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October 5, 2006
Google Labs has just posted a site for searching public source code, which seems to compete with Krugle.com. I’m not in a position to evaluate the two, but (he said, evaluating them anyway) Krugle seems to have a richer set of services. In any case, here’s what Krugle users have to say about it. And, of course, it’s totally cool that the Krugle site is blogging about this. I love the way the Web encourages this type of human-ness. [Tags: krugle google]
Deval Patrick, the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts, is being attacked by his Republican rival for writing letters in support of paroling a convicted rapist, Benjamin LaGuer, who has been in jail since 1983. When a DNA test showed that LaGuer was guilty (a finding LaGuer and a bunch of DNA experts dispute), Patrick dropped his support. So, Patrick is soft on crime because he believes justice sometimes miscarries and/or because he believes in the possibility of redemption. Outrageous!
Then I saw photos of the prisoner and his erstwhile supporter.
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There’s something they have in common that I can’t put my finger on. Both in suits? Nah, that’s not it. The way they’re holding their hands? Nah. Similar haircuts? Nope.
Wait, no, it couldn’t be—dare I utter the unutterable word in this contest—race? Surely the Republican campaign wouldn’t have chosen this issue because—although I doubt they ever put it to themselves like this—it associates an African-American candidate with an African-American rapist. Why, the Republicans would never ever Willy Horton stoop so low as to imply that a Democratic candidate would fail to defend our women from those predatory, over-sexed Black men.
What I truly don’t understand is why the Boston Globe has been giving this charge the front page treatment. Why this one among all the other charges coming out of the desperate Republican campaign, some of which are on actual matters of substance? The Globe ought to be ashamed that it’s fallen for the Republicans’ plausibly-deniable racist appeal. [Tags: politics deval_patrick racism media journalism]
Steven pens a terrific column for Newsweek on One Web Day — appropriately dark for such a sunny topic. [Tags: OneWebDay Net_neutrality steven_levy susan_crawford]
October 4, 2006
Why is it that I think that Congress voting to authorize torture is a bigger scandal than Republican leadership covering up a Congressman molesting his aides?
Foley is a sick bastard preying on children entrusted to his care. What he did was wrong and illegal. But the torture “compromise” creates a new legal norm. Tortured the wrong guy? Whoops, too bad. The victim gets dropped off in a field somewhere and the torturer goes home to watch TV. Tortured the right guy? Whoops, there goes any protection for captured Americans. Whoops, there goes what’s left of America’s claim to moral uprightness. Oh well, easy come, easy go, I guess.
After 5.5 of years of unimaginable confinement and torture, John McCain can’t lift his arms higher than his shoulders. How does he justify to himself giving an inch on an anti-torture bill? Whatever claim McCain had to placing morality higher than political expediency, he just lost it. In that regard, he’s actually making Hillary look good, which takes some doing.* [Tags: foley politics torture john_mccain hillary_clinton]
*She voted for a war out of political expediency. That’s a bad thing to do. IMO.
The Green Media Toolshed Media Contact Database is a directory of journalists built by a distributed base of 20,000 volunteers and designed for use by non-profit groups. At PDF Micah Sifry interviews the founder, Martin Kearns. [Tags: media politcs everything_is_miscellaneous journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]
October 3, 2006
Mark Frydenberg of Bentley College was teaching Intro to Tech last spring for freshman who have some background in tech. He started podcasting his lectures using a pocket pc. He asks who in the room has used wikis in a classroom. Lots of hands go up. People have used them to develop a class taxonomy, to sign up for groups, and to work together. Mark also used it for people to make up questions for an exam; Mark then chose from among the questions. He also had them create a video podcast about one of the topics of the class because he wanted to know what might be useful educationally about podcasting. (It wasn’t graded. It was an extra credit project.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing. And because Mark ran this primarily as a discussion, it will come across choppier than the session was.]
This semester he’s having the students use Blogger, Feedburner and PodZinger to create the podcasts. PodZinger makes podcasts it searchable.
He found that his students would listen to a podcast of the course for 6-10 minutes. (The course podcasts were an hour and 15 minutes.) So, he asked them to make podcasts of that length about the course topics. The first were talking heads. Then they tried recording screen shots by pointing the camera at the screen, which doesn’t work very well. They found Camtasia, which works better for live screen capture. (CamStudio is an open source product that does something similar, Mark says.) As more students did their videocasts, they’d start to one-up each other, figuring out how to do picture-in-picture, etc.
“You don’t know something until you have to teach it,” he says. [Very true.] How might podcasts be used in a class, he asks us.
Phil Malone says he uses it to have law students simulate oral presentations to clients and colleagues. Rebecca MacKinnon says that it surfaces knowledge in the class beyond what the teacher knows. Mark says that because he didn’t give any guidelines about content, it helps surfaces when people don’t know some things.
He found that students weren’t tempted to skip the class and just listen to the podcast because it was clear that more was going on in the class than lecturing. He sometimes found himself repeating questions for the mic. The big thing he saw was that having students create podcasts “let the students be themselves” — the sense of humor, humility, comforting other students, etc. He notes that it added a liberal arts element to a tech course. And it aids critical thinking by requiring students to plan how they’re communicate in 7 minutes on a pocket PC screen.
Colin Rhinesmith asks if the experience changed students’ understanding of mainstream media. Mark says that they understand better what it takes, plus they had a sense of empowerment that they could put their media up in public.
Rebecca asks if this ought to be done younger as an educational tool. Mark replies that all college freshmen ought to be taught how to create podcasts and videocasts so it can be assumed that they have those skills for use in other courses.
The podcasts are available on the Web but Mark didn’t publicize them.
He shows a graph of downloads of the podcasts. They spike around exam times—he put up a review podcast instead of a review sheet. Downloads by hour: 2am was surprisingly popular. Also, right after the class was held.
Phil asked what Mark learned that he will apply next time. Mark says he’ll continue to use Feedburner and PodZinger. He wants to have people comment on one another’s podcasts. Video was the right way to go.
He also has his students blog.
I ask about using a wiki to have the class create a group paper, or a site that’s a student guide to the topic of the class. How would you grade it? Mark thinks and says you could give groups of four a particular topic and grade them that way.
Q: Are you making former content availble to the next class?
A: I don’t want to make them available because I want students to go through the same moments of discovery as the students did last year. I’d rather make them available afterwards. [Tags: berkman podcasts media education]
If you were asked to list all of the states in the US, which would be the last one you’d think of? And care to say where you’re from? [Added restriction, after the first three entries: You have to think of this state without actually listing them for yourself. That is, which would be the last you list, not which is the last you list.] [Tags: puzzle absurdities doep]
October 2, 2006
Ethanz’s got an important post that says (roughly) those touting citizen journalism have spent too much time talking about the utility of having citizen reporters in spots where professionals reporters may not be and not enough time talking about citizen journalists as an enormous pool of expertise on topics regardless of geographic position.
Bingo and baddabing! Ethanz’s example is of the lost opportunity to call on people around the world with mathematical expertise to explain the substance of Grigoi Perelman’s proof of Poincaire’s conjecture.
The miscellaneous world is reorganizing itself largely around topics because that’s a—the?—fundamental unit of interest. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman citizen_journalism journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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