Category Archives: technology

Productive May Day

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Today is May 1, Labor Day in Europe, and thus a holiday. I used it to see if I could get my WordPress MU installation running and actually create blogs which did not work earlier during the week. I had run into trouble when I used sub-domains, but the sub-directories work fine.

The reason behind the upgrade to WP MU was that I wanted to create a second blog on my server to showcase my daily photograph. Of course, I could always link to my flickr photo set, but I prefered to use a blog. Well, that was not a novel in itself, as others had already done so before me, e.g. D’Arcy Norman and also Alan Levine as I realized very recently. From them I got the idea to use the Monotone theme, which displays the photos with an individual background that matches the dominant color in the photographs. Way cool.

After having solved my blog creation problem and having moved my regular blog (this one here) over to my MU installation, I started to tackle my photo blog. As Alan Levine describes nicely in his post “(Almost) Effortless Photo Blog”, I wanted to connect my blog with flickr as well to be able to post immediately to my photo blog from there. I had no such luck until I found out that I had to activate the XML-RPC publishing protocol in my blog settings under “Writing”. Once the checkmark was placed, I could link my blog to my flickr account.

Now I had the monumental task to add all pictures to the blog. That took about four hours for 119 photos (I had missed to take a photo one day) because my internet connection was uncooperative today and everything was rather slow. However, now that I am done, I really like the result, and I also found the “Page Links To” plugin to allow a tab in the blog menu to open my photo blog immediately.

Update: I changed the archive page to display 31 photos instead of only 24. That is particularly nice when the archive of an entire month is displayed.

What’s plan B?

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A week ago, Steve Wheeler was supposed to present on Edupunk in the Forth Online Round Table of educamp. Unfortunately, his tech equipment and the university servers left him in the lurch. While Steve was trying frantically to get back online, Graham Attwell rescued the situation with PowerPoint Karaoke over Steve’s title slide (you can watch the entire session in Elluminate) and brought along the discussion.

After his failed session, Steve wrote a blog post entitled “Can anybody hear me?” about is intended presentation and his frustration of attempting the humanly possible to get online.

That was the first time that I was in an online session and a presentation could not take place due to the fact that the presenter could not be heard / get back into the system despite previous checks. During CCK08 we had a problem once when slides could not be uploaded to Elluminate, but that was solved quickly by viewing the slides on Slideshare and giving the occassional reference in the chat window to the current slide for late comers.

This debacle led me to think about the question “What is the plan B for online sessions?” When we teach or present at conferences, we usually have a “Plan B”, an alternative, in case the technology we want to use is not available or does not work. I used to have a set of overhead transparencies for presentations and important training material in my luggage. I abandonded that because rooms are now generally well-equipped and sometimes do not have an overhead projector anymore. I still make screenshots of web pages in case the internet does not work and I want to point out something on a live site. Backup copies of the material I need are always stored on a USB stick, sent to my email account and / or uploaded somewhere online. I could even do without the visual support if needed as long as I do not loose my voice.

However, as I have never presented online, I had not thought about what to do when problems occur in the virtual space. Problems like the one we had in CCK08 are manageable when the slides are available online for viewing / downloading. But what can be done when the presenter cannot be heard? A presentation cannot be typed into a chat window. All possible scenarios I came up with always require the internet and another system that allows for synchronous audio discussions. Of course, that requires that the presenter as well as the audience have access to it. That requires a lot from the tech support for online sessions, and I dare say that it is not doable as there are so many factors that are in the dark. Would one have to test two or even three systems in advance to make sure that at least one works?

Less favorable alternatives are the re-scheduling of the session after the tech problem has been solved satisfactorily, a write-up of the presentation as Steve did, or the actual presentation as a post-recording done by the presenter alone at home. Although the latter two are better than not doing the presentation at all, they certainly lack the interactivity with the audience.

So, the question still remains: What’s plan B?

