Uploaded by TEDxTalks on Aug 12, 2009
Finale: Creating Hemispheric Unity through the Arts. Benjamin Zander conducts the Youth Orchestra of the Americas. How bringing together young, energetic musicians in the pursuit of excellence and the celebration of cultural diversity can serve as a powerful model for creating unity and catalyzing social change.
Presented at the 1st TEDxBoston on July 28, 2009 (http://tedxboston.org).

About TEDx, x=independently organized event.In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self- organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

In the meantime, one of the more interesting presentation that I attended was by Rachel Smith, called: Visual Note-Taking with the iPad. At first I was thinking that this was a giant step backward in terms of using the iPad to create notes that weren’t really searchable. Ack. But this also reminded me of the recent whiteboard videos where an artist takes a talk and creates a real-time info-graphic of the talk (a la Dan Pink’s video on Drive). This also reminded me of a friend who used poster-board graphics to improve student literacy (something called Project Glad, back in the day). Check out Smith’s video:

I already had the PDF on my dropbox so I thought I’d try to use something like GoodReader. Lord help me, they’ve updated it to use iCloud but I have no idea how to use my dropbox with it. FAIL. So I went directly to the Dropbox app, found the file and hoped that there’d be an option for me to select which app to view it with. Ha! No luck. I got another generic PDF reader with no annotation enabled. Then I remembered that Circus Ponies’ Notebook app (for both the mac and iPad) imports the PDF either as a file to be clicked and viewed, or as a annotated pages. So I dropped the 184 page dissertation into Notebook on my mac, imported as annotated pages, saved it onto my dropbox folder and then opened it up all ready for reading and marking up on my iPad. I had four other articles that i wanted to review so I created a separate Notebook file, and dropped four other PDFs into their own separate tabbed sections of the Notebook. Talk about having a powerful tool and not knowing about it.

I just watched the Apple Education event keynote and I’m very excited about what I saw. If you haven’t seen today’s keynote yet, run, do not walk to your local device (I got a better connection via my iPad projecting the keynote to my TV) and sit a spell. Nope, Schiller will never have Steve’s dynamic style, but the content is definitely something that we need to be keenly aware of. In a word they are taking book publishing and specifically textbook publishing, and taking it to the next level. The textbook will not be a static collection of words and images frozen at printing but have the portability of a book, the videos and interactivity of a networked computer and the freshness of blog pages, while retaining formatting, typography and layout that tends to be lacking in web-based textbooks.

I was going to try my hand at getting Udutu to work for my stand-alone copyright unit but I’m now going to investigate the possibility of using iBook Author to make the unit. Now we know where all the iWeb brain-power went over the last couple years. And I’m curious to see Full Sail will continue to experiment with iTunes U, in that iTunes U seems determined to become it’s own LMS and not just a lecture delivery vehicle.

I’ve been getting emails from QuarkXpress begging me to check out their new iPad/ePub friendly $299 app (if you have a previous version of QuarkXpress). They’ve got to be peeing their pant. I wonder how Schoology feels about Apple putting more effort/muscle behind iTunes U with added assignment and communication features. Yikes.

Enjoy. jbb

3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici

What does one expect when about to tour a public school described as innovative and tech-savvy? Classrooms filled with rows and rows of white gleaming tables populated by endless computer monitors under antiseptic white fluorescent lights? Giant wall monitors in the office and all common areas with the day’s activities scrolling below a looping-video of a professionally produced virtual tour of the school given by an smiling young woman? White-headphone wearing students silently gliding from class to class on hover-boards? Up until the last one, I probably had you thinking, “Yeah.” I had the opportunity to visit a very innovative school the other day and you know what I noticed? The place looked pretty much like any school I’d visited where teachers were interacting with students and students were engaged in their learning. In other words, the place wasn’t a shrine to shiny technology, but educators were busy working with their students using technology. Period.

I’d heard about Audubon Park Elementary in Baldwin Park from coworker, Dr. Bedard, who said that it was as an innovative place where, unlike many schools, students were encouraged to bring their tech from home in the form of e-readers and iPads to the classroom. That piqued my interest. Oh yeah, she also confirmed what we’d heard from other coworkers, that many classrooms have students sit at tables in groups of four on yoga-balls bouncing up and down as they do their work. Interesting. So, while there is tech in the classrooms, the place is not a shrine to technology. Educators, beginning with the principal, Trevor Honohan, have chosen to find effective ways to do their job using technology.

Assistant principal Bryan Dolfi told me that the change began over a year ago when Principal Honohan saw how much impact the installation of interactive promethean boards had and began to look for ways to encourage the classroom interaction. Dolfi said that they were fortunate to be located in an somewhat affluent neighborhood and worked with the community and parents of the 1,150 K-5 students to raise funds to add netbooks to the classrooms. I asked Dolfi how the staff of a bit over one-hundred took to the change. I’ve been on school sites that were awarded huge grants with the accompanying radical influx of technology only to have a third of the staff leave because they were asked to use the technology in their teaching and they felt like it was too much to ask. Dolfi took me to look in on a classroom where the teacher was using the Promethean board, standing at the back of the room asking her students items from their science unit. I’ve been on enough school tours to known when I’m watching the technology-dog-and-pony-show for the visitor and when I’m watching something that’s part of the day to day routine and this was the real thing. Then Dolfi added after we left the room that the instructor had been one of the less tech-savvy one’s who had been scared to use the tech only a year ago and now she was one most called upon to help others get comfortable using the tech. Interesting.

Teacher with students in class - Microsoft Office clipart

Teachers set up to succeed, learning how to use technology in the context of their day-to-day job in a way that helps them reach and work with their students, which make the students more engaged, which makes the parents happy, which make the principal and district happy. This isn’t a story about technology but about smart dedicated people taking advantage of the tools within reach (or making it so that the tools are within reach) and then getting to the job of learning and serving their students. No giant screens with intrusive booming messages or hover boards or student/drones wearing white-earphones, just teachers, students, administrators and communities working together (and taking advantage of tech).

Sources:
Audubon Park Elementary School
Trevor Honohan — Principal
Bryan Dolfi — Assistant Principal
1750 Common Way Road
Orlando, Florida 32814

• image: Computer Classroom by sixninepixels, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2680 retrieved 1/14/2012
• image: 3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=3062 retrieved 2/14/2012
• image: Teacher with students in class – Microsoft Office clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?ex=2&qu=reading%20classroom#ai:MP900439545|mt:0| retrieved 1/14/2012

The Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey

I love that Stephen Covey put mail and phone calls in the “Not Important” quadrant of his “Time Management Matrix.” There you go, straight from Covey himself, “Not Important!”Makes me laugh, when I left public education in 2008, my principal chided me for trying to get help from support staff through email instead of using the mailboxes in the front office. Email was something that the district used (once they realized that it was a hell of a lot cheaper to do then sending out paper newsletters that no one reads). I love how education is almost always a good ten-years behind the technology curve. And here I am, even though I’m on the computer all day (unlike classroom teacher who told me, “I don’t have time to check the email!”), thinking that there’s got to be a better way to get this done.

What started this quest was the somewhat inefficient practice of saving my emails in folders in my email client based on general purposes. I have folders for my coworkers, folders for my students with subfolders for various repeated tasks (like their capstone projects), then I have folders for social networks and entertainment and blogging, etc., ad infinitum. But sometimes the message doesn’t fit any single folder. Sometimes it’s a message from Dr. Bedard about a student’s capstone project. Do I store it in Dr. Bedard’s folder or the Capstone subfolder for my students? Alas, the search function requires that I know which folder the message is stored in before it can find it. I use iCloud (formerly MobileMe [sound of taps playing off in the distance]) because it’s IMAP and I can access my account(s) and stored messages on all of my devices and am not limited to which messages are stored on which computer, but there is that “which folder” problem. I much prefer the Gmail way of dumping everything into one single Archive folder and using tags to ID messages. Thus, if I were using Gmail I could put Dr. Bedard’s message into the archive with her name as a tag, the student’s name as a tag and “capstone project” as a third tag. Wonderful. But Apple’s Mail app on the computer or iOS devices don’t use the label/tag structure.

So, I decided to check out an email client called Sparrow. It’s very visual and has a “conversation” style. But guess what, it allows for tags and the like and has a unified INBOX but I can’t pull messages received via my iCloud accounts and save them in my Gmail label-drive archive folder. It might look like it’s more conversational and has a reduced footprint on my desktop, but it’s actually even more segregated than how I did email using the default Mail app. I really should have tried out the free demo version before buying the thing. Doh! FAIL. And… and this doesn’t really address the problem of measuring one’s efficiency by the tool instead of perhaps changing the tool to better serve the real purpose of working with students and colleagues.

It’s too bad that Google Wave died. Some have experimented with Google hangouts, but that looks like glorified video-chat. We’ve been experimenting with Manymoon (now called Do.com – scared), but it’s basically just a single-level task-manager where we check off when we’ve done an assigned task with no collaboration and no project building. And, of course, we get all of our notifications through our emails, so it doesn’t diminish that flood. Truthfully, we’re probably just not very good at using this tool. So, here you have a group of highly intelligent tech-savvy online educators, who actually really like to work together and we can’t seem to find a collaborative tool that is worth the effort of getting up to speed on.

