TED and Me

This is originally from Donal H Taylor’s blog, and I wanted to share it here. I think it’s a nice “simple” explanation.

Someone shared this through Twitter and I thought that I’d share here. It’s a nice visual comparison with a frightening truth to it.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Wow. I always had a hunch, but I have never really looked closely at the Terms of Service for some of the most well-known social software sites out there. I say wow because I now realize that my rights are not as protected as I (naively) thought.

One of the ETEC565 Toolkit exercises asks us to choose 4 social software sites and:

Read each TOS thoroughly, highlighting key language, and ascertain:

1. Who “owns” materials posted by members?
2. For what purposes can these materials be used?
3. Would using each site be appropriate with your students?
4. In your opinion, how well are the privacy interests of members represented?

I chose 4 that I either use often or have experimented with: Facebook, Second Life, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Out of the 4, I would say Twitter protects the privacy interests of its members the most. In fact, I feel quite confident now in using Twitter more for this reason.

Second Life comes in, well, second – a distant second. The ToS gives Linden Labs permission to use your content for promotional purposes, unless members – in writing – ask them not to. This is the same for Facebook and LinkedIn, although Facebook seems to be a little sketchier about the rights of its members. It seems that they try to get away from any responsibility for whatever backup, copied, remixed content of its members is still out there, giving them the go ahead to use that, too.

The main reason for these ToS is allow the companies to use whatever they seem fit for promotional purposes, which is not surprising. I mean: they are businesses. But what concerns me is the number of educators and students that may be using these services without realizing that their content is no longer 100% theirs. How much trouble could this cause down the road for schools, teachers and students? I wonder with some concern.

I’ve been working with Audacity for some time in the classroom and the ToolKit exercise for ETEC565 was very straight forward. Simply put: Audacity is great for educational purposes. See here for a brief description of Audacity in Education.

Prior to ETEC565, I have been using Audacity in an ESL course where students must create episodes for our university student podcast magazine. I show students how to use the program for creating professional audio content, but I also show them how they can use it to reflect on their own language use, whether for pronunciation, stress, intonation, or even word choice.  By displaying how Audacity can operate in a similar way as MS Word (i.e. cut and paste words), I found that students pick up the program very quickly.

I’m experimenting with Audacity again.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been playing around with goanimate.com, a very easy to use animation application. During a summer course I’m teaching right now, I’m asking students to write creative stories (short plays) that deal with a common English language problem for Chinese speakers. They must record their stories using Audacity and add an audio component to their animation that they’ve created.

I’m finding that the combination of students creating a visual product (animation, plus text in speech bubbles) and producing a corresponding audio creates an engaging environment. My hope is that as they produce the text, audio, and animation they are constantly reflecting and learning the language – and in a fun way! We shall soon see.

In ETEC565, we were asked to:

Select one of the web 2.0 tools from the ones listed on the page (or others that you know of if you want), and create a short media piece that tells a story.  You can tell a story about yourself or about some issue.  You can also use the tool to tell a story that could be used in your classroom in relation to an activity or part of your curriculum.  You choose.

I chose goanimate.com to tell my story. You can read more about why here.

I also said in an earlier post that I would comment a little on Jenkin’s book. I’m about halfway through and i think that it’s been a very informative read Here are just a couple of points from the bookthat I’d like to highlight (I also talk about this on my digital story page).

Jenkins identifies four activities youth should develop skills in, especially in today’s media changing word:

• Affilitations: Memberships, formal and informal in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendter, Facebook, metagaming, etc.
• Expressions: Producing new creative forms such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videos, fan fiction, ones, or mash-ups.
• Collaborative problem-solving: Working together in teams — formal and informal — to complete tasks and develop new knowledge, such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, or spoiling.
• Circulations: Shaping the flow of media, such as podcasting or blogging.

I believe goanimate.com offers students a chance to develop these skills. However, Jenkins makes a good point that in order for activities to work, and to create an effective participatory culture, cultures (that is educational, national, etc.) must support them (2009); the curriculum must recognize and support these types of technologies and activities. Jenkins also says: “inter-activity is a property of the technology, while participation is the property of culture”. I think that that is an important point to remember.

Jenkins also identifies and discusses three problems:

• the participation gap (similar, but not identical to the digital divide)
• the transparency problem (do youth have deeper understanding of hoe media shapes their perception of the world)
• the ethics challenge (i.e. copyright issues)

In honour of my classmates …

GoAnimate.com: ETEC Life form discovered! by smcminn

I’ll write more about what I think about the pedagogical values of goanimate and similar tools soon.

SIDE NOTE: I just bought the book Confronting the Challenges of Particpatroy Culutre by Henry Jenkins. So far it’s a great read! (I’ll comment more after I’ve read a bit more.)

I’ve been playing around with some Web 2.0 applications. I created this animation using www.goanimate.com. I’m thinking of having students use this tool to create storyboards, which, I think, has a lot of pedagogical value. Have a look and let me know what you think.

GoAnimate.com: frightened vs frightening by smcminn

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

It’s been a while since my last entry, but I’ve been traveling from Vancouver to Algonquin Park (what a beautiful place!) to Ottawa to Cambridge, Ontario in the last week and a half. I know in today’s social and mobile media world it’s not an excuse, but, hey, I needed a break. But that’s not to say that I haven’t been playing around with technology for educational purposes. In fact, this past week was rather interesting with regards to social media and communication technologies in education. Or, more precisely, the difference between wikis and discussion forums.

As an activity for the UBC MET ETEC565 course (phew — what a mouthful!), we were asked to perfrom a discussion through a wiki. Here is a part of the task:

Wiki Activity: Social Media and Learning

Both Wesch and Alexander claim that social media (web 2.0, social software) are having a dramatic impact on classroom spaces. How do the trends and issues identified by Alexander and Wesch resonate with your experiences in your own classrooms? What kind of opportunities and challenges do you see associated with using social media in the classrooms within which you teach?

Unlike previous discussions, we are going to conduct this activity in the context of a wiki environment.

Step 1. Wiki Edit

First we ask that you contribute a “sighting” from your own experience of how the presence of social media is apparent in the lives of your students or in how they (or you) interact in the classroom.  We can post our “Sightings” on the following page: 66A Sightings.

 What I quickly discovered was the difference in affordances of each technology. Some things that I wanted to do in the wiki, I could not (or found difficult). For example, unless everyone were equally organized in their standard forms of contributions (adding new discussions, replying to posts, re-replying), the wiki appears to be chaotic with what its discussion feature allow for. A wiki is great for collaborating and creating, but not for discussing ideas (NOTE: we were using MediaWiki).

Don’t get me wrong; the discussion feature of the wiki is very imporatant. How else can collaborators discuss how they want to create their product? But for assessment purposes (i.e. particpation, etc.), the wiki discussion page is, to me, not very useful. It’s diffiult to track, measure, and it’s diffiutlt to standardize or organize. So I prefer the structure and affordances of a discussion forum in WebCT instead. At least, if the purpose is to generate asynchronous communication about a subject hat you want students to learn and discuss about, but not create. On the other hand, creating wiki pages allows for many other learning activities that a discussion forum can not. See here fore information on that part: Wiki affordances.