Now forget about the algorithm that brought this here and focus instead on the card. Every decision on this card is maximized to keep you on Facebook. So, for example, my name is bold and blue and prominent. The headline is also prominent, and Facebook pulls the description from the page so that the Facebook reader can read a summary of an article without going to the article.
A really interesting post lots to think about. Unlike Facebook I’d encourage you to read it
I’ve been wondering about what software choices do to us, and our thinking. These sort of considerations are missing from the from the conversation among technology enthusiasts in school education(or I’ve missed them).
I am not sure I am knowledgeable enough to even start teasing this out. Certainly there seems to be more immediate problems in our digital learning bubble (access and skills for two). But if we make choices for ourself and learners with out even considering the effects and affordances of software design we may end up drifting in the wrong direction.
In early October my school had a visit from Google Expeditions. I’d been contacted to see if I would be interested and jumped at the chance.
Google Expeditions are a 3D VR ‘experience’ using google cardboard. I’d tried a few mobile apps using cardboard before but not in a classroom setting.
The plan was we would choose Expeditions that would fit into our learning.
On the day Kostas from Google turned up in Banton having traveled on public transport with the whole kit in a backpack. This consisted of one tablet, one router, a set of android phones with a google cardboard for each phone.
Expeditions are a set of several 3D VR ‘images’ that can be looked around. The images are broadcast from the tablet ( or a phone) to other devices on the local network. The Tablet is handled by the ‘leader’ the phones by the ‘explorers’. The leader controls which image/space the explorers see. The leader’s non-3D view includes some notes and discussion points.
The devices need to be connected to the same network but they do not need to be online. The scenes are ‘served’ from the tablet. The tablet does need to be online at some point to download the scenes in preparation.
When in a space the explorers can look around by turning their heads or bodies. Moving forward and backwards has no effect.
The leader cannot control where the explores look in a scene but double tapping will show the explorers an arrow pointing to the object tapped (we saw that explorers would always follow these arrows).
We had chosen a couple of Expeditions that would fit with out learning, but did have the chance to explore quite a few.
The pupils were very engaged immediately, the images are surprisingly ‘hyper real’ and the experience of turning round or just moving your head was delightful.
I’d chosen the spaces we looked at at fairly short notice, one did not really fit with my expectations the other was linked to a topic we had not then started. So for the point of view of linking into the learning and teaching I hadn’t planed well enough. From the point of view of exploring potential new technology and giving the pupils a glimpse of the near future.
I’d also feel that the resources might be a bit more valuable after the initial excitement had died down and the pupils used the system more than once.
So how would we use this past an exciting but brief test. Although the kit is relative inexpensive a class set would still be an major resource for even a large school.
I suppose it could be a share resource for a group of schools or local authority.
I wonder too if it could be used on a smaller scale, with less devices. At the end of last month I was talking to Will Tuft on Radio #EDutalk about ‘The immersive classroom’, this involves setting up classroom experiences, for example the aftermath of a hurricane, with props and tasks. I wonder could the cardboard be part of some such class. For example a group of ‘divers’ could take it in turns to put on the googles and explore the sea.
It could also just be used by a few children as a time.
I wonder if as well as the obvious exploration angle if it would be a rich resource for writing.
All in all an interesting experience, it will be interesting to see how this type of technology develops.
Thing 15 is tumblr. I’ve been using tumblr for a few years now for all sorts of different projects, but I though I’d skip by that to the next thing, OneNote.
Try using OneNote on your pc/laptop/device.
Create a new Notebook, add some sections, pages, and try out the features. Use the Interactive Guidance Videos to learn your way around the platform.
Write a short blog post detailing your use of OneNote and how this may/may not be of benefit to you.’
For two years I worked alongside Ian Stuart who is a OneNote expert. Despite Ian’s enthusiasm for OneNote and many powerful demos it didn’t at that time click for me.
I tend to keep notes as text, HTML or markdown files in Dropbox. My _notes folder has nearly 1000 notes including over 300 in a blog posts subfolder and almost 100 in the snippets one. Searching via the finder is pretty effective for this sort of information[1].
When I moved to working in the classroom this August I though I should use the chance to revisit OneNote.
