Blogs: Vitacora y Edgeek

I starting reading Henry Jenkin's blog a while back and he refers to very interesting things. In one of his latest posts he recommended a novel by Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, and I picked it up on the author's site, ready for my iPhone with a CC license. I also ordered a print copy from Amazon. I just wanted to check it out first. It was a very fun read. I just finished it that same day. It's not too long. It got me thinking about how it could be used in school... I'll not go through convincing the English teachers to assign it (I'm convincing every teacher of doing lots of new stuff with computers), but it would be a fun book to teach (by a geeky teacher). I felt it was sort of instructional, as it explained encryption (back to Turing and the Enigma) and dealt with some interesting privacy and security issues. It also got me thinking again about encrypting mail and IM conversations, and hiding my Internet traffic... yeah, I know, a little paranoid, but encryption of mail is not a bad idea though tough to implement. Thinking of the school, I could do it with the teachers that have their own laptop, but not with the others, getting them to use pgp with their school-issued gmail accounts and FireGpG or enigmail... stop rambling...

Totally recommended read... that was the point. I yet have to look at the educator's guide that comes with it.

I have to change my approach to blogging. This isn't working anymore. Last post was end of April. I keep trying to write too long... too elaborate for the kind of time I have available for blogging. I will change the approach. I will post short mostly... comments on things I see or read, but won't try to elaborate too much. Sometimes I will.

I'd seen this video a while a back thanks to Qadmon, but I can't remember if was a blog post or some face to face exchange. Anyway... our librarian sent me a link to Copysouth which reminded me of Lawrence Lessig's TED Talk and the Fair use parody video. To remind myself and my readers of both videos , you can watch them below ("embed" is awesome and Wordpress 2.5.1 is working wonders):

Lessig's Ted Talk (from Ted Talks site):

Fair use parody video (from Youtube):

Last Friday I had a very interesting talk with a guy called Pablo Arrieta, a teacher at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. I didn't agree with many of his views, but I pretty much just let him talk without controversy (it'll come some other time), since it wasn't a debate but a conversation with students, where he was the guest speaker and I was just part of the audience. Mostly, he showed some cool tools. Among them was Scribd, of which I'd read in Stephen Downes blog as well as Jay Cross'.

It seems interesting for online publishing, especially when you don't have time to do all the design and have a Word (or the like) document you want to show inside a browser window.

Here's as example of what it looks like displaying one of the documents Jay uploaded:

I got to this video thanks to Vickie Davis' blog. She is putting together a list of videos that show some of the things we technology advocates-enthusiasts preach. This video seems to be inspired in the M. Wesch's "A vision of students today". Here's the video: (thanks Vickie, I'm looking forward to the full collection).

As I did last semester, I am teaching a class at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the school where I went to. I decided to call it the same as last semester, even though some things have changed thanks to the feedback I got from students last semester. I am also gonna experiment working with Knowledge Forum; Learning in Motion lent me a trial database they are hosting themselves. (Thanks Marlene!) I can only use it this semester, but it's a great oportunity. I bet I could try and convince some people at the University to help me lobby for a site license or something. Not easy in a public university bureaucracy, but I'll give it a shot by showing what my students did with it (fingers crossed). You can take a look at the syllabus by going to the Wikispace I created for it:  http://cmta.wikispaces.com.

All feedback welcome through here or there. And this time I'll try and keep my promise of updating this blog with posts from the class.