Just to take this discussion up to a mind-blowing level, I’m reminded of a Net@Nite interview of Luis Suarez from IBM, who works in the Canary Islands with bosses in the United States and coworkers spread across the world and has virtually eliminated email as part of his workflow. Right. He’s using social media, blogging and collaborative tools to get the job done. Email has been reduced from the conduit to another form of texting, sending short messages. It’s taken all of this time, more than ten-years, for many educational institutions to get everyone on email and now we realize that it was never meant to be the main conduit/repository of our communication needs. It’s just a goddam useful tool meant to be a reminder of some task, not a measure of whether one is getting one’s job done or done well. Check out Suarez’s blog and vision for how we should be working (online) together:

Sources:

• image: Image: ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net retrieved 1/13/2012.
• image: The Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, (c) 1989/2004.
• image: MM900234754.GIF, microsoft clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?ex=2&qu=email#ai:MM900234754|mt:3| retrieved 1/13/2012.
• Video Podcast: A World Without Email, Net@Night, episode 204, http://twit.tv/show/netnight-amber-and-leo/204 retrieved 1/13/2012. 
• Blog post: Reflections from 2011 – A World Without Email – The Documentary by Luis Suarez, http://www.elsua.net/2012/01/06/reflections-from-2011-a-world-without-email-the-documentary/ retrieved 1/13/2012 

A link showed up in my twitter-stream to a website dedicated to the belief that they got ripped off attending the university where I teach. It was more than a tad depressing to have my university called a diploma mill or that it’s accredited by the same organization that accredits dog grooming schools. I’d say that the person behind the website was one unhappy customer/client/former-student. I wish that I could say that this was a new experience but we’ve had a few students… former student go-postal on their Facebook pages. Thus, I normally wouldn’t waste energy on the disgruntled rantings of an unhappy former-student, but the added one-two-three combo of this website and the call for greater government scrutiny on for-profit universities recruiting practices plus the $100,000 challenge from a silicon valley millionaire questioning the value of college challenged me to also ask: What are you getting for your college education dollar?

To start with, what follows are my own observations as an educator (K-8 & university) and lifelong student and does not represent anyone’s official opinions about anything. Okay, that out of the way, anyone who tries to reduce a college education to post-college Benjamins is going to be sorely disappointed because a “satisfied life” cannot be reduced to Benjamins. Period. I have long held the belief that a college education in the early part of the previous century was meant for the rich and the upper-middle class, to give their young men (and women) greater experiences of the larger world that they would later apply to helping with the family empire/business. After World War II and the G.I. Bill the possibility of a college education became much more universal. And as with many things in the 1960s to 1980s, somehow the possibility became an imperative and instead of being an option for the ambitious became the destination for those trying to find themselves. The traditional university as the road to riches lost its historic moorings and started to believe its own PR.

Image: smokedsalmon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I began my college experiences in the mid-1970s and as the son of Latino working-class parents I was lucky enough to benefit from the belief that there weren’t enough Latinos pursuing college degrees. This gave me access to scholarships and student loans that helped me as I earned my three college degrees and worked toward my doctorate. It might not have seemed fair to some that I benefitted from the under-representation of my heritage, but my mom always said that one must take advantage of any opportunity life presents, understanding that luck might open the door but it’s going to take hard work to see things through. So I looked at my own experience as one I was lucky enough to have had, by no means something I was entitled to and not something that was meant to make me rich somehow. The latter fact didn’t always translate well for some.

One weekend when visiting the folks during my sophomore year at Loyola Marymount University my dad sat me down, put the LA Times in front of me and told me that I wasn’t to get up until I had circled all of the jobs in the Wanted section that I was qualified to do with my one-year-plus of university. He meant well, but didn’t understand when I tried to explain that it doesn’t work that way. It probably didn’t help that I was a Religious Studies major at a Catholic university and my Christianity of choice was with the other guys, Protestantism. On many levels this didn’t make any sense to my folks. If college isn’t something connected with getting a better job, then what’s the point?

Well, this isn’t meant to be a smart ass answer, but I guess it depends on where you are at life, what your educational objectives are and what options are open to you. The answer is very different for an 18-year-old with no responsibilities, no obvious skills or gifts but an unconfessed fantasy to be a rock star (not me!) versus a 30-something single mom who likes to paint versus a newly unemployed 40-something journalist from a small-town paper. And reducing the equation to just money cuts one off from countless possible options. In fact the first thing to consider is that one does have options and that the goal has to be something more meaningful than what is easy and what is going to get one the big bucks. Add to that, one has to realize that there is no one answer for any of us.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I had one friend I was jealous of because he cruised straight through university as an accounting major, landed a solid job right out of college and married the boss’s daughter. Then out of nowhere, he quit his job and opened a mattress retail business with his wife (also an accounting graduate) running the back office while he sold mattresses to OC folks who weren’t happy with their sleeping situation. Switching from a name-brand accounting firm to running a retail establishment wasn’t anything that I could have anticipated, but in the end he was happy and seemed to be on solid ground. Conversely, I’ve known my fair share of undergrads who drifted in and out of several majors before they looked at their transcripts late in the game and selected a degree program based on what would require the fewest additional units for them to graduate. Surprise, they ended up with a degree in something completely unrelated to anything they cared about, much less loved. So, one should not be hindered by the thought that there can only be one path. Additionally, the straight line isn’t always the quickest one to one’s goal. There’s also the part where one should not expect to get out of an experience beyond what one is willing to put into it.

I sat in a classroom for one of my teacher training credential courses at an expensive private university and the instructor had set things up so that a few of us would give presentations on language acquisition issues every class session, until everyone in the course had done a presentation. Consequently very little time was spent with the professor doing any lecturing. At one point, when the professor wasn’t in the room, a student loudly complained that we were all doing the work and that the professor wasn’t doing anything. How was this worth the thousands of dollars we were spending taking this class if we’re doing all of the work, she demanded. Not that she was actually interested in any attempt at an answer, but by this time I fully understood that it wasn’t about sitting in on lectures, but what happens beyond the lectures. A good college education is a combination of passionate educators who have pulled together powerful and timely curriculum and engaged learners working together to synthesize the curriculum into their own practices and understanding, in the end adding to it as the learning is passed forward to the next generation. What is generally missed by those bitching about getting ripped off by their institution is that one generally gets what they put into the endeavor. It’s not enough to have the best in the industry as instructors using cutting edge techniques and equipment if the students are just going through the motions. There is a great burden on instructors to strive to pull out the best and inspire their students, but ultimately it is a partnership between instructors and students that will make a difference. It’s too easy for instructors AND students to blame each other for a less than satisfying experience. It’s a combined effort and if all parties have been hard at it but are finding no fruit then it’s time to move on. Period.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s good that college recruiters are held accountable for what they promise, but this is true all around whether one is looking at traditional universities or at for-profit institutions. Let the buyer (student) be ware. But also one has to let go of the idea that it’s the institution’s or it’s staff’s responsibility to turn undisciplined teenagers into solid academics or award winning artists. It’s a partnership that demands from both parties. I’ve attended five private colleges and universities and one state university and there was not a perfect one in the whole bunch. But when I was there I was inspired to learn and push myself harder than anyone would have expected from me. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only way to a better life is through a college education. But if you do have the chance to spend time learning something you care about deeply from the best in the field, grab it and make it part of your life story. At the same time don’t buy the line that the only way out is by paying big bucks to some institution that will give you a piece of paper and that will magically lead to the land of riches. The piece of paper is just a symbol of what you have accomplished and mastered while at the institution. What will get you the job is what you can do and the expertise and passion that you uniquely bring to the effort.

It’s a mistake to expect a college education to be one’s economic panacea. It’s also a mistake to discount the opportunities presented with a college education as a frivolous waste of time and money. Some learn the lessons of life despite the college curriculum and some have to retake the courses over and over again before it starts to make sense. Some wear the cap and gown but never graduate and some graduate long before their courses are complete. And some never get it.

At one point in my journey I made a lot more money working for the phone company than I did as an educator. And if it had just been about money then I wouldn’t have quit the phone company job to teach 6th graders in Hawaiian Gardens, making half the pay for twice the work. But like my university experiences, teaching pushed me and made me a better person for the effort. And my time with the phone company had made me a trouble-shooter, not hindered by the “way things are done” when it came to my classroom. So, it wasn’t the straight-line or the big bucks, but I got something from every experience. I’m proud of all of the institutions and experiences and I cannot imagine my journey without the years spent challenging and being challenged by my professors, colleagues and eventually, my own students. It’s sour-grapes and childish to blame the institution. But this isn’t to say that there aren’t those out there looking to take your educational dollars with less than honest intentions. It’s important to choose wisely, like anything else that you might spend tens of thousands of dollars on. You shouldn’t need a college education to figure that one out. Well, most shouldn’t.

Resources:

• College Montage by Joe Bustillos. Source files: (top, left to right) http://pastriesandbacon.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/side-note-its-gym-time-baby/, http://buzznet.com/~13d1747, http://theskyisbig.blogspot.com/2011/01/fuller-seminary-library-at-sunset.html, http://www.akahmai.com/blog/?p=1284, http://calstate.fullerton.edu/news/2009/014-us-news-world-report-ranking.html, http://www.squidoo.com/biola-university?utm_source=google&utm_medium=imgres&utm_campaign=framebuster, Retrieved 11/04/2011.
• For-profit colleges under fire over unpaid loans – Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/For-profit-colleges-under-fire-over-unpaid-loans-1702408.php, retrieved 11/4/2011.
• PayPal Co-Founder Hands Out $100,000 Fellowships To Not Go To College : The Two-Way : NPR, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/25/136646918/paypal-co-founder-hands-out-100-000-fellowships-to-not-go-to-college?sc=fb&cc=fp retrieved 11/4/2011.
• FRONTLINE: College, Inc. 01/04, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJSPkXiVDhE&feature=youtube_gdata_player retrieved 11/4/2011.
• For-Profit Colleges Under Fire – CBS News Video, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6838088n retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Thiel Fellowship Pays 24 Talented Students $100,000 Not to Attend College – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Thiel-Fellowship-Pays-24/127622/ retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Is a College Education Worth It? – FilEntrep: The Millionaire Mindset!, http://filentrep.com/is-a-college-education-worth-it retrieved 11/4/2011.
• PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College – Slashdot, http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/26/1322248/paypal-co-founder-gives-out-100000-to-not-go-to-college retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Image: smokedsalmon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2038 retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1152
• Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659 retrieved 11/4/2011.

