Wikis: A Home for Collaborators

Reflections on Learning

I was first introduced to the idea of creating my own wiki(s) in the summer of 2009. Certainly I knew that wikis existed and have used some of the more popular ones like Wikipedia or even the Internet Movie Database a lot over time. But the idea of making my own wiki was something that had not occurred to me.

Our prof for our Masters cohort setup a wiki for our group through wikispaces. For the past two years our class has used this as a place to share ideas, point out new tools, and to discuss our projects. Using this as a springboard, I’ve created wikis for both personal and professional use. I’ll expand on this more in the sections below.

As I have some experience with this tool, I wanted to concentrate my learning this week on seeing how other people use wikis and to see what new tricks I might be able to learn to enhance my own wiki experience. Secondly, I wanted to explore the issues that are fundamental to wikis, perhaps not resolving anything, but definitely finishing the week with a better understanding of the impact of this tool on learning.

The CommonCraft video makes reference to the messiness of email and how wikis can clean this up. One of the interesting things I’ve stumbled across during this course are the many references to Google Wave. I’m not sure if others have seen this as well, but this looks to be a fascinating look at how email and wiki knowledge could be combined.

The Personal Level

On the personal user level, wikis for me have been FUN and have saved me a lot of work! Even in the CommonCraft kind of way! I haven’t used them to plan a camping trip, but have definitely used them as a tool in my personal life. Our rec hockey team needs to keep standings and post schedules and results – we created a wiki for it. Now the league directors can log in and make the changes. Previously, this info would all be sent to me and I would alter the info. Now multiple people can contribute, the workload is spread out and is more current.

Our rec hockey team also keeps a personal website for people to poke fun at one another, share stories, collect funny articles, etc. Again, I used to manage all of this as a traditional website, but now we have set it up as a wiki where anyone on the team can contribute any time they like. It builds a sense of comraderie and at the same time spreads the workload.

I would submit some links here for these wikis, but one of the benefits we’ve taken advantage of with Wikispaces, is in keeping our wikis just for the users. I’ll list them here nevertheless, if only to demonstrate that it is a tool that is in use:

Personal Wikis:
Icehogs.wikispaces.com (my hockey team)
Recleague.wikispaces.com (our hockey league)
Professional Wikis:
Mes08.wikispaces.com
Riverheights.wikispaces.com
Tlcsd76.wikispaces.com
Cslp-epearl.wikispaces.com
Social30-1.wikispaces.com


The Professional Level

My first foray into using wikis at a professional level began in the fall of 2008. We had just changed how we structured our Student-Led Conferences at our school and I wanted to get feedback on how everyone felt about the changes. Our next staff development day already had a full agenda, so I put forward the idea of having this SL conference discussion on the wiki. We gave it a try, had about 50% participation, I collated the responses and shared them at our next staff meeting. An item that may have taken 25-30 minutes to discuss was covered in 5 minutes. We’ve since used our wiki to discuss other items or as a follow up on discussions that didn’t seem complete.

I’ve since created a wiki for our school district administrators as a place for them to “play” and learn about some of the web2.0 tools. This wiki is in the newest stages of development (we’ll actually be doing a hands on presentation to our admin group on Thursday of this week) so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.

The real interesting uses of wikis I think are classroom based. Hans Huizing is a teacher at Hunting Hills in Red Deer. His Social30-1 wiki is extremely interesting. Again, this is a private wiki, but Hans has let me access it to lurk and learn. Students are posting incredible rants (a la Rick Mercer), having deep discussions on philosophy, and using it as a way to demonstrate their knowledge of current events. Other possibilities are only limited by the student and teacher imagination. A music wiki that allows students to alter music and share music theory, a children driven wiki on everything from the alphabet to bugs, a primary school that uses a wiki to have children teach other children the school rules, an economics wiki that is driven by AP students, and a new video sharing wiki that is designed for educators at www.watchknow.org.


New Knowledge

Where last week I was a bit down on podcasting, this week I am very keen on wikis. I think they are a great tool for collaboration and even though they may be currently underutilized as pointed out by Davies and Merchant (p. 102) I do think they are a tool that will have their day. This is not to say that however, that wikis do not come with some issues attached.

