensate artists and rightsholders for P2P file sharing.

To learn more about that proposal, read the EFF’s April 2008 whitepaper “Let the Music Play.”

Will the RIAA’s leaders see the light and change their tactics? I’m sure their lawyers on retainer have enjoyed the income they’ve earned as a result of this litigation spree over the past five years. Let’s hope RIAA leaders don’t rely exclusively on the legal opinions of their now wealthier lawyers on this situation.

I don’t have any insider knowledge or a crystal ball, but I do know that in this situation as well as others “good leadership matters.” In multiple contexts, I’ve seen misinformed leaders without vision and understanding persist in counterproductive courses of action despite the best efforts of others to sway their opinion and change their perceptions. I hope the leaders of the RIAA setting policy for the organization will take the time to actually read these well-researched and thought-out reports from the EFF. There ARE more constructive paths forward than the harmful and fear-laden ones the RIAA’s leadership has chosen to pursue for the past half-decade.

Technorati Tags:
p2p, lawsuit, riaa, eff, sue, music, itunes, legal, intellectualproperty

One of our presenters for K-12 Online has raised some good questions regarding fair use in an email to me. Their question is whether or not including a 30 second video clip from a past episode of a syndicated television program (now off the air but still covered by U.S. copyright law) would qualify as fair use and be OK to include in their presentation for the conference. Here are my thoughts on this question.

I can’t give you a definitive legal opinion, but here are some ideas. This is from:
http://www.wtvi.com/teks/02_03_articles/copyright.html

There are 4 different factors to consider in determining fair use under US copyright law:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

The degree to which you offer a critique of the work and the degree to which your use of the work is “transformative” and results in a substantively different work as a result of your inclusion of the clip are big parts of this fair use determination. The facts that you are creating a noncommercial, educational presentation and just using a short clip support an opinion that your use would qualify as “fair use.”

If you are going to (as you say) just use a 30 second clip from this, and tie together the clip into your presentation by evaluating it in some way and creating a final work that is transformatively different than the original work, it is likely your inclusion of this clip would qualify as fair use. Just playing the clip and not saying anything about it before or after– and integrating it into your presentation may not qualify as fair use. Utilizing a short portion and using it thoughtfully to make a point and create a substantively different media product than the video is/was is more likely to qualify as fair use.

I have not seen your presentation (I’m guessing it is not complete) but based on what you’ve said, if you’re creating a presentation that meets the requirements above I think it should qualify as fair use. If you are still not completely comfortable with your use of the clip, you might consider the following suggestion:

Submit your presentation with the included clip, being sure to include analysis and some critique/discussion of it before and/or after playing it. If K12Online (or you personally) receive a request from the copyright owner of the [SHOW TITLE] program after your presentation is published to take the video down because of an asserted copyright violation, then you could encode a different version that does not include the clip and we could replace your presentation on the website. If that would happen, however, I would recommend we contact the EFF for a free legal opinion and see what we want to do based on that opinion BEFORE it is taken down and changed.

I hope these ideas are helpful. I am CCing both Dr. Renee Hobbs and Dr. Joyce Valenza to see if they have other suggestions to share. Good luck with your presentation, I’m looking forward to seeing the final version. These questions you raise are good ones and I am sure others are wondering about similar issues. On Nov 11 (after K12Online08 is over so it won’t be out to help with this situation, unfortunately) the Media Education Lab at Temple University is announcing a new publication regarding fair use that specifically focuses on the “transformative” nature of works qualifying as “fair use.” You might take a look at the “Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use” for additional guidance. From what I understand that document has informed the work Dr Hobbs and others at Temple have done on fair use as it applies to educators and students in projects like yours:
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/

Technorati Tags:
copyright, k12online, k12online08, fairuse, eff, law, lawsuit, intellectualproperty

Major milestone today: I worked with Advanced Network Design (the company that manages our firewall and network at the Oklahoma Heritage Association) to get our firewall and DHCP server configured for videoconferencing with the Tandberg Edge 95 MXP codec we have. We used the following open port settings (referenced in a November 2007 post) to get the firewall configured for both incoming and outgoing H.323 videoconferencing calls:

• Port 1720 TCP
• Port range 3230-3270 TCP
• Port range 3230-3253 UDP

I am meeting virtually with Lance Ford in the morning to go over the features of the Edge 95 MXP in detail. I used both Polycom as well as VTEL (ooh, remember those days…) when I was working at Texas Tech University as the director of distance learning in the College of Education for five years, but wasn’t introduced thoroughly to Tandberg until I started work for AT&T in 2006. I REALLY like Tandberg equipment and their people, and am very enthused to partner with Tandberg here at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City. My favorite experience to date with Tandberg equipment was our December 2007 videoconference from Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, connecting U.S. veteran survivors of the Japanese attack on the U.S.S. Oklahoma with elementary and secondary students back in Oklahoma USA. Tandberg loaned us the videoconferencing equipment to make that connection free of charge, and was a wonderful partner with which to work.

