It’s official. Xtranormal is a great little online tool for composition courses, particularly if your course emphasizes the conversational nature of academic writing.

After contemplating the use of Xtranormal in my composition course for about a year, I offered students the option of creating an Xtranormal script and video in lieu of two low stakes assignments. Working in groups, students who opted for the video project produced two-minute videos that put Malcolm Gladwell, Sherry Turkle, and Nathan Rott into conversation on the issue of social media and social action.

Writing effective source-based papers with a strong dose of argument is a tough task for college freshmen. Producing animated videos that put texts into conversation can actually reduce the level of complexity involved in getting the argument rolling. On top of figuring out the texts, locating moments of connection, and putting the texts together in the service of a position or view, students need to wrestle with effective integration of texts, a balance of quotation, paraphrase, and summary, documentation style, organization, and sentence construction. It takes a full term (or two) for students to become even somewhat proficient at juggling all these elements, and it can be frustrating for them. Their ideas and readings can quickly outpace their ability to represent their views in the structure of the academic paper. Here’s where Xtranormal is a great tool.

Xtranormal uses Flash and text-to-speech technology to enable novice movie makers to produce animated videos online.

Students prepare a script that puts a couple characters in a scene and sets them in a conversation. When students have to use some of the language of the texts they’re reading as they develop the script, they really begin to do some of the hard work of academic thinking. Xtranormal is fun because the author chooses characters, a voice, a background, camera angles, sound effects, and more.

The major drawback, really, is Xtranormal’s revenue model. Rather than offer a free, ad-supported version for those unwilling to purchase the characters and sets, Xtranormal teases creators by providing seed money to make the first video. There is an education discount that puts the tool within some teachers’ budgets, but it’s likely that most students would have to work with a limited set and character selection to work in the budget of the teaser film. (Home economics for digital production?)

Xtranormal was optional this term. I think I’ll require a project of this sort next term.

I finally sat down and started some serious work on a print stylesheet for Across the Disciplines. While there are some kinks in the general printout, and I’m certain that tables, figures, and some other visual elements aren’t going to print so cleanly in the current version, The print version of the journal’s articles are far more attractive than they were just a few days ago.

We’re hiding header graphics and nav, and are actually restyling headings for a black-and-white document. Hanging indents in the References are now carried over into the print articles. And more.

I had planned to write a print CSS for Across the Disciplines soon after I recoded the journal for XHTML 1.0 Transitional back around 2007 or 2008. It had been on the agenda for quite some time. It seemed that every time I thought I’d turn some attention to what is really a fairly straightforward project I found myself working on some other part of the site.

Most recently, I thought I’d finally write the stylesheet in December 2010. But then I spent a good bit of late December and January ensuring that the articles in the journal complied with HTML5 standards following a major site-wide overhaul of The WAC Clearinghouse.  The result is a site that will certainly remain compliant for some time since HTML5 is still just a draft specification. But that work really left little energy for CSS coding.

Lesson: Write a damn print CSS at the same time you write the screen CSS. It’s easy enough to do and it’s possible that readers will thank you for saving color ink, whitespace, and paper.

This is my second attempt at a POV video of a Mount Agamenticus ride. The first attempt involved a great 25-degree cold weather ride, but the cam was pointed at the ground and one could get no perspective.  On this second attempt, I tried to get the cam mounted in a better position.  Things start out ok, but the duct tape/bubble gum rig I have set up just seems unable to hold the cam in the right position. All the bouncing over rocks doesn’t help.

The audio for this video is courtesy of Youtube’s Audio Swap feature. Apparently, I wasn’t careful enough with fair use in dropping in my own music; Youtube graciously deleted the audio associated with my original before publishing the project. (Thanks, I think.)

The Rig

HTC Evo mounted to a plastic lightswitch cover using zip ties and o-rings. That apparatus is then mounted to the decent quality helmet mount for my night light rig. But the weight of the phone seems to be too much for the little adjustment hinge on the night light rig.

The Ride

I like this challenging little ride. The first part involves a decent climb up the west side of Mt. A, and around to the north. It’s mostly a wide double-track, but there are plenty of decent boulders, slippery wet washouts, and some serious roots to ride. On a dry day it’s 100% doable, provided you’ve got the legs and lungs to take it. In the video, it’s pretty clear that things are very wet and loose. The decaying leaves complicate matters by hiding the treacherous stuff that’ll cause the rear wheel to give way, the front end to stall on a big root, or worse.