1. Open iChat. On the menu bar select iChat >Preferences.

2. Select the Accounts tab at the top.

3. On the left side-bar under Accounts, scroll down to the ‘+’ button to add a new account.

4. With AIM selected under the Account type you can either enter your existing AIM information (screen name & password), or choose ‘Get an iChat Account’ to create a new AIM account. If you have an existing AIM account you can skip to step 8 after entering your screen name and password.

5. If you click the “Get an iChat Account…” button your web browser will go to the “open an account” for the service that you’ve selected in the “Account Type” selected in step four (above).

6. Fill out the information needed to create your AIM account.

7. After entering all of your information make sure that you write down your selected username/screen name and password in a separate location to keep on hand for future reference. After filling in your information and submitting it, you will receive a “Congratulations!” confirmation message.

8. Now that you have your AIM account created, go back to the iChat application to finish the AIM account set-up. Enter in your screen name and password that you just created. After entering, select ‘Done’. Your newly created AIM buddy list will open up.

9. Make sure to share your new account with classmates, professors and friends. Having an IM account only helps if others know about it. Following is a video that’s a little dated on using AIM with iChat followed by Apple’s iChat Basics video. Enjoy.

Sources:

Full Sail University, Digital Literacy course, iChat_AIM_Account_Setup.PDF

https://new.aol.com/

MacMost Now 113: Using iChat with a Free AIM Account. http://youtu.be/mN2Qrtg1kdQ retrieved 9-16-2011.

Apple Find Out How Mac OS X iChat Basics. http://youtu.be/BMmCvcZW3wc retrieved 9-16-2011.

Uploaded by jasoncgillett on Sep 6, 2011. Parking lot fills at FUll Sail University, Building 5.

Thanks Jason for capturing a rare quiet moment at Full Sail’s Building 5 parking lot. The following is a video-slideshow of my 2011 photos FullSail related:

Click here for my Full Sail flickr collection going back to 2008. Enjoy.

Unmotivated Students are easy to find in most American Public High Schools today. Action needs to be taken to motivate those students. In this video i show some of my unmotivated students. Then propose some Challenge Based Research to motivate these students.

Watch the full episode. See more Digital Media – New Learners Of The 21st Century.

Watching this as a educator and knowing how little “the public” seems to understand whats happening makes me think of the title: Education: It’s Complicated. Thanks emdt student, John Carter for the heads-up.

image by MacRumors.com

So for those up us with current accounts or those who want to keep their previously created iWeb site on the Internet, we have about a year to figure out how to replace mobileme hosting. This applies to all current emdt students and graduates from the past three years. Those who did not activate their mobileme accounts are out of luck and will need to find alternatives right now. I’ve been looking through numerous articles ranging from speculation to top ten lists on the iCloud transition and possible solutions. I will list them in the Sources section below.

iWeb on Dropbox

I found an excellent step-by-step instruction on how to host any website using Dropbox’s Public folder here: http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites. I’m going to adapt their instructions for our purposes.

Basically the idea is that we are going to save our iWeb site to a folder and that folder will be in the Dropbox Public folder. The dropbox folks note that “You are limited to client side scripts and HTML since Dropbox cannot run any server side stuff.” With that limitation in mind lets begin.

1. Create a folder in your Public folder in your Dropbox folder (in my example I created a folder called month11 - remember to avoid using spaces or punctuation in your folder title)
2. In iWeb, from the Site Publishing Settings page, in the Publish to: menu select Local Folder
3. Still in the Site Publishing Settings page, in the Folder Location section, chose the folder you created in step one. Leave the Website URL blank for the moment.
4. If you are working or updating an iWeb site save your work (file menu > save).
5. After you’ve saved your work (or if you are just moving your website to the new location), select the Publish Site button.

Because of how iWeb creates it’s folder structure you might have to search around a little bit before you find the correct folder and html file that will act like your index.html or home.html file that you want to put in the Website URL section of the iWeb Site Publishing Settings page and to bookmark and share.

In my example website (above) I created a folder in my Public folder named month11 and called the website edm613 (which iWeb name as a folder inside of my month11 folder). When I drilled down I found a folder named Home and the Home.html file that I needed to point to get the functional website URL: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/[DropboxID]/month11/edm613/Home/Home.html. Remember that after the domain name, such as dropbox.com, upper case letters make a difference, so be aware of this in your URL. Also the designation [DropboxID] will be your special dropbox ID number. Finally, because iWeb wants complete control of the folder where your website is saved to please do NOT remove or rename any file in the folder you’ve chosen to save your iWeb website to. If you are successful you should have a fully function website now. enjoy.

test iWeb site on dropbox

Domain Names: The dropbox wiki ends with the following information:

If you own a domain, you can create a CNAME record that points to dl.dropbox.com. From this, you can create links such as download.yourdomain.com/u/[DropboxID]/interestingpicture.png. For more information, see here: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=7897&replies=17.

