Author: Clint Lalonde

by Clint Lalonde on Multimedia Tools

Animoto creates very slick videos automatically

This was way too easy to do.

I finally had a minute to test out a new video creation service called Animoto, which promised to automagically create a very slick video with a few clicks of a button. So, to test out the service I choose some photos I took during the recent U20 World Cup here in Victoria. I uploaded the photos, picked one of their music tracks and hit create. All the photo transitions are done by the site. And you can see, it did automagically create a very slick video that I can easily embed into my site.

The service is still in beta. You have to sign up and wait a few days for your invite. And it is limited to 30 seconds for the free service. You can, for a fee, create longer videos. But this was about the easiest piece of multimedia I have ever created.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Do students want us in their space?

Got into an interesting discussion last week with a couple of faculty members who are just coming to Facebook for the first time. They have been receiving notifications from former students who have their email address in their address book when they upload them to Facebook. Usually the invitation to the faculty by the student is an inadvertent side effect of the Facebook bulk email address upload, and the students are often embarrased that the faculty person got a request from them. Which lead us into discussing whether or not students really want us in “their space”?

While there is a lot of excited clamoring in the edtech blogsphere about the potential of Facebook as a personal learning environment (me included), it seems to me there is a reluctance by students to have us that closely entwined in their life. I’m beginning to suspect that students see a real disconnect between their life and their education. Facebook is not where they go to learn. It’s where they go to socialize, relax and throw virtual food at each other.

Earlier today I was doing a Technorati search using my insitution as a search term to see if there were any incoming students blogging about the school and came across this posting on MySpace from an incoming student who is none too impressed that one of our faculty has sent her an invite to join a Facebook.

Granted, her frustration seems to be more of the “this Facebook thing has gone too far” as opposed to “this is an intrusion where I don’t want it”, but you still have to suspect that there will be students who see MySpace as just that- their space. And whether they throw the doors open and invite us educators in with open arms remains to be seen. But I won’t be surprised if some students balk at blurring the lines between “school life” and “personal life”.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Google releases new research API

Some new geeky goodness from Google aimed squarely at researchers. The University Research Program for Google Search is a new API that gives programmers the ability to tap into Google. In their words:

The University Research Program for Google Search is designed to give university faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the web.

Our aim is to help bootstrap web research by offering basic information about specific search queries. Since the program builds on top of Google’s search technology, you’ll no longer have to operate your own crawl and indexing systems. We hope this will help enable some useful research, and request only that you publish any work you produce through this program for the academic community’s general benefit.

The major restriction is that the program is open only to academic faculty members and their research teams at colleges and universities. However, the flip side of that restriction is that any research results obtained using the API must be made available to the public.

From Programmable Web.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

Desire2Learn 1 Blackboard 0

A judge in Texas has ruled that 35 of the 44 patent claims Blackboard has filed against Desire2Learn are invalid.

In addition, the rules have been set down for the future court case. Specifically, the ruling spells out how key terms will be defined for the court case.

To illustrate how detailed these proceedings are, the terms that needed to be defined before the case could go to trial are “Hyperlink”, “Tool”, “Asynchronous communication” and “Synchronous communication”.

More details on this decision can be found on the D2L patent blog.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Warning for Facebook users using third party applications

VeriSign iDefense is warning Facebook users to beware when installing third party applications.

While no specific applications have been named, VeriSign says that the potential is there for third party applications to gain access to sensitive personal data.

On one hand, it’s nice to have security people issuing warnings like this to raise awareness that there are risks of having their personal data used in ways they don’t expect. On the other hand, why single out Facebook? This kind of blanket warning can apply to any web platform that allows access via API’s.

While there might be some technical hurdles to overcome before our information is safe online in applications like Facebook, the authors tend to think the problem has just as much to do with user attitutdes as it does with technical problems. Do all users go into using online applications like Facebook with their eyes wide open to the possibilities of how their personal data could be used? The authors don’t think they do.

However, Olson and Rick Howard, director of intelligence at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs, said a longer-term problem is users’ openness with personal information on public forums.

“They seem to have no sense of privacy,” Howard said. “We think it could go two ways. In the future, they’re either going to decide they’re embarrassed by all the information they’ve put out there, or they may decide it’s just the way it is and (that) it’s OK to put information out there.”