To verify my video IP settings were working fine within our network today, I downloaded and installed a copy of the free/open source XMeeting software program for Macintosh. Like the commercially available Polycom PVX software (only available for WinXP though, not Vista) XMeeting lets you connect your computer directly in a H.323 videoconference as an endpoint.

After connecting locally on our network between my MacBook Pro and the Tandberg codec, I dialed out later in the day to Lance and had him dial me directly, to confirm our firewall is setup to allow both incoming as well as outgoing videoconference calls. All of this means we should be “ready to roll” with videoconferencing here at the OHA. Once we bring fiber to our building and network in the coming months and increase our available bandwidth to 5 MB our connectivity will be even better, but today’s calls at 384 kbps and 512 kbps looked and sounded great.

I wish there was an open source H.323 program like XMeeting for Windows computers, but to my knowledge there is not. Netmeeting has been “deprecated” by Microsoft (there’s a good Scrabble word for you) for WinXP users in favor of Windows Messenger and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. For Vista users (a group of which I’m happy to NOT count myself a member) Windows Meeting Space and MS Office Live Meeting are the Microsoft-recommended and endorsed online collaboration environments. Microsoft SharedView is a free application for both XP and Vista which can also be used for collaboration, but NONE of these software options (with the exception of the now deprecated Netmeeting) are H.323 compatible. Ekiga IS H.323 compatible and free, but is only available for Linux.

Later this week I’ll be taking this Tandberg Edge codec to Oklahoma City University, which is hosting our first “Oklahoma Institute” panel discussion with civic leaders scheduled for the afternoon of October 14th. Again with the help of Tandberg and Lance Ford, I am helping facilitate videoconferencing connections for this event with remote sites in Enid, Lawton, and Tulsa. The theme of our October 14th OI event is “public service.” Participating panelists include Clayton I. Bennett, current Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor, Mickey Edwards, and current Muskogee Mayor John Tyler Hammons. This promises to be a great panel discussion and I’m looking forward to helping make this a blended learning event via videoconferencing technologies.

As an aside… Interestingly the VTEL English WikiPedia article has been entirely deleted for some reason. It is still referenced in today’s version of the Tandberg WikiPedia page. I wonder why?

Technorati Tags:
video, tandberg, videoconferencing, firewall, port, ports, configuration, oklahoma, heritage, association, oha, virtual

I’ve spent a fair bit of time the past few weeks working in Moodle to create a randomized quiz for students visiting the museum where I work after their field trips, as well as a teacher evaluation survey. I am really enjoying the opportunity my new job role is affording me to create social media content and work with web 2.0 tools like Moodle, but I am finding these prospects unexpectedly challenging in many ways as well. I commented tonight on Twitter that I should have taken a course series in college on project management and accurate time estimation for job completion. I didn’t unfortunately, and although it is never to late to learn something new I am finding it difficult to balance the practical need to say “I can’t do that right now” or “That will take quite awhile to complete” with my innate desire to produce results and be extremely responsive to the needs and desires of my peers and supervisor.

photo credit: John-Morgan

As I finished the initial “draft” of our online Moodle randomized quiz solution today, it occurred to me that it is much more dangerous to utilize an open source solution for a “production need” in a case like this rather than just “experimenting” with it as I am with the courses I’m teaching this fall at our church. I’m proposing that my new department contract with Remote Learner next year for some formal Moodle support. I’m not expecting problems, but there can be a VERY dark side to “being your own tech support department,” and although I feel I have a great professional learning community to which I could (and do at times) reach out at need for technical assistance, I think I’ll feel a lot better paying for professional support assistance as we make Moodle an integral part of our educational outreach activities.

I was delighted to discover the Moodle Questionnaire activity module recently as I sought a way to create Lickert-scale questions in a survey for teachers. An evaluation survey didn’t “fit” in the default Moodle quiz module options, but this questionnaire module fits the bill nicely. This was the first “add-on” module for Moodle I’ve downloaded, uploaded, configured and utilized. The process was very straightforward, and quite similar to the process of activating new plug-ins for Wordpress. I uploaded the entire module directory to my “mod” directory on my Moodle server, and clicked the “Notifications” link under the Administration sidebar to have Moodle install and configure the new module. I did have to re-download an older version of the module based on the version of Moodle I’m running currently, but once I got that correct version it configured itself immediately without any problems.

In the process of figuring out how to use the Moodle quiz module I did learn what the “adaptive mode” is, and ended up choosing it with an equivalent penalty weight as the entire question has. This means students taking our quiz can attempt a question multiple times, and they can see whether they got the question right or wrong immediately, but their first answer is the one that will count.

photo credit: ShawnKball

I love how I was able to create six different question categories and then populate each category with questions which include photographs. The quiz itself draws random questions from each category, so we’ll be able to continue adding to the question bank in each category in the months ahead but will not have to clear or make changes to the quiz I’ve created itself: More question possibilities will simply become available as they are added to the bank.