Alternatively, you can use TinyUrl or bit.ly to create a shorter, custom link to your page or setup a redirect from a domain name you already own.

Sources:

• Ten ways to replace iWeb and MobileMe hosting By Steven Sande, http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/13/ten-ways-to-replace-iweb-and-mobileme-hosting/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• From iCloud to Dropbox: 5 Cloud Services Compared By Brian X. Chen, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/cloud-services-compared/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• What to do with your MobileMe-hosted site post-iCloud By Geoffrey Goetz, http://gigaom.com/apple/what-to-do-with-your-mobileme-hosted-site-post-icloud/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• MobileMe: Some speculation about the transition to iCloud By Steven Sande, http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/07/mobileme-some-speculation-about-the-transition-to-icloud retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Apple reviving expired MobileMe logins for iCloud transition By ipodnn staff, http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/11/06/16/requires.ios.5.os.x.lion/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Opinion: Why Apple scrapped MobileMe for iCloud: What went wrong with MobileMe By Jackie Dove, http://www.macvideo.tv/distribution/news/index.cfm?newsId=3286864&pagType=allchandate retrieved 6/22/2011.
• MobileMe Support By Apple, http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Make Your Own Website By by SebastianH/DropBox, http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Steve Jobs Confirms Discontinuation of iWeb in iCloud Transition By Eric Slivka, http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/12/steve-jobs-confirms-discontinuation-of-iweb-in-icloud-transition/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• image: Clouds by karindalziel, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nirak/644335254/ retrieved 6/22/2011.

I just had a chat with Karl Peterson, current month 12 student, he called to share that he’d met a professor, Jim Groom, at the University of Mary Washington who’s doing a course on Digital Storytelling as an open university course. According to Peterson, Groom has no formal ed tech training but is mirroring a lot of what we’re doing in emdt. You can visit his course at http://ds106.us. Awesome.

Then when I was on the ds106 site I noticed a Internet Radio player and on the player at that particular moment was someone I’d met through twitter @DrGarcia, the Gypsy Rogue Scholar. Woe, I know that she’s mentioned doing an internet radio show, but that’s way too “we’re all connected” for me. And as I’m writing this, they’re playing a mash-up on copyright, my area of concentration. The universe is scaring me.

You can get more info on radio-ds106 at http://ds106.us/ds106-radio/ and http://bit.ly/radio4life. Yeah, there are more of us experimenting and creating new media in education (mostly ’cause the old system is dead).

I need some help. My CBR Project, Phase I, will be underway quickly; it involves my students composing music and putting it to a silent film. However, I know that most silent films are black and white and they are fairly old. However, I don’t know if there are copyright laws that would pertain to that genre of film. Is there a public domain cut-off for this type of film? If I need to get permission for something I would like to use, if it meets certain criteria, then I need to get it ASAP. Please point me in the right direction. Thanks, MM

So copyright law says, basically, that you need to ask permission to use any copyrighted material and any media created in the past 70 to 100 years, unless otherwise specifically licensed, is copyrighted. For your project what this means that you need to either use movies that were published in or before 1911 or look for movies that were licensed differently or track down the copyright holder(s) of the movies that you want to use and get permission.

There is a tiny education Fair Use loophole. But the test as to whether something can be used under this loophole is:

Can you still teach the same unit/lesson if the specific piece of media were removed or replaced.

I’m guessing that the answer is “yes,” you can replace the silent film with any other silent film and still do the lesson. Therefore the educational Fair Use loophole does NOT apply. You are not really teaching about that film directly, but using it to teach something. Also, even if you could not replace the media, you would not be able to use the whole film because the law states that you can only use a “small portion” of the whole work.

So, a better solution would be for you to go to http://www.ourmedia.org/ or http://creativecommons.org/ to find media that can be used for your projects. These website were specifically created to enable creatives and educators to legally use media and train the next generation of creatives. Hope that this helps. jbb

Resources:

• Chaplin Image by tonynetone, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonynetone/5185166037/, retrieved on May 8, 2011
• filmstrip clipart by microsoft, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=movie%20camera#ai:MM900162967|mt:3|, retrieved on May 8, 2011

I don’t know if this governor expected such a huge backlash and just assumed that the unions would take it lying down. So let me say it plainly, this isn’t about balancing a budget as much as political bullshit. Fix the problems. The unions have shown that they will work with you, if you actually had a working plan. Here’s the link to the NPR story: The Long-Term Effect Of Wisconsin’s Union Battles.

WI “Budget Repair Bill” Protest (Feb 20-24?) Pt. 3 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

We are peaceful. We will stay peaceful.

Around four days of footage (Feb 20-24?) from Madison, WI protest against the SB11 “budget repair bill.”

You can see all the amazing emails I’ve been receiving from people all over the country here: www.mgwisni.posterous.com/​

Mgwisniphoto@gmail.com If you would like to embed the video somewhere, please email me. Please keep sending me encouraging emails of support from wherever you are.