The video doesn’t capture the ride to the summit because I skipped that part of the ride that day. It does capture the easterly descent from Mt. A and over to Second Hill. That’s a hairy downhill section with some sizable 2′ drops off boulders that head right into a tangled nest of roots and loose rocks, followed by some nice technical switchbacks that head to Porcupine and Second Hill.

The ascent of Second Hill is another good little workout that’s about 95% doable, at least when it’s mostly dry. I’ve done this hill about 15 times and I have yet to pull up the last little piece of rock to get clear to the summit.  Mostly, it’s because it’s a near vertical face, but there’s also the thigh burn to contend with by that point. Descending Second Hill on the north side is a fun section because it isn’t quite as rocky and root-infested as so much of the other hills, at least until you get near the bottom. At the bottom, there’s a pretty serious washout and root-laden section that’ll draw some blood if a tire slips out at the wrong time. In the video, there’s a nice foot-deep puddle marking the end of the descent. I’m sure some folks have wiped out there and gotten wet. Thankfully, I’ve avoided that problem.

There’s some nice, somewhat challenging up and down riding on the way back over to Mt. A, and I actually wish there were more of that sort of terrain on my ride. And then it’s a good backtrack up the mountain and down the northwest side to the parking lot.

My friend Daniel and some of his colleagues have been hard at work on a really important documentary about development in New York. Having done a lot of the hard work behind the documentary, they’re now at a financial impasse.  They need additional money to be able to purchase rights to some of the archival footage they want for their documentary.

To help generate funds for this important next stage of their project they’ve turned to Kickstarter, a really interesting crowdsource-based fund-raising tool. And they’ve created a trailer to both set up the context for their project and to solicit donations.

The clock is ticking. Consider a pledge.

Last April, at the Northeast Writing Across the Curriculum Consortium (NEWACC) Steering Committee meeting at Boston University, I agreed to work with Mike Palmquist at the WAC Clearinghouse to get a NEWACC site up and running by the upcoming NEWACC meeting at Quinnipiac University. NEWACC was imagining a website within the Clearinghouse, as well as a blog. Ideally, this would run in a single tool, a CMS with a blog built into it. I started thinking WordPress because of its strong blog platform and its functionality as a CMS. (Obviously, that’s not the only option.)

Unfortunately, the Clearinghouse didn’t have the back end apparatus to host any of the popular blog platforms. And there were concerns about security in a PHP/MySQL setup. At first it looked like a unified solution would not be possible. But Mike is a great guy who is willing to push the boundaries a bit.  He told me they were experimenting with virtual servers for local projects at Colorado State. After a few months of testing, in mid-September Mike got a virtual Windows Server up and running, with IIS on it.

WordPress on Windows?  Hmm. Generally, Windows and PHP with MySQL don’t even belong in the same sentence. My first response was, “This won’t work.” Then I thought, “This won’t work without major hacks, patches, and a major months-long headache.” Surprise!

6 Hours Later…

WordPress is notable for its famous “5-minute installation” instructions. Right in the instructions are guidelines for installing WP on Win. Microsoft has a FREE (yes, free) product called MS Web Platform Installer that makes relatively quick work of all this headache. Get it installed on your server and you can manage all the app downloads and installations through checkboxes and a GUI.  Sweet!

It wasn’t quite that simple, though I have to take some of the blame because of my lack of knowledge.  I didn’t know there was something called IIS until I started trying to run a tool built to run on Apache on a Windows Server.  It took a couple meetings with some web folks at UNE (Al and Neal, thanks!) before I started to get a handle on the Windows Server/IIS thing. My internet access in Maine is pretty spotty, and this really limits file transfer speeds. The first installation of WP went into a subdirectory, and so it was in the wrong place.  And the FTP access wasn’t activated on the server until after I poked around.What is amazing to me is that it’s running at all. And it is!

WP 3 as a Network

The new power of WordPress 3 is that it can run multiple blogs in a single installation. It’s important to activate this feature within 30 days of an installation. I don’t know if NEWACC will have a use for this feature, but if we don’t do it now we’ll find it harder to handle down the road.  So I took on this piece as well.  I found instructions for Network activation on a Windows installation of WordPress at Laura Gentry’s site. Smooth as silk.

Next Steps

4.5 months into the project we’re set up with server space at Colorado State. We have a virtual server running WordPress 3, a platform that will integrate the NEWACC website with the NEWACC blog, and a tool that can actually scale up to host multiple blog or sites over time. I can now turn my attention to the thing I agreed to do in April.  I can start to build the website for NEWACC!

