Author: Clint Lalonde

by Clint Lalonde on Multimedia Tools

Adobe to add DRM to Flash video?

I imagine video remixers around the world are holding their collective breath today in hopes that Adobe will not go ahead and include Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption in the new version of Flash servers.

One of the great byproducts of the emergence of powerful, free and easy to use media production tools like Jumpcut, iMovie and Windows Movie Maker is the emergence of the video mashup. Someone posts a video, perhaps to a video sharing site like YouTube, DailyMotion or a similar site, which then gets captured by someone else, remixed and recut to create something new.

Flash video is one of the technologies that is making this easy to do. The vast majority of video sharing sites are using this relatively new video protocol which, up until now, has been DRM free, unlike many other streaming media technologies like Real and Windows Media which have had DRM encryption fro quite some time. Ironically, the new version of Real Player includes a video download tool that allows you to download and save Flash video, but not Real video. Go figure.

Remixing is nothing new. But in a digital age, video remixing is becoming a powerful tool of both expression and media literacy. Seth Schoen at the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes a great point in his article:

Before we understand how to read media messages, we must first learn how to speak their language — and we learn that language by playing with and remixing the efforts of others. DRM, by restricting the remixing of Flash videos, stands to bankrupt a rich store of educational value by foreclosing the ability of students and teachers to “echo others” by remixing videos posted online.

There is another angle to this story. The fact that Adobe can use this new tool to effectively lock out any client side player except for an Adobe player. I don’t imagine Adobe would be so stupid as to shoot themselves in the foot and do this. One of the major reasons we are currently looking at purchasing a Flash server at our institution is precisely because it is much more platform neutral than Real, Windows Media or Quicktime. But corporations have done sillier things in the past in an attempt to control a market.

This will probably be a minor annoyance in the future as workarounds and hacks will become available should Adobe follow through with the plan to do this. But still it puts a hurdle in the way of remixers looking to build upon previous works to create new forms of art and express themselves in new and interesting ways.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

Desire2Learn 8.2 – my first impressions

We’re preparing to upgrade our version of Desire2Learn from 8.1 to 8.2 in the Spring. This week I got access to our 8.2 sandbox to take a look.

While I have experienced 8.2 in action at the D2L community site, I didn’t fully realize the extent of this upgrading. In the words of some of my colleagues – it’s HUGE!!!!!!

Here are some of my thoughts and some screen shots for you.

Overall

The changes to the user interface are substantial. Overall the design feels more unified and cohesive. Navigation between tools has pretty well be standardized on the left. No longer do you have to hunt around for where the option tools might be – on the right, left or along the top.

There are new icons which feel more contemporary and help give the system that more unified feel I mentioned above. The new icons are also more logical, although I think D2L relies a bit too much on icons to convey information, especially in the content area for students where no text information is provided for the icons they see.

A nice feature is the icon highlighting of your current option. This makes it much more obvious as to what option you are currently using within the system. The previous version didn’t have this highlighting and relied on font color alone to convey what option you were currently working with. This was always confusing for me, especially if a tool only had 2 options and you had one option with blue text and the other with black text. Which one was I actually using? Now at a glance I can see where I am and what option or tool I am using.

Course Management (edit course)

This area has had a major upgrade for the better.

The previous Course Manager area was very clunky and confusing. For one thing the course navigation bars used to disappear and were replaced by the Course Manager options. This was a bit confusing for faculty, especially when they would make changes to the navigation bars for their course and not see those changes reflected in the navigation bar. So it’s nice to see that when you now enter the new Course Manager, the standard course navigation bars remain. And if you add a tool to the navigation bar, it immediately appears. Instant feedback for users.

The Course manager navigation bar has been moved from the top to the left, making options more obvious to users. And you can now manage your groups via Edit Courses.

Course Content

This area has also had a major overhaul and is probably going to throw our faculty more than any as it is quite a bit different than the Content Manager in 8.1. But once they get used to it I think they will find it saves them time as it reduces the number of clicks you need to add or edit content.

When you first enter the new Content Manager as a teacher, you are now taken to manage content instead of view content, which will save a few mouse clicks. The navigation has moved from the right to the left and has been greatly simplified.

You can now access reports about your content directly from the Content Manager, giving you a snapshot of how many times the content has been viewed and which students have viewed what content. And student feedback is directly accessible from the Content Manager.

