The other day my wife, son, and I traveled upstate to spend some time with our family. Along the way we listened to a couple TED talks. These talks are free to download via the TED website or you can subscribe to a feed through iTunes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design and their annual conference brings together some of the most interesting speakers from around the world. These individuals range from famous politicians to scientists doing some amazing work. They are given 18 minutes to give the “talk of their lives.” Often I look for talks related to education or technology but somehow a talk on classical music slipped in.
We had finished listening to four other talks when I decided we should give the last one a listen.
We listened and we loved it.
The talk was given by Benjamin Zander and the most memorable part of the talk is when he speaks about “shiny eyes”. He relates his experiences as a conductor and his personal realization that he wanted to consistently “awaken possibilities in other people.” In order to assess how he was “awakening” these possibilities all he had to do was look at their eyes to see if they were “shining”.
“Who am I being if my players eyes are not shining?”
For parents, relatives, and teachers…
“Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”
As a parent and a teacher this caused me to pause and think about what I do daily to awaken possibilities in my son’s life and the lives of my students. Often we can get caught up in the daily grind leading to the simple things and glorious opportunities passing us by.
Take a listen to the talk and enjoy. We loved it and I hope you do too!
I am evil…at least in the eyes of the music industry. For my evilness they have slapped my wrist.
1 year and 8 months ago I made a video containing short clips of my son’s first four months. I also added in 5 minutes of Lynryd Skynrd’s song “Simple Man” as a background track. I shared the video with family members and on a whim decided to add it to Youtube along with clips of my son’s first Halloween and first words. This is where I messed up. It is a mistake many make, and probably do not realize they are making.
I foolishly thought my little video would be seen only by my own family and the friends they shared the video with. I knew the risks. I knew online videos are open to everyone unless the user makes their videos private. But I decided to fight the law and see what would happen. (In reality, I was just naive, and did not feel there was a threat to my video).
Even after I started learning more about content online and copyright issues, I did not take the video down because I was curious to see if it would be noticed.
Almost two years later my video has performed as I predicted…
With 300+ views I can tell you that 90% were from my own mother showing the video to her friends. Regardless, this does not excuse my usage of protected works.
Today I received notification from Youtube that this video had been found to contain music belonging to Universal Music Group. Or at least, I assume “UMG” stands for Universal.
Here is a screenshot of the email that was sent to me…
As you can see my punishment is weak. Their claim allows them to include advertisements on my video page. At first I was relieved my little video could still stay up. This seemed very fair, until I visited my page and saw this…
I have since removed the video and hope to hear from others. Has this happened to you?
How can we as educators share an experience such as this with our students as they venture out and create digital projects?
I have used tools such as Celestia and Stellarium before but this one truly looks like I can slide these two to the side. Excitement aside, we will just have to wait and see how it works once it is released and how it can be integrated into a learning environment.
When you visit the TEDTalks website there is a little button on the bottom for downloading the video as a Mp4. I have already popped it into iTunes so I can show some teachers at school today!
“Science educator Roy Gould gives an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope — a technology that combines feds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and builds a comprehensive view of our universe. (Yes, it’s the technology that made Robert Scoble cry.)”
Common Craft just put up a new short 3 minute video on blogging. I love their simplistic and friendly approach. Something like this video, as well as other productions from the crew, are fantastic for sharing with fellow staff members who are curious what a “wiki” is, what “RSS” is, or what “social bookmarking” is. Great stuff!
A few days back I received an email invite to join the beta testing for the website iScrybe. I signed up late this spring for the announcement of release. Since I had not heard back from them I moved on and started playing with Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar. A great feature for any of the new web calendars is the ability to export the calendar file, which I quickly imported to Scrybe. The Scrybe interface is slick, the thoughtpad is a neat feature that reminds me a lot of clipmarks/del.icio.us/yahoo gobbler, and the ability to work offline is much easier, and faster, than using Google Gears.
Here is the promo video from Oct. 2006
I really enjoy viewing, editing, and scrolling through the calendar in flash. I had it running on my laptop, offline, as I was adding events for the first week back. When I got home I logged in via wireless and it automatically sync’d all my work from the day. Simply awesome! I look forward to when we start seeing this functionality in more web services.
Note of frustration. Today I went to download my “beginning of the year” files from Google Docs and the web blocker popped up. I knew I had the files backed up at Yahoo Briefcase, only to find that blocked as well. Last but not least, I found my thumb drive with my last back up. In between the decorating, labeling, and crayon sorting, I was hoping to use Google Docs to put together a collection of creative commons flickr images that I plan on using for a bulletin board near my classroom library. Luckily Zoho Writer worked for creating a web based document containing the photos. Flickr Storm + Zoho Writer + Color Printer = Success. Now I have some nice scenic, global pictures to hang on my connections board!
Related links…(I think I will keep doing this related link sharing!)
Question for everyone–pass the word, please comment!
Does anyone know of a place where I can host SWF files? I have a screencast I made, using Jing Project, for the Yahoo Gobbler. I have it hosted at Screencast.com on one of their free accounts, which has limited bandwidth. I am afraid that once 20 people watch it I will no longer have access to it for the month. I have already used up a quarter of the bandwidth showing it to my colleagues.
Why…because this summer I sang the praises of Bloglines to many of my fellow teachers during one of the professional development courses that I attended. With a little pressure I even helped them set up an account (This I was hesitant about because learning about RSS and Feeds could be a whole day workshop, as compare to a 20 minute set-up). The difficult thing with RSS, Bloglines, or any news aggregator, is that many people have never heard of the nouns contained within this sentence. This is perfectly fine, I too was in their shoes, and now I seek daily to find resources to educate myself on these “web tools” as well as seek ways to better utilize them for gaining knowledge and sharing information.
Back to the hypocrite portion. The day after I shared with everyone how much I loved Bloglines for organizing and collecting incoming blog and news posts, I jumped ship to experiment with Google Reader. I fell in love with Google Reader. What I liked was having the ability to “tag” posts, “share” posts, and “star” posts. When I say posts, I mean new blog and news entries. Overtime I have developed a pretty expansive list of feeds that I follow. Some have posts that I star, in order to find later, some I share (via a neat Google Reader page, and even on the side of this blog) or some I just skim right over. Needless to say, Google Reader became my feed reader of choice.
There are more features to come, as Beta Bloglines has iterated on - including new options for saving, sending and sharing posts, as well as building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. Also coming soon is upgraded developer APIs. One of the more exciting future features from my point of view will be Personalization Preferences, allowing users to edit a feed or settings.
So it seems as if Bloglines is innovating in order to catch up to the competition. Will it gain back my favor? Read/Write Web provides a nice piece on the history of Bloglines…
Then Bloglines got acquired by Ask.com in February 2005 and the innovation ground to a halt. Bloglines did add some search elements in March 2005 and the service showed no signs of slowing its user growth - in May 2005 Bloglines dominated the RSS Reader market. But despite that, the rot had begun to set in. In October 2005 I lamented that Bloglines was no longer innovating. Fletcher left Ask.com in June 2006 and for many more months Bloglines languished, with seemingly little interest within Ask.com to improve the service - despite the regular protests by loyal users such as myself. So many of its early adopter users moved onto something else - in my case Google Reader, which was innovating in a big way during 2006.
My experimentations are fresh since Bloglines Beta has just come out. My opinion so far is…”WOW”. Pretty lame description, for which I apologize. Only a few of the features promised are built into the current release. This comes from the Beta information page.
“Bloglines Beta is opening now with basic functionality and we will add features regularly over time until it reaches full functionality. Upcoming releases will be grouped along the following key activities.
Mobile – Bloglines on the cell phone.
Actions and activities involving a post – Save, Send, Share.
Personalization Preferences – Edit a Feed or Settings.
Creation of Disposable Email Addresses.
Upgraded Developer APIs.
Creation of a Link-Blog.”
Once these are integrated I should be able to provide a better review. So far I love how it pulls in a lot of the AJAX (the super cool ability to drag and drop content around a webpage) functionality that I like about Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, and the Yahoo Gobbler. With news of Bloglines releasing a new Beta service, and Yahoo Mail dropping its Beta label, I have had a super tech week.
This morning Zoho announced that their writer service will start providing users the ability to access their online writer files offline! I have used Google Gears for viewing my Google Reader feeds offline, and I am very excited about Zoho moving towards using Google Gears with the rest of their applications.
“We are taking our first steps towards offering Zoho Writer offline. With this update, you’ll now be able to access all your documents offline (Mac or PC) in read-only mode. We will offer offline editing capabilities in the coming weeks.”- Zoho Blog
The ironic part of this story is how Zoho, a competitor/threat to the Google Documents service, is using Google open source technology to power their newest feature. I am pleased by Zoho’s recognition of Google’s efforts towards providing offline content. The question is now, how long till Google uses Google Gears with their Documents service?
Since the video is so tiny, you can view the screencast here.
A well done screencast on what exactly “tagging” is. This resource is very useful to those who are just starting out with social bookmarking sites, photo sharing sites, and blogging.
