Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I’m expermenting with video compression to see if I can work out the ideal size for uploading and downloading video clips here in Ghana. The bandwidth here is much slower than in the US, so I have to be careful about how large a file I post.

Here are two versions of some footage from the BusyInternet cybercafe, one low bandwidth and the other medium bandwidth. The low version is around 600k, while the medium version is 1.3 megs. (For those of you keeping score, the uncompressed version of this 40-second clip is over 30 megabytes - pretty useless here in West Africa.

Anyway, here are the results. Click on the appropriate link to try each version.

BusyInternet montage: Low bandwidth clip Medium bandwidth clip

One of the first things that struck me as I’ve driven back and forth to BusyInternet in central Accra is the number of local businesses that have religious names. The businesses themselves generally seem to have nothing to do with religion, which makes for some interesting combinations, like these:

Surf and Ye Shall Find Cyber Cafe
Wrath of God Hair Cuttery
God is King Dental Services, Ltd.
With God All Things Are Possible Electronics
God First Communications Centre
Thy Will Be Done Aquariums, Ltd.
Fighting Temptations Internet Cafe
The Finger of God & Holy Spirit Manufactured Goods
The Living Gospel Internet Center and Car Wash

So it seems that local business must answer to a Higher authority as well as to the bottom line…. -andy

For the last five years, I’ve been involved in researching my genealogy through DNA testing. The tests I’ve had done have revealed lots of interesting information about my ancestors, but it’s also introduced me to a group of nearly 50 people who’s DNA has been matched as being so similar to mine that we share a common ancestor. (Some of you may recall when I blogged about getting a DNA match with Ethan Zuckerman - small world, ain’t it?)

To help facilitate the sharing of information between our little group of DNA “relatives,” I recently launched a group blog, DNA Cousins. I’m not quite sure how the site will play out, but the idea is to give members of this extended DNA family a chance to post news related to family tree research, DNA research studies, etc. So if you’re interested in this kinda stuff, please come by and have a look… -ac

With all the running around I’ve been doing the last week setting up video blogs for elementary school teachers and getting ready for my Ghana trip this weekend, I almost neglected to mention the relaunch of a website that everyone should visit. It’s called Global Voices Online, and it’s a project involving Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Joi Ito and an equally amazing group of bloggers from around the world.

Global Voices wants to harness the power of the international blogosphere. When you look around much of the Internet, what you often find is a bunch of blogs run by white, well-educated and relatively well-off people. Sure, there’s diversity out there, but it’s often ignored or not given the credit it deserves. Global Voices forces you to take note about what’s going on in the rest of the world, thanks to the tireless work of bloggers in every corner of the globe. From South Africa to Iran to Uzbekistan to China, Global Voices is a network of articulate, passionate people trying to make a difference at home and abroad.

I’ve been modestly involved in the project, but I hope to do more. And if you know any good bloggers in far-flung places, be sure to let Global Voices know about it…. -andy

It’s day two of our video blogging workshop in Atlantic City, and we’ve just set up our first video blog, Atlantic City Rought Cuts. In a few days, the site will be live at www.acroughcuts.com, but for now you can see the site at www.starw.org/acrc. Meanwhile, the RSS feed for the site is also available. We’ve posted several test blog entries and a couple of video blogs as well. Here’s a sample:

Video of MLK Elementary School teacher Janine Riggins talking about their new video blogging project.

Today I spent a wonderful day working with a team of nearly a dozen teachers from MLK Elementary School in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They’re in the third year of a NJ Department of Education grant to use technology to improve student literacy, particularly in the context of exploring causes of bullying and neighborhood violence.

Now in its third year, the project is expanding to student video production, which is why I’ve come here for a couple of days. I spent the morning introducing the teachers to various documentary production basics, such as the roles of different team members (editors, researchers, producers, etc), a typical documentary production timeline and the mechanics of documentary storytelling. The group kept me on my toes, peppering me with questions all morning.

After lunch, we began brainstorming how the project would unfold over the course of the year. Rather than having students create their documentaries and call it a day, we’re going to incorporate video blogging as a key tool in the learning process. The teachers will manage two video blogs, tentatively called Atlantic City Rough Cuts and Atlantic City Final Cuts. The Rough Cuts video blog will be used to premiere student works-in-progress - “rough cuts” of documentaries that need to be critiqued. They’ll post them on the video blog as a way of seeking feedback from the public, particularly video bloggers from around the world. The students will then examine these suggestions, decide what’s appropriate, and revise the videos, reposting them as necessary to the rough cuts blog. Eventually, when the videos are ready for prime time, they’ll be posted to the Atlantic City Final Cuts video blog, for people who simply want to experience the final product.

As far as I know, this will be one of the very first times that video blogging is integrated into a public school curriculum, let alone an elementary school curriculum. The entire process of documentary production, from concept development to scriptwriting to editing, will be used as a way to meet state standards regarding proficiency in reading and writing. And if all goes well, we’ll end up with a sizable collection of video shorts representing a diverse cross-section of life here in Atlantic City.

In honor of today’s marathon training session, I’ve cobbled together a five-minute video blog of what we did today. Please excuse the really crummy narration quality - I forgot my headset mic and had to use my laptop’s internal mic while its fan was whizzing away. -andy

Video of today’s documentary and video blogging workshop at Martin Luther King Jr Elementary School in Atlantic City.