I am using the mac desktop version of OneNote, my pupils use the iOS app. So these notes pertain to those applications.
I started a ‘planning’ notebook, pulling in notes and information from the school and doing my weekly planning in a simple table. It was easy to archive these pages as I went and I could the simple syncing between work and home very useful.
The ability to combine files, images, media and text is useful and works fairly simply. The fact that I’ve kept using the system for planning and extended use to include a class notebook tells me I am finding it useful.
The only major flaw I’ve found using the mac app is an occasional failure of the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts. OneNote used the standard ⌘-c ⌘-v for pasting I find these often fail, especially the first time or two I use them after opening a notebook. The menus and contextual menus work fine, but the keyboards are my preferred method of doing this. Copying something and pasting to get the previous content of the clipboard pasted is alway annoying.
I would also really like to be able to have more than one notebook open at once. I believe this is supported on windows and not mac. Given that mac users are traditionally more likely not to have documents full screen and to use drag and drop between documents I find this a wee bit surprising.[2]
I’d also like to be able to set a page width rather than have a page of infinite(?) width.
I started a class notebook to use with the pupils in my class. They are using the OneNote app on iPad Airs.
I’ve used this to distribute information, worksheets and the like to the pupils and to gather in work. I started just before the addition of the class notebook tools. When the tools appeared I’d just had some fairly negative experiences with the class sharing and using Word and Onedrive on their iPads. I though I’d give OneNote a try for this instead.
When the tools work they have been very effective, I can create a page and distrubute it to all of the pupils easily, I can target the section of their notebook I want the content to go to. I can then easily find all of that content and mark it within the notebook.
I have also got a way of distributing shared resources to all of the pupils. The only part of the workflow that is missing was the ability to upload documents created in Word and saved to OneDrive to the web (glow blogs). But failures with that was the reason I started using a class notebook in the first place.
For the most part this has worked fairly successfully. When pupils are submitting written work they seem to prefer typing in the native iOS notes app (or even word) and pasting the finished text into OneNote.
Collecting a set of brief texts in the one place on a table in the collaboration section has been more successful that multi editing a word doc[3]
Occasionally I’ve had sync failures for particular pupils, while the distributed page gets to the rest of the class it will not sync to one pupil. Often logging off force quitting, going through the log on sorts this but not always[4].
I’ve had one really frustrating experience with adding notes to pupil work which did not sync at all consistently leading to a very confusing lesson but for the most part the class notebook has been a success.
Reading back over this post so far I realise that I’ve dwelt on the negative aspects more than the positive. I thing that is because I am finding the software pretty useful and these bits of friction stand out.
There are a lot of really cleaver features.
The ability to share with pupils as a group, individually, and to distribute content to each of them is great. The choice between letting pupils edit that content or not is also useful.
Another useful feature is how easily the pupils can record audio in a page. This allow them to listen to themselves read and me to collect there reading.
One of the most interesting is the way text in images is handled. This can be searched. It also, on iOS at least can be copied.
Ironically in getting this screenshot I had a repeat of a problem I had in class this week. After I inserted an image, OneNote crashed. It then refused to sync.
sync problem
The answer was a tweet away.
@johnjohnston I get the id's message if one section is corrupt, rest of file sync ok. Try copying affected section, deleting old #MIEExpert
On iOS I couldn’t copy the whole section, but I could select multiple pages and move those to a new section. After deleting the, now empty, problem section all was ok.
It would be good if the error message was a wee bit more indicative of the problem and how to solve it. It looks like a hangover of the Window’s desktop app? Even if I sync the OneDrive, where my OneNote files are stored, to my desktop, the OneNote files are replaced by a weblink. This raises another worry, total reliance on the cloud.
I am going to continue using the class notebook for a while and see if we can work around the problems. The many affordances of the software certainly seem worth further exploration.
It also may be that updates will fix things. The app has been very frequently updated, in fact it feels slightly beta like sometimes.
