academhack

Just finished my semester here at University of Texas at Dallas, which gives me time to return to this neglected blog.

Over a month ago I signed up for a beta-invite for Sliderocket, a what looked to be promising online presentation tool. Think of it as Google Docs for Power Point. To be sure there are several free options for presentation software out there, but none are as feature rich as I would like. And since slides are all about visual presentation I don’t just want something that lets me make bullet points or show slides of text. I want something that looks nice. After playing with Sliderocket for several hours, I can say so far it is the best in its class.

Why would you want one of these? Why use a web based application when a desktop based one works so well? Good question. I don’t see web based applications replacing desktop applications completely but they are useful in ways that desktop versions are often not. For instance, web based applications allow you to collaboratively author a document/work together in real time. Several times over the course of the semester I used Google Docs to work on a document with colleagues, either simultaneously, or back and forth over the course of several days (without having to navigate swapping files, which can get tricky when we are using different applications). Having a good slide creation program will allow me to collaboratively create slide presentations with others, or you can require students to use it, allowing you to easily add comments directly to the slide (again sans the problem of swapping files). Second, while I probably won’t be giving up Keynote anytime soon, a web based application will allow me to edit a presentation easily when I don’t have my computer. I am big on being redundant with presentation information. When I am going somewhere to give a talk I always have the slides available on the net somewhere in case my computer crashes/dies or can’t be hooked to projector etc. . .So, having a backup for editing is also a good idea. And finally, having a free online tool to which you can point students is important. This way students can author presentations/documents without having to buy expensive software (a presentation authored in Sliderocket could easily look better than Power Point-and its free).

Why Sliderocket “rocks:” Unlike a few other free versions out there (including both web based and desktop based) the people who designed Sliderocket understand that slide presentation is a visual/layout “thing”, not a text/word “thing.” All of the essential features are there: images, build in, build out, slide transition (those ones only available in Keynote, can now be used thanks to flash on a PC), embed movies, embed audio, text manipulation, etc. Right now they only offer five templates (but they are the only ones I really want). You can upload presentations for Power Point (not from Keynote though, which isn’t really too much an issue as Keynote exports to Power Point).

But where Sliderocket really shines is in its ability to share. As you create you can share whole presentations, or individual slides, for collaborative editing or viewing. You can even use Sliderocket to host a “meeting,” giving out the web address for others to view the presentation. And again because it is done in flash, you don’t have to make the sacrifices in style necessary to use something like Slideshare (which I currently rely on).

Sliderocket does have a few limits. First, it is still in beta so you will have to sign up and wait in line to give it a try, and it could be a bit buggy (although I had no problems). Second the load times were a bit more than I would like, nothing annoying but just that extra second too long. In fairness this could be a result of the internet connection I am working from, but this is something to keep in mind (more data is being transfered here than via a much simpler web application). Finally, no web application yet is faster than what I can do with a desktop one. This is partly because of speed of connection, load times etc., but also partly because of things like keyboard shortcuts, automation etc. So, while I probably won’t use Sliderocket as my replacement for Keynote, it will be my collaborative tool of choice (just as soon as all my friends get invites).

If you want to convert a Microsoft Word document into an HTML document that makes sense, follow the suggestions on this tutorial. (I know Microsoft Word lets you do this automatically, but the HTML is produces is at best questionable, and usually horrendous.) The methods in this tutorial are much better, and worth the effort if you are converting a document to be viewable via the web.

Continuing my long rant against bad PowerPoint presentations, check out this post on the Lessig blog, about how a physicist adopted the “Lessig style” and learned how to be a far more effective communicator.