To simplify the interface and the available options in our Moodle course, I learned I could “hide” unneeded module elements including the news section, the latest activity block, and the administration block as well. In addition to showing one of our part-time employees how to add additional multiple-choice questions to the quiz question database, I still need to create and customize a Moodle theme for our site which will integrate our logo and color scheme.

I really, REALLY like Moodle, and am so glad to have several opportunities this fall to get more first-hand experiences using and customizing Moodle to meet different learning management system requirements. I certainly don’t consider myself to be a Moodle guru, but I am comfortable now with the new title, “Moodle-dabbler.”

Technorati Tags:
moodle, learning, online, lms, remotelearner, support, quiz, survey, customize

Welcome to episode 10 of the Technology Shopping Cart Podcast, recorded as a live webcast on September 26, 2008. This episode features a conversation with Bob Martin and Brad Meyerhoff,  educational technology trainers for MOREnet in Missouri. Karen Montgomery and Wesley Fryer visited with Bob and Brad about the challenges which sometimes arise when teachers begin using read/write web tools to facilitate collaboration, communication, and content creation in classrooms. Bob and Brad work with a wide variety of teachers in diverse Missouri school districts, and have facilitated a number of conversations at educational conferences in the past year which focus on overcoming the obstacles to effective web 2.0 integration in schools. In addition to discussing strategies which are working to open the door to web 2.0 tool use, webcast participants also discussed a few educational technology news items and shared several new “geek of the week” websites. This was our first live webcast in which we used free CamTwist software, which permits (among other things) a slideshow of static images to be shared in the Ustream video window instead of just a live video feed. This audio podcast version is longer than the Ustream archive for this episode because it includes the first fourteen minutes in which we had some audio technical problems with Ustream. Those problems were entirely user-generated! We are continuing to learn more each week about podcasting as well as webcasting. As always we welcome your feedback and comments.

 

 Podcast285: TechShoppingCart Episode 10 - Challenges with Integrating Web 2.0 in Schools [01:20:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (810)

Show Notes:

1. Tech Shopping Cart Wiki resources for this show
2. UStream video archive (minus the first 14 minutes of the show)
3. National Study Reveals How Teens are Shaping & Reshaping Their Wireless World. Study Sheds New Light On Teens’ Cell Phone Habits, Expectations & Dream Phone Wishes (12 Sept 2008)
4. Use Google Moderator To Crowdsource Group Questions
5. Trainer Profiles from MOREnet
6. Google Moderator
7. K-12 Online Conference
8. Key Resources for Media Literacy from Temple University
9. CamTwist for Mac
10. Schools are NOT required by Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) to block all web 2.0 sites
11. The EdJurist Blog- http://www.edjurist.com/
12. Scott Bauries: The Recent E-Discovery Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Communicative Technologies in School Districts (Intro)
13. Buzzword (collaborative document writing from Adobe)
14. Using a Mac, how to webconference using Ustream and skype (thanks Ryan Gordon)
15. Gomeric Hill: Blog of Karen Montgomery
16. Thinking Machine: Presentation and Workshop Curriculum of Karen Montgomery
17. Karen Montgomery on Twitter
18. Wesley Fryer on Twitter

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It was a full day of family fun for my daughter and I in the Flinthills of northeast Kansas! After attending a tailgate and then watching the KSU Wildcats squeak out a win in their last non-conference game of the regular 2008 football season, we attended a wonderful musical performance of “The Wizard of Oz” in the remarkable “Columbian Theater” in Wamego, Kansas. The Columbian reminds me a lot of The Pollard Theater in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where our family saw the musical “Big River” last fall.

Here are a few photo highlights from our day!

The Columbian Theater after the performance tonight:

Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West posed with Sarah after the musical was over:

Perhaps most remarkable in tonight’s performance was the work of the “flight crew” who managed to empower witches as well as monkeys to fly!

While the “Wizard of Oz” musical performance was likely the highlight of my daughter’s day today, attending a KSU football game with my dad was certainly mine:

During the game, fans were asked to take photos with their cell phones and then email them to wildcatfans@ksu.edu. I snapped and emailed in the following photo with my iPhone, but it was NOT shown in the 2nd half along with other submitted fan photos. I wonder if the reason it was excluded was the guy sitting behind us, who looks like he was TOTALLY ASLEEP! The game wasn’t a nail-biter for most of the afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t as boring as this fellow apparently found it! (We should probably give him the benefit of the doubt, I bet his eyes just happened to be closed when I snapped the shutter for this picture.)

