Hero rats

Just watched a cool Ted talks video about rats!

These rats are "hero rats." Some are trained to sniff out land mines, others to sniff out tuberculosis.

The director of the program is a guy who quit his job as an engineer to solve some of the developing world's most pressing problems. I admire him.

I'd like to donate to the cause. Have to figure out my reluctant PayPal account first.

Those rats are both clever and cute!

12th day: Doing good on the Web!

I'm especially intrigued by the Kiva website. I like that the money is loaned rather than straight charity. Not that I'm against charity, but I like the idea of the money being used to help a business venture, something that can help sustain people for a long time. It's the "teach a person to fish" rather than "give a person a fish" idea.

I've done the Hunger Site clicking before, too, but because there's so little investment from me, I just ended up forgetting about it! I guess I should put a reminder on my computer.

What are the ethical considerations to promoting these in a class? I don't think I would feel comfortable doing it as I remember being a poor college student. I would have felt bad if a college prof encouraged me to lend $25 when I didn't really have that kind of money even to part with for a while! Still, it might be interesting to discuss the way they persuade their audiences.

Day 11: Thesauri!

OK, I'm a word nerd, and I LOVED this idea! I may have looked at something similar to it before. It's cool to see the links between words.

I started with the free site, Lexipedia. I like it, especially the idea of "fuzzynyms". But I think it's British, which might not work for my students. What would they do with the term "small beer" for trivial? Or "trifle"? What would they think of "jolly"?

Visual Thesaurus is also good, but the diagrams aren't as large for the non-paying customers.

Still. Very cool.

Day 10: Mind mapping

I love bubbl.us! I will definitely use it in my class. I have students brainstorm topics for blogging because writing "this is what I did today" is boring after a while. It will work great for prewriting--for the students who like visuals and that free-association that this kind of thing requires.

Here's mine:

Day 8: New Search toolz

I like the idea of these, but I'm having trouble making them work for me. The screen shots and variety in the cube was most intersting, but I couldn't get the cube to turn correctly! I tried the arrow keys, etc. like they said, but it would only rotate a bit and kept showing me one side.

Viewzi had the nicest interface. I like that. But it took forever for it to load the screen shots.

Don't know if I'll use these.

Day 7: Mashups

This is what I said on the Coe 13things blog:

The data masher scared me a bit. I kept thinking about Randy Christiansen saying "correlation does not equal causation"! I think that it would be a great way to manipulate statistics and mislead people. Or, maybe you could use it more ethically.

I'll try one of the picture mashups--I think I accidentally started creating it on Lisa's account. . . . oops!

Here's my picture mashup, with one MP3! Or you can view it below. Grab and drag to see different parts of it.

Day 6: Tiny URL

The difference between a kid's Xmas list and a mom's Xmas list:

The kid's Xmas list is what he wants for Xmas.
The mom's Xmas list is what she's going to buy everyone for Xmas!

Here are a couple things on MY Xmas list and tiny URLs with links to the websites:

Nanodots for Robbie
http://tiny.cc/v1bc2

Calligraphy set for Eli
http://tiny.cc/e53yv

Day 5: Wallwisher

Cute idea. I'm not sure I'd use this in class, but I liked posting on Lisa's wall :-)

Here's my wall: post away, anyone who's reading this!

Day 4: Grooveshark

My boys have told me about this. Robbie will say "everyone pick a song so we can make a playlist" and we have an odd Nesmith family playlist with folk or odd rock (Bruce), 70s music (Jane), Green Day (Robbie) and Lady Gaga (Eli).

I don't like to select music, most of the time. I'd rather listen to the radio--in stereo, not MP3 files, which sound thin to me--and get pleasantly surprised. Yet Grooveshark does this, too. When I went there, I just clicked on "Classical" and they started playing a lovely Chopin Mazurka! How did they know I liked Chopin piano music? Vivaldi's up next .

But every once in a while, I NEED to hear a particular piece of music that I don't have. This site might help me there.