As I explored wikis this week a couple of key questions kept occurring to me. It is here that I would like to focus the attention of this week’s blog. The first thing that occurred to me I’m going to call “stale-dating”.

Stale-dating
For me this is when a wiki has not been used enough to show it’s worth. Posts are old, have lost their relevance or there has simply been a lack of participation. Will Richardson talks about this on pg. 62 of his book, but is optimistic that will change and imagines the possibilities if it does change. From my own experience and from exploring the trailfire again this week, he might be a bit overly optimistic. Many of the wikis I explored had some of their last entries in 2008 or even 2006, leaving them looking like an ambitious project that has just been left sitting there.

I’ve experienced this too with my own wikis. A seasonal activity like hockey attracts people at only certain times of the year. They stop visiting this little space on the web and break a habit and suddenly a vibrant place becomes stale. It will pick up again, but will need some nurturing. A separate but related concern/experience is with my school-based wiki. When I created it I envisioned this place where people would contribute and create, posing thought provoking discussions and sharing resources. For the most part, it’s pretty much been driven by me and the last thing I want to create is some top-down, make work project for teachers. I still think this has potential but won’t take off until teachers/users discover intrinsic benefits.

Authorship
A second major issue surrounding wikis is the notion of authorship. Both Richardson and Davies & Merchant explore this in depth in the texts. Authorship of wikis often flies in the face of traditional referencing particularly in the academic world. The most important lesson however, as Davies & Merchant point out on p. 96 is that using wikis creates an opportunity to teach students about the importance of critically examining all texts that we read carefully. This was highlighted in our class’s online discussion last week, where we all wondered about the authenticity of the web. Rather than lamenting that nothing is trustworthy out there, we have the opportunity and responsibility to teach children to be critical thinkers.

Finally, I might be getting a little bit ahead of myself here, but I found it interesting that many people use Wikipedia as a source for current events and news. The examples cited in the texts on the Tsunami in south east Asia and the London bombings were an angle that I had not thought of previously. What did occur to me was a question. I found myself wondering if a tool like Twitter might eventually surplant this in the realm of “citizen journalism”. An even more instantaneous way of sharing what is happening. More realistically, I’m guessing that twitter will eventually just feed info to the wiki and the tool will be combined.

Finally, finally, I found a very interesting article at http://www.gantthead.com/blog/Project-Management-2.0/1560/
. Here the author highlighted some of the issues of wiki use in all arenas.
They see the wiki as a great way for people to deal with multiple projects and initiatives, but caution that the challenge is in getting people to abandon current habits and integrate the wiki into their daily work. As I’ve mentioned above, this is definitely a common experience in education. What was also very interesting was reading the comments section that followed this article where it was pointed out that in the business world the wiki might be useful in the idea creation phase or brainstorming phase, but as an overall tool for getting the job done, the wiki was found to be lacking.

Taking all of this into account, for me, the wiki still remains a very effective collaboration tool. I too have experienced the fact that the job doesn’t necessarily get done on the wiki, but I can say that wiki does do a good job of getting the job started and creating discussion.

References

Davies, J. & Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for schools: Learning and social participation. New York, NY: Lang Publishing.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed., p. 90). Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

http://www.gantthead.com/blog/Project-Management-2.0/1560/

http://www.watchknow.org/

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior

http://welkerswikinomics.wetpaint.com/

Mercer, A. (2008). The wiki website in music education: A new collaborative medium. The Canadian Music Educator, (49)4.


With info from:

http://webtools4u2use.wikispaces.com/Webtools4U2Use

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6590061.html

http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/09/where-do-i-start-with-wiki-7th-grade.html

Bailey, M. (2009). Classroom 2.0: Technology engages student learning. Education Today, 21(1).

McPherson, K. (2006). Wikis and student writing. Teacher Librarian, 34(2).

Bells & Whistles III

Podcast embedded

Bells & Whistles II

Struggling getting the podcast to work. Here's the link for now. I was enjoying other everyone's podcasts and noticed that I interpreted this assignment quite differently. I hope mine isn't too LAME (get it?)!