For students, the content modules and topics are now collapsible, reducing the clutter on the screen.

Discussions

As with the Content Manager, the Discussions tool in 8.2 is quite a bit different than the Discussions in 8.1 in terms of look and feel and new features.

When you first enter Discussions you are taken directly into Manage Discussions instead of View Discussions.

As I mentioned before, there is a peer rating system so students can rate other participants content. And discussions can now be tied directly to the Grade tool, a nice integration feature.

Bookmark

Finally, users can now have multiple bookmarks to content within the system as opposed to a single bookmark.

Blogs & Personal Homepages

Two tools that haven’t changed that I was hoping would are the Blog and the Personal Homepages tools.

The blog tool is still the only way you can publish an RSS feed for any content from within D2L. Both the blog and the RSS feed can be made public. But compared to other blogging options, the D2L blog is still very clunky and confusing to use. I would love to see some major work done here to make this a more compelling option for our faculty and students.

I was also hoping we might be able to suggest the Personal Homepage tool as a possible replacement for stand alone faculty websites as the Public Homepage is also outside the LMS. But you can’t link from one page to another within the Personal Homepage tool. And you cannot create folders or organize content. A bit of work here would make this a much more compelling option that Frontpage for many of our faculty.

Conclusion

This isn’t a definitive or comprehensive look at all the changes in 8.2, but rather a snapshot of what I’ve noticed after poking around the system for about an hour. For example, I haven’t touched the new Group Folder or Group Dropbox functions, or taken a look at the Group Workspaces area or any of the new Admin tools within the DOME. But overall I’m quite impressed with the changes D2L has made to the LMS.

Now, on to train our faculty….

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Google Docs adds Forms

Google Docs users have a new tool at their disposal – forms. And it looks dead easy to use.

Create a spreadsheet, share it as a form, choose who you want to email that form to and Google Docs will collect and tabulate that information in a spreadsheet.

I created a form in a minute. Fill it out if you would like to give it a try (no personal info or Google account is required). I’ve set it so that responses will be displayed in the form so if you fill it out and go back to the form you’ll see your response. This info also gets added to a spreadsheet that I’ve made public in my Google Docs account.

Dan Schellenberg has created a screencast on how to create a form with Google Docs.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

I just joined Twitter and I'm lonely – wait a sec…Google can fix that!

Google releases Social Graph API

The scenario:
EdTech geek finally joins YASN (Yet Another Social Network), in this case Twitter. Said EdTech geek now needs to find friends also using Twitter (and find a reason to use it) or else see it go the way of other social networks. Fortunately, some folks whom I virtually follow on a regular basis are already using it, so I check out their profiles and follow along. Uploading my Gmail account catches a few more friends, but this all feels pretty clunky.

Soon there will be a better way. Today Google announced their Social Graph API. Using 2 technologies I’ve never heard of – FOAF and XFN – Google will now be able to track my relationships like they track the linked relationships of webpages. They then open this information up to social network developers who can now make it possible for me to, say, find all my Facebook friends who are using Twitter.

Here’s the high level overview.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

"The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10"

The wonderful quote in the title comes from a graduate student at the University of North Carolina and was posted over at one of my favorite blogs about parenting and technology parent.thesis.

The quote comes from a post about an issue that many of us in the classroom deal with. How do we capture our students attention when there are so many distractions around? Do we ban it or embrace it?

Well, one strategy is to take this particular prof’s approach and do both. He does a wonderful job at making his point while still managing to capture his students attention.

Just in case you miss it at the end, he introduces his friend to the class. A joke, but an effective one.

The parent.thesis post mentions a PBS Frontline documentary called Growing Up Online that aired a few weeks ago. They’ve posted the whole show online and it has a great segment featuring 2 high school teachers on both sides of the fence. They have posted the entire doc online. And, if you have kids, you may want to check the whole thing out. As the producers of the documentary point out, we might be facing the greatest generation gap since rock ‘n’ roll.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

MIT Lecture Browser – text search for video content

I just came across the MIT Lecture Browser and am a bit smitten.

Essentially, it’s a combination speech to text converter and search engine for video lectures at MIT. Enter in a word and the search engine will not only find the videos that the word is used in, but it will also take you to the exact spot within the video where that word was used and give you a running transcript.

