Month: December 2006

Wildlife Photograph Archive

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I volunteer as Director of Education at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute (AWI), which is located just outside our town of Sackville:

The AWI is unique among wildlife rescue programs in Atlantic Canada in using rehabilitation to identify and highlight key environmental health issues for public attention and response.

Learning by doing is central to the mission. Wildlife rehabilitation work is a kind of ecological sampling. It helps identify environmental change. Habitat loss, toxicity, and wildlife-borne diseases can all be better understood if we document and study wildlife afflicted by these conditions.

During the past year I started an AWI photo gallery on Flickr as a shared resource of wildlife pictures. We use these photos in our educational programs. I have since created a group photo pool called Atlantic Wildlife Network. Our aim is to have an open database of wildlife pictures that can be used for educational activities. We hope to get pictures of North American animals at different stages of development and from various angles in their natural habitats. We’ll also continue to add pictures of the hundreds of animals that pass through AWI annually.

If you have pictures that you would be willing to share, then please check out the photo pool. Membership is open. I would suggest using a Creative Commons license, such as Public Domain, Attribution-ShareAlike, or Attribution-Non-Commercial. This would make it easy to share and use the pictures without having to check with each copyright holder. Note that Flickr allows you to mark individual photographs with separate licenses.

Please feel free to use those photographs already posted. Thanks & happy new year :-)

And there is now an AWI Photo Blog with more pictures.

Who is Time’s person of the year?

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I’m sure that everyone who hasn’t been in an eggnog-induced coma has heard that Time’s person of the year is – You; or those people who control the information revolution:

And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

Before we get too complacent with “our” status as person of the year, here’s the view from someone in the education field- infomancy:

When it comes to “me” as a professional, the place where I spend the majority of my waking hours is rather not “we.” Or, perhaps it is a bit too “we” – but the “we” that schools have created to mean “us in the corner twiddling our thumbs and pretending that the Internet doesn’t exist.” See, for me, Facebook is forbidden. Second Life is shut down. Amazon reviews are avoided. Podcasts are against policy. Blogs are…well…banned just might not be strong enough of a word. The word that springs to mind is demonized. So how, then, could Time possibly have meant “me” when they named “you” as the person of the year?

As I look at Time’s description, I notice that I may not qualify as person of the year either:

  1. Made a Facebook profile? – No
  2. Made a Second Life Avatar? – No
  3. Reviewed books at Amazon? – No
  4. Recorded a podcast? – Does recording a Skypecast count?
  5. Blogged about my candidate losing? – Nope
  6. Wrote a song about getting dumped? Never written a song and happily married.
  7. Camcordered a bombing run? No, I’ve learned to avoid military operations, especially as a civilian
  8. Built open source software? No, I just try to use the stuff.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to find my 15 minutes of fame some other way. I assume this means that I can’t put a cool person-of-the-year badge on my site; dang!

Popular posts in 2006

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This year saw blogging enter the mainstream and I’ve noticed that I no longer have to explain it to most people. I changed platforms (from Drupal to WordPress), which has made comment spam management much easier. There is no doubt that e-mail spam is a major problem today and now comment & trackback spam have claimed their places of infamy (as much as 93%) on Web 2.0.

The good news is that blogs are frequently cited in the mass media. The bad news is that most teachers in our area don’t have a clue about blogs, the two-way web or how to incorporate these into their teaching. Plus ça change …

This blog has had a constant increase in readership this year [thank you] with several posts getting significant views and comments. I just checked the stats and these are the most popular posts on this site in the past year, as determined by number of viewers. They’re listed in chronological order.

  1. Teachers’ Roles in Learning & Problem-solving (Nov 2005)
  2. Learners as contributors – the end of the industrial model (Jan 2006)
  3. The relevance of the learning profession (Jun 2006)
  4. Informal learning and performance technology (Jul 2006)
  5. Blackboard patents the LMS, but does it matter? (Jul 2006)
  6. Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent (Aug 2006)
  7. My PKM System (Aug 2006)
  8. Aliant Connection Speed – the saga continues (Sep 2006)
  9. Small schools, loosely joined (Sep 2006)
  10. SmartDraw 2007 (Oct 2006)

A pause for the Solstice

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Time to recharge my batteries, focus on our family and stop blogging for a while. Thanks to all the folks who came by here this year and especially those who left comments, as it’s the continuing conversations that keep me going. All the best for Christmas, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa or whatever you may be celebrating at this time of year.

Here’s a photo, by Rockcliffe View, of what I wished the Tantramar Marshes looked more like this year, but alas we have no snow (yet).