Listen to Podcast

Bells & Whistles

Reflections on Learning

I can think of a number of things that I own or use where it seems that I only scratch the surface of their potential. Many of these things are in the realm of electronics or technology. For instance, I know that my PVR (which by the way may have been the greatest invention of the past decade) can recognize my favourite shows and record them for me whenever a new one comes on. I know that my Blackberry can be used as a GPS device and that there are a multitude of “shortcuts” that I have yet to use. I know that the smartboards in our classrooms can be used to take attendance and do our announcements. All of these functions, all of these bells and whistles are things I have yet to explore. Perhaps it’s because of time, perhaps because I’ve tried it once and have forgotten the concept.

The Internet in general and Web 2.0 more specifically are like this for me as well. There seems to me, to be an entire world of add-ons and features that exist out there that I know very little about. In one way this is exciting because there is so much to learn. In another way, it’s intimidating and at times a barrier to entry. Why even try because I’ll never be able to figure it all out?

For me, podcasting is one of these things that I’ve heard lots about, but, for a variety of reasons, have never used it very often. My goal, in this section of the course then, was to learn as much as I could about podcasting and see if it was a tool that I could integrate more into my online existence.

The Personal Level
One of the strangest things that has happened to me as a personal user/learner on the Internet is that more and more of what I do is text based. As a kid I would watch all the sports highlight shows, now I’d rather read about it. If I visit a sports news site or a blog and there is an opportunity to click on video or listen to an interview or podcast, 99 times out of 100, I’m only going to read the text.

With this in mind, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks clicking those links I wouldn’t normally click. Listening and viewing things, I normally would not have listened to or viewed. My conclusion, based on this really simple sample, is that I’m not sold on it. I think this has more to do with my own personal learning style. I owned a walkman once back in the day, I’ve tried to listen to books on tape, my wife has an iPod, but I’ve never used it, I run 30 or 40 km a week and never listen to music.

On the personal level, I’ve actually find myself migrating away from websites that have moved more content from text to audio or video files. I think there are some reasons for this and I’ll explore these more in the final reflection portion. My research this past week thought does indicate that I am probably a dying breed. One that will have to face the reality that more and more content is going to be presented in this way and that I will have to adapt my ways to keep up.

The Professional Level
Will Richardson’s section on podcasts is on the surface another example of this overwhelming barrier to entry. His book is filled with suggestions of radio stations to re-enactments that can help bring the classroom to life. Many teachers however, know very little about using their email properly let alone start manipulating MP3 files in Audacity.

This combined with an ever-expanding curriculum that many of us struggle to complete each year, makes the time constraints of the learning curve even more daunting. I think ultimately, it is this barrier, TIME, that is the number one factor in making people slow or non-adopters of new technologies. It probably also speaks to my apprehension (or maybe it’s laziness) in investing a pile of time in creating a podcast, when I could write it down or explain it in person a lot easier?

At some point though, I have to challenge my own bias. The easiest way for me to do this is to break it down into more easily manageable entry points. I’ll refer to these in each of the following sections.

Teachers
Just to show that I’m not just some teacher opposed to change, in the early 2000’s my grade 5 class scripted, acted, filmed, edited, produced and published online 6 videos of Jacques Cartier’s arrival in Canada. One group, chosen by the class, acted and filmed the raw footage. We then partnered with a nearby high school CTS lab where 6 groups of students each manipulated the raw footage into their own 3 to 5 minute “commercial." Each commercial was to be based upon the Canadian history vignettes on Histori.ca and on television. The end result was outstanding (I have them on DVD somewhere and will try to upload one to my blog). The flip side of this was the time commitment. We spent weeks (if not more) on this and while I can justify all of it as being linked to the curriculum, I did feel that I was crunched for time in other areas.

The key to success of ideas like podcasting will be in how we can integrate into the other things we are doing and how we can use it to enhance children’s learning. Todd Diakow is Technology Lead teacher in the Lethbridge area and he offers a presentation on “Do I Have to Write Another Essay?” This speaks to the notion that many students learn in different ways and that podcasting might be a way to allow students who are more verbal an opportunity to better express themselves.

