Technology

information & communication technology

Video Principles

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I’ve been thinking that video on the Web tells some stories a lot better than writing about them. After having stumbled through digital photography, I’m now thinking about trying my hand at videos.

Tom Werner has collected some excellent advice on how to shoot video and has posted it as a handy checklist for anyone interested in improving their skills. The advice comes from Phil Pendy, whom I met while at the Innovations in Learning Conference. Phil has done it all and has more experience than many of us can even imagine.

Here are Phil’s video principles:

The #1 factor is that spontaneity makes video interesting.
For video on the web, the two more important things are close-up and not too much movement.
Begin at the end of what you want and work your way back.
Editing is important. It’s pacing that makes a video.
Overshoot (and edit later). Be prepared to throw it away.

Check out Tom’s post, as there is a lot more to learn. So maybe Santa will arrange a video camera for Christmas …

More FUD?

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The mass media are spreading a variety of stories about the Internet’s inability to carry traffic in as little as two years. I’m not an investigative journalist but I wonder if this is a concerted FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign to put pressure on governments and regulators to allow the telecommunications oligopoly to more freely implement packet shaping. First tell everyone that there is no more capacity and then say that it’s the fault of all those youngsters using peer2peer file sharing and voice over IP, two areas where the telco’s aren’t making any money.

For example: Financial Post; ABC News; The Star.

It just seems to me that the Internet’s inherent structure is flexible enough to route around capacity issues and allow for innovative solutions to speed traffic without imposing a system reminiscent of Ma Bell’s telephone monopoly. Personally, I would put more faith in a loose bunch of researchers, coders and hackers (à la open source) to solve any capacity problems that may arise in the near future.

The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it

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The title comes from Mark Pesce’s presentation in September on Mob Rules, which I found via Will Richardson. That means that everyone in the edtech field has already heard about it. Anyway, this is an absolutely fascinating read, even for someone already immersed in all this Web 2.0 stuff.

The whole idea of the Mob is intriguing and seems bang on to me. “Now that 3 billion people are connected with mobile phones, the old rules have really changed”, Pesce says, and I agree, that it’s not about the technology:

Before we get all hippy-dippy and attribute agency to something that we all know is really just a collection of wires and routing boxen, we need to clarify what we mean when we use the word “net”. The wiring isn’t the network. The routers aren’t the network. The people are the network. We had social networks ten million years before we ever had a telephone exchange; we carry those networks around in our heads, they’re part of the standard “kit” of our cortical biology. We have been blessed with the biggest and best networking gear of all the hominids, but we all share the same capability. The social sharing of information has played a big part in the success of the hominids, and, in particular, human beings. We are born to plug into the network of other human beings and share information. It’s what we do.

From now on, anything that is top-down (bureaucracies, hierarchies, advertising) will be circumvented by the networked Mob. Pesce also says that “The Mob does not need a business model“, as is obvious with P2P file-sharing. No one makes any money and The Mob doesn’t care.

My comments don’t do this article justice so take some time to read it and some of the others on the website.

One final note; a little bit of déja vu occurred as I was reading this. I was downtown earlier in the day, and tried to find an open wi-fi connection, hoping that I wasn’t too far from the Café. The only open connection was called “Free Public Wi-Fi”and it connected me to this site – Meraki. I had never heard of it, and didn’t connect as it was fee for service, and I wasn’t ready to give out my credit card number. Anyway, about 20 minutes later I read this on Pesce’s post:

Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network.

Small world, big Mob.

Trailfire – bundling your links

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Jay Cross mentioned Trailfire last week and that had me check it out again. I found a trail about personal knowledge management that included one of my posts.  I had just been talking about PKM with a client and promptly sent him the trail, and he responded, “That’s the first time I’ve seen trailfire – that seems a lot better than sending a list of links. Very cool.”

I’ll have to set up a few trails on subjects that keep coming up in conversation. It’s another handy tool, like social bookmarking,  that helps reduce e-mail and ease collaboration.

Blog readability test

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Since a lot of people are checking out their blog’s readability on this quick test [dead link], I thought I’d join the crowd. Now I wonder if this is based on US high school levels, or Canadian or European, etc. Personally, I think a lower level is better, so perhaps I should get rid of them words like taxonomy or pedagogy. Anyway, FWIW:

 

high_school_reading_level.jpg

Thanks, Karyn.

Update: Note comment #5 and also that the code provided (not on the image above) links you to a cash advance site. I guess we can all be scammed at some time.

VocabProfiler is a lexical analysis tool from UQAM that actually works!