Art Wolinsky and I went to dinner tonight just outside of Atlantic City, where I’ll be leading a two-day workshop on documentary making for a group of elementary school teachers. During dinner, Art and I talked about what I’ll be presenting tomorrow morning, as well as fun Internet topics such as video blogging, podcasting and Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia in particular, we talked about the hostility that many educators have towards the website, particularly their concerns that it can’t be considered a reliable source. It’s the classic dilemma of a wiki website - because wikis allow any site visitor to edit or add content, you raise the risk of getting content that isn’t up to snuff. And the fact that young and old alike often go to Wikipedia and see that its name ends in -pedia, they assume it’s just like any other encyclopedia and they should take its content as vetted, accurate information, which ain’t always the case.

I explained to Art the community of Wikipedia volunteers known as Wikipedians who have created a system of checks and balances to improve the quality of content and avoid problems with virtual graffiti and inaccuracies. But it’s not a perfect system, so it’s not a huge surprise that a lot of educators just don’t want their students utilizing the site.

I had a flashback; a group of us on the WWWEDU email list had tried to create a “Kidopedia” - an online encyclopedia written entirely by kids - back in 1996, hosted by St. John’s University. It didn’t get very far because all encyclopedia entries were being posted manually by real people; that, and the fact that it was hard to articulate a compelling case as to why kids should be doing this in the first place.

While I understand educators’ concerns about directing kids towards “reliable” reference sources, the more I think about it, the more I think Wikipedia’s flaws actually make it an ideal learning tool for students. That may sound counterintuitive, of course - how can you recommend a tool that you know may not be accurate? Well, that’s precisely the point: when you go to Wikipedia, some entries are better referenced than others. That’s just a basic fact. Some entries will have a scrupulous list of sources cited and a detailed talk page on which Wikipedians debate the accuracy of information presented in order to improve it. Others, though, will have no sources cited and no active talk pages. To me, this presents teachers with an excellent authentic learning activity in which students can demonstrate their skills as scholars.

Here’s a quick scenario. Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it? Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed about horses on the page.

This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their way through the list, they’ll find themselves with two possible outcomes: either they’ll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they’ll prove that it’s not. Either way, they’ll generate a paper trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or another.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections, with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and referenced - hopefully with multiple sources.

Get enough classrooms doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: Wikipedia’s information gets better, students help give back to the Net by improving the accuracy of an important online resource, and teachers have a way to make lemons into lemonade, turning Wikipedia from a questionable information source to a powerful tool for information literacy.

I can already see it now: an official K-12 Seal of Approval put on Wikipedia entries that have been vetted by students. Wish I were more handy in Photoshop. -andy

I managed to get into New Jersey a little sooner than expected; when I got to the airport this afternoon, they were just getting ready to board the 3:30pm flight to Philadelphia. Rather than wait around for my flight an hour later, I asked if I could fly standby; a few minutes later I was on board, with the last aisle seat available.

I got to Philly just before 5pm; by the time I was on the road with my rental car, it was the height of rush hour, so things were pretty slow going. But since I was early, I was in no hurry to get to the Jersey shore; the sun was shining, Nine Inch Nails were on the radio, it was a breeze. I even almost managed to get all the way without getting lost, but just before my last turn I found myself chatting on the phone with my brother about his new job at the Associated Press and somehow drove on past the turn. A quick call to Art Wolinsky, my host for the workshop, got me back on track, and soon enough I was pulling into his drive. He got a kick out of me locking all the car doors. “Yeah, you’re from Boston all right,” he quipped.

In just a few minutes I’ll be off to the airport to fly down to Philly, where I’ll rent a car and head over to Atlantic City. While I’m sure the ocean is really nice this time of year, my main reason for going is to run a two-day workshop on documentary making. I’ll be teaching a group of teachers documentary basics, from the role of a producer to production schedules to storytelling mechanics. I’m really looking forward to this - it’s not often my work and my hobbies intersect so well.

Depending on how much we’re able to accomplish, I’m hoping we might do some video blogging while we’re at it. I’ll just have to see how comfortable the teachers are with the idea. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get them to set up a video blog for the school year, so students can premiere their video shorts online. Stay tuned…. -andy

Like many other bloggers this week, I’ve discovered that accused rapist/murderer Joseph Duncan has been maintaining a blog for more than a year. Duncan is accused of murdering the family of eight-year-old Shasta Groene, then kidnapping and raping her and her brother before killing him as well. Reading over the blog entries, it’s clear that he’s had a lot to say about being an accused sexual predator in a variety of cases. To call the entries disturbing doesn’t do it justice. It’s truly horrifying.

Thousands of people have posted comments on the site, almost all of them in extreme disgust. I just wonder who, if anyone, was reading his blog before he was arrested in the Groene case. Is there any way we could have stopped these crimes from happening? Could the use of a few key word tags like “pedophile” and “children” and “rape” used in conjunction with each other as a Technorati RSS feed perhaps have revealed a crime waiting to happen? I’m not sure if I’m advocating that law enforcement use keyword-driven RSS feeds to trowl the Internet for potential predators, but it certainly raises some interesting, and disturbing, questions… -andy

Edupodcaster extraordinaire David Warlick has just posted a blog entry and podcast he and I recorded last Tuesday night at the NECC conference. In the podcast, you can here Dave observing me posting a podcast from my mobile phone and going through the process of uploading it to my blog.

It’s interesting listening to Dave’s podcast considering it contains my entire Podcast A Go-Go podcast, both the recording itself and the process of uploading it. So it’s kinda like a podcast documentary of my mobile podcast. Nothing earth shattering, perhaps, but it’s certainly a hoot to listen to a few days after the fact. Boy, I wish I could have stayed at NECC for another two days - so much fun to be had…. -andy

CNN is now reporting that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is resigning. She’s been a consistent moderate over the years, and conservatives are revving up to replace her with one of their own. No matter who replaces her, this is going to be a very, very ugly summer in Washington…. -andy