My only complaint from the day was that outside bottles of water are NOT allowed in Bill Snyder family stadium, and the stadium-wide fixed price for bottled water is $3.50 each for 20 ounces. Good grief! I think that is ridiculous.

Perhaps the message of this t-shirt is not true. It certainly was in our house today, however!

Technorati Tags:
kansas, manhattan, ksu, wamego, football, theater, columbian, kansasstate

After almost a full year of playing the online game Travian, gameplay is over for me on our server. One of the other alliances successfully built their Wonder of the World to level 100.

The player “Steve the Spiffy” referenced in the message above was a member of our alliance (SE Meta) and the player we had HOPED would be able to build his wonder to level 100 first. I think he must be a college student because he seemed to be online playing Travian almost 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. I know from one of his messages that the number of hours he spent playing the game really took a negative toll on his health. I am sure he is VERY bummed to have lost the race to the top on our server. I am disappointed, but I didn’t invest NEARLY the amount of time playing this game as some of the leaders of our alliance clearly did.

I ended the game with 20 villages, and some pretty respectable production levels in my capital.

It is rather amazing to consider that almost every day for the past 10 months, with only a few exceptions, I’ve been online at least a few minutes each day to play Travian. “Playing Travian” has meant logging in to:

• Build up fields and construct buildings in my cities
• Check messages and send messages in-game
• Build troops and most recently send troops to our alliance villages building wonders
• Scouting other villages and sending raids on neighbors
• Checking and monitoring attack logs
• Trading resources with other players
• When I was leading a small alliance, monitoring player activity, admitting new members, messaging others who attacked our members, organizing defensive and offensive attacks, etc.
• Settling new villages in new locations

I have learned a GREAT deal playing Travian, as has my 10 year old son. It’s been so fun to work with him on understanding a coordinate grid system, and helping him learn to graph on a coordinate grid so he could plan expansion of his own villages. I’ve seen him write more email messages than he ever has before in his life, as he had to respond to inquiries from other players, and most recently (during our endgame struggles to assist our alliance members) messaging our offensive alliance leaders to send his “hammer” (large force of offensive troops he built up) on strategic, coordinated attacks with other alliance members against our enemies.

Alexander and I recorded two podcasts during the past ten months, in December 2007 (“Podcast209: A 10 year old discusses Travian, an online simulation war game”) and in March 2008 (“Podcast240: Travian Tips and Lessons Learned After Four Months Playing Online.”) Those have been two of the most popular podcasts I’ve ever recorded and published. As of tonight, Podcast209 has been downloaded 5371 times, Podcast240 has been downloaded 2212 times. (According to my PodPress stats.) I am sure we will record a final “debriefing” podcast in the next week or so while the game is still fresh on our minds. We’ve learned a GREAT deal about a lot of topics during the past 10 months of gameplay together, and it will be interesting to hear what he has to say at the end of this “era.”

Personally, although I have enjoyed playing Travian, I am also relieved the game is over. The game is setup so that if you are not “active” on your account during a period of time (I think 24 hours) your account goes “red” and other players can see that you are inactive. Going inactive can result in getting kicked out of your alliance (which protects you from attack from others) and potentially being raided and attacked by other players. I’m relieved Travian is over because since I finished the game with 20 different villages, maintaining each of these villages at the end of every day has really taken a fair bit of time. I didn’t actually time this, but I’m pretty sure each night I would spend at least 20 or 30 minutes on Travian doing all the things I needed to do to maintain my resources, troops, buildings, and alliance members.

Here is the thing which seems so weird now that Travian is over, however: Besides my own son and my cousin, who played Travian on our same server for awhile, I have NO IDEA who the other players were/are that we played with in our alliance and against on our server. In the alliance which we (Alexander and I) joined for the last half of the game, we did have an online forum which I had to register for with my actual email address. It would have been possible to ask one or more of the players in our alliance “Who are you in real life?” but I never did, and don’t plan to. Everyone played with a screenname. The player profile area lets players indicate their location, so I know most of the players in our alliance were in the United States, but some of them live in Australia. One of my best buddies/friends in Travian, actually, who was the person who acted as a “sitter” for me when I had to be offline from my account for more than one day, does live in Australia. I have no idea who he is! This is so weird.

It almost seems as if I haven’t been doing something “real” since I don’t have any idea who these other players are that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time with communicating, collaborating, problem solving, and virtually “fighting” against other players and alliances. This HAS been real, however, even though the gameplay has all been virtual and online. The experiences have been real for my son and I. We got in the “doghouse” with my wife after only just a couple months of playing, because one evening another alliance launched a massive wave of attacks against our small alliance and we ended up being late for an event that night because we had to send out a lot of messages to our alliance members before leaving the house. (My wife had difficulty understanding why that was a good and necessary decision at that point.) This was a REAL gaming experience, and actually the longest / most sustained gaming experience I’ve ever had. Yet because of the anonymity of it all, it has a different feel than I have when playing a “normal” game face-to-face with others.