For example, Robbie has been working on creating a vo-corder from bits and pieces of junk around the house--found out how to do it on the internet somewhere. He tries to explain the vo-corder to people by explaining the physics behind it. They look puzzled. Then I say "You know, like Peter Frampton." And they understand :-)

So Robbie used Grooveshark to find Peter Frampton music. He was not impressed. But we were glad he got to hear it!

Day 3: Picnik

Lisa introduced me to this online tool when I was working with my journalism students on a website. It is invaluable! We didn't do cute things with it like stickers or sepia tone, but we used it to change the size of photos--especially important when loading on a web page. I think we also used it to put captions/cutlines right with the photo, which made creating the web page much easier.

I love Picnik. I haven't used it at home, but it's a great classroom tool for journalism.

Oh, I like the funny "loading" quips! They make me laugh, which is good. Need to lighten the tension when working on projects.

Here's what I did with a "fun" photo. Yeah, it's true that trumpet players have a bit of an ego. How many trumpet players does it take to change a light bulb? 10. 1 to change the bulb, and 9 to say how much better THEY could do it.

Day 2: Doodle

I've used "when is good" but Doodle is so much more fun to say! I'm pretty sure this is the one Bob Marrs used to schedule our upcoming department meeting.

I like these. Not much more to say!

1st day--poll everywhere

I don't use my cell phone much, so at first this didn't seem too interesting. . . but my students do! I'm looking for ways to keep them involved in class, and they think cell phones are interesting, so this might work.

I use survey monkey in class, and they love the instant gratification of the results graphs--this would be the same for quicker, pulse-taking questions.

I might use this! My practice poll was http://www.polleverywhere.com/multiple_choice_polls/MTgwMzU5NDQzOQ

Go ahead and answer if you want to! It's kind of a rhetoric nerd's poll . . .

Signage fail

(The Rhetoric Department's building is Eby Annex)
This one's worse.

Final Reflection

I enjoyed having this project this summer. It allowed me to have some deadlines and to work on stuff for someone else. Being a "student" and having to do "assignments" posted by someone else is always a good experience for a teacher. It reminds me of how I feel when I get behind, don't understand, DO understand, and/or have a great experience with an assignment.

One thing I found with this summer 13 things is that I'm already pretty digitally savvy. Of all the 13 things, only 1 or 2 were new. I'd never used ScribD, and I've heard of, but not signed up for online libraries/booklists (now I have a Goodreads account . . . )

Other than that, I already had a blog (actually several), have assigned wikis, adore Delicious, used Google Docs, tweeted, used You Tube vids in class, used screen capture and tag clouds, etc. etc. This program just got me going back to them and thinking about how to do them better. I'm also glad that Bruce downloaded Jing onto this laptop :-)

So thanks for the opportunity to use this stuff and be reassured that, contrary to my sons' views, I am a pretty hip person, electronically.

Thanks, Lisa, for coming up with the idea and for administering the program!

(p.s. I'm going to make a Wordle of my blog when I get to Coe--my laptop here at home is wary of the Java plug-in.)

Using Screen Capture in teaching

I have used screen capture when giving feedback on student work in the past. Here's a sample of me giving feedback on a brochure created in my Professional Writing class.

Screen Capture Feedback on Brochure

I found that giving them a recording of me talking my way through these documents worked VERY well for this class--they met in the evening, and some students had a hard time getting to my office hours during the day.

This worked especially well for this short document. They could listen, look at the cursor pointing out parts of the draft, and make changes.

I've also done just audio recordings of me giving feedback. Here's a link to an example--it has to download and then be played back.

Audio Feedback on Brochure

They seem to pay more attention to what I say in a recording than they would when I write comments. I think that's interesting!

Jinging

Luckily, Bruce downloaded Jing onto our laptop, so I didn't have to do that part :-)

I used it to make a little screencast explaining a webpage I created a while ago. It's a webpage that links crochet and advanced geometry, using these lovely items, which I made.

I've been thinking about hyperbolic crochet (that's what it's called) because a chain of events has occurred that might lead to me doing a workshop on it down at my sister's school in Atlanta! I don't know much about math, but she's a math teacher. I'm going to teach the kids (the ones at the junior high) how to crochet these items.