Inside Higher Ed has a piece on educators who are using wikis in class. For the most part the article simply rehashes the “Wikipedia is good, Wikipedia is bad” argument, but this time with a pro-wikipedia spin. The article discusses several instructors who use Wikipedia in their classes, either as source material or editing Wikipedia as an assignment. The problem with the article is that it does little to separate out the idea of a wiki, from Wikipedia. To be sure Wikipedia is the most prominent example of a wiki, but wikis are used in various contexts above and beyond authoring encyclopedia articles (academic job wiki anyone?). In fairness the article mention other wikis at the end of the article, like Scholarpedia and Citizendium. The problem here is that this limits the argument to a “wikis as legitimate encyclopedia” argument. Never mind that wikis are used in a variety of other contexts, or that Wikipedia has already passed the “is it accurate test,” this just plays into the red herring argument of whether or not students should use Wikipedia as a source for their papers (this is a false criteria, one shouldn’t use Wikipedia not because it is a wiki but because it is a secondary source). The more important issue here is that wikis constitute a different type of writing and archive structure, one which students need to learn to read and write in . . . oh well at least several of those who commented on the article picked up on this. Maybe the debate is shifting.

Here is this week’s collection of things you might want to check out if you are interested in academia, technology, or perhaps just looking for something to read while you wait for that download to finish.

• Scholarly Research Excahgne: Someone I follow twittered this earlier in the week (sorry not sure who so I can’t give credit). Anyway it is a new peer-reviewed open access journal, focusing for now at least, on the sciences. There is not much content as of yet, but the advisory board is international and substantial. Equally as important, the developers seem to have spent time thinking through the layout and structure. I’ll be interested to see how this develops.
• Wikis in Education: One of the things I have been thinking about his how to use Wikis more effectively in teaching, particularly because I want students to develop collaborative literacy as I think this will be an important rhetorical skill in the future. This recent interview with Stewart Mader is a good place to start.
• Twiddla: Twiddla is a virtual whiteboard. I have been waiting for this to be done right, as it is an extremely useful tool, and not everyone has Mac OS 10.5 which allows easy screen sharing. Twiddla is extremely easy, as they say “no plugins, no downloads, or firewall vodoo.” (Firewall Vodoo? Haven’t heard that before, but think I will now use it regularly as a catch-all phrase.)
• AideRSS: I am always on the look-out for how to pull off new tricks using RSS feeds. AideRSS allows you to sort and rank posts. This is particularly useful if you are trying to monitor sites which produce high volume updates.

While I was checking out Evernote (see post below) I got enamored with the idea of having my database accessible over the web (read iPhone). Evernote makes this really easy. But ultimately Evernote was no where near powerful enough to entice me into switching (in fact I have been ramping up my Devon use lately for a project and continue to appreciate how much more powerful it is than the others, crunching through audio, video, images, twitter posts etc.). So, I started to wonder if there was a “hack” to accomplish this via Devon. I started to ponder having the database updated to a website every night. What I should have done though is check the Devon website first. Why? Because apparently this is a built in feature of Devon. The catch you have to upgrade to Devon Pro Office, and it is a bit complicated. There is a tutorial however. So, I am going to give this a shot, and fill you all in later.

P.S.: I ended up with some more Evernote Beta invites, let me know if you still want one (leave a comment, or email me).

On and off for the past week I have been playing around with Evernote (still in Beta), now that the program will be available for the Mac. Like other versions of the keep your brain organized programs (Devon, Yojimbo, OneNote), Evernote promises to let you “remember everything,” indeed its icon is an “elephant” (personally I think one of these programs should go with a goldfish, as in you only have to remember something for 3 seconds to use the program). While I am an avid user (some say fan-boy) for Devon I am willing to consider other options, and Evernote had three features which were enticing: 1) A clean simple “Mac-like” interface (this is my main complaint with Devon). 2) Web Syncing-which would allow me to use it anywhere via the iPhone and 3) Text recognition with images (i.e. you can handwrite notes, take a picture, and save it to your database).

The Apple Blog and The Unofficial Apple Weblog have reviews worth reading.