Lots more to reflect on when it comes to Travian, but overall I’m glad it is OVER.

What am I going to do with all my evening free time now?

Maybe I’ll actually write my dissertation at last…..

Farewell Caper, Swampeater, Cupperous Tin, Killer Mike, piscespixie, addramyttium, and the other members of SE Fox!

Technorati Tags:
travian, game, reflections

As you may know, the first U.S. Presidential debate of the 2008 campaign is scheduled for this evening (September 26, 2008) at 8 pm CDT. Here in Oklahoma, our public television network (OETA) has created the Oklahoma Votes 2008 website to provide dynamic election coverage. One of the site’s resources is the Political Pulse blog, authored by Dick Pryor. The blog has the tagline “Unbiased Information on Oklahoma Politics.”

I got to know Dick last December when we were both part of a team sent to Hawaii to facilitate a videoconference with USS Oklahoma veteran survivors from Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. I really enjoyed the opportunity to not only work with Dick but also learn from him as a veteran journalist in both radio and television.

In his most recent entry on The Political Pulse, “Debate Prep Resource,” Dick linked to Frank Baker and Karen Zil’s outstanding website “Lights, Camera, Debate!” which provides resources to use in advance and following the Presidential debates. The website focuses on:

How to watch the presidential debates from a media-literacy perspective.

This is a great collection of resources. What a super time to focus on media literacy!

As a related aside, OETA’s Oklahoma World War II Veterans Project won the Emmy Award for Community Service at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Heartland Emmy Awards Presentation on July 19, 2008. Resources still available related to this project include the Oklahoma World War II Stories project website, and the WetPaint wiki we used for educational digital learning projects related to our December 6, 2007, videoconference from Pearl Harbor. The Veteran Interview guide on the OETA website (PDF format) is one resource we continue to use for our ongoing Celebrate Oklahoma Voices oral history project.

Whether or not you’re an Oklahoman, I commend both the Oklahoma Votes 2008 website and Dick’s Political Pulse blog as great resources to utilize in the classroom and at home as we watch and participate in the unfolding elections this fall at local, state and national levels.

Technorati Tags:
election, oklahoma, oeta, politics, pulse, blog, debate, presidential, president, education, classroom, socialstudies

For this morning’s live Technology Shopping Cart webcast over Ustream and Skype I tried using CamTwist for the first time. Complimenting SoundFlower (a free “Free Inter-application Audio Routing Utility for Mac OS X”) which can be used to combine and change audio sources for webcasting, CamTwist (also available free) permits users to mix up and change the video sources used for different applications, including a Ustream webcast. I just used the slideshow feature to alternate between different still images during our webcast. I like this better than just having people see me when we are having a panel discussion with four different people, and I’m the only one who can potentially be on video!

The only problem we ran into for the first 10-15 minutes of the webcast was that I muted the broadcasted audio in my Firefox browser so no one in the chat room could hear us for the first “news” segment of the webcast! I was hearing playback audio from the webstream and needed to mute it, but hadn’t realized that audio was coming from my other open web browser (Safari) which I was using to login into the Ustream chat with a different username. After I paused the playback on that window and turned the volume back up in the Firefox broadcast window everything was fine!

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

I’ve submitted a proposal for our fall (Nov 13 and 14) Oklahoma Distance Learning Association’s annual conference called “Webcasting on a Shoestring” which will be a how-to session for webcasting with the following hardware and software ingredients:

• A MacBook Pro laptop
• A Sierra Wireless AT&T cell network USB data card
• A free Ustream.tv channel open in FireFox
• Skype software and a free Skype account
• Audio Hijack Pro (a $30 software program for Macs)
• Free SoundFlower software
• Free CamTwist software

The session description I submitted is:

Hosting radio shows for a global audience with an Internet-connected laptop and $30! Historically it has been quite expensive to produce and host a live radio program that is broadcasted for a global audience. Today, it is possible to share a live webcast over the Internet using a laptop computer, a high speed Internet connection, and a combination of free software programs as well as one $30 commercial software program. In this session I will explain and demonstrate how to use a Mac laptop, a USB cell phone data card, a web browser and the website Ustream.tv, Skype software, Audio Hijack Pro software (the $30 program) as well as free Camtwist software to webcast for a global audience on a shoestring budget. Access referenced links on http://handouts.wesfryer.com/shoestring-webcasting.

Generally I share more introductory-level presentations at conferences so I’m thinking it will be fun to share this more “bleeding edge” session on webcasting. One of our guests today on the show (I think it was Bob Martin) commented that in his job role, he “tries to bleed [with web 2.0 tools] so teachers don’t have to.” I feel a little like that using these tools for a live webcast! There were a few scratches during our webcast today but I don’t think anyone did any bleeding!