With more than 100 million videos online and another 100,000 being uploaded each day, there is an awful lot of great content that is, for the most part, hidden away from search engines that do nothing but search on tags, keywords and descriptions.

I imagine this kind of search will be much more common in the next couple of years – in fact, there are already some options emerging in this area.

The speech to text recognition isn’t perfect. I used the example search term of “wine”. one of the videos returned was from Nicholas Negroponte, talking about the hundred dollar laptop at the 2005 MIT Emerging Technologies Conference. I was intrigued. Where in that address did Negroponte talk about wine? Well, here’s the text quote:

show you a few slides so wine doubt laptop it does you could that that creek slips out and see sells word eat else can slip and

And here is Negroponte’s actual quote:

show you a few slides. It’s a wind up laptop. (bit of a stumble) that crank slips out and c cells or d cells could slip in

So the speech to text is a work in progress.

But besides the technology, the ability to access and search the MIT lecture library for content is also very cool. However, it looks like there isn’t a heck of a lot of content there yet. Do a search for “television” in the category “Media” and you only get a single video returned. I suspect the word “television” might be used in a few more classes than that in a Media Studies program.

Maybe part of the reason I am smitten is that it reminded me of a project I was working on about 5 years ago. We have a large collection of digitized audio and I was trying to build a web based application using an XML based language called SMIL that would do something similar with audio clips. That project eventually died, and I was a bit sad that the use of SMIL was never really mainstreamed, despite being a W3C technology. It looks like the MIT site uses some SMIL program and that brought back some warm fuzzies of my bygone project.

Really, how can you not love a programming language called SMIL?

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

So long Netscape

In life we tend to have many different types of relationships. There are the relationships that stay strong over time, usually due to close proximity and daily contact. There are the types of relationships that come and go over the years, flaring then dimming, but always able to quickly be stoked back into life again. And then there are those relationships that are brief, intense, and then disappear from your life forever (well, until you are reunited 20 years later on Facebook).

I would classify my relationship with Netscape as the third. For a few brief years, it was the web for me. It did it all – web browser, email client, even a web page editor (ah Netscape Gold, I remember you well). It moved me from the world of Silly Little Message Reader to the wonderful world of the web.

It was my first love.

But then the sexier, more sophisticated choices arrived, and I was wooed by first Internet Explorer and then Firefox. Oh, I tried many times to head back to the arms of my first love, but it really never lived up to the memory.

So, needless to say I was a bit saddened, in that self reflective living in the past with my rose coloured glasses sense, to hear that AOL has pulled the plug on Netscape.

Seems like only yesterday that AOL paid 4 billion dollars for the browser. Now I’m no business expert, but you have to think that is a pretty lousy ROI. From 4 billion to dead in 10 short years.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Teach Collaborative Revision with Google Docs

Google for Educators has partnered with Writing magazine to put together a handy little piece on how to use Google Docs to teach collaborative revision.

The content is aimed at secondary students, but still contains some useful takeaways for post-sec, especially if you are new to Google Docs. There is a step by step how-to guide to using Google Docs (available as a pdf, not a Google Doc?) and a pdf about the revision features of Google Docs.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Learning online: Factors associated with use of the Internet for education purposes

I haven’t been able to fully digest the information here yet, but last week Statistics Canada released the latest version of their online newsletter Education Matters with an article titled Learning online: Factors associated with use of the Internet for education purposes.

This article investigates the use of the Internet for education-related reasons based on findings from the 2005 Canadian Internet Use Survey (CIUS). After providing an overview of Internet use in Canada, the article describes selected social, economic and geographic characteristics of those going online for education-related reasons. It then examines specific reasons for going online for education-related purposes, including distance education, self-directed learning and correspondence courses.

Some points have jumped out at me. As Stephen Downes has noted, 26% of Canadians using the internet for some sort of online learning is impressive.

Some other points from the article:

  • People who use the internet for education tend to be younger and better educated than average internet users.
  • Nearly 80% of all full- and part-time students reported going online for education, training or school work.
  • Residents of Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Quebec reported the lowest rates of Internet use for education, training or school work, at around 20%, and those living in Ontario reported the highest rate (32%).

