Final words

Done already??
I chose to make my final project my wiki. I will probably continue working on the foolish thing, but for the purposes of class, I chased down just about every important point of content (92 unique pages) and included a number of pages for the use of students as pointers in creating their own wikis.

On the whole I really enjoyed this class and I feel like I did a pretty good job everywhere but my literary world. I'm afraid between feeling sick and working on my wiki, I left my poor literary world a bit on the incomplete side. My Athena and Zeus-bots dueling in response to anything said in the chat channel on Mount Olympus was amusing, but as a space intended to convey much about the Odyssey, I'm afraid the work is simply lacking in content. This might be doubly sad because I can tell that the literary world deal is Allen's baby! Maybe I'll have to come back to it?

Digital Storytelling

After a good deal of waffling on a suitable topic, here is my first (serious) attempt at digital storytelling. I wound up choosing to tell about the 6 weeks of childcare I did last summer in Montana largely because I had enough pictures to make it work. Trying to fit into the legal 30-seconds-or-less frame for music meant doing some ad-hoc looping, but I think it worked out all right. I felt a lot of limitations working with Windows Movie Maker on this; I've worked a lot with Vegas for video editing prior to now, but since I don't have access to that any more I had to make do, and frankly I was left wanting for flexibility. I wish I had more time to fuss with the iMovie software...

James Gee

James Gee's talk on Thursday was one of the more fascinating speeches I've listened to in quite some time. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I've been playing video games since early childhood, I had never before even considered some of his basic premises about video games. Why indeed am I willing to spend so much time on overcoming the repetitive challenges in basic games, while a learning task of similar proportions in school would be stultifying? Gee's discussion of affordances and the sense of embodied power seemed spot-on, and the end portion of his talk brought the educational possibilities of video games into much sharper focus for me.

Podcasts

Towards the end of learning more about podcasts, I made my own (a simple overview of wikis), which may be downloaded here (mp3, 5 megs). I used Audacity, which was very straightforward to work with, although I'm far from mastering it. One issue I had was that every time I stopped and restarted recording the software automatically generated a new track, so by the end, with my constant restarting of recording after losing my train of thought, I had about 20 seperate tracks that I would have preferred to all be on one line. Otherwise it went relatively smoothly; it helped I suppose that I wasn't shooting for any fancy effects, but recording my speech, adding a music track (Circle by Jon Hopkins, that is), playing with track volumes, cutting and moving segments, and exporting to an Mp3 were at least as easy to accomplish as with GarageBand. Compared to GB Audacity simply seems to use a less aesthetic interface, though I think that GB can probably go further in directions involving the fusion of graphics with the audio.

The editing process was interesting in that it forced me to examine my speech carefully. I found that I apparently have lost the habit of filling speech space with UM or ERRR or LIKE fillers, and simply...leave space while my thought train catches up. I edited out a few of those spaces, but like most issues of self-consciousness (another being that I felt I failed to add much enthusiasm to my speech) I doubt most other people would notice the first listen through. This quality of podcasting to make one face up to one's speech-giving qualities and habits is something that I think should very much endear it to the english teacher or any teacher trying to help their students with presentation skills. Podcasting becomes a task of quality content creation and presentation combined with a powerful element of self-critique during the editing process.

Wiki wiki

I decided to delve into the concept of using a wiki to catalogue and organize a fictional world. You can see my efforts here. I seriously can't stop working on this thing. After trying to keep the information I'm cataloguing here straight across an inch-thick stack of looseleaf pages, notes, and postits, it's wonderful to be able to get it all in one place. I'll never have to guess at the name of Ned Grainder's third child or wonder where Isleton was in 818 again. Hurray! I'm just now getting into the real meat of the cast of characters. The only lamentable thing is that I can't really collaborate with someone on this, unlike the project that I would use it as an example for.

I think that this would be an awesome group project. Think of how great a wiki would be to keep track of the backgrounds of a dozen different characters in a story. What if students could collaboratively develop that and then write a story (or stories) using what they'd created?

More to come once I get the reading all done.

RSS continued...

I said in my last post that I wanted to figure out how to make RSS as efficient as possible. I've made a conclusion or two in that direction by now:

First of all, efficiency in using RSS seems to be as much a product of how the reader engages the content as anything else. If each news source could be considered as a newspaper article, then the RSS aggregator has just become a newspaper. I personally don't read newspapers from front page to back; I look over the headlines, skip in a few pages to finish an article or two, check the editorials, then head for the comics. That same skimming action applies to using an RSS reader, too--learning to quickly navigate the content and ascertain what is worth reading up on.

Secondly, it's very possible to cut down on the irrevelent content presented by the reader by using news searches. Subscribing to the feed from the Washington Post's front page headlines provides me with interesting content, but for every article there that I read, there are several more that are just cluttering my reader. I'll grant that the shotgun-content of those feeds has its uses. However, the news search RSS can cut into the news items that I find to be currently relevent much more effectively. This could be a great tool for students.

Suppose some students had been assigned to research an author; they could set up an RSS to return news articles about that author. However, as I experimented with this, I was struck by the necessity of having a good working knowledge of how to use search terms to produce relevant search results. For instance:

Michael Crichton as a search term produced book reviews on the writer's work, as well as articles such as this that examine the issues addressed by Crichton's latest book.

On the other hand, Brian Jacques, which might be a student's first attempt to find news or reviews about the popular children's author, returned news items such as this about a recent murder. Hand-in-hand with the use of this technology in education must come instruction on how to refine search terms. In this case, "Brian Jacques" author might work better, but the student needs to know how to do that!

A few feeds I went ahead and subscribed to, aside from all the class blogs, were the NY Times Science page, the Washington Post front page, and the Grand Rapids Press front page. I set up a few news-search RSS's that I've been changing around since I couldn't come up with anything I wanted to follow very badly; at this point I left it with the Michael Crichton search. I also subscribed to Qwantz, which is a webcomic I like to read.

My News feed has produced such interesting headlines as:

2:07 AM (14 hours ago)
From Spaceflight to Attempted Murder Charge
from NYT > Space by JOHN SCHWARTZ
A NASA astronaut, Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, has been charged with the attempted murder of a rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut.

and also:
3:06 AM (13 hours ago)
Loneliness Linked To Development Of Alzheimer's
from washingtonpost.com - A Section by Post
Elderly people with few or no friends were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as people who reported that they were not lonely, a study shows.

Those journalists seem to work late to keep the deadlines...

RSS

RSS: a very, very different way to look at the internet.
I'd heard of RSS, seen people complaining at blogs and comics without it, but having now tried it, I'm very surprised. This is something so easy to do and I never realized how easy it was. Google Reader. Any RSS-capable source beamed to one page, nothing complex about it! For current events, research, or anything like that, RSS looks like an astoundingly useful tool. A student researcher could work so much more efficiently looking for news items, information...

Efficiency in information gathering seems to be the key idea here. However, consider that Google News gathers news from over four thousand sources; consider that there are probably hundreds of thousands of blogs with RSS feed. Where does efficiency in information gathering transition into information overload? It should be easily possible to subscribe to more feeds than could physically be read in a day. I'm interested in how to use this tool efficiently; I want it to work for me, to find what I want it to find and be succinct about it. I'll have to see what I can figure out about that!