tech-ed collisions

careerOne + myspace = myspacejobs

An interesting service from myspace and career one, myspacejobs combines the might of the social networking space with the "country's fastest growing employment site". This article from adelaidenow suggests the importance of networking in building a career. Myspace makes a great eportfolio service and no doubt that is what many people around the world are using it for. As it continues to gather momentum we in the education space will continue to debate "really important" policy matters such as 'how much space should we let them have, or how long should we keep the information, what rights shall we give them etc. Meanwhile all such notions are rapidly becoming irrelevant to anyone seeking a space to promote themselves and their abilities. Of course we can always point to negative uses of myspace and provide gems of advice such as 'do you really want your potential employer to see pictures you put up of last weeks party etc'. Feeling cynical today!

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  

'Canon' fodder and remix

There are some brilliant examples on the Web illustrating just how important the read/write web is and the culture of remix. Along with these examples are also some really interesting stories. Take for example, the story behind the funtwo "Canon Rock" video on YouTube. This video was put up on YouTube about two years ago and has been viewed over 33 million times. Another version of the same funtwo video has been viewed over 1.7 million times. By any measure that is a staggering number. Canon Rock was a remix of a piece of classical music (Pachelbel's Canon in D major) 'published' by a Tiawanese guitarist (Jerry Chang) several months earlier. Chang (JerryC) took the classical piece of music, made orignally for violins and applied his electric guitar to it. The result was sensational. Inspired by this effort, funtwo recorded his own effort at JerryC's work and an Internet phenomenon was born. Do a search on Google Video or YouTube on 'canon rock' and there will be thousands of results. Have a look at some of these and you can see that a massive number of amateur musicians and learners have been inspired not only just to try and learn this great piece of music, but to publish their efforts. They are remixing, adapting creating, participating, and most importantly, learning. You will find all ages, all abilities and people from widely different backgrounds having a go. Its not just those with electric guitars either - acoustic guitars, keyboards and all manner of 'instruments' are being used. One guy is teaching himself how to play it on his acoustic guitar for his daughter's wedding - he is giving himself plenty of time to master it as she is only three! If, as Garry pleaded in 'We watched TV...they make TV', you viewed the Lawrence Lessig video he refers too, and you take a look at what is going on here you will really start to understand the notion that people are producing/remixing for the love of it and how important it is to our culture. So.... back to all those amateur musicians, and as Lessig very importantly points out, amateur and not amateurish, here is a sample of participation and remix: In how many ways does this relate to learning? For a start, its giving classical music a new life with a new generation. As stated before, it is inspiring others to have a go and learn something new. As a personal learning aid, some of the efforts published on Youtube, particularly from those who are not guitar geniouses and are brave enough to publish themselves, you can really pick up (sorry about the guitar pun) on the techniques that are being applied and demonstrated at a level you can understand. How about participation itself. Those who are are learning all the time and benefiting from it. If you played the funtwo video linked to earlier in this post (and I recommend you do if you appreciate music want to see an amazing performance ) and want to find out more about funtwo see the NY Times article 'Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last'.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  

They are TV!

Following on from Garry's post, 'We watched TV ... they make TV', this isn't exactly about remixing and publishing content, its about publishing yourself. Interesting post from Greg Sterlings Screenwerk blog looks at the diminished view of privacy that is emerging in today's web generation. Shameless promotion or just emergent behaviour? Make your own mind up.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0   general   privacy  

Another call by teachers to shut social networking sites down

It seems these types of calls are still appearing quite regularly. This BBC article reports on a Professional Association of Teachers conference in the UK. There is a desire here not just to ban sites such as YouTube in schools, but to shut them down. Locally we have seen a number of States banning sites such as YouTube etc from use within schools for a number of reasons. The problem in this case is cyber-bullying, both of students and teachers. In response to the problem, the demand seems to be to shut all such sites down, at least in the short term. It is not clear whether a (long term) solution was discussed. Clearly the problem is not the sites themselves so shutting them down isn't going to stop bullying from happening in the broader context. A spokesperson from the Beatbullying charity goes on to say:

""Calls for social networking sites like YouTube to be closed because of cyberbullying are as intelligent as calls for schools to be closed because of bullying. ...Cyberbullying is flourishing for two reasons. First, society is not adequately preventing bullying behaviour... ...And secondly, it seems to be easier to type something hateful to a school friend rather than say it to their face..." "
Sadly, history and society is riddled with examples of individuals/groups using technologies to hurt others. Banning those technologies is a response but doesn't address the cause of the problems though. This is a really difficult issue - we can see so many positive examples from appropriate (there's a value laden term) use of social networking sites but put yourself in the victims (students, teachers, families etc) perspective and try to see how they feel too. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  

