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.