A final driver of this for teachers will be how they are able to incorporate this into a routine. Doing a podcast for the sake of doing a podcast is not something that works at my school. There needs to be a meaning behind it and a reason for existence. There also needs to be an opportunity to try something more than once to better learn the tool and to improve on previous work.

Librarian/Administrator
One of the real benefits of this course for me has been the ability to find ides that I can incorporate into our schools library. I “stole” the idea of the video book review from another librarian when we did the video-casting segment. This week, I really enjoyed listening to the students in the “Good Master’s! Sweet Ladies! readings. I definitely want to do something like this to promote reading with our students.

I’ve toyed too, with the idea of doing our morning announcements through our school’s website. Teachers could turn on their smartboards, click a link that plays the national anthem and listen to any announcements for the morning. If anything this will be a fun project, however, I wonder about it’s longevity? Theory is one thing, getting people to hand in announcements on time to produce a podcast is another!


Students
As always, the biggest implications here are for students. Ultimately, the success of these and similar tools is going to rest on the ability of schools to build on prior learning. A grade seven teacher is going to have an easier time integrating podcasts in the classroom if students come to it with experience. If teachers feel that they are constantly re-teaching they will likely avoid the idea all together.

A second consideration is the technology itself. In clicking through many of the links of the Education Podcast Network I saw a lot of material dated from 2006, 2007 and 2008. I was left wondering if podcasting had suffered a bit from the fad effect. It became popular for quite some time, but people have moved on to other tools. I don’t necessarily have anything quantifiable to back this up, but just a pattern I noted.

Reliability is another concern here. I was unable to listen to many of the podcasts I came across. Sometimes these were software glitches, sometimes links had expired. One the trailfire websites for instance (EdTechTalk) never did work for me. We’ve all been to those PD sessions where the technology failed and we were left frustrated and the presented was left flustered. I am nervous about that with our students because it seems that as we move into some of these tools, the potential for glitches is magnified.

New Knowledge

My tone this week has obviously been a bit negative with regard to podcasts. While I do want to explore this more, I still have some concerns about the cost/benefits in terms of time.

Having said that, I know that I have knowledge this week that I did not have before, so clearly there must be value in this. If you check out the link www.techteacher.ca you can find some very good links to screencasts which are pretty much the same as a podcast. In the most recent one, Shaun LeBleu does a great job of showing teachers how students can “sign in” using the smartboard. A unique touch, done in about 10 mintues. Clearly he put some work into putting this together and those watching received some real benefit. But is everyone willing to do the same?

For me, I obviously need to spend more time playing with this tool to either better understand it and refute my bias or secondly to be able to provide an educated perspective on what I perceive to be the limitations of podcasting.

References

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed., p. 90). Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

http://www.purposefuldesign.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ZVpNbI5x8Us%3D&tabid=599

http://www.commoncraft.com/podcasting

http://medinger.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/in-the-classroom-kid-podcasts-of-good-masters-sweet-ladies/

http://www.epnweb.org/

www.techteacher.ca

Without info from:
http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/3059

An Acquired Taste

Reflections on Learning
I have a colleague that I’ve coached volleyball with and against over the years and seemingly in a previous life. He and I have joked about putting in an entry for the reality show “The Amazing Race”. Each of us would bring our own set of skills that would match up well to the challenges on the show. My colleague’s skill is one I definitely do not possess, but one that is absolutely essential to success on this show: The ability to try eating anything (at least once).

In a previous, previous life I was a golf pro. I was at the CPGA buying show in Banff and someone ordered a meat platter for our group. It had everything from venison to wild boar pate. I like meat, but I starved that night, because I couldn’t look at the platter let alone eat it.

As I approached social bookmarking, I was nervous that my picky eating habits were going to kick in. I’ve looked at sites like delicious.com in the past and from what I could see on the surface level it seemed, well…lame. Joanne’s words in her discussion post about social bookmarking seemed to reconfirm this for me.