I’ll try to get the mp3 version of the webcast posted as podcast over the weekend.

Thanks again to Ryan Gordon for his instructions on webcasting with Ustream, Skype, Soundflower and Audio Hijack Pro.

Technorati Tags:
webcast, ustream, skype, soundflower, audiohijackpro, radio, camtwist, show, host

You’re cordially invited to join Karen Montgomery and I at 3 pm GMT today (that’s in an hour - 10 am US Central time) for another live, webcast episode via Ustream.tv of our “Technology Shopping Cart” podcast series. This week we are focusing on the theme “Challenges of Integrating Web 2.0 in the Classroom” and will be joined by three Missouri educational leaders.

Bob Martin and Brad Meyerhoff are all educational technology trainers and integrators with with MOREnet in Missouri. You can read their bios and link to additional information about MOREnet on the MOREnet Trainer Bios page.

For this episode we’ll follow a three part format, addressing:

1. Noteworthy educational technology news from the past three weeks (since our last episode)
2. Our theme of the week and panelist interviews: Challenges of Integrating Web 2.0 in the Classroom
3. Our “geeks of the week.”

I have shared this before but it bears repeating: Our linktribution credit and “shoutout” thanks for our “geek of the week” show element goes out to Bob Sprankle, Cheryl Oakes and Alice Barr in their Seedlings podcast which is now available as an almost-weekly live webcast (Thursday nights) on EdTechTalk.

This week we’ll be using a special Ustream channel Karen has setup specifically for Technology Shopping Cart podcasts. Please join us at 11 am Eastern / 10 am Central / 9 am Mountain / 8 am Pacific for our show, which as usual will last about an hour. We welcome questions, comments, and shared links in our Ustream chat room. We also welcome international educators outside the United States to join us and chime in the conversations.

Online TV Shows by Ustream

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technology, education, integration, podcast, webcast, ustream, morenet, missouri, challenges

My September 13, 2008, post “Explaining the value of microblogging and Twitter for educators” inspired Paul Barrette to comment and ask:

But in the US, how would you open up access to Twitter while still meeting the requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure passed in December of 2006 that require school districts (among other public institutions) to archive electronic communications? Archiving can easily be done with an internal system (we use FirstClass), but it’s not really feasible for systems outside of the district.

In my rather lengthy comment response to Paul’s question and the assumptions which underlie it, I responded in part:

The intent of the law [FRCP] was not to chill use of every website and software tool which permits collaboration and facilitates learning. The intent of the law was to provide documentation of network abuse and misuse. [PREVENT THE INTENTIONAL DESTRUCTION OF DOCUMENTS RELEVANT TO ONGOING LITIGATION.] Districts should and must according to the law make good faith efforts to archive electronic communications on the district’s email server, but it is unrealistic and counterproductive to attempt to archive every outbound packet of data which is created by students, teachers, and other district staff members in-district.

Of course I am NOT a lawyer, so my opinion should not be construed or interpreted as legal advice, but Scott Bauries IS a lawyer and has written an articulate post also responding to Paul’s question and perspective on the Edjurist blog titled, “The Recent E-Discovery Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Communicative Technologies in School Districts (Intro).” Scott concludes his post by noting:

As I mentioned above, the e-discovery amendments for the first time introduced into the FRCP explicit provisions regulating the disclosure and production of electronically stored information. Since then, a misconception has developed among some public education practitioners that institutions using such information must therefore now archive all electronic information in case it is later needed in discovery, despite their prior practices and despite the lack of any anticipated litigation concerning the information in question. No such independent duty was created by any of the e-discovery amendments adopted in 2006, and no such duty exists anywhere else in the FRCP (although state education laws or administrative codes may require otherwise). As I will explain further in a future post, under the FRCP, an institution may be required to halt the routine destruction of electronically stored information once litigation has begun, but outside that limited circumstance, the e-discovery amendments do not require the archiving of any electronic information not previously stored.

As to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education, then, it is unlikely that the e-discovery amendments will reach much of this information because, if it is stored at all, it is usually stored by a third party, such as a blog hosting site (and is therefore in that party’s possession and control, rather than the district’s). As to the use of other electronic communicative technologies, such as email, the amendments clearly apply, and the remaining posts in this series will address the specific changes that were made to the FRCP and how they impact the daily work of education practitioners and leaders who use these technologies.

Just as educator misconceptions have led to widespread, overly conservative interpretations of fair use provisions of U.S. intellectual property law (a situation being addressed by a forthcoming report due on November 11, 2008 from the Media Education Lab at Temple University under the leadership of Dr. Renee Hobbs) I think we have some cases of conservative misinterpretations of the FRCP by school district administrators and IT staff members when it comes to web 2.0 sites and technologies.