We're going to make lots of items and create a "crochet coral reef" with them--because of course this kind of "advanced geometry" occurs in nature all the time. You can see one coral reef here:

Ellen will explain the math, and a biology teacher will talk about coral reefs. I'm going to handle the yarn and hooks!

So here's the link to the jing-ed video where I explain a bit of the math . . . Hope you enjoy it!

RSS Feeds

This summer I've been using Google Reader. It's handy! I like it.

Before this summer, I wondered about using RSS feeds, but I wasn't sure I wanted them. I have mixed feelings about them. It's the new version of news, where news is "pushed" to readers rather than readers looking for the news they're interested in.

Plus, I'm not sure I want to have tons of "news" being pushed at me when I'm trying to get work done on the computer.

(Any readers are finding out that I really think of my computer mostly as a work tool. I am a writer, and use it for research and word processing. I am a teacher and I use it to put together classroom material. I use the computer to keep in touch with friends.

(I don't necessarily want to have the computer TELLING me what to read and what to buy when I get on it to work! And I don't want to use the screen for all my research and interactions with people. So I like any device or software or app that lets me limit its reach while also getting the most out of it.)

I think Google Reader is a great way to handle this. It's not my homepage, so it's not like I HAVE to look at it every time I turn on the computer.

Advantages to Google Reader: It's handy for me to use when I'm curious if there's something new on a friend's blog. Or on 13 Things! Google reader is the way I've found out about Lisa's new posts, like today's. Now, with RSS, I can find out what's new in the news, or, more likely, see if there's a Fresh Air show I need to listen to :-)

I can also just click on "mark all as read" if I don't want to be bothered with Too Much Information, the scourge of our times. Handy.

So, yes, I'm going to use it--to keep up with areas of interest, both professional and not professional. But some of my fave websites still use email newsletters, Facebook, and twitter instead of RSS, so I'll use other things as well.

Creative Commons

Huh?

I did not really understand the first video--seemed like yet another montage of images with hip background music! Luckily the second one made more sense.

But is it for me?

I can see that some people in some fields might find this very useful. The example that made the most sense was the violinist playing a duet with someone who posted a solo. Cool! But I thought "Who's going to use this? Mostly post-modern cut-n-paste-remixing music and art people, not me!"

I do some sharing, but not with this license

I do use materials from the web that have "limited rights reserved;" for example, crochet patterns that are free but the author does not want you selling the items you make with the pattern. Those patterns don't have a specific CC mark on them, though. I guess if I wanted to create a pattern and post it on the web, I could use the CC mark on it that best matched what I wanted people to do with it.

How to get licensed

This is how I would do it: Go to "license your work" on the website. Fill out the form with name of work, etc. Decide on what and how much I want to share. Then copy the HTML code and paste it onto my website, or email it to myself.

It would look like this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

But would readers know what that means? I guess they would just click on the link to find out.

Would this help students?

It would be a good way to begin a discussion about what copyright laws are! If one wanted to have that discussion.

I'm not sure how I would use remixing in one of my classes. I'm not completely crazy about the cut and paste culture. . . . (see Susanne Gubanc's blog).

In my role as a teacher, it might be useful if I were creating web course materials to share with the world, but I don't know if I would do that. I guess I could look around for stuff that has this kind of license, but I did not find any kind of index on their page ("journalism exercises licensed with us," "rhetoric assignments licensed with us")

Suggestion Box

I wish they had a little index of where you could find works that have CC licenses. That would be cool. I guess the idea is that artists/scientists/writers or whoever just puts the license mark on their work.

Good Reads

I've heard of Library Thing--in fact, my brother-in-law, a librarian, uses it--but I decided to try Good Reads.

I'm not sure I like it. It's a bit tricky to navigate and it doesn't seem completely intuitive to find my bookshelves. But it's OK.

Despite being an English major, for me, reading is really a pretty solitary activity. I don't belong to book groups, and I just have a few friends and relatives I talk with about books. I have done some sharing of booklists on my blog, nesmithfamilyblog.blogspot.com. This is quicker.

But, of course, it's ONE MORE social network to go to. Which is why I'm ready to consolidate everything with Google Reader or something similar!