on locr: geo-tagging photos

Visiting one of our service providers this morning gave me a chance to play with a photo geo-tagging service. locr provides a service that uses an internal or external GPS receiver to tag your photos with GPS coordinates which you can then upload to their website to share with the rest of the world. It certainly makes geo-tagging your photos very easy - it is all done automatically rather than running a script later which tags your photos by comparing timestamps on them with timestamps in a GPS receiver. I am still coming to grips with a new phone (its turning into a love/hate affair) so the quality of the photos taken here isn't good. locr runs a program on the phone that you use to take photos with. As I didn't really delve too deep into instructions the photos aren't that well focussed - however, in my hurry, I wasn't sure whether there was a way to focus the camera using locr or not. The phone takes a few minutes to pick up the GPS positioning so you really need to anticipate when you are going to take that first photo (something not easily achieved in many situations). Anyway, once the photos were taken, they could be immediately uploaded to the web which was great. You can see these photos here. locr has a javascript 'badge' that you can embed in your site/blog etc but it is misbehaving with our blog software at the moment and I haven't had time for a closer look. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted July 20, 2007

on blogging (part 2)

Thanks to Tim for this. I like Tim's approach to blogging - his blog is work related but not on a work blog which provides a nice level of independence and freedom to discuss, well anything really. Also, separating the time to blog from work allows inspiration to write about something whenever that takes place, not just during 'traditional' work hours (when and where we work could be the topic of many other posts I guess). Speaking of timestamping, this blog seems to be timestamped by default. It was interesting to go back and have a look at what times of day I blog and, while unintentional (I don't reserve a time to do this) there are some very definite patterns there. I do think though that the ideas for most posts happened outside these times. Cheers, Jerry.

Filed under  //   Web 2.0   blogging  
Posted July 10, 2007

the Net at work

Just heard from a colleague about an unfortunate? release of a new cookbook. It seems a very well known chef who is also an international television personality has just written another book and unfortunately it seems a Word version has escaped from the publisher so it is now flying around the Internet uncontrollably. If this is all true and the leak was accidental, I wonder what happened to the poor person who was responsible. Here's a dilemma for the author - what should he do? He is extremely well known and well liked and very, very successful (ie well off). Here's a suggestion - the book's out now so potentially hundreds of thousands of Net (email) users have it already or soon will. How about making it an 'open source' (excuse the pun) cookbook. Make it Creative Commons or something similar. No doubt many, many people will purchase the high quality print version but why not have a free one too? Give it to the community although as I understand it, the cook in question is already one of the most generous and does an awful lot for people in need already. The Internet is a fantastic thing but this does serve as an illustration of how seemingly naive actions can very quickly get out of control. If this all did happen a number of people will probably have been hurt in some way because of this unfortunate event. Following up on this story - it appears it was a hoax (and also not so new) but it is still makes an interesting hypothetical. What could you or would you have done in if you found yourself in a similar situation - try and recover some of what may have been lost, turn it round and exploit the marketing potential of it through the web's viral marketing reach etc. Cheers, and good cooking.

Filed under  //   Web 2.0   rant  
Posted May 25, 2007

twittervision

I love mashups - here's one combining a couple of my favourite services. twittervision.

Filed under  //   Twitter   Web 2.0  
Posted May 23, 2007

2007 Web 2.0 Awards

Well, SEOmoz's 2007 Web 2.0 Awards have been out for a couple of weeks now. All the usual suspects are there such as technorati, bloglines, magnolia, furl, yahoo! local, craigslist, google docs, feedburner, 43 things, google maps, frappr, ning, flickr, picasa, linked in, digg, del.icio.us, pageflakes, and of course, YouTube. As you can see, there are quite a few google and yahoo! services in the mix. If you have a look at all the awards, you will find even more google and yahoo! services. What surprised me was the number of 'same old same old' in the list. Some of these have been around for quite a long time now and perhaps are just part of the fabric - we really depend on them and use them all the time. If you have a look at the criteria by which they are measured (usability, usefulness, social aspects, interface and design, content quality) it is easy to see why they are there (again). Since there are 'over 200 sites in 41 categories' there is a lot to look at so quite a bit of time and effort must go into producing these awards. It's really worth checking them out and seeing if you can find something that works for you. Here's a few interesting ones:

  1. donors choose - teachers submitting ideas for funding
  2. be Green - highly topical at the moment - look at the carbon calculator
  3. a couple of interesting hosted wikis (wetpaint, pbwiki) - check out the student/teacher example in pbwiki
  4. twitter - my views here
Of course there are many more to look at and it would take hours to go through the lot of them.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted May 22, 2007

on Bubbleguru

When I get this to work (using javascript in Wordpress doesn't seem to be too easy for me), the accompanying video message should speak for itself. As I state in it, I am not sure whether this is a useful thing or a really annoying popup. However, I am sure some people will find some interesting uses for it. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Web 2.0  
Posted May 16, 2007