And He Blogs

Image by Andrew Feinberg via Flickr

How’s that title for an attention grabber? It basically translates to saying, unless you’re a bad parent, you should drop what you’re doing and pay attention. In blogs, newscasts, and almost everywhere else that you turn we hear the warnings. Scary warnings about food, travel, drugs, and now the de rigueur warning about the hazards of the Internet and [insert dramatic music here] Internet Predators. The latest example is by way of Will Richardson who points to an incident that happened in a Wyoming high school. An officer from the nearby Cheyenne Police Department came to the school and spoke to students about the dangers of predators on the Internet. He used MySpace as an example of where students post their personal pictures and therefore leave themselves vulnerable to those bad people watching out there. Now, while there is some debate about what the officer actually said. Richardson’s point that it is the absolutely wrong approach is right on. He has a suggestion:

Go to your principal or superintendent right now and ask her/him this: Would you really rather have your students learn about safety online from some “authority” figure who drops in and attempts to make them fearful, or from people who they know and trust and see every day in their classrooms who over the course of time in appropriate and balanced ways can educate them instead?

Now I know a few police officers, good men and women all, but I know that their perspective is somewhat clouded by the fact that they see the end result of the "bad Internet". To them it must look mostly bad. So this fear approach to Internet safety doesn’t work any better than other types of "scared straight" education. This results in nothing more than articles like this one from 2003, which starts out like a bad novel. "Christina Long’s life was full of promise." I mean for cripes sake, what purpose does this serve? Christina Long was indeed the victim of a crime, but the Internet was no more of a perpetrator than violent TV, or slash and burn video games. Another example is this pitiful article from Katherine Ramsland.  After referencing the story about Christina Long, she refers to a June 2006 article in Science News:

[The] article reports that nine in ten adolescents utilized Internet resources in 2004, and at least fifty percent went online every day. A lot of them are contacted by predators seeking a viable contact whom they can draw into their net. Most predators have a number of fetishes and paraphilias, so for some, almost any kid who responds will do.

Guess which part of that paragraph were Ms. Ramsland’s words (hint, they’re in bold), because they are, in fact, wrong. Watch the PBS Frontline program Growing Up Online and see how the teenagers talk much more rationally about online life than the adults. Maybe we need to correct some of their laissez faire attitudes, but for the most part they know where the good Internet ends and the bad one begins.

So what is a good source of information that is easily digestible and dispels the myths of online predators? Well, start with the Crimes Against Children Research Center’s fact sheet from the University of New Hampshire. A quick read of this resource will demonstrate loud and clear how much hype there is when it comes to Internet dangers. Kids know when they’re being lied to, especially when we try to scare the crap out of them.

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Why not get some onsite video when you visit a place in Google Earth? The

Google Lat Long blog announced yesterday that if a YouTube uploader "geotagged" a video in YouTube, a Google Earth user can see videos associated with that specific place. The example above shows a video from the observation deck of the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario. It’s another interesting way to see the world.

I’ve added the location information to a video of the Jepson Science Center (an "exciting" video from a project a while back). I don’t know if there is supposed to be a delay and will eventually be added to Google Earth, but as of this morning (16 hours later) it has not shown up. I reserve the right to have screwed something up, so we’ll see.

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I have a new and blossoming relationship, with a blog editor, and it’s from . . . gulp . . . Microsoft. I’m trying not to feel icky about it, and that’s not hard because there is so much to like about Windows Live Writer. It’s a cinch to set up the connection to your blog, even Wordpress blogs (single and multi-user versions). You can have multiple blog connections and switch between them effortlessly. If you ever want to get to the dashboard of your blog, there is a link that you click (labeled Manage Weblog) that will get you to your admin pages.

You can insert hyperlinks and images with ease. As far as images go, you just pluck them from your hard drive and WLW handles the upload to the proper directory. You have lots of control of the appearance of the images, even the ability to add effects and watermarks. You can also insert tables, as well as maps from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

Finally, inserting video is extremely easy. Just plug in the URL that’s provided and it will show you a preview. YouTube and Google video work, as I’m sure many others do. There is another, separate tab for Microsoft’s Soap Box video site. Anyway, did I mention that adding video was easy?

What I’ve mentioned so far is what comes with a standard install of WLW. You can also add "plug-ins" (what a quaint little term). There are plug-ins for adding Flickr images, ink from a tablet PC, even SnagIt screen captures.

All of your categories are available to you from a drop-down menu, and you can add categories too. You can also get a live preview of your post and see how it will look in your blog, and even preview and print out your blog post. I’ve installed WLW on a Windows Vista and XP machine, though it is a part of a Windows Live "suite" install (programs like Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery, also worth a look). The experience that I have had with WLW blows away anything I’ve tried previously, such as Flock and Performancing. So it leaves me with a dilemma. Do I avoid it because it’s from Microsoft, or do I reward the people who created this jewel and use it to make my life easier? You might begin to see which way I’m leaning.