U.S. law does NOT require school districts to archive EVERY data packet traversing school networks. It IS legal (as far as FRCP mandates go) for school district leaders to permit the use of blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and web 2.0 conversation sites like Twitter and Plurk without setting up a system for archiving all these communications packets. There are different reasons school districts block websites, and one of the most common is to attempt to keep students “on task” when they are online. (i.e. not checking their Facebook profiles when they are “supposed” to be doing Internet research.) Just as there is no legal requirement for schools to block websites to “keep students on task,” neither is there a legal requirement that schools block all web 2.0 sites from teacher and student access on the school network when the data packets shared on those sites are not being electronically archived by the district.

Many thanks to Dr. Scott McLeod and Dr. Justin Bathon for forwarding this original post about Twitter and and FRCP to Scott Bauries for his insights and perspectives. If your school district is blocking web 2.0 sites and tools because of a professed belief that FRCP requires such sites to be blocked if all data exchanged there cannot be archived, I encourage you to forward this post from Scott to them and continue to follow his post series on Edjurist.

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This podcast is a recording of Dr. Renee Hobbs’ keynote at the 2008 OTEP Reading Conference on September 19, 2008 at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma. The title of her keynote was “Media Literacy as Literacy for the Information Age.” The conference theme was “Critical Literacy for Adolescents.” The Oklahoma Teacher Enhancement Program (OTEP) is a Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant awarded to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education by the U. S. Department of Education. Renee Hobbs is one of the nation’s leading authorities on media education. She is the director of the Media Education Lab at Temple University, and over the past 20 years, she has helped bring media literacy to the forefront, educating thousands of students across the United States through her collaborative work with state education agencies and media companies. Hobbs is also the co-founder of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), the national membership organization of the National Media Education Conference; the co-principal investigator at the Pennsylvania Department of Public Health; and the co-director the Ph.D. Mass Media program at Temple.

 

 Podcast284: Media Literacy as Literacy for the Information Age by Dr. Rene Hobbs [01:30:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (830)

Show Notes:

1. Dr Hobbs’ presentation slides on SlideShare
2. Media Education Lab at Temple University
3. Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA) - The national membership organization for media literacy
4. Ypulse Interview: Renee Hobbs, Goddess Of Media Literacy
5. Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement
6. Key Media Literacy Resources from the Media Education Lab
7. 2008 OTEP Reading Conference Speaker’s Page
8. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education

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This podcast is a recording of Dr. Cathy M. Roller’s keynote at the 2008 OTEP Reading Conference on September 19, 2008 at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma. The conference theme was “Critical Literacy for Adolescents.” The Oklahoma Teacher Enhancement Program (OTEP) is a Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant awarded to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education by the U. S. Department of Education. Dr Roller is director of research and policy at the International Reading Association, develops policy statements with the board of directors, generates professional partnerships and oversees the traditional role of the research division. She is the author and co-author of four books published by the International Reading Association, including her books So…What’s a Tutor to Do? and Variability Not Disability: Struggling Readers in a Workshop Classroom. She is the editor of Learning to Teach Reading: Setting the Research Agenda, and she has published and regularly edits a number of journal articles. She has also received research grants and has presented at and attended a multitude of regional, national and international presentations and professional meetings.

 

 Podcast283: Dr. Cathy M. Roller's keynote at the 2008 OTEP Reading Conference [01:17:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (409)

Show Notes:

1. 2008 OTEP Reading Conference Speaker’s Page
2. Bio of Dr Roller on The Alliance for Excellent Education
3. Oklahoma Teacher Enhancement Program (OTEP)
4. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education

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I really miss Jott. Since the service went out of beta I have not used it. I’d probably pay a Flickr-Pro price of $30 per year, but $4 or $13 per month seems a bit too pricey. Jott does offer a free option, but so does EverNote for making short web-accessible voice memos on an iPhone. EverNote doesn’t transcribe your voice memo to text like Jott can (or attempts to do) but I do like having all my notes organized in a single place with EverNote. I found the EverNote iPhone application handy this week to record a voice memo for myself when I was in the car, and later return to it when I was on my laptop. EverNote and Jott are different web-powered applications with different types of functionalities, but there are several similarities that cause me to group them together for comparison sake.

I am using EverNote with three different software platforms, essentially: The EverNote iPhone application, the EverNote Macintosh software application, and the EverNote website. EverNote also has an iPhone web application, but I haven’t used it yet.

I used Jott a bit to update Twitter in the last six months, but several times I found that it misunderstood some words I recorded and sent unexpected text out as a Twitter update. As a result, I’d classify the Jott-to-Twitter functionality as KOFTT (”kind of fun to try”) but NRFDU (”not ready for daily use.”)