Between good and bad

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Making decisions is not always easy, especially when you need to decide between the good and the bad, but sympathize with the in-between because you can see the advantages and they seem to outweigh the disadvantages when the product / service is used as intended. I’m not making sense? Well, hopefully it becomes clearer in the next few lines.

I ran across userfly on the ReadWriteWeb blog. It is a new online service which allows you to record a screencast of anybody who comes to your website. That way you can study the user’s behavior while s/he is on your site. This in itself is awesome. You do not need fancy and expensive equipment anymore to do basic usability testing, but you can do it on the fly. However, as you can see in the screencast, every keystroke you make is recorded and played back. Does that ring a bell?

Although I would hate to see anybody misuse this one line of code which is all that it takes to set up userfly on a website, the potential is there. When each keystroke is recorded, it is very easy to spy out passwords. However, there is a solution to that: Use a password manager or copy and paste your password in a browser’s text field. Then only the keystroke “v” will show up, but not the entire password.


Demonstration of userfly on Vimeo.

Tumbarumba‘s problem, to which Waxy.org linked, lies somewhere else. With the Firefox plug-in Tumbarumba you can replace text on a random web page you are viewing with text from a number of short stories. That adds a bit of fun and may be very good for an April Fool’s Day joke or for a session on web credibility. However, it poses a problem because

  • you don’t know on which page the replaced text appears
  • you may not detect the replacement when you only skim the text.

For example, when you take a screenshot of a page, save or print it before reading it in it’s entirety, you may not realize that text was replaced. If you then use that text as reference and quote it with the incorrect text, then that is a problem. Maybe you stumble upon the replaced text because the inserted one is way out of context, but maybe some passages will actually fit. How will you recognize the switched text then?

Tumbarumba was created as “a frolic of intrusions—a conceptual artwork“. Your mind is challenged. However, will you change your on-screen reading habit and read everything carefully?


Tumbarumba demonstration on YouTube

ZZ are going to be top: First look at the Zotz plug-in for Zotero

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Thanks to my Twitter network, I learn about interesting, funny, stunning, awesome, academic things to do, to read, to view, to reflect upon, and to wonder about.

Last night, I saw @zotero‘s latest post on a new plugin that would allow Zotero users to export library collections to the web. As I am a happy Zotero user as it facilitates the process of taking bibliographic notes, I needed to check this plug-in out with which one can upload connections to the internet.

Mike Wesch wrote a blog post on “The Digital Ethnographer’s Notebook: Diigo vs. Evernote vs. Tiddlywiki” In the comment section, Zotero was introduced to the discussion and with the just released plug-in Zotz, got points for moving into the online world.

Zotz allos users to publish collections from their Zotero library to Citeline of MIT. After a collection is uploaded to Citeline, one can change the appearance, title and what others would be allowed to see. The thus created page can be downloaded as an html file to be used on an intranet for example. Furthermore, the references can be saved as files to be imported in bibliographic manager software for further use.

That is a great start to share a (part of a) Zotero library with others. I assume that the development on Citeline will continue. There is a lot of potential because right now it is rather static beyond the basic editing options and thus there is space to grow:

  • The link to the exhibit (Citeline’s word for what Zotero calls collection) can be shared through an URL and the exhibit can be downloaded for use somewhere else. However, there is no way for me to tell Citeline whether I would like to keep the URL private or public.
  • You can only delete an entire library, but not individual entries.
  • You cannot add items to an already existing exhibit.
  • People with whom you share your Citeline exhibit cannot make comments.
  • Special characters are a slight problem. They got messed up during the upload.
  • You cannot update an entry on Citeline. This is not good esp. in light of the previous point. You would have to correct the letter to its English equivalent in Zotero and upload the entire collection again but to a new exhibit and re-do all the fine-tuning on Citeline.
  • You cannot search across of exhibits of one person.
  • Other “social networking” features could be helpful, e.g. adding people to your network to keep track of their exhibits. Saving exhibits of other people, being alerted when they created a new exhibit.