But my conclusion, not powerful enough, not even close. Evernote is designed to be a note capturing, note taking, program, not a research organization one. For example, you can clip info from websites and import easily to your database, but the process takes a couple of extra steps as it routes you through a webpage for confirmation, not for the high-powered clipping. Second, it doesn’t directly import .pdfs (or not at least as easily as Devon), instead you have to convert the content into notes, and I couldn’t figure out an easy way to import audio or video files (not even sure it can handle these). Third, and most importantly it doesn’t even come close to the search function of Devon, which suggests other terms, similar terms, related terms, does fuzzy logic, shows other articles which are similar, can suggest sorting and filing locations for articles, and summarize . . .

So, while one could use Evernote as an on-the-go note taking sorting application, a remember everything, organize your research application it is not.

I do have ten invites if others would like to beta-test. Leave a comment below and I will email you an invitation if you want to give it a try.

Here are some things readers of Academhack might find interesting.

• One of the difficulties in teaching and researching on the web, is preserving the paths of exploration, not only for one’s own purposes but so that others can traverse the same path. In this regard I have mentioned Diigo before, which allows you to bookmark, highlight, and create slideshows from webpages (a useful solution). But there are other options for sharing web surfing. As Liberal Education Today highlights one can use Trailfire or perhaps more interestingly PMOG which attempts to add a bit of fun to the process, making web surfing a social game.
• Speaking of staying organized. Gathering in Light (the name has something to do with Quakers the subject of the bloggers dissertation) has a well formulated post on using del.icio.us to organize your research, especially when prepping for writing the dissertation.
• Finally The Chronicle covers Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s open sourcing of the manuscript review process. Working with MIT and GrandTextAuto he made his manuscript available free online. Thus opening up the peer review process. I tend to agree with Noah when he says that The Chronicle article tends towards creating a conflict (blog review vs. peer review) when perhaps that wasn’t the point. Anyway both the article and Noah’s reflections on the process are worth a read.

At last the long promised follow-up to the previous Twitter post. For whatever reason that blog entry has garnered a great deal of interest, so rather than respond individually in comments to those who posted here and elsewhere I thought I would group my thoughts together in one place.

My General Philosophy

Let me start by saying although I have suggested a range of possible uses (and others have raised even more), within the context that I have used it there are really two key reasons I find Twitter useful. First, for what I teach Twitter is an object of study. That is I teach Emerging Media and Communications so I am interested in thinking through how these new forms of communication shape the content of of what is communicated and thus shape our culture. At this level it seems rather obvious that I would deploy Twitter in my class. In fact I could make the argument that not teaching Twitter, at least on a cursory level, would constitute a rather glaring omission given its increasing presence in the digital networked communication structures (more on this later). I am not suggesting that Twitter is the ultimate (killer) web application, or that it will have the life span or presence of other web applications, but rather that at this current moment it is important and influential and not teaching it would seem odd (same would go for something like YouTube in the classroom). Furthermore, of all the digital communication forms I taught less semester, Twitter served as the most useful example for talking about “Smart Mobs.” We read Rheingold’s book about half way through the semester, but it is when students started using Twitter that I think they had a pragmatic example on which they could hang some of the more abstract concepts we were engaging. I should also add that the students who were most engaged with these concepts were the quickest to take to Twitter, and the ones who ended up continuing to use it. Not that this was not without its problems, but the problems themselves were instructive.