Why do we do what we do? Some might respond that asking such questions is a typical first-world problem, that it’s the modern equivalent to trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head because with so many people going hungry in the world and in our own country, how dare we waste time entertaining such things as “motivation.” It should be pretty damn clear that we do what we do so that we can feed ourselves and our families and keep out the dangers of the outer world. It’s all about higher and higher levels of survival. Once you have enough bread for the day, then you need to make sure that you have enough bread for the week and then once you have that you need to make sure that you never go without having enough bread. But can one ever have enough bread?

During 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a local telco as a well-paid technician. We worked in a union-shop so whenever we worked overtime we got time-and-a-half and if we worked enough over-time early in the week we could reach double-time. With construction booming in Southern California there was a lot of over-time to be had. I noticed that the technicians who were the best at what they did liked getting the over-time pay but were motivated to do the quality job that they did because they liked fixing problems and liked being good at it. The technicians who were just about getting the over-time pay rarely were the ones one could count on to get the job done right the first time. In fact, for all of the time they put in, they could be guaranteed as spending most of their time avoiding work. And neither group like having management breathing down their necks, telling them what to do at every turn. Even the self-motivated ones would let things slip through the cracks because micro-managing stole their incentive to do better. Just like the video said, getting properly compensated helped, but it was no guarantee that the job would get done. When I left the phone company to go teach we were working so much overtime that it was almost a 50% cut in pay for me to leave. And even much later when I left California to come to Florida I took another huge cut in pay. One has to make a living and should be able to do so without resorting to endless part-time gigs, but it’s not about the pay. It’s unfortunate that it’s generally only highly funded companies like Google, where they have a 20% time policy where employees can work on personal projects for 20% of their on-job time, where they explore such things as “motivation.” Too bad.

by emdt student, by Saray Taylor-Roman

I was touched in so many levels by the first four chapters of this book. And, I feel like sharing this personal anecdote.

In 1996, my whole family moved to the U.S. from Mexico because my dad was getting his master’s degree. My sister and I did not know any English and this was the day before school. Our parents called us to the living room and told us something that went like this: we want you to know that to us you are the most beautiful, intelligent, funny, and amazing daughters in the whole world and nothing or no one will make us think differently of you. We know that you don’t know any English. We know that you will struggle, and when you get a failing grade, we want you to know that we will see an A because we see the effort you put in, because we see you growing, because we see you becoming women of outstanding character. Don’t worry about grades, go live and enjoy our two years here. Make the most of it and if in the way, your grades happen to be A’s, so be it… That evening, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders, I was no longer scared, I was ready to take over the world!

Needless to say, my sister and I did extremely well. Due to language immersion, we were proficient in English within 4 months. I went on to tutor in Spanish, French, and Chemistry after school and took some extra courses to graduate a year early. My parents believed in me and that made the difference. I was given an A and the rest was history.

Sources:
Original post, http://thetaylor-roman.blogspot.com/2011/02/wk2-reading-initial-response.html posted 02/09/2011

“Labs Versus Classrooms” is a video essay about the most effective ways to implement technology on a school site.


“Goldilocks & Tech Implementations” is a video essay about how to properly implement a tech program.

“Tools to Manage The Classroom” is a video essay detailing my first experiences using technology as a classroom teacher.

“Tools to Create Curriculum” is a video essay about how I used technology to meet the needs of my students beginning from my first years as a classroom teacher to being school site tech coordinator.

Two Bonus videos:

An introductory look at the video journalism program that I created using 5th grade reporters/editors and 6th grade news-anchors and studio personal. We even had second graders reading the news

“Welcome 2 the Real World” was a music video inspired by the 80s Jane Child song. Students wrote a paragraph about what the word “Real World” mean to their parents and I recorded them reading their essays and added that to footage I’d shot in Downtown Long Beach.

Another day, another Fair Use issue in the headlines. Imagine my surprise as I began to do research to update my previous article on the Fair-Use/Copyright kerfuffle between the Associated Press (AP) and street-artist/icon-wanna-be Shephard Fairey, to discover that the case was dismissed yesterday, January 11th, 2011, and that the two parties had entered into an undisclosed financial arrangement. I loved the lead paragraph from the Animal/New York website:

US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein has dismissed the cases between Shepard Fairey and the Associated Press. And so, the whole copyright infringement vs. fair use vs. fake evidence ballyhooed mess has been resolved with a “confidential” financial settlement. The AP and Fairey will also “collaborate on a series of images,” according to the AP’s press statement. Wait, what?

For those who may not be familiar with the case, Shephard Fairey has been practicing his craft of graphic commentary/stencil graffiti for a number of years and found some notoriety with the Andre the Giant/OBEY image. According to Fairey, in an LA Times video/interview, he said that he wanted to do something for the Obama campaign around the time of the Super-Tuesday push, found an image of Obama and by the following day had a poster with the word HOPE. The poster and image instantly went global. Fairey said that the image captured the leadership and humanity of the candidate and the word HOPE captured the feelings of his supporters. Success.