The report also noted that people who go online for education-related reasons “appear to be more “engaged” Internet users than individuals who did not go online” because they go online more frequently, for longer periods of time and have more varied activities than those who are not using the net for education related purposes.

By far and way the most common activity educational users of the net do when they are online is research (71%), followed by distance education (26%). Interestingly, according to the data, more education related users used the net to communicate with school administration than to communicate with a teacher or instructor.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

A Vision of Students Today

I am going to EDUCAUSE in Seattle next week and some of the sessions I am most looking forward to are the ones based on student data. What technologies are they actually using? Which do they find beneficial and which are over hyped? Most importantly, which ones do they want us to use?

Today I came across a video called “A Vision of Students Today” (via OUseful). It was created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. The video is a snapshot of 200 students in a Cultural Anthropology course and;

summarizes some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.

It’s well done and powerful.

Interesting note that the end of the video seems to hint at something that Scott Leslie recently blogged about regarding the power of live and in person social learning. But the slightly ironic twist here is that the project was done using Google Docs and posted to YouTube, a couple of educational technology poster children applications. The point being that technology is never the end all or be all when it comes to effective teaching and learning. It is simply another tool in an educators arsenal. I look forward to the “…to be continued” piece.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

Pearson's TestGen doesn't play well with Desire2Learn

This is a pretty specific post aimed at the poor D2L admins who, like me, have spent hours trying to work around a very granular and specific issue. Hopefully Google has led you here in your quest for a fix for this problem and that this will work for you.

A number of our faculty use tests created using TestGen, a Respondus-like test creation software package created by Pearson Education. We have been running into problems exporting multiple choice quizzes from WebCT 4.1 CE to Desire2Learn. The questions were exporting from WebCT 4.1 CE to Desire2Learn fine, but the correct answers were not.

After troubleshooting and hunting around, we discovered that the common thread for these multiple choice questions was that they were all originally created in TestGen and then imported into WebCT. When we exported the courses from WebCT as a WebCt 6.0 package, the xml file spit out by WebCT contained an error. A value variable for the correct answer to a multiple choice question gets incorrectly set to 0 when it should be 100.

Here’s what we did to fix the problem. It’s cumbersome, but it works. The obvious fix would be for Pearson to add a D2L export to their list of supported formats for TestGen. We’ve asked for that and hopefully that is in the works. But for now, this workaround has had to suffice.

  • Export the questions from TestGen in WebCT 4 format.
  • In WebCT, create a blank course. Import the quiz questions into WebCT.
  • Create a blank test in WebCT. We discovered that WebCT wouldn’t export any questions in the database unless at least one quiz was defined. So we created a dummy quiz with no questions in it.
  • Export the entire course as a WebCT 6.0 course.
  • Unzip the exported package.
  • In the course folder in the IMS package, find a file called questionDB.xml. Open that with your favorite XML or text editor capable of doing a find and replace. Search for these 2 lines of code:
    <setvar varname="que_score" action="Set">0</setvar>
    <setvar varname="answerValue" action="Add">100</setvar>
    and replace with:
    setvar varname="que_score" action="Set">100</setvar>
    <setvar varname="answerValue" action="Add">100</setvar>
  • You will have to make this change to each of the MC questions in the file, hence the ability to do a find and replace is essential when you are dealing with hundreds, or even thousands, of values.
  • Rezip the package.
  • Upload to D2L as a component. Choose to only upload the question library and you are off.

This fix is also documented in the D2L community (login required) in the Discussions > Product Management and Enhancements > Quizzes area. The fix was discovered by Rafi Syed.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Google Calendar knows Gmail

I’m not a power user of any of the Google tools. I have accounts and I do use Docs & Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, but I barely scratch the surface beyond the basics of these tools. So when I stumbled across this little feature today, it made me pause and reflect that I really need to investigate these tools for more of these productivity enhancements.

I received an email from a non-Gmail using friend inviting my family to a dinner at their house. In the body of the email was a time and date for the dinner. Since I use Google Calendar, I decided to create an Event from the email. This is the first time I have used this feature. So, I clicked on the more actions dropdown menu and choose Create Event.The event pop up opens up with the date and time already prepopulated within the event. Google Calendar has gone through the Gmail message and found a date and time in the body of the email and prepopulated the event based on that information. It even went so far as to make a decent guess as to what the title of the event might be and prepopulate that as well.