Despite this handy site, I'll probably continue to keep track of books I want to read by writing titles on a tiny slip of paper I keep in my wallet . . .

and keep track of what I have read in my reader's journal.

Fun with Google Maps

I didn't notice that Google Maps was a "thing" but I was having fun with it tonight! Here's what I made. Click on the little blue tags to get photos!

View Nesmiths in NYC in a larger map

Google Reader

Is anyone else having fun with Google Reader? Helps you keep track of blogs you read, etc. Maybe it'll be a "thing."

I'm thinking it'll be useful for RSS feeds, which is one of our upcoming "things."

So far, I find reader useful--one place to look to see if my fave bloggers have posted anything. I've subscribed to several of your blogs!

You Tube Time

Everyone loves that one!

But really, here are some videos you MUST watch: Mine!

I sold this one and another to the Gazette a while ago. It's amazing how little money I got for so much work. Video creation really eats up your time. Still, I enjoyed doing it.

Here's Bruce with one of his songs. I hope to do another music video soon.

Here's MY cute kitty video!

I use YouTube for teaching quite often. Sometimes it helps to get an animation or short clip to illustrate something. You can find important speeches on NYT.com (which also posts the typed text and indexes speeches), but some things can best be found on YouTube.

Recently, I found clips from the Carol Burnett show after she'd been on NPR doing an interview. It was fun to watch those again.

You can be my YouTube friend by adding me, jcnesmith, or just going to one of these videos! Let me know what you think!

My Delicious!

I LOVE Delicious! I use it all the time--have tons of pages with links to good articles for teaching, crochet, etc. etc. The tags are useful.

OK, plus I love the name: "let me check my delicious" hee hee!

I learned about it at a journalism teaching conference and it makes so much sense. I used to bookmark on my computer but I never do that now--it only works for THAT computer, and I'm often using different machines.

I recently joined another social network for yarn-arts called Ravelry. It has a bookmarking tool, so I won't need to bookmark crochet patterns on delicious again.

I don't do too much with the social networking aspect of delicious . . . .yet. I've shared my delicious name with my students in the past, but they don't use delicious or any social bookmarking tools (again, I'm way ahead of the "digital natives"), so I don't think they took advantage of it.

As for getting others' bookmarks: I get enough of my own bookmarks without having to look thru others' bookmarks. That's my "limit the impact of Web 2.0" mantra, I guess.

my delicious is jcnesmith! add me to your network!

I tweet

I got a twitter account this winter, so I could be hip, like my students. (They are PR majors, mostly.)

Turned out, none of them--none--had accounts. I was ahead of the "digital natives" once again.

I'm not crazy about twitter. It would be great for someone who has a mobile device--but I don't even use a cell phone (and don't want to). (Now an I-pad . . . that would be nice!)

But if I'm at my laptop, I might as well just post a short 140-character update on FB! And everyone I want to alert will be on it. Not many of my friends tweet.

So I did it for a while. It was nice to:

• do a quick update when I didn't have time for a blog. For example, I tweeted about seeing 2 wild turkeys walking along 2nd Ave. SE near 17th street.
• follow funny people like Steven Fry and The Onion (even a 140 character post from The Onion is enough to give you a lift!)
• that's about it.

People I follow that others might enjoy

• Steven Fry
• The Onion
• American Ballet Theatre (ballerinas tweet their day/performances--kinda fun.
• Sarah Prineus, Iowa City YA author
• Christopher Trappe, Gazette author who's ALSO FOLLOWING ME!

Not many people follow me. I have way more friends/followers on FB.

You can find me @jcnesmith.

I'll tweet a bit so you know I'm alive :-)

Web album posted from Picasa

Des Moines Sculpture Garden

Click on the picture to view the entire album.
Posted from Picasa.

I thought this sculpture looked familiar . . .

Posted from Picasa. I wanted to post the entire album. I'll try again.

Flickr or Picasa?

Sometimes Web 2.0 seems a bit overwhelming. As of now, I have 3 active blogs (and 2 non-active ones), I'm a member of facebook and ravelry, I have a YouTube account, and I occasionally send out a tweet. So when I saw the new "thing" required me to join TWO MORE web 2.0 sites, Yahoo and Flickr, I was a bit hesitant.