I responded to her post by thanking her for making me not feel guilty for not liking a tool (is that a double negative?). My goal, as I stated in my post, was to give it a try, but I didn’t expect that I’d like it or find any value in it.

While it is early (I’ll explain what I mean by this later) I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by this tool. I’m committed to using social bookmarking through the timeframe of the course and I don’t think I would be surprised to use it beyond that as well.

The Personal Level
On the personal level, I’ve never been a big user of bookmarks. It isn’t necessarily the way that I personally navigate the Internet. I tend to have a lot of sites that I visit regularly, but most of them I simply know the URL and go directly to it. Every once in a while I will stumble across something I like or search for something specific and add it to my “favourites”. Not necessarily because it is a favourite, but rather because I don’t have time to read it right now and I want to come back to it later. Often times, if the thing I find is in a pdf format, I’ll simply save the file to my hard drive.

What I have noticed is that when I do look at my favourites, two things stand out. First of all, they are very disorganized because no thought has gone in to putting them there in the first place. They are generally there chronologically and for the most part haven’t been looked at in a long time. The second thing I notice is that for about a quarter of the bookmarks, I can’t remember why I saved the site in the first place. Some favourite that is!

Exploring delicious allowed me to revisit (and delete in many cases) each of the websites I had bookmarked on my computer. The tagging process and the refining of tagging was interesting (I’ll touch on that more at the end). What was really interesting for me was the addition of the tag button to my toolbar. I tried to make a point this week of tagging sites I visited (personal and professional) to just get in the habit of tagging, bookmarking and cataloguing. One can easily be surprised by the eclectic nature of their bookmarks.

I mentioned earlier that I’m in the early stages of this. I’m most interested to see what this looks like at Christmas time and whether or not it will be a habit for me and ultimately something that I rely on (perhaps the true measure of any good tool).

The Professional Level
Reading chapter 6 in Will Richardson’s book made me wish that I had explored Diigo rather than delicious as it seemed to have enough unique twists to make it worthwhile in and of itself. However, my goal going into this was to go deep with a tool rather than skim the surface of a bunch. I know there are trade offs to this and that I will likely have to come back some day to check out some missed tools.

Richardson is very big on creating a community of researchers and I think this could apply to teachers, librarians and students. I’d like to break my discussion down into those three categories.

Teachers
From professional development to using it as a teaching tool or as a way to start having students think about referencing, social bookmarking should be an important classroom tool for teachers. Teachers can collaborate on projects with one another, set up networks within school departments, within school districts or around the globe (ie. http://delicious.com/aussieandrew). The benefit being that they can quickly tap in to resources that other people have found useful.

Librarians
Social bookmarking is particularly useful for reference librarians. Funk (2009) notes that some reference departments maintain a network of Delicious accounts. This allows their reference librarians to see each other’s collections easily. In fact some writers are pointing out that it is librarians who are really taking charge when it comes to social bookmarking. Stephens (2007) says that many libraries are establishing protocols and encouraging others to get involved in tagging collections. There are obviously drawbacks to this. Librarians have long established protocols for how to catalogue books and much if not most of what you will find on social bookmarking sites is far from protocol. The Dewey Decimal system it is not! However, this does not mean that librarians, at the local level, cannot take charge of their own networks. It is exciting to see that many have.

Students
I can think of many ways that this would be a useful tool for students. As Fontichiaro (2008) notes, many students have a difficult time keeping track of where they have been on the web and where they retrieved information. A social bookmarking habit would allow them to easily keep track of their sites. These could then be easily viewed and evaluated by the classroom teacher. If criteria were setup regarding references or visiting sites, students could easily demonstrate that they have done this. I like Richardson’s idea in chapter 6 of having students simply put their name or a code in their tags to link their bookmarks together and give the teacher a sense of how well the students have done.

From a collaborative point of view, a group of students can establish a network whereby they can share the research they have found. Since this information is all shared in a web-based setting, students can then work on this information from any user station in the school, from home or elsewhere.