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I had seen this information a while back about what is the best video format to upload to get the best quality playback from YouTube videos. Well, obviously there is a (corny) video to go along with the information. Boy, that DivX sure gets around.

Just to sum up, save your video with the following attributes:

* MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
* 320×240 640×480 resolution (*updated recommendation)
* MP3 audio
* 30 frames per second

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Tweet, Tweet! In Twitter talk that means I approve. TwitBin is a Firefox extension that adds a sidebar with your latest “tweets.” Install it, configure it, and you’ll see recent postings plus a field to add your own tweets. Ctrl+Shift+m will show and hide the TwitBin sidebar. Very handy, and it just works.

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I grabbed the above photo before they took it down. According to their “Direct2Dell” site, Ubuntu Linux is coming pre-installed to a Dell near you. Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux that just might be at the tipping point to provide a serious alternative to PC or Mac. And, of course, it’s free to download and install.

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In a moment reminiscent of the famous scene in The Graduate, I whispered to Jim Groom the word SimplePie. Long story short, don’t tell Jim about something new, neat, and cool, and expect him not to blog about it right away. So here is my SimplePie wiki contribution. The plugin works by making available a <feed> tag that will encompass any RSS/Atom feed URL and have it display nicely within a wiki page.

The real strength of this extension comes when used in combination with del.icio.us, especially where media files are involved. As I talked about long ago, I have a del.icio.us feed that gets ported into iTunes that is comprised of mp3 files that I mark with a “tolisten” tag. This allows me to instantly podcastify any random mp3 that I find out in cyberspace. Now, with the wiki plugin, I can share those files on a wiki page, and keep them automatically up-to-date. As Jim said, we are in the early stages of playing, but when something works this well right out of the gate, it lends itself to further exploration. SimplePie appears to be a deep cave.

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Oops! I read a comment on our Wiki/Blog mashup stating that the link to the wiki wasn’t working. Turns out the code to make the link appear as a tab at the top of the page was getting stepped on by Internet Explorer. It worked fine, of course, in Firefox. I had to specify a “class” tag when including the URL in the list item (which makes up the tab). Something like this:

<li class=”page_item”><a href=”http://umwdtlt.org/newmedia/wiki” title=”Wiki”>New Media Wiki</a></li>

Now you I.E. users can see the page in a better light. I’m still working on the footer in the Wiki displaying off-center in I.E.

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I haven’t got too much of a clue what this all means, but some of the MediaWiki Extensions (here, here, and here) that I have pointed to in recent posts now have a warning on them. So if you have your wiki wide open (where anyone can edit), you are apparently vulnerable to this type of attack. The UMW New Media Wiki is locked down so that only “sysops” can edit pages. I’ve been in contact with Jim Wilson, and he clearly knows way more about this stuff than I do. He has his own YouTube Extension that I have not tested, yet.

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Well, apparently my MistyLook/Wiki/Blog concoction was well received, so I think it’s well worth following up with a few more bits of information, and clarification. First, thanks to all who commented, especially those who weren’t sure what they were looking at really. Frankly, I would want to know too. Let me just say that from the start this was about creating a space that had a look and feel that was consistent, and at leased “loosely joined” two great technologies. It is certainly not a final answer, but a starting point. User integration, data integration, and presentation still need lots of work.

This “project” started at the end of last year when I went through the process of updating the theme to my blog. Mistylook was a finalist, but I ultimately went for Coffee Spot for a slightly more unique feel. Both of these themes, by the way, are the work of Sadish Bala, so large amounts of credit go to him for such pleasing designs.

I had been playing off and on with MediaWiki, but I had not gotten serious with it until this year. I was looking into issues with editing permissions and thoughts about vandalism, which oddly enough is that oh so delicate balance that Alan Levine barked about in reference to this MistyLook project. I also wanted to investigate the possibilities of getting video to work in MediaWiki and discovered first, the third-party extensions, and eventually the Google/YouTube extension.

Just recently I discovered the MistyLook skin for MediaWiki on the Skins Page, which was added sometime in March ‘07. The disappointment was that it was for MediaWiki 1.9.3. You know the rest of the story, but I did discover that Trevor had implemented the MistyLook theme at the University of Minnesota for a website, and it sure doesn’t look like any wiki. As I’ve said, Trevor has been a big help in all this. His suggestions keep rolling in and I’ll share more soon.

There certainly needs to be more skins made available that are based on the WordPress themes. Hopefully, that will progress sooner rather than later. So anyway thanks again, Oh Great EduWeb Community, for the encouragement. There’s more to come.

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