Wonderful World of Wikis

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I’m digging back into wikis for a client; reviewing my bookmarks and following trails of links in this growing field. For instance, WikiMatrix has dozens of options listed and includes a selection wizard to help you select a wiki. In reviewing some saved posts in my aggregator I re-read Nathan’s post on using wikis in a pharmaceutical company, with this advice on a content strategy:

  1. If someone isn’t willing to maintain a piece of content, it can’t be that important to the business.
  2. We happily show people how to do things with the site, but we don’t do it for them.
  3. Occasionally we highlight sections of the site on the home page, which is a great way to drive the defacto owners to clean it up a little.
  4. We encourage people to have high expectations for content on the Intranet. If something is missing, please report it to the appropriate area of the business, or better still, add it for them.
  5. The answer to verbal queries for many departments has become, “it’s on JCintra”. This reminds people to search first and ask later.
  6. In the end, the quality of content in an area is a reflection on the defacto department owner, not the Intranet itself.

I also checked enterprise-strength wikis at SocialText and was a bit frustrated that the section on Pricing & Licenses does not include any prices. My request yielded a response that someone from sales would be contacting me shortly. We’ll see if I get a clear answer or just a sales pitch.

SmartDraw has a Blog

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About 5% of visitors to this blog who found it via a search engine were looking for SmartDraw, a visual design and flowcharting tool for PC’s.  I’ve used SmartDraw for several years and was even an Affiliate for a while. When the 2007 version arrived, there were several complaints from the market and many customers wound up on my site and made their comments about SmartDraw 2007 here.

I’ve just been informed by Paul Stannard, CEO of SmartDraw, that the company has launched the SmartDraw Blog.   So go ahead and tell SmartDraw what you like or dislike about their products and services, because markets are conversations and it’s better late than never to join in.

The Inexorable Wave of Technology

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The Internet and and other information technologies have changed everything, whether you like it or not. The ability to connect people, information and ideas from any node in this massive network has changed all the rules.

Reverse Marketing Engines, from Make Marketing History:

So, in spite of the demographic realities, the considerable doubts about the longevity of brand loyalty and the radical changes to daily life that digital technology has wreaked, businesses still repeat the mantra of attracting youth, capturing new users and molding technology to their traditional way of doing business. Changing marketing thinking in the corporate world is clearly akin to turning round an oil tanker.

A digitally literate UK? from Strange Attractor:

“The fact is, that most of those working in education, in politics, in the civil service are the equivalent of modern day illiterates. Without understanding how to read and write on the web, there is no other way, really, to describe this state of being.”

Younger Docs, from Nine Shift:

The National Center for Heath Statistics reports that 44% of physicians aged under 35 report using full or partial electronic medical records. That’s opposed to physicians aged 65 and older, where only 18% of docs use e-records.

Cameron Bales made this comment on doctors and medical records, after reading the post above:

If retiring docs hope for money from selling a practice, and or have all of their patients easily get a new doctor then they need to implement EMR [electronic medical records]. Young docs would rather start from scratch, pick their own patients and not fight with paper records they can’t read. If a retiring doctor can’t sell their practice or even find somebody to give it away to they have the expense/hassle of keeping all those medical records for x years (10 to 18 years depending on the age of the patient).

Three stories and an argument

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I’ve supported Creative Commons (and use a CC license for this site) for several years and see it as a leader as we move to a digital economy. Larry Lessig’s presentations are usually quite informative, but it’s obvious that he put a lot of effort into his TED Talk this year. As Larry says, this talk is “Somethings old, somethings new, lots that’s borrowed, none that’s blue.”

He points out that we are living in a society where most of our children are doing illegal activities (AKA piracy) because we haven’t figured out this whole digital universe yet. Let’s get it right for our kids

Take 20 minutes and watch the presentation on how creativity is being strangled by the law.

Update: Don’t believe me? Here’s what Garr Reynolds has to say:

The 18-minute constraint forced Larry into making the best talk I have ever seen him make. He nailed it. His content was good, the argument was logical (even if you do not agree with it) and his visuals and the way he effortlessly controlled the visuals behind him is the perfect demo for the way it should be done. 

Can OpenSocial become OpenLearning?

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One of the problems with our online social networks is that they don’t talk to each other. What is happening in our Ning learning community is walled off from some interesting Facebook groups, though many of us are members of both. With the announcement of OpenSocial, it seems that social networking has just opened up (to Google’s advantage again) enabling developers on the edges to create and connect.

I’ve found that the information technology community has always been years ahead of the educational technology community. There is little that is technologically innovative in any LMS or VLE that doesn’t already exist in enterprise IT. Ed Tech usually follows Info Tech [it’s all about the pedagogy] and I wonder if that means a similar opening up of learning environments, forcing training & education to follow. For instance, Clive Shepherd has been asking for input on Facebook about the use of this platform for learning. Of course, you can’t follow this thread unless you’re a FB user.

If you were investing in educational technology, where would you be putting your money as of today – into a walled garden or an open, worldwide, shared ecosystem? I’ll be interested to see if OpenSocial becomes the learning platform that some thought Facebook could be (as of yesterday) or if there is room for a separate learning-oriented social network.

Update: I like Dave Winer’s not so upbeat perspective on OpenSocial, as well as Dion Hinchcliffe’s Six Essential things you need to know about OpenSocial.