I was particularly hesitant because I already have photo albums on another photo-sharing site, Picasa.

In fact, if you've ever posted any pictures on Blogger by clicking on the little photo icon, you have photo albums, too.

I found this out a year or so ago, when I was looking for some photos I'd deleted from my camera. I found out they were alive and well in a Picasa Album! Blogger put them into a Picasa Album without me doing anything!

So I have one album for each blog except for Taekwondomom, which I can't seem to add to anymore, either (I last posted in June 2007). Could be I changed my password since then!

But I do have albums from:

Nesmith Family Blog, which includes this photo of no-knead bread.

And Jane's Journalism Blog, which I kept in spring of 2009. This was my visual for a "backpack journalist."

I even have a photo album of just random stuff. What is that yarn thing on the signpost? :-)

Unfortunately, with these sites is that you can't just easily grab a photo and insert it into a post you're already writing. If you click on "Post on Blogger" it creates a whole new blog post. So what's the point of uploading your photos to them if you're just going to share the photos on your blog anyway? I suppose for photo storage . . .

What I do with photos when blogging is just upload them from my camera into the blog post. You click on the little photo icon at the top of the blogger frame. Find your picture and upload it.

Blogger puts your pictures at the top of your post, in reverse order, but you can move them around. And Picasa will save every last one of them in a web album without you having to do that separately.

On Picasa, you can type in captions, etc. and share them with friends. You can also add a map, so people know that the yarntag is located at 4th Avenue SW between 1st and 2nd street. So if you want to add additional stuff, or to send to people who don't read your blog, or send albums of photos that don't make it onto your blog, you're cool.

So, am I missing out on any cool aspects of Flickr by not joining?

Being a follower

OK, I've had fun looking at colleagues' blogs and opting to "follow" them. I hope I get some followers as well.

I've found that recently, I've been dividing up my social media writing energy. Basically, I use 4 social media sites:

Facebook--for quick checks on friends and acquaintances (Jane Claspy Nesmith--friend me!)

Nesmith Family Blog--for sharing longer "essaylets" about things that I'm interested in or things my family does

Twitter--for short outburts/soundbites about my life (I'm @jcnesmith)

Ravelry--for musings, questions, and lists pertaining to my crochet projects. (Again, jcnesmith on ravelry)

I don't want to spend TOO much time staring at a screen (and as a freelance writer, I have to use the computer for work, too), so I'm finding that my posts on our family blog have become less frequent.

Does anyone else sometimes feel like their life is being swallowed by Web 2.0?

p.s. thanx for the reminder to add tags! I often intend to do this, but I forget.

Becoming a wikipedia editor

13 Things blog suggested that we go to wikipedia and look up a topic we knew about:

look up a topic you have interest in or know something about (it can be anything...knitting, dog care, astronomy, Greek mythology...there are over 3 billion articles, you are sure to find at least one you are interested in or know something about). Do you have anything to add? If so, click "Edit" on the upper left hand side and add your knowledge.

So I went to . . . amigurumi, of course!

The entry was quite short. . . I wondered what would bulk it up. One could write about the best type of yarn to use (cheap acrylic is best), or about the eye/mouth placement (low on the face for highest Kawaii quotient).

Of course, one could even write about Kawaii--cuteness in Japanese. 可愛い

(The amigurumi entry is linked with the "cuteness" Kawaii entry . . . )

But I noticed that each statement had a footnote. I wondered if one could add statements without footnotes. I mean, using cheap acrylic yarn is . . . common knowledge to those of us who make amigurumi. The mighty "F" hook is always used with worsted-weight cheap yarn--everyone knows that. But is that OK in wikipedia? I've noticed recently lots of "citation needed for this" notes in the entries.

And maybe these details are too technical.

I liked that the amigurumi entry noted that amigurumi "have no practical use." Or, as I always say, they are "totally useless items."

Wacky wikis

I used a wiki for the first time this past spring term. I felt my Advanced Writing Workshop students needed to learn about professional writing for Web 2.0, and I figured it would be better for THEM to do the research than for me to do it and give it to them. So the students brainstormed various topics--professional writing for Facebook was the most popular!--and divided them up. Then they did some web research on the topics and created wiki pages for each one. First they just dumped their info on the page; later, I had them integrate and synthesize the material so it wasn't just a patchwork.