After the conclusion of the campaign AP threatened to sue Fairey for the use of the photograph that they believed he used to create his poster. Then in February of 2009, Fairey decided to beat AP to the punch and sued AP, claiming that his use of the photo was covered under Fair Use. To make things even more complicated, the photographer who allegedly took the original image, Mannie Garcia, sued AP claiming that he was a freelancer and not an AP employee when he shot the disputed photo and therefore he was entitled to compensation from this litigation. At the end of February 2009 NPR interviewed Fairey and Garcia (separately). It probably didn’t help to settle things down that the disputed poster had just been hung in the US National Portrait Gallery on January 20th, 2009.

It was a textbook case on Fair Use that I immediately chatted with my students about. Looking at Fairey’s actions and pre-emptive lawsuit, those who had read the requirements for a Fair Use defense could say in unison: Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position. Again, Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position.

At the time I asked around to see what others in the media business felt. I asked photographer and TWiT contributer, Scott Bourne, his take on the case (via Twitter) and he said, “I think the artist stole the photo and his fair use claim will end up costing him treble damages. All depends on whether AP owns [the] pic.”

When NPR’s Terry Gross asked the photographer of the Obama image, Mannie Garcia, his take on Fairey using his photograph he said, “[It's] crucial for people to understand, simply because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s free for the taking, and that just because you can take it, doesn’t mean that it belongs to you.”

A cursory survey of opinions online at the time from the likes of Milton Glaser on BoingBoing, Mark Vallen on Art-for-Change, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Chal Pivik on the Los Angeles METBlogs, seems to show that the more the pundit knows about the actual steps or changes to the photo that Fairey made to create the poster the more likely the writer came down on the side of Fairey’s Fair Use claim. NPR, of course, did an excellent job covering all of the angles of the story, finishing up with a discussion with law professor Greg Lastowka on the case and Fair Use. Click on the link/player at the end of this story for NPR’s interview.

And so the case stayed here for about ten-months with the photographers crying foul and the graphic artists flipping the bird. Then in October of 2009 Fairey dropped a bomb admitting that he’d lied about which photograph he’d used and destroyed evidence of the actual images he’d used (which he feared would have proven AP’s case because the image required far less manipulation to create the poster). Fairey’s attorneys, which included support from Stanford University’s Fair Use Project, withdrew their support. Photographers 1, Graphic Artists 0.

In my original article I concluded that had my research on this story ended with the NPR piece I would have been left with a different image of Shepherd Fairey than the one I gained via a series of videos that were created long before Obama campaign, when Fairey’s main claim to fame was his “Andre the Giant: Obey!” world-wide sticker/poster/street art project. Fifteen-plus arrests later for “street art” activities and it’s little wonder that he’d be a media darling while at the same time being in trouble for taking someone’s else’s photograph and not thinking twice about using it to make the Obama: Hope image. Even though it would have gone completely counter to his street-artist-persona, a simple call or email to AP would have saved him all of this hassle.

But who am I kidding. In one of the videos, when Fairey says, “Shephard Fairey: Icon” for the G4 series of the same name, implying his own status in the art/street culture world, I was put off by the arrogance and willingness to play both sides of the media. I predicted that when all of this plays out the title of his next video would be, “Shepherd Fairey: Oops.” But I guess given the out of court settlement, the Fair Use test case was kicked to the curb and Fairey is left to say either, “Shephard Fairey: Halfsies” or “Shephard Fairey: Do You Take Checks?”

Media:

NPR: Fresh Air: Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement?

If you don’t see the audio player above, you can switch to Firefox or Click here to listen to the podcast

Los Angeles Times Video: Hope: Shepard Fairey and Barack Obama

Sources:

Image: (FILES) People walk past Shepard Fairey’, retrieved from http://www.boston.com/ae/specials/culturedesk/FILES-US-POLITICS-INAUGURATION-PORTRAIT_001.jpg on 01/13/2011

Shepard Fairey Settles Case, Collaborates With AP Instead by Marina Galperina, retrieved from http://animalnewyork.com/2011/01/shepard-fairey-settles-and-collaborates-with-ap/ on 01/13/2011

Barack Obama artwork case settled, retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12170620 on 01/13/2011

Image: Giant/OBEY, retrieved from http://www.graffiti.org/faq/kataras/kataras_fig3Fairey.jpg on 01/13/2011

Obama photo: Mannie Garcia (AP)/Obama image: Shepherd Fairey, retrieved from http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/milton-glaser-weighs.html on 04/09/2009

Obama “Hope” Image vs. One Lost Shephard by Joe Bustillos, retrieved from http://joebustillos.com/2009/04/10/obama-hope-image-vs-one-lost-shepard/ on 01/13/2011

Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement? NPR Fresh Air interview, retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101182453 on 02/27/2009

Hope: Shepard Fairey and Barack Obama – Los Angeles Time interview/video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_EOzZ9iaJQ&NR=1 on 04/07/2009

ICONS: Shepard Fairey, YouTube video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNv-9IOBZZo on 04/07/2009