I don’t think I’ll be converting my own notes out of text files any time soon. Having them in an open format that I can open with a myriad of applications on different platforms is important and Dropbox[5] certainly seems to have syncing down a lot better.
on iOS I mostly use the drafts app to keep notes, this syncs via iCloud and has been rock solid for several years. Draft’s ability to push text to different places is outstanding. The Apple notes app is pretty good too although a lot simpler than OneNote. ↩
the first few times I used a windows computer this completely floored me, I could not understand why anyone would want full screen. ↩
this took us into of lot of failure, repeated attempts to log on and a lot of wasted time. ↩
I am not sure if these problems like others with the MS iOS apps are to do with the apps, authentication with glow or local network issues. ↩
Dropbox is not a suitable choice for use with my pupils. Onedrive via glow takes care of account management, data protection etc without me having to do any work. ↩
Basically because they were the first computers I use. In addition I’ve years worth of shortcuts, kludge and scripts that help my workflow.
But I’ve often discussed this with other educators and often suggested that macs are cheaper. This is usually scoffed at, not too surprising given the shelf price. They do last a long time though.
I was pretty disappointed when North Lanarkshire decided to mostly switch away from macs a couple of years ago.
I saw this in my feed reader today:
IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan Debate over: IBM confirms that Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs | Jamf
The range is a little less impressive than the headline but enough to keep me on the mac track for my next purchase.
featured image: my own. Color Classic, run through some filtering app long enough ago so that I’ve forgotten.
To opt-out of Google’s identified tracking, visit the Activity controls on Google’s My Account page, and uncheck the box next to “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services.” You can also delete past activity from your account.
After that I headed over to the Google My Account page and turned off as much as I could.
Over the years I’ve used dropbox as a quick way to publish webpages. many of which I’ve linked to from post here.
I’ve got plenty of other places to post to the web but for some things and some wee projects it has been very convenient to drop html files into my dropbox’s public folder they are published.
Dropbox Basic (free) users: Beginning October 3, 2016, you can no longer use shared links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox, it will no longer render in the browser. The HTML content itself will still remain in your Dropbox and can be shared.
Google Drive did something similar at the end of August this year.
I believe that both services removed this feature because of abuse. A great pity. It will have broken quite a few links I’ve posted.
The most frequent use I made of this was a simple mashup of gpx files, google maps and flickr photo sets. It was on adding to this today I notice the breakage.
I suppose I could try one of the services that publish your files in dropbox else where or set up some sort of script to upload things but any alternatives, ftp, surge, github etc that I’ve tried lack the simplicity.
I am in general a respecter of copyright. I use other people’s images her on the blog and always attribute and respect copyright.
Occasionally for more creative purposes I sidestep the rules to use of old movie or tv footage on my DS106 blog for more fun stuff (example: characters). I don’t think any corporate dollars have been harmed;-)
A couple of days ago I read [Trying] Going to Flickr Zero, CC0 where Alan has changed all of his Flickr licenses to CC0. I can see the point.
My flickr photos are CC-BY-SA in the same way as this blog. This got me thinking. I am, unlike Alan, no photographer. It is unlikely anyone is going to make loads of cash from any of my images (or my deathless prose here). Over the years I’ve had a couple (2) of folk contact me to use a picture of mine for “commercial” purposes, and been delighted to do so. CC0 would change little except make reuse easier.
But I do like the idea of attribution and getting attributed. The attention feels nice. It also might encourage others…
The Share Alike idea seems nice too, but I guess might occasionally make things more difficult to use. I may lose that soon.
But not everything I create can be CC0. Not yet. And in my local context these things can really really matter. It can make the difference between who gets a job or tenure or promotion and who doesn’t.
and in the comments:
Audrey Alan and Doug are examples of intersectionality here – no stable academic job but famous and with lots of social capital.
I’ve not really got any problems in this regard, being an amateur sharer rather than a pro.
In Primary School
This is hard. Over the past few years I’ve had to explain copyright to teachers. Now I am back in class working with 8-11 year olds. Since I was last in the classroom full time pupils spend a lot more time on line, they are very familiar with finding images via google searches but digging out the license is hard. Lots of tools now make it very easy to ignore copyright.
I made FlickrCC StamprThis is a way to search for, and stamp with attribution, Flickr images that you can use. It is designed with school pupils and mobile in mind.