Lehman College/CUNY - May 8, 2009

Marc Prensky of Games2Train, keynote speaker for the 2009 CUNY General Education Conference held at Lehman College/CUNY, had the audacity to declare that we should rename general education, from General Education to Future Education. (Oh, Boy!)

Prensky didn’t explore the implications of this notion for an important component of the historical mission of higher education. Is history no longer important in Future Education? What of the arts? His comment was a throwaway of sorts.

The surprising thing about Prensky’s comment is that people didn’t gasp, particularly since most in the audience reported that they had never seen the video, “A Vision of Student’s Today,” by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch.

Explosion of YouTube

“You can learn anything you need to learn about software on YouTube.” (Marc Prensky, May 8, 2009)

“Video is the new text.” (Mark Anderson. Qtd. by Prensky May 8, 2009)

I found Prensky’s claim that you can learn anything you need to learn about software on Youtube particularly intriguing.  My own exploration of interface literacy development through screencasting software tutorials is an effort to tap into and to build on this trend.  There are, of course, many challenges to this viral aspect of learning.  As Prensky put it, “Education is not something you can do to students; we need to do it with them.”

Here’s a hitch: There’s an aspect of boundary crossing here when educators attempt to use twitter, or post “classwork” on YouTube.  What space is left for students if we’re going out and reaching them where they are?  One thinks of Spicoli the surfer/stoner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Mr. Hand’s decision to show up at his house at the end of the term to teach him history so he can graduate. OUCH!

Prensky’s Binarisms?

I was struck by the series of binarisms in Prensky’s presentation.  I found them quite productive for explorations of his idea that we need to “balance” or to meet in the middle of these divides. Of course, they have all the problems one often finds in binaries. They invite misunderstanding, and cultivate a “divide” that doesn’t really exist.

• Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants
• Verbs/Nouns
• After School is Pulled by Kids/School is Pushed on Kids

We can see this binary approach in his early work on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (http://www.marcprensky.com/). Intriguingly, Prensky was critical of this binary because it has been taken wrong. I don’t find this surprising; binaries often set up misunderstandings.

Today Prensky offered up a couple additional binaries: Verbs vs. Nouns and Pull vs. Push Learning.

When it comes to technology we seem to quickly focus on the nouns, the actual software.  Prensky suggested that we shift to a focus on verbs. The nouns will change (MS Word to Open Office, from email to texting), but the core verbs remain. No matter the noun, we’re really after presenting (Powerpoint? Youtube?), communicating (Outlook? MySpace?), and learning (Blackboard? Mediawiki? Drupal?) As Prensky put it, “We want students using the best, most up to date nouns (tools) for each verb (skill).”

As Prensky put it, his notion of Future Learning (the new General Education?), is built on another binary. School learning is being “pushed on kids,” while after school learning is being “pulled by kids.” Prensky wants us to reach out and learn how students are engaging in this after school learning. Peer-to-peer, self-directed, even just-in-time learning are all elements of this “pull” learning Prensky advocates.  The counterweight to this approach is the top down approach, the sage on the stage, and the lecture format.  One of Prensky’s slides reported that a high school junior told him, “My teacher thinks she’s awesome because she made a Powerpoint.”

Audience Commentary

Unfortunately, Prensky did not leave time for a structured Q&A following his presentation.  Only audience members who interjected during the talk were able to ask questions.

• These are not really “our” students at CUNY. We have older students, students who want a more traditional education, and students who want the class as a space away from this tech stuff.
• Keyboarding is a skill that is needed for all of these technologies.

It fascinates me that we have the technological capability to make documentation and reporting easier through single-source production, and yet our 20th (19th?) century thinking prevents us from taking advantage of the potential.

Example

Faculty at CUNY are now required to enter their scholarly/creative activity into a CUNY web-based reporting system. As almost anyone can quickly recognize, this is yet another report piled on top of existing reporting.

As far as I can tell, there was no consultation with individual colleges on the design of this system and the potential integration of the system with local college online reporting systems. The result is an expectation that we’ll take the time to “repeat” our reporting in multiple systems.

Why would anyone embrace technology if it means writing, re-writing, and re-writing the same text in multiple systems? The embrace of technology just seems idiotic in that kind of context. Copy-Paste works, but it really doesn’t take advantage of the wonders of the database.

Fortunately, we have a responsive web team on campus. When I brought this new “report” to their attention, we were able to begin work on a mechanism to push the data entered in our local systems to the CUNY system.

The setup is not nearly as seamless as it might be. But it’s a whole lot better than what would otherwise be the case.