I know in programming terms it is really not hugely difficult to parse the email message and find dates and times, although in this case it was made a bit more difficult because it wasn’t a well formed date and time, but still it was a really nice productivity feature to stumble upon in the Google suite. And one that makes it much easier to schedule an event from an email in Google than it does in Outlook.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

A walled garden falls

The New York Times is opening up their website, ending a two year experiment in charging for online content.

Despite the fact that they had over 250,000 subscribers and their subscription revenue was over $10 million dollars, in the end The Times decided they could make much more with online advertising than with keeping the lock on the door. Which really says something about the state of online advertising these days.

It was also interesting to read this rather naive quote from Vivian L. Schiller, who is the senior vice president and general manager of the NYTimes.com site.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

Your kidding, right? The senior vice president of a major web property like The Times didn’t realize that search engines drive traffic? Doesn’t that strike you as odd that someone in such a position of authority at a major online property in the media publishing business failed to understand one of the most basic web marketing truisms that search engines drive traffic – lots and lots of traffic – to web sites? I’m missing something in her statement.

For academics and researchers the most exciting part of the announcement might be the fact that they are opening up their archives.

…The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Not sure why the material from 1923 to 1986 is still locked up, but nonetheless the thought of being able to freely access articles and data from The Times via their website should make research a little bit easier.

As a fun little search, I searched the term “internet” from 1981 on to see when the word first appeared in the NY Times and it looks like the date of the first mention of the internet is November 5th, 1988 in an article about a computer virus called “Author of Computer ‘Virus’ Is Son Of N.S.A. Expert on Data Security”. This is really early days as the virus is in quotes and doesn’t even have a name. They simply refer to it as ‘virus’. Fun. And note the number of computers in infected.

The program eventually affected as many as 6,000 computers, or 10 percent of the systems linked through an international group of computer communications networks, the Internet.

Less than 20 years ago there were only 60,000 computers on the internet. Crazy. Today there are probably 60,000 computers in my neighbourhood.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

A simple Del.icio.us mashup for D2L using Yahoo Pipes and Feed2JS

Mash delicious, d2l, pipes, feed2js

One of the features I like about Desire2Learn is the ability to create custom widgets within the LMS. I’ve just finished creating a custom external resources widget for our faculty based on del.icio.us feeds of some of our course developers and it was a snap to incorporate it into D2L. Here’s how I did it.

The Scenario

In addition to myself, there are 2 other developers at my institution who, among other tasks, actively support faculty using D2L. We wanted to create a custom widget of external Desire2Learn resources for our faculty to give them access to resources other institutions have put together. Instead of creating a page of static links, we decided to use our del.icio.us accounts to create a dynamic reference library that would automatically grow and update as we added d2l related links to our delicious accounts.

One problem was that we all tagged resources slightly differently in del.icio.us, so we needed to standardize our tagging convention. We decided to use the general tag of “d2l” to designate a resource we wanted to share in the widget.

With that non technical piece out of the way, I began to work on merging the three feeds into one.

Mashing up del.icio.us feeds in Yahoo Pipes

PipesI decided to use Yahoo Pipes for no other reason other than I am familiar with it and wanted to get something put together quickly. Since we are all networked in del.icio.us, it was quite easy to go to my colleagues accounts, click on their “d2l” tag and grab an RSS feed of that tag.

Once I had the RSS for all three accounts, I was able to begin creating a new pipe.

The first step in creating a new pipe is to specify the source of the data. In this case, it is the 3 RSS feeds from delicious, so I dragged a Fetch Feed module into the pipes work area and enter the 3 RSS URI’s.

I noticed that we had all tagged some of the same resources, so I needed to do a bit of data cleaning. Enter the Unique Operator, which allowed me to filter out duplicate links that appeared in the mashup. Now I had a unique list of links.

The one other thing I noticed was that both of my colleagues had added and tagged our institutions local instance of Desire2Learn in their delicious accounts. Since the final product of this feed was going to be within a widget inside that instance, I decided to filter out the url to our institutions Desire2Learn instance using the Filter Operator.

I now have a mashup outputting a single RSS feed created from 3 source feeds. The next step is turning that RSS feed into a Javascript snippet that I can use in the D2L widget. A great future enhancement for the widgets in D2L would be the ability to import RSS feeds. Right now you are limited to HTML and Javascript, which is what we are going to use.