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Myths, Research & Sharing

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Once again, Will Thalheimer nails what is passed off as corporate research as actually the propagation of a myth (meme?), asking:

Is it plagiarism if you steal a lie?

The culprit in this case is Forrester Research. The previous culprit was NTL. Will is doing the field a great favour by holding us to high standards of research and citation.

My own experience is that a lot of corporate research is fluff that is sold for very high prices. Many researchers, like Will or Stephen, or practitioners like Jay, make their work available for free, in order to encourage peer collaboration. The free information and research is just as good, if not better, than the “research” that is sold as fancy white papers to large, unsuspecting organisations. I find that it’s worth your while to pay for research that is contextual to your particular circumstances or to hire a researcher to look specifically at your field or region. Generic research, sold in +$1,000, one-size-fits-all packages, is probably not worth it.
Caveat emptor

Open Source – you get what you pay for

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Elgg is a social networking (like MySpace) and learning (not like Blackboard) platform that I use and have implemented for clients. It is free and open source, under the GNU Public License or GPL.

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Recently, Ben, the main programmer for Elgg, has been getting some comments about the lack of documentation for Elgg. He has responded, correctly, that the voluntary developer team has not been able to complete all of the documentation but volunteers are always needed and appreciated. Dave, the concept guy behind Elgg, has set things straight with his post, Understanding Open Source.

I think that these misconceptions about open source being free and fully supported come from the now common phenomenon of free web applications, like Gmail or Skype. Perhaps the average user doesn’t know that there can be a difference between “free” and “open source”. Initially, it may not make much difference to the user, but it can be important later.

Open source software is released under a variety of licenses such as the GPL. Free software that is not OS is owned by someone else and only its use is made available for free, under certain conditions. With open source, the rub is that the community has to stay involved to make the software better. If you’re looking at OS software, check out the size and involvement of the developer and supporter communities first. With free software, you usually have to give something away in order to use it. Quite often it’s your privacy, as you do not own your data, or you may have to put up with advertising on your application. Someone has to pay.

Open source gives you something extra though, and that is the ability to take the whole application, source code and all, and move it or even modify it. For instance, my website uses WordPress, an OS blogging platform. If I am not satisfied with my host, I can take the whole application and set it up somewhere else. I cannot do that with Gmail or Skype. Therefore, I own my data and the application that makes my data available to my readers. With almost 1,000 posts on this blog, this data is becoming quite important to me as my knowledge base. The decision to use an OS system as well as an OS database gives me a certain amount of flexibility, evidenced by my switch from Drupal to WordPress this year. My only costs were labour. I could not have taken my data out of a proprietary system (like Blackboard) as easily.

Using open source requires a commitment. That commitment may be less with the more popular programs (OpenOffice, Firefox) which have corporate or foundation backing. The little guys need your help, but you can also have a lot of influence on smaller projects.

So if you’re using open source applications, get involved; because you get what you pay for.

Five Things Meme

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Dave Cormier has slapped me with a meme, kind of like a chain letter, to write 5 things that you may not know about me.

Memes can be very powerful and some can actually be dangerous, and if you want to know more about memes and memetics, listen to Sue Blackmore’s presentation at Pop!Tech. This meme is fairly safe, even though there is some (friendly) coercion that if I don’t pass it on I’ll not be part of the group. Interesting things, those memes.

So here are 5 things that you may not know (or don’t want to know) about me.

First of all, Dave, I don’t have a secret love of armadillos; sorry :-(

In chronological order (drum roll please):

  1. I played Frosty the Snowman in the school play in grade 2 and was a celebrity for the rest of the year
  2. I was on our school team on Reach for the Top (we lost)
  3. I played piccolo in a military marching band during university (it was easier than carrying a rifle on parade)
  4. I met Pierre Trudeau one evening in 1977. I had a blind date for a dance in St-Jean sur Richelieu and my date was a personal friend of the Prime Minister. My French at the time was very poor while my date’s English was passable. Trudeau told us this was a great example of his vision for bilingualism; an anglophone trying to speak in French to a francophone speaking English. Vive la différence!
  5. I was an amateur vintner in Germany, after a friend passed on a very small plot of about 200 vines on the local hill that was covered with “real” vineyards. It cost me about $10 a year to lease it from the town. All I ever made was bad vinegar, but the grape-pressing party was great.