New Knowledge
Much of the writing in the articles I researched, the ones provided to us in the readings and on the trailfire highlighted many of the same benefits. Social bookmarks allow you a web-based system of organizing your bookmarks. You can access them from any computer, you can share them with friends, you can use key words or tag to search for websites that other people deemed interesting. Ultimately, it is supposed that this could provide better information because it is a human rating the site rather than some bot (Richardson, 2009).

In contrast to this, others feel that this might not necessarily be a benefit at all. The problem with folksonomies being that not all “folks” are necessarily equipped to properly catalogue websites or books for that matter and one could end up with a mess of information and poorly chosen key words (Bates, 2006). Add to this, simple errors such as spelling mistakes and controlling singular/plural words (Rethlefsen, 2007) or more malicious problems such as spam (Bates, 2006) and you might end up with a series of tags that are not all that useful.

Interestingly, once I tagged all of my bookmarks, I actually went back and edited many of my tags. I found that I used words like “tool” and “tools” almost interchangeably, when I meant the same thing. Seeing each of my tags appear in my cloud tag on my blog, allowed me to focus in on redundant tags and clean up my own labeling system. My guess is that the more time I spend working on this the better I will get at it. I’m also predicting that I’ll start to notice what key words others are using for tags and mimic this.

So far, wild boar pate it is not. I’ve had a taste, a nibble if you will, this past week and have enjoyed it enough to order some more. I’ll keep you posted on whether it becomes an acquired taste, a mainstay of my diet or something that was simply a passing treat.

References
Bates, M.E. (2006). Tag- you're it! Online, 30(1), 64.

Fontichiaro, K. (2008). Using social bookmarking to organize the web. School Library Media Activities Monthly, 24(9), 27.

Funk, M.E. (2009). Testing the web 2.0 waters. American Libraries, 40 (1/2) 48.
Rethlefsen, M.L. (2007). Tags make libraries del.icio.us. Library Journal. Retrieved 10/02/09 from ProQuest Journals, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6476403.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed., p. 90). Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Stephens, M. (2007). Tagging & social bookmarking. Library Technology Reports, 43(5), 58.

With info from:
http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking

http://web2tutorial.wikispaces.com/social_bookmarks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Video Killed the Radio Star...

Reflections on Learning
I caught a snake in my backyard the other day. A tiny little garter snake, about 12 inches long and about as thick as a pencil. I know there is another, larger one around too, because I found the skin it left behind along the foundation of my house. You should know that I am both fascinated by these slithery creatures and terrified of them. I was completely freaked out by this thing, yet once I caught it (in a large steel garbage can) and knew that I was in control, the snake became more interesting to look at.

Last night I was thinking of how this is a lot like social networking. It’s like letting a snake into your backyard. Some of us are terrified of it and some of us are fascinated by it. Some of us are even tempted by it.

Metaphorically, YouTube itself might be seen as some evil copyright-breaking snake that slithers around the Internet doing pretty much as it pleases. Ironically, however, the snake here is the “masses”. It is all of us who contribute and download and share that create snake. Come to think of it, from the “snake’s” perspective, it probably doesn’t feel like it is doing much wrong.

If I reflect on my beginning uses of YouTube or any other video sharing service, I would say that it was primarily for humour. Whether it was showing someone a funny skit from a TV show or a blooper or a video that someone had emailed to me, my video watching, in the beginning, was probably about 90% humour-based. It was kind of like having access to your own 24 hour funniest home video channel. If you haven't seen this one, well...



And if you haven't ever visited ImprovEverywhere you are missing out.



As I became a more savvy user of this tool, I discovered many other ways that video sharing could be useful. I will highlight these in the following sections.

The Personal Level
For me, the most mind-boggling aspect of the Internet in general and video sharing in particular is that a user can find pretty much anything they want to look for. On the surface, this is very convenient. I want to know how to lay hardwood in my living room, I can go to any number of sites both commercial and otherwise and watch someone else give me a do-it-yourself lesson. Much more significant here, is that someone has taken a serious amount of time to script, film, edit and produce the video that I’m looking at. In many cases, there is seemingly no monetary reward for these videos, which makes it even more fascinating that someone would take the time to do all of this work.