I wonder how many users are aware of how to fine tune their privacy settings in Facebook or of how Facebook controls personal information? Rather than rely on technical solutions from developers to solve the problem of keeping our information private, I think the better solution is to work on educating users about the nature of open and social networks.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Virgin, Creative Commons and Flickr

Virgin Mobile in Australia is creating a bit of a buzz by using photos they found on Flickr licensed using the Creative Commons license in advertising campaigns, including as the basis for their Virgin website Are you with us or what?

A Flickr Group called “Virgin Mobile – Are you with us or what” has started up in response to the campaign, and Australia’s Triple J radio has posted a podcast looking at the issue.

Virgin has followed the spirit of the CC license and given attribution on the photos. It seems most of the controversy revolves around the issue of whether or not the people in the photos have given permission for their likeness to be used.

As far as I know, this is the first major marketing campaign that has been built upon CC images and you have to think that commercial photographers are now either a) quaking in their boots at the thought of having to compete with millions of other photographers in an open forum, or b) salivating at the though of one of their pics getting snagged and used in a marketing campaign by a big company, thus cementing their reputation and giving them the ability to charge even more for their products.

In either case, you can expect that this campaign will go a long way to clarifying exactly what CC licensing is and help people understand the different levels of licensing that CC offers. And we can expect to see many more large ad agencies search the Flickr pool before dishing out thousands of dollars for a stock Getty image.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Librarians rock

According to a recent article in the New York Times, librarian is quickly becoming THE career of choice for progressive information technology thinkers.

With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

Not that I needed a New York Times style article to validate it, but librarians are the information technology specialists of our time, regardless of their cultural “hip” status.

Living in the information (overload) age, anyone who can help me find, filter, organize and contextualize the content onslaught is pretty much a god in my books, and librarians help people do that everyday.

And if you think librarians are redundant in this age of Google, then check out 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Social Networking and Web 2.0: Who is doing it?

Business Week has done a nice bit of research pulling together some demographic information to come up with profiles on who uses the current crop of social web services and how they use them.

Overall, social sites are growing at a huge rate, but for many of us it seems that we just want to lurk and are not actually contributing anything. Only 4.59% of Wikipedia users actually contribute any content, while the numbers for sites like Flickr (0.2%) and YouTube (0.16%) are surprisingly low.

Not surprising, the major contributors to social sites are in the 12-26 age group. Business Week calls them the Creators. These are the people who publish web pages, blog and upload videos to sites like YouTube. This group also has the largest percentage of social network Joiners with between 51% to 70% participation rate.

What is surprising to me is how consistently low the level of the Collectors is across the board. In every demographic, the rate of people who are tagging or aggregating, collecting and remixing content via RSS hovers between 11% and 18%. While it is encouraging to see some consistency across the demographic board with taggers and aggregators, overall it tells me that people have yet to see the value of both syndication and tagging.

For me, collecting it is one of the most exciting features of social networks – the ability for me to take all these disparate pieces of information and mash them up into a form that makes sense to me. It allows me to become my own editor, to begin to create my own mediascape and filter my own information.

Tagging is really what puts the social in social networks. It is through tagging and folksonomies that you begin to harness the power of the collective. As content gets tagged, it begins to take shape and organized into a coherent system. But in order for tagging and folksonomies to work, there has to be a fairly diverse and large group of users. Until that happens, the value of tagging and folksonomies run the risk of being tainted by a small group of sophisticated users.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Keep working in web apps offline with Google Gears

One of the big sticking points with using web applications is that you have to be online to use them. No internet connection = no access to the application. It looks like Google is working to plug that hole with the beta release of Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser plugin (still in early beta release) that allows you to use web applications even when you are offline.

While initial reaction has been that the plugin is a good proof of concept, Gears still has a ways to go before being unleashed onto the world.

One of the stumbling blocks right now is that Gears only provides the read functionality of the read/write web. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done before Gears will provide full read/write functionality. Plus, there is only one app in Google’s stable that works with Google Gears and that’s Google Reader, although there has been strong hints that Gmail and Calendar will be next. So, rather than this being a beta release, I consider this more of a proof of concept release.

Regardless, the release of Google Gears is poised to solve one of the major hurdles towards mass acceptance of web applications as a replacement for their desktop counterparts. For that reason Google Gears is an important release in the evolutionary cycle of web application development.