I’ll pass this along to another five people, but don’t feel guilty if you decide not to reply:

Hal – I’m certain that you have done some interesting things

Jay – because you have lots of spare time ;-)

Jon – to know more about you

Karyn – to get a different cultural perspective, from across the pond

anol – for another cultural perspective, across a different pond

If you’ve already been tagged, then of course you’re off the hook :-)

Moving from Furl to del.icio.us

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I’ve been using Furl as a social bookmarking tool for a few years but the RSS feed has not worked since September 2006. I decided to try to transfer my Furl archive (+800) to del.icio.us. I used the export as Mozilla bookmarks function in Furl and then saved the page as an HTML file on my desktop. In del.icio.us, I used the import/upload function and uploaded the file. It worked quite well and saved my files with their tags. One glitch was that all of my imported bookmarks were marked private and I had to individually change the settings to public. The other problem was that del.icio.us only imported about 500 of the bookmarks. However, I have most of my bookmarks in del.icio.us and will be using it as my primary tool for sharing web pages because it seems to be more collaborative and the RSS feed works.

Conversations create markets

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Markets are conversations and conversations create markets.

What follows is a case study that shows how important conversations are in the marketplace and especially in our ubiquitously connected world.

I have been using SmartDraw for several years and made my first post about this diagramming software in May 2004. I was approached by the company and asked to write a testimonial, which I did for free. I later became an affiliate which meant that I could place “click-through” ads on my site and I would get a commission on any subsequent sales.

This year I downloaded the new version, SD2007, and checked it out. I liked the look and feel and found it easy to use. The company had changed the free trial period from 30 days to 7 days, so I didn’t have a lot of time to test it. I decided to wait before purchasing SD2007. I posted my opinions on this blog on 31 October.

What followed were a number of questions and comments, mostly negative. I tried to help out those who commented and personally replied to some of them. This post became the unofficial SmartDraw complaint site, because there was no public forum offered by the company. In the course of the last month and a half, traffic to this post has been steady:

  • Searches containing word SmartDraw (mostly Google) that came to this site since 31 October – 211
  • Visits to my blog post on SmartDraw since 31 October – 411 (this doesn’t include any views from RSS aggregators)
  • Click-throughs to the SmartDraw download page:
    • November (negative comments began in mid-November) – 22 Clicks and 12 Downloads.
    • December to date – 3 Clicks and 2 Downloads.

Someone also set up a wikipedia page on SmartDraw, though its commercialism was in question, and even decided to link to my post. The link to my site is currently not there, perhaps because of the negative comments (5) on my post.

I signed up as a SmartDraw affiliate as an experiment with online advertising. I liked the product and felt comfortable endorsing it. The SmartDraw ad was not as “in your face” as Google Ads, so I thought it would be better for my viewers. During the course of over two years I’ve earned about $150 in commissions. I noticed that of the people who clicked-through this year, 70% downloaded the software but only 4% actually purchased it. Given the negative comments I’ve received and the lack of company response to the issues raised, I doubt that I will purchase SD2007 in the near future.

Let’s go back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, from which we get the initial thesis that markets are conversations. In this case, I think that theses 11 and 12 are much more pertinent:

11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

SmartDraw is a small business, not some multinational corporation, and I’m sure that they’re trying to do the right thing. However, at this time SmartDraw is not engaging its customers in real conversations. Instead, customers are venting on my site, because there is no other place to go. A company blog, or an evangelist who knows what’s going on inside the company, would be quite helpful right now.

Staying quiet and letting others carry the conversation is not in the best interest of SmartDraw. It’s not in the best interest of any company. With blogs and powerful search engines, anyone can find out who is talking about your company. If your company doesn’t make it easy for customers to converse on your website, then they’ll find somewhere else to do it.

The Cluetrain left the station a long time ago; 1999 to be exact.

Update: Paul Stannard, CEO of SmartDraw has added a detailed comment on the evolution of the product to my original post.

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When oligopolies win, people lose

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Warning: Rant Ahead

Windows does it again. This evening I rented a DVD from our local movie store. I decided to watch it on my PC, a Dell XPS M1210, which I recently purchased for almost $2K. I had already watched a movie on it and had used Dell’s CinePlayer, which worked well.

On loading the movie (an older movie: Memphis Belle), I couldn’t get it to run in CinePlayer, Creative’s Media Center, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. Here was one of the messages:

Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD because a problem occurred with digital copyright protection.

Basically, I was locked out by my software. I put the the DVD on my older Windows PC and it played like a charm.

So; I can rent a legal version of a movie and my software can decide that I cannot play it. Who are the pirates here? The oligoplolists who try to control every aspect of our lives with usurous “End User Licence Agreements” and copyright protection that protects everyone but the paying customer? I say bring on the “pirates” and bring down the big media oligopoly! Let’s keel-haul the bilge rats.