That last part was the hardest: synthesizing all the material. Students seem to think if they find, copy, and paste material, they've "researched" it. Always has been that way, but web 2.0 makes that process really easy. Synthesizing the material is still hard. I need to think more about how I conduct that assignment if I do it again so that it's not just a patchwork of cut and paste.

I use Wikipedia as a "first source" when I'm finding out about something I know nothing about. Like pop culture!

Google Calendar

I put an item on Google calendar, and got an email notification. I wasn't actually ON the computer at the time, but I still made it to my ballet class on time :-)

This should be very useful if I am working on the computer and not aware of the time (happens quite often). So many times I look up and "OH!" I'm late for something!

I wonder if I could combine my Google calendars from both of my gmail accounts. Right now, I am "sharing" calendars between my two personae. I sure would like them to be combined somehow, and for email notifications to go out to both email accounts.

Anyone have any ideas?

Maybe it would just be easier to log on to and use one!

In the clouds!

I enjoyed thinking about Web 2.0 apps I use this week. There's one other I just found out about this year--from Lisa--it's Piknik, which allows you to edit photos very easily. My students in journalism used it for our web stories.

As for Google Docs, I'm not crazy about it. It does something funny to the formatting, which is often an important part of documents I'm working on (syllabi, etc). Also, until recently, I guess, it didn't want to upload docx files. It seems to do that now.

But I am going to use it today! I started on an assignment for a fall class yesterday at Coe, and will work on it from home today.

As for the other apps, ScribD was interesting. Nice that the site allows users to categorize the docs so that other like-minded writers/readers can find it. But probably they don't, unless they're looking for it, or it's somehow viral.

Like most of the rest of the web, there's no editor, so anything can get published--a good and bad thing. I like the idea that you can use it for civic participation like the city of Marion did.

I couldn't get logged on to Zoho with my Google account, so didn't get to explore that one too much.

Why I signed up, part 2

I'm hoping to get more insights about Web 2.0 from this self-directed course. I need to talk about it in my classes, and I'm always looking for new resources to help my students think about the Web.

You know, our students may be "digital natives," but in many ways, they are very naive about Web 2.0. They use it for facebook, shopping, texting, etc., but most are really un-savvy. As I sometimes put it, they are not in the driver's seat! Most of the time, they ask ME questions--me: a digital immigrant! But I have learned to "drive" a bit more--to create blogs, websites, to work with digital video and images, to tweet and use del.icio.us (social bookmarking site). Pretty much they just socialize and shop.

So I don't think we need to be intimidated by our students' seeming "nativeness" on Web 2.0.

Speaking of students, I've challenged my two sons, ages 13 and 15, to do "13 Things" along with us. I told them if they did the assignments (including creating a blog), I'd reward them with a $20 gift card to the store of their choice! We'll see what happens.

My older son is definitely in the driver's seat with Web 2.0. He knows some html code, creates games on the web, has an Opera website, and is pretty savvy. And both my sons occasionally act as my tech support guys!

Learning and Teaching Social Media

I just joined facebook in December, but I started blogging in 2005 when I started my first blog, Tae Kwon Do Mom.

I have a Twitter account, but I don't use a cell phone.

(OK, I own a cell phone, a VERY basic pay-as-you-go Virgin Mobile

but I don't carry it around with me.)

I teach online writing in my journalism class, (here's our latest site!--check out their slideshows and the interactive map of "summer at Coe")

but I read the paper versions of the New York Times and the Gazette every day.I want my Rhetorical students to understand the rhetoric of the web . . . but I also make them read Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian.So I guess I'm interested in this summer project because Web 2.0 is a big presence in my classes and in my life as a writer.

As you can tell, I use social media and enjoy it--but I also love old-fashioned paper stuff. Also, I'm not always crazy about the changes web 2.0 has brought.

I think having this approach makes non-natives better at thinking critically about web 2.0. We CAN teach digital natives a thing or 2.