This has had a significant impact on people’s lives. If I want to find Elmo singing a song about “going to the potty” for my 2 year old son to watch, it’s right here (along with some nasty versions too!). If I want to learn how to change the brake fluid in my truck, it’s right here. If I want to figure out how to tune up my bicycle, I can find it here .

This last one is of particular interest to me because it’s isn’t YouTube based. It’s a meeting place for people that want to share their expertise with others. As with many other applications, you get greater access if you pay (and in this case share) but the free stuff can be extremely valuable to individuals. And while this is not an education site, the crossovers are obvious. Students/teachers would be able to find unique ideas here to use in their classroom and at the same time they could take their own unique projects, upload and share them.

The Professional Level
As I began to explore the trail fire laid out for us, the one thing that occurred to me is that we are really in the infancy of understanding how to use video and video sharing. The “weekly” updates provided Allen County Public Libraries were informative, and the ideas presented at the NetSpeed conference were interesting, but in the end I’m left with the feeling that this is a lot of work for people to be doing to promote themselves with no real guarantee of any return. From the perspective of an elementary school principal/librarian, I would have a tough time spending time/resources on this kind of work when there is so many other things to do.

I do appreciate however, that the needs of institutions vary and that these are viable forms of promotion for those with larger audiences. For me, the focus has to be on getting the tools into the hands of students. Sure, I have to model these things, but my school’s philosophy is that the students need to be using the technology. So, with that in mind, the trailfire link that I found most interesting was the one about flip cameras. I actually played around with a similar idea a couple of years ago (stole it from Ian Jukes) that I would carry around a Flip video camera and capture video of students doing good things and play it at our weekly assemblies. A great idea really, sadly however, the realities of work were captured well ahead of any student video. I’ll make a private commitment to revisit this. The application mentioned in the article however is something that fits with my belief that the tools need to be in the hands of students. I’m going to develop a challenge based on this and get my grade 5 students to do video book reviews to post on our school website. Great idea Jennifer Wooten!

I wanted to also comment briefly on some of the other tools available to us. YouTube and TeacherTube have become standard tools for teachers in our classrooms. Each of our classrooms are equipped with projectors, smartboards, surround sound, which makes it easy for teachers to utilize resources that they find (as long as the lousy desktops we have attached to these peripherals doesn’t fail – sorry, editorial comment). Another resource that we use extensively is UnitedStreaming. This is a service that our District pays to access and it provides us with thousands of licensed videos that teacher may use in their classroom. As a rule, our teachers will look here first to see if they can get a licensed version before they look elsewhere.

YouTube’s obvious advantage is its quick access and ease of use (Mullen, 2008). Teachers (and students, if they have access) can quickly get dozens of results for most anything they are looking for and then organize these into folders for later use or embed them into other software (Smart Notebook for example).

Using the Flip Video Camera as a jumping off point and the idea of getting the tools into students’ hands, I searched for articles that focused on student involvement. As Gentry (2008) argues, many of the examples that are out there now serve mainly as viewing resources rather than resources that act as tools for students. What is exciting is that just as technology evolves quickly, the applications and uses of it in the classroom will evolve as well. I look forward to learning more about this as the course progresses.

An interesting side note to all of this is that in 2007, as a high school assistant principal, we dealt with a fighting issue at some our schools through video sharing. Students were fighting and then posting these fights on to the web. We’d find the fights (rather easily) and deal with the red-handed (and red-faced) combatants. I won't link to those...

New Knowledge
The notion of Creative Commons is a relatively new one to me and seeing as how I missed this in the photosharing activity, I wanted to explore that a bit more here. One of the interesting things I stumbled upon here http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12757 would allow YouTube users to access material that meets copyright requirements more easily. What’s interesting to me is that this really creates a streamlining of sharing. Users, as they upload material, can essentially provide unlimited access to other users. In the long run this might avoid many legal hassles or concerns for schools.