I’m using EverNote more and more for taking notes both on my laptop and on my iPhone. I love how it synchronizes all notes to the web, so everything is immediately backed up just in case something happens to my iPhone or laptop. EverNote does permit users to publicly publish notes, but there is not a way for others to collaborate on those notes currently (in a Google Documents way) or to leave comments on them. EverNote is becoming one of the most valuable applications I use each week to take and organize my notes in different contexts. The ability to record voice memos is an added bonus.

This video provides a good overview of EverNote’s functionality. I like the reference to my “external brain.” Moving information, ideas, and to-dos from your brain into a trusted documentation system is a foundational part of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) organizational approach. I certainly don’t have that approach mastered, but documentation options like these from EverNote certainly help in these endeavors. I have just started to experiment with the EverNote function of OCR scanning a business card from a PhotoBooth or other iSight camera-captured image. At one time I considered purchasing a Neat-Receipts Scanner for this purpose (and to scan receipts.) It appears EverNote could fill that need much more cost-effectively.

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The Oklahoma Heritage Association and Gaylord-Pickens Museum, where I now work as the director of technology and education outreach, is still on a single T-1 line for Internet connectivity. We have solicited bids to bring fiber optic cable to our building and increase our total bandwidth to the commodity Internet to at least 5 MB. A T-1 line provides just 1.5 MB of bandwidth. Although I am using the abbreviation MB for bandwidth, to be more precise I actually should use the abbreviation Mbps, for “megabits per second.” As we’ve added more staff and Internet utilization has increased, we’ve come to the point where a T-1 line is no longer sufficient for our needs. The increased utilization of multimedia on the web has certainly also played a role in this evolution. Here is some graphical proof of our need for additional bandwidth.

This first graph from the free Internet Frog Speed Test website shows download and upload (downstream and upstream) Internet speeds for our network this morning from the vantage point of my Macbook Pro laptop’s WiFi connection. A download speed of 208 kbps and an upload speed of 21 kbps is laughably slow for today’s Internet website demands. The T-1 line’s full theoretical downstream and upstream capacity (symmetrical capacity because they should be equal) is 1.544 Mbit/s, or 1544 kbps. Doing some simple division, we can see that the downstream bandwidth available to me on my laptop this morning (208 divided by 1544) is just 13% of the T-1 line’s total capacity, and my upstream bandwidth available (21 divided by 1544) is just 1.3% of total capacity. Clearly we need more bandwidth! I can FEEL it when I’m online.

Since my experiences “getting burned” not having a provided Internet connection during my spotlight session at the OTA conference in February 2008 in our downtown Cox Convention Center, I’ve paid (out of my own family’s budget) for an AT&T 3G wireless data card to connect my laptop to the Internet. This has permitted me to access my curriculum materials for school workshops in districts which block all wiki sites, and also permitted me to access the Internet in locations where public access was not available or not working. It also provided the opportunity to do some live webcasts from the Smithsonian air and space museums in Washington D.C. this past March.

Increasingly in late morning and the afternoons at work now, I am finding it much more efficient to use my 3G data card to access the web rather than using our organizational, shared T-1 line. This second bandwidth graph shows that my 3G connection is providing me today (at our museum) with a full 1.5 MB of bandwidth downstream and just over 700 kbps of upstream bandwidth. This makes a HUGE difference when “working the web.”

I’m hopeful that by January of 2009 we’ll be able to bring a fiber optic connection to our building and increase our shared bandwidth to at least 5 MB. Our network management company has installed some bandwidth monitoring software in the past two months and I have not been able to see the statistics it’s collected yet, but based on my own informal surveys (like the one I’ve described in this post) it’s clear we’ve reached the capacity of our current Internet pipe. It is very interesting to be on “the other side” of negotiations over organizational bandwidth pricing now that I’ve joined the OHA, and I still find it hard to believe consumers are able to pay so little (comparatively speaking) for bandwidth in residential homes compared to organizations who have to fork out thousands of dollars per month for much LESS bandwidth. The uptime guarantees for business Internet connections are certainly different than they are for residential connections, but the bandwidth and pricing differences are so big that I suspect they are not justified. The same market forces which have reduced prices for residential high speed Internet access have not been nearly as powerful in lowering average organizational/business bandwidth prices in many areas, certainly not in the Oklahoma City area where I live and work most of the time. I’ve screensnapped (mostly with Skitch) over 70 bandwidth graphs from different locations over the past few years, and these are all available on my Flickr site when you search for the tag “bandwidth.”

Once we have a fiber optic connection to the Internet at our building, we’ll be able to incrementally increase our bandwidth all the way up to 100 MB if we want to, just with a phone call to our provider/ISP. I am eagerly looking forward to the day when our shared, organizational bandwidth will exceed the personal bandwidth I’m able to access with my Sierra Wireless Internet data card on my laptop. Until then, however, I’m quite thankful that I have another option for accessing the web faster from my laptop. I just wish the monthly price for this service was less!

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