Feed2JS

There are tons of great tools that you can use to convert your RSS feed into Javascript. For this project I used Feed2JS.

I took the RSS feed from the Pipe output and plugged it into Feed2JS. Feed2JS gives you a number of options to tweak the behaviour of the feed. I truncate the feed at 15 and choose to open the links in a new window to avoid taking the faculty out of D2L when they click on a link. I click on “Generate Javascript” and voila, I have a nice chunk of Javascript ready for embedding into a D2L widget.

D2L widget

D2L Final WidgetThe final step in the process is to copy the Javascript code and create a custom widget in D2L.

In D2L I created a new widget in the “Manage Homepages” area. After giving the widget a title, I decided to share the widget with other faculty members who may want to use it for themselves in their own courses, so I choose the share option in the Admin tab.

Since I only want faculty to see this widget, i set the release conditions to teacher. Finally, in the custom code tab I paste the JavaScript code I generated at Feed2JS and save the widget.

Once I have created the widget, I can then go into our Faculty Community course and add the widget to the homepage of the course. Now, whenever faculty enter the community, they will see the widget with the most recent resources our work group has tagged in delicious.

Reading through this it seems like a bit of work to create the mashup. But in reality it took me much longer to write this article than to actually create the mashup. All in all from start to finish it took me less than 15 minutes to create what will hopefully be a valuable resource for our faculty.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Delicious gets a makeover (and drops the dots)

Del.icio.us, the social software I probably use the most, is undergoing a facelift and, for such a simple interface, it’s headache inducing to see how the team went about the redesign. 2.000 post it notes on a whiteboard. Yikes! I thought my whiteboard was a mess.

One enhancement is the addition of the the url delicious.com. You can still reach the site using the now famous del.icio.us url, but by adding the delicious.com domain name it should help ease url confusion for newcomers. On more than once occasion when I show off the software to people, I have had users adding a .com to the url and ending up at some default landing page.

I’m hoping the search engine is much faster, as has been reported. I’ve been frustrated, and somewhat baffled, by the slow speed of the search engine, considering that Delicious is owned by Yahoo, which should know a thing or tow about optimizing search engines.

The new design is still in beta, but you can get some details and screenshots on Webware.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Facebook is not how life works

Following up on a post from a few days ago regarding whether or not students want us in their space, I just came across an interesting article from the Washington Post called An Unmanageable Circle of Friends.

Overall the article is critical of social networks and the seemingly shallow relationships between people that often form. While I agree that many of the relationships are shallow, I also happen to know that the opposite is true and some fairly deep relationships can occur.

It’s also true that social networks don’t build real connections. It’s the people behind the keyboard who are the architects of real connections. I think the technology itself is agnostic when it comes to the level of depth of the relationships it mediates. The users choose how deep or shallow they wish to wade into the social network pond.

The one point that was bang on for me, however, was the point raised by University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman. Wellman really hits the nail on the head with regards to Facebook, MySpace and other social networks.

The bigger problem with Facebook et al., says Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist and founder of INSNA, is that current sites “assume that everyone in your life is on one happy network.” On MySpace, your work colleagues are given the same info as your Halo buddies. That’s not how life works, and pretending it does dilutes the meaning of our more powerful connections.

Essentially, everyone in our network gets the same level of access to personal information, whereas in “real life” we have much more control over what types of information we want to share with the people around us. I don’t necessarily tell my work colleagues all the details of my personal life, although they all know much more about my kids than my banker does. But my banker knows much more about how much I owe on my mortgage than my colleagues. We build these little walled areas in our life and when areas collide it makes us feel uncomfortable. And this is where I believe the friction will occur with students as educators push more into their online social networks.

One other question raised by the article, and one that I’ll be asking more and more, is how many social connections can we have before they begin to lose meaning and effectiveness? I have never heard of Dunbar’s number before, but I’m certainly going to research it a bit more as I continue to look at the effectiveness of social networks as an educational tool.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Another year begins

I took these photos looking west on Hillside/Lansdowne Road, which is one of the main arteries leading from downtown Victoria to the University of Victoria and Camosun College. The top was taken on Friday morning, the bottom this morning.

Traffic on Hillside Ave

I’m really glad I live close enough that I can walk to work.