Finally, one of the more fascinating developments is that of websites like HULU. Here, users can download just about any television show that exists (as long as they live in the United States). While I’m certain it won’t be long before we’ll be able to access a service like this in Canada, I think it is also interesting that more and more things like this that used to be underground or pirated are becoming mainstream and legal.

What might have more consequence for educators are applications like this. This Calgary based company allows you to download television shows, instructional videos, etc. to your iPhone or Blackberry to take with you anywhere. The kneejerk reaction for schools will be to block this kind of thing, what will be interesting are those educators that will be able to see this as a tool and take advantage of it.

In case you were wondering about what happened to the snake, well my kids and I looked at it for a bit and then eventually released it into the wild behind our house. A couple of days later he/she/it was back (or another one just like the first one). I didn't catch it this time, although I did chase it around for a bit. I'm guessing we'll probably have to get used to living with these creatures, metaphorically or otherwise.


Gentry, J. (2009). Using youtube: Practical applications for 21st Century education. Distance Education Report, 13(7).

Mullen, R. & Wedwick, L. (2008). Avoiding the digital abyss: Getting started in the classroom with youtube, digital stories and blogs. Clearing House 82(2).

My Bucket of Photos

Reflections on Learning
Spent the last week or so exploring photosharing websites. I eventually chose to use Photobucket. No particular reason why, although it did seem easy to use and easy to sync with my Blogger website. To be honest, I’ve never given photosharing much thought. My wife is the camera person and whenever I think to take pictures it's generally too late. The Wikipedia info was interesting, but a bit superficial and clearly the guy in the trailfire video is trying to sell the notion of photosharing and makes it sound so EASY and so FUN. The text provided more insight into the social aspect of photosharing, but I think the most interesting learning here occured through experimenting with the tools. That's probably the way it was meant to be.

The Personal Level
At this level, I can see many applications. My brother and sister-in-law have been doing this for years as they have traveled and lived in many places and it has always been a really good way for us as a family to keep track of them and stay in touch with them. With the evolution of Facebook, my wife has certainly shared more photos than ever before and it is something we should use more often. My preference, I suppose, would be to use these services in a secure way, making certain that I can limit who can see my photos (or better yet, albums) and in particular pictures of my family.

The Professional Level
One of the things I would like to see us do more at school is share what is going on in a more timely manner. We’ve moved to mostly (95%) delivering our newsletter electronically and I envision that our website (www.riverheightsschool.ca) will eventually serve as a real-time newsletter for us. At the school level we already collect photos from teachers for a year-end slideshow, and one of the things I’d like to do at school is stream some of these photos onto a monitor in our main entrance as a way of sharing what is happening at our school. Doing this through a photosharing site would seem to be a natural extension of this and something I might experiment with over the next few months. The concern here is time management. These things do not happen by themselves and they generally aren’t that interesting or good if they are not regularly updated. Finding someone to manage this and manage it well could be challenging.

Thinking about this for students, it’s easy to see how they might use this as well to share information with family and peers. It’s also easy to see how the school will want control over this to make sure posts are appropriate. Much of what we do at our school in this aspect is done through ePearl. This online portfolio is secure and allows students, teachers and families to interact and share school information.

New Knowledge
A couple of thoughts to wrap this up. I’ve thought a lot about how Facebook shares photos and the tagging process and the implication this might have for professionals. I think of the person who has a picture taken of them that they would not want posted online, the photo taker then posts that picture online and tags the people in the photo, consequently sharing that information with everyone. Sure the photo or tag can be removed, but damage could be done. I read in one of the blogs we needed to subscribe to that one prof was quoted as saying, “I have to believe that anytime my laptop is on, my life is not private.” Maybe a bit extreme, or maybe not extreme enough, but definitely a word of caution.

The other thing I wanted to share was about twitgoo. Does anyone out there know what this is? Have you had experience with it? I was playing with my photosharing site trying to share with my blog and my facebook page and clicked on the twitter feature. Suddenly, a picture of my daughter popped up in “twitgoo” and I was taken to a page where any “tweeters” can post photos. Within seconds 32 random people had viewed my picture, some made comments, and then the picture moved down the tweetgoo list and into obscurity. It was kind of a helpless feeling.