Dave’s Whiteboard

Will Richardson urges me to Get. Off. Paper. Well, he’s urging his educator colleagues, but the message resonates.

“Just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room,” he says, “paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards…it’s everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, ‘paper trained,’ and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.”

I recognize the urge to keep things on paper (and if you visited my office, you’d agree).  Not everything of value has yet been digitized, and not every digital fixed expression should have taken the trouble.

Richardson nonetheless has a sound point.  I’ll combine it with my own belief: most people move more readily from the concrete to the general, rather than vice-versa.

Certainly that’s true for me.  I remember watching a clip of a teacher making a presentation to a group of his peers.  At the start, he showed a Delicious link and said, “You don’t need to write any of the other links down.  They’re all at this one.”

I hadn’t seen that before (and, alas, hadn’t thought of it).  That clear example changed the way I thought about social bookmarks.

Just as I don’t think most people hear the message behind “you should try a wiki,” I don’t think they hear “get rid of all that paper.”  I’m recalling some recipes that a vegetarian published.  His title?  “From Beef to Beans in Ten Short Years.”

This low-key humor said, “I’m not trying to correct your life.”  Also, “these recipes are pretty good.”  I think I’ll do better by offering you roasted winter vegetables — or, even better, clapshot — than by explaining how most people don’t understand rutabagas.

The more stuff I keep off paper — like these blog posts — the more open I am to expanding that.  My wife and I actually did some of the planning for our (very small) wedding via wiki — so that either of us could add or change ideas from work without having to email the other.

I’m now tinkering with keeping project logs on my wiki, instead of in separate Word documents — both so I can get to them even if I’m not at my computer, and so that I can search.  (A private blog might work as well, but I’m giving the wiki a try for now.)

“Concrete ideas” photo by caffeineslinger.

Looking at Jane Hart’s list of top tools for learning, I thought I’d try the Audacity sound editor / recorder.

(I didn’t have any pressing need, but I did have a little free time.)

I tried two or three experiments at once: setting up Audacity, using a page on my personal wiki as a kind of digital journal (instead of scribbling in the spiral notebook I use to track software experiments), and making a few recordings.

Lots of stops and starts, naturally, but in a couple of hours the other night, I was able to record a voice track and also record streaming music (like the sound track off a YouTube clip).

As with many things technical, there’s stuff I can’t quite figure out. And I had to do some hunting — at first I couldn’t get Audacity to make the switch between recording off a microphone and recording from the stream. I downloaded a few new drivers, I fiddled with my computer’s sound setup as instructed by the Audacity wiki.

It helps, I think, to expect that you’re not going to get it right the first time. Of course, it also helps (if your ego’s not too easily bruised) to think that 13-year-olds all over the country are managing to do this.

I think I probably did more adjusting than I needed to — I may not have understood that SigmaTel (which I think is the name of the sound card or chip) might have been a valid choice all along, which means I downloaded or tinkered more than I needed to.

So what? Well, this morning, I thought I’d try another experiment. Here’s what I wanted to do:

• Record a voice track
• Record a music track from a streaming source
• Combine those things into a single file
• Post them here on the whiteboard

In reality, I had four voice tracks — each “edit” ended up on a separate track (I haven’t figured out if that’s a requirement, or just ignorance on my part). The thing is, I started at about 9, and by 10 *, I was listening to this one-megabyte mp3 file:

* Of that hour, about 30 minutes went to picking out the tune, which means I was getting the melodic cart before the mp3 horse. Nothing new there.

Okay, now I have to find an mp3 player to work here within the blog; right now, if you click the link, you get to download the mp3.

Late-evening tech update: I installed the WordPress Audio Player plugin, but didn’t have the files in the right folders. That’s fixed, and you should have a control to let you play the file. Feel free, if you like experiments.

The tune in the clip is Bright Side, by Heavy Mellow, from their Acoustic Abstracts album; it’s used under a CC by-nc-sa license.

Here’s a nice example of applied technology and (fairly) straightforward how-to.

Twitter Vote Report is a vehicle for live updates (or up-to-the-minute tracking) of voting experience across the country.  You can report via Twitter (using the #votereport hashtag), by text (start with #votereport, text to 66937 [MOZES]), by phone (567-258-VOTE (8683) or 208-272-902).  More details at the site.