Despite this list of it-would-be-great-to-have-that features, and I can think of some more easily, I already like this plug-in because it allows me to share references with others in an easy way and let them know about some of my favorite funny YouTube videos.

Citeline

Citeline

Lost in Technology

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This past week was an online feast I had not experienced before. I tried to catch as many sessions of the conference Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 at which great minds shared their knowledge, experience, and thoughts. I will blog about that over the weekend a bit more trying to summarize important points for me before they get lost in next week’s travel excitement.

On top of that it was the 11th week of CCK08. Though I have not been an active participant in the course by way of writing blog posts, discussing in Moodle etc., I try to participate in the Wednesday Elluminate and Frida uStream sessions. I always look forward to them.

As we are nearing the end of the course next week and I will not be able to attend the last sessions (maybe next Friday if I am very lucky), I was happy that I would be able participate today during a break of the online conference. However, as our hosts Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, and George Siemens are very busy people, we did have to have one day when a session would have to be canceled. That was the case today. Nevertheless, and due to not reading “The Daily” earlier, three of us (Eduardo, Lisa and I) gathered in uStream and reached the decision to have our session anyway. Thus, we did get to have our revolution after all (if you don’t know what I am referring to, I point you to the beginning of the uStream session of Week 5). ;-)

Lisa quickly pointed us to her uStream channel, but as all of us had never experimented with uStream before, we had difficulty to bring everybody in on the audio (and video). Andreas and Carmen joined us there after they got our Twitter messages. Soon, we realized that we couldn’t get onto the uStream audio and decided to try Skype because that would allow us – in theory – to audio chat together.

That meant to get all our Skype IDs together and start a conference call. We kept uStream open to be able to text chat while continuing the tech experiment in Skype to get everybody in there. After some bits of discussion in Skype in a smaller conference call with three of us and the other ones listening to Lisa filling them in and text chatting in uStream, we were all united: Eduardo in Uruguay, Lisa in Southern California, Carmen in Minnesota, Andreas in Germany and I in Luxembourg.

Unfortunately, the tech gods did not have their protective eye on me during that hour. I could only get sound through uStream although I was on Skype and could be heard through there. On top of that my audio lacked behind between 30 seconds and 1 minute thus making it difficult to contribute to the conversation in a timely fashion. I usually cut in while others were talking and I felt aweful about that because I interrupted the entire conversation. I resorted to text chat in the end but could hear everybody.

As Lisa rightly said, “And here, you know, the pipe really was more important than the content.” That was certainly true. We had to figure out how to connect and not just connect but bring everybody on the same tool and allow for participation (no willing CCK08 participant left behind). Due to the technical problems, we could not finish our discussion on the blog software we used for what reason, what we will do after CCK08 will be over, whether we will continue blogging, staying in contact etc. It would have been a really interesting discussion had we had more time and mastered our internet communication tools better.

Hosting a live session certainly takes preparation and even when you have all the technology available to you that does not mean that it will cooperate and do what you want. However, we managed to get connected and stay that way more or less using two tools (not in one environment) simultaneously.

A big THANK YOU to Jeff who usually manages our Friday sessions and stays on top of his tech game to connect Dave, George, and Stephen to us from wherever they are on the planet and with whatever internet connection they have to work with. He’s always in the background handling the difficult part of connecting everybody as smoothly as possible.

After our allotted time for our Friday class, everybody went back to their other tasks. I wondered what happened to the  intentions to have meetups as they were discussed at the beginning of the course. There are two Second Life group that meet / met regularly if I remember correctly: one English-speaking one and one Spanish-speaking one. Are there other groups? Maybe even face-to-face ones? How often do / did they meet? What are their experiences?

Our little group was a great experience today, we stayed in class, and learned together without our teachers / instructors / facilitators / moderators / curators / enablers…

Communicating online can be more difficult but still be fun

Communicating online can be more difficult but still be fun