For more on how Gears works technically, there is a good post by Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Yahoo Pipes useful but frustrating

I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes for a few months now and have gone from being ecstatic to frustrated. I still think Pipes is a useful tool, especially if you want to aggregate a number of RSS feeds into one, but lately I’ve spent more time dealing with Pipes than I was hoping to have to spend by using a tool like Pipes.

Part of the problem is that Pipes is deceptively simple. Programming via GUI…drag a feed from here, drop it into a module, add a few conditions and voila you’ve got a mashup. Of course, the devil is in the details, as I am finding out.

Take, for example, my EdTech pipe, which I use to aggregate a number of blog feeds that I read. It’s a pipe that had been working fine up until a week ago. Not sure what update or fix was rolled out by Yahoo, but it broke the pipe and the feeds weren’t parsing correctly. So, for the past week when I have a few minutes I’ve been trying to fix the pipe. This morning, out of frustration, I completely dismantled and reassembled it. Turns out, the problem was probably more me than Pipes as I was trying to sort 7 different feeds based on dates, and each feed used a different type of date field to identified the published date. Despite the fact that a number of them were Atom feeds, apparently even Atom feeds can set a published date to use a different field. So when I tried to do a sort on the pubDate field, I ended up only getting the feeds that actually used that field.

Fortunately, there is a handy dandy Rename function. So I went through all the feeds, found the appropriate dates fields, renamed them to a new field called theDate and sorted on that. Bingo, all my feeds sorted nicely in chronological order.

So, despite the fact that I find Pipes a bit flaky, I’m beginning to suspect that the problem has more to do with my hacker level programming skills than the actual application.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

Desire2Learn gets a tad social in 8.2

Just got some release notes for the new version of D2L (8.2) on the way this summer and it looks like they are beefing up some of the student collaborative tools, and improving on the (albeit basic) social features of the LMS.

One of the features that looks interesting is the ability for students to rate the value of a message posted in the discussion forums. In this respect, students can begin to grade conversations between students as to whether they are relevant or useful.

In addition, there will be a peer review option on discussion posts. Details are a bit sketchy on this feature and at first glance I’m wondering if this feature might be a bit redundant as discussions themselves can serve the function of peer review. I’ll have to wait and see the actual implementation of this feature to wrap my head around how it is significantly different than functionality already available by default with discussion boards.

Group Lockers and Group Dropboxes will make it easier for students to collaborate on group projects and shared files within the environment.

To aggregate group functions, D2L has created a central place for students to view their groups, contact group members, and access shared locker areas, dropbox folders, and discussion topics.

These new collaborative tools should make it easier for students to interact with each other and work on group projects while giving instructors a bit more flexibility when it comes to group assignments and projects.

One thing on my wishlist for future releases is more RSS feeds from the various tools to allow students to put the content where the like. The discussion boards seems like an obvious place for RSS feeds, but it would also be nice if this new central aggregated area would have an RSS notification system that would show when group lockers or dropboxes were updated.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

BBC to put one million hours online

The BBC is working on an ambitious plan to put nearly 1 million hours of it’s audio and video archives online and there is some fascinating stuff here.

Some of the highlights include an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. that aired on the day he was assassinated in April 1968. In the interview King says: ‘The important thing isn’t how long you live, but how well you live.’

As a music buff, I’m also interested in the John Lennon/Yoko Ono interview that was broadcast in January 1981 and never heard again.

Technically, archiving the material is not a problem. However, the Beeb is running into hurdles negotiating copyright clearance for some of the archives. Despite owning the copyright and having rights to originally broadcast the show, it looks like they do not have the right to repeat many of them. So the time consuming process of negotiating with actors, agents, composers and presenters is throwing up some hurdles.

The educational value of this material is immense. Unfortunately for those of us outside the U.K., it looks like the archives will only be available to licence-fee payers free of charge. No word on whether there will be a fee charged for those users outside of the licence-fee area.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

A Fair(y) Use Tale

This is a short film put together by some folks at Stanford that I thought you might appreciate. It’s about 10 minutes long, but it is fantastically well done.

Basically, to illustrate copyright laws in the US, these filmmakers have edited a whack of animated Disney movies together to create a new work – a documentary about copyright.

Even if you don’t have any interest in copyright law, the editing alone is wonderful.

Hmm, wonder what Disney is going to say about this? How far will fair use and satire carry these guys against Mickey?