Also from the site, I got the code to modify for a state-level report:

Folks who haven’t used Twitter can start today, using the how to help page.  I’d never used hashtags before — keywords with # in front of them — but Twitter’s eager to have folks do so:

Including “#votereport” in your tweet is enough to get your report tracked by Twitter Vote Report. But the more details you can stuff in, the better. So, for example, include in your Twitter post:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

Since I work from home, I’m able to pick my time to vote… and with this nudge, I’ll report via Twitter when I do.

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An afterthought: last election, there were about 1875 voters registered in my precinct — I wonder how many of them are on Twitter?

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Afternoon update: We walked to the precinct. I checked the time as we entered the community center: 1:13 pm. I didn’t recognize a single election judge, so the whole crew may have turned over since I was a chief judge in this precinct in 2006. I stopped to chat with one of the chief judges on the way out; even with that, eight minutes, from entry to exit. We were back home at 1:31.

The check-in judge did tell me that they’d been busy up to about 30 minutes earlier.

Jeff Cobb of Mission to Learn notes via Facebook that someone at Wired thinks you shouldn’t blog any more:  Paul Boutin writes that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.

I’ve never been a fan of Wired; it’s like the love child of Fast Company and Martha Stewart Living. To me, it’s full of people who don’t think you’re doing things right and all too eager to straighten you out. With that disclosure out of the way…

Boutin sounds a bit like the graying souls who remember how great [insert website name here] used to be — you know, before [insert point in time here]. To the extent that there are shills, opportunities, and scam-meisters behind blogs, why is he surprised? That’s what happens with technology: people start using it in ways that you didn’t expect.

Can’t you just hear copyists in England bitching and moaning about how great publishing was before William Caxton set up that damned printing press?

Just because entire cable channels shriek about attractive  young white women who’ve disappeared doesn’t mean you should stop watching television.

Boutin says that “the time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.”  As a comment to his article notes, “You used a long blog post to announce the death of blogging? There could be some baby in that bathwater…”

I don’t think I even want to know how Boutin defines “better spent.” How is this snit different from saying, “You oughta be watching Henry IV (Part One) instead of Dancing with the Stars?”

Or vice-versa?

He focuses on the fact that the top 100 Technorati sites are dominated by professionals. If your burning ambition is to have a two-digit Technorati ranking, then you’ve got a lot of flacking to do.  (You’re also way too busy to read my blog.) Otherwise, have some coffee and relax.

It’s true, as Boutin points out, that blogs made self-publishing easy. And sites like Flickr or YouTube make it easy to public visual or audio material.

Still, although he says that the real appeal of Twitter is brevity, it took him over 600 words to say that. (That’s a standard op-ed column size, by the way; he’s not exactly trailing clouds of innovation across the digital sky.)  Based on character count, he could have managed it in 28 tweets — but that wouldn’t suit Wired, which I assume pays by the article and not by the Twitter volume.

To me, Boutin is confusing the product (blog posts) with the process (communicating). He’s also paying way too much emphasis to advertising and revenue, topics that easily turn the blogosphere into an Amway convention.

If your interest is in having conversations, rather than inviting people over so, once they’re gone, you can check under the cushions for the change they spilled , then Boutin’s “discovery” is less than startling.

Not having a blog because Robert Scoble (or Tina Brown) does is as silly has having one because he does. Blog software lets you be all about you — your interests, your opinions, your passions, your distractions. Whether anyone joins in is optional.

Printing press photo by Vlasta2.

Harold Jarche via Twitter pointed me to this video with Jay Cross. As he points out on Informal Learning Blog, it’s a demonstration of “direct to the cloud” — nobody had to save the video and then upload it.

Sun’s Charles Beckham says this feature means that making your video available becomes a kind of utility — encoding and streaming happen on the fly. (Since the video ends up on a server, it’s not exactly true that there’s no file — but it is true that you don’t have to worry about the file.)

I believe it’s the voice of Sun’s Karie Willyerd asking about the next level of applying this. She’s addressing what I think of as the lining around the cloud. Honestly, my first reaction to this demo was dismay: “Dear lord — now millions of people can crank unedited stream-of-consciousness and call it ‘online learning.’”

But nothing in this technology requires that you just shoot your mouth off, just as (Edward Tufte notwithstanding) nothing about PowerPoint requires that you bore people to death). As Beckham says toward the end of the video, “The real expert who can use Camtasia — knock it out.” I take that to mean, hey, we’ve got this tool to make it easy to publish video. Whether it’s boring video or pretty-good video or transformative video is up to you. “If we have to teach ‘em how to produce something, it’s a bug…. all we care about is the IP and the brain cells of everybody who works here.”