The second use is one that I see relating more broadly to education and this is where the social networking function of Twitter plays in. And it is this feature of Twitter I was alluding to in the end The Chronicle video blog, when I said Twitter helps us to expand the walls of the institution. Okay, so I am going to get overly general here and paint some fairly broad strokes, but just grant me some of this latitude. I would suggest that the old model of higher education as much as it was characterized by professors standing in front of the classroom lecturing to students in front of a chalkboard, the one to many aspect, it was also characterized by being a community of learners. Perhaps I am invoking a nostalgic model of education that never was, but I am thinking here of the way in which many students lived together in dorms, socialized after class. But in this moment at least I think that is becoming less and less the case, students attend college where their identity as a student is just part of what they do and who they are. Many of them have jobs, commute to school, etc., and thus the social aspect of the campus life has changed. If this is the case than these “new” ways of socializing such as Facebook and MySpace are where students are forming their learning communities, ones which do not entirely, perhaps only minimally, overlap with their classroom experience. Thus to extend the walls of the classroom, make education relevant to all aspects of students lives rather than just what they do four-five hours a day we need to think of ways to extend the ways we form and foster learning communities. Now I am not going to make an argument for our against the “lack of face to face communication” (this line of discourse has always seemed a bit silly and reductive to me—see below), instead I want to suggest that as educators learning to communicate with students in the ways and through the channels that they use makes education all the more relevant. In my graduate class (I haven’t taught Twitter as a object yet, thus it is not required) I have noticed a disparity between those who use Twitter and those who do not. Since I only see them once a week if they are one of the students who throughout the week uses Twitter i tend to have a much better sense of what they are doing, how they are engaging the material, and how my class fits into their overall educational goals. Perhaps this strays into territory which makes some in education uncomfortable, a realigning of the faculty student boundaries, but in a society where once rigid social hierarchies are being brought into question by these new modes of digital communication I would offer that this type of student faculty network is a good thing. (If you don’t believe me, think about how much of graduate school is determined by the network of academics one discovers as a student, both connections to faculty and other students—not necessarily what happens in class.) And so here I am going to purpose maybe the more radical thesis, that educators face a choice either to continue to close off what happens in the classroom, treat is as a sacred intellectual space and time whose borders are absolute, or to understand that like many other institutions its domain is by no means rigidly determined. One is the path to relevancy the other to producing educated individuals.

Some critics have suggested that this could get overwhelming, 50 students a class twittering, or a student twittering for three different classes. Maybe, but since I see its use for building a community of learners across classroom spaces I think some of this “large network” might be a positive thing, and for now at least I really don’t see so many professors using it that it gets too noisy. Others have suggested that this just illustrates a problem in our society whereby we replace face-to-face communication with mediated communication. Two things, first I often use Twitter to foster face-to-face communication, and second there is no such thing as none mediated communication (even face-to-face is mediated). As I have pointed out on multiple occasions, I find that some students have actually increased their participation in class, once we began using Twitter.

Additional Uses for Twitter

In my last post about twitter I listed some possible uses for microblogging for education. Since that post several other academics have chimed in adding their thoughts to the list. So, I thought I would take the time to collect some of those thoughts in one place.

• @iVenus uses Twitter for teaching foreign language. Her blog has several Twitter posts worth reading.
• @jbj the author of The Salt Box suggests that one can use Twitter to reflect on and keep track of quick reflections on how class went for the day. Chris Copeland at TeachEng.us points out a the same thing.
• Several commenters pointed out that Twitter might be useful for large lecture style classes, as sort of a back channel to the lecture, or a way to get instant feedback. This strikes me as useful. Of course you run the risk of letting your audience take over. (But, maybe this is a good thing.)
• Tom Scheinfeldt points out that Twitter is an excellent outreach tool.
• Melaine McBride makes a similar case to the one above, that Twitter is a useful tool for “Classroom2.0.”
• If you want more from me check out the interview I did with Campus Technology. Of the several interviews, recent press write-ups, etc. I think this one turned out the best.
• Finally if you are looking for more check out Howard Rheingold’s Twitter bookmarks on delicious.

Up Next (within a week maybe), the Technical Side. The Nuts and Bolts of How to Use Twitter in a Classroom.

I am thinking about putting together a proposal to present at the MLA on microblogging (don’t want to limit it to just Twitter). If anyone is interested send me an email dave [at] outsidethetext [dot] com. In order to have enough time to complete the polished proposal for submission to the MLA by April 1st I would need an initial abstract and CV from those interested by March 18th.

Apparently Blackboard wants to be Big Brother. (As if being a patent troll wasn’t bad enough.)