Turning Digital Natives into Digital Citizens

Although using the deprecated term ‘digital natives’ the topic is sensible, trying to turn young Internet-literate users into responsible digital citizens.

—

Volume 27, Number 5

September/October 2011

Turning Digital Natives into Digital Citizens

By DAVE SALTMAN

Today’s K–12 students are commonly called “digital natives” because they have grown up with digital technology. But natives can run wild, using the Internet to (wittingly or unwittingly) plagiarize others’ work or bully peers using social media.

via Harvard Education Letter.

ScoopIt as a Curation Tool

Several of my Twitter follows started using ScoopIt as a curation tool for web pages and presenting the link collections as a collage of adjacent tiles each of which shows a suitable image and a headline. ScoopIt is currently in beta but it did not take long to receive and invitation.

Immediately I liked the simple bookmarklet for capturing web pages and the effective integration with the major social networks. As is only to be expected you can share any collection you create under a suitable topic and explore other curation topics created by others. Anyone can suggest additional links for a curation topic, and for your own topic you can decide whether to add the suggestions or not. Key page links from other topics can be rescooped into your own topics which is a handy feature and another measure of popularity.

The stats feature gives you an indication of how popular your curation topics become. I initially chose four topics to curate:

• Cloud Apps
• Chromebooks
• Education Gallimaufry
• Technology Gallimaufry

[I was hunting in the thesaurus for an interesting word for a collection and became hooked on gallimaufry as you can see.]

As of this writing my stats look like:

The blue columns show the page links I have added to one or more curation topics and the cumulative line graph shows accesses by others. Unsurprisingly Cloud Apps is my most popular curation topic.

Apparently my efforts have earned me the right to invite others to ScoopIt but I don’t come close to my favourite topic of all which is future school by Steve Wheeler – he’s well into the thousands for views.

Host a Free Web Site from Dropbox using DropPages

I was really impressed to see an innovative service DropPages.com that allows anyone to host a free web site from one of their Dropbox folders. My very simple sample site is at mrees.droppages.com which essentially contains a copy of this post. Pages are stored in a folder in my free Dropbox account. In a gloriously simple way DropPages link to your Dropbox folder and provide you with a free public URL.

The process works like:

• You share a Dropbox folder with DropPages.com
• Changes to files in your shared folder are synced with a web server
• DropPages render your pages for your website’s visitors

DropPages provide you with a sample web site in a Zip file to populate your Dropbox folder. You can then modify the contents of the page files, templates and styles to create your own content which is what I did here. In my case I have reduced the site to just this page. The template structure is a little tricky to follow at first and the multi-column layouts need some CSS knowledge. However simpler layout are simple to introduce.

To get started according to DropPages:

• Download the sample site
• Rename demo.droppages.com to something like myname.droppages.com
• Share your folder with server1@droppages.com
• Wait for approval

There definitely are the benefits claimed by DropPages:

• Simplicity. Edit your files on your computer, save an you’re done.
• No logins. No passwords to remember. woop!
• Sharing. Need someone else to edit pages? Share the folder with them.
• Backup. Everything is synced between your computer, Dropbox and DropPages. It’s safe.
• Fast. Quick to edit, quick to render.

DropPages suggest you use the dreaded Markdown language of early wikis to format your pages. Ugh! Fortunately if your pages are in HTML (like this page) they will render correctly.

This definitely opens up a very simple way to host and maintain a simple web site. We need to thank Dave McDermid for this creation.

From Zotero to Mendeley

This is a New Year’s resolution that has actually come to pass. I have been a fan of Zotero for more than two years, a time in which Firefox was my browser of choice. By 6 months ago I had built a collection of about 800 references made so easy by the increasing capability of the Zotero Firefox extension. Zotero grew to about 2.5MB, a quarter the size of Firefox itself, as its feature list was extended. The constant updates began to be annoying especially as Firefox required restarting each time.

Like many others I used 2 or 3 different machines when building the Zotero collection, a problem since Zotero initially assumed a single, local database of references. Eventually I solved this problem by using Windows Live Mesh to synchronise the Zotero database and files between several machines (see previous post 1 and post 2).

I gorged heavily on Zotero’s excellent facility not only to store a web link reference but also to store the actual contents of a web page with all its images, styles and scripts intact. It was late in the piece that I discovered these files occupied about 700 MB on disk totalling over 70,000 mostly tiny files! No wonder Live Mesh struggled when my new netbook appeared – it took 12 hours or more to sync those files.

Zotero finally supported shared libraries and associated files but was limited to only 500 MB for free so I was stuck with Live Mesh. However another insidious development was taking place – I was becoming hooked on Google Chrome – and Zotero was only available on Firefox. In the end I turned to Mendeley which not only has shared libraries from the get go but also has desktop apps on all major platforms and a mobile presence on iOS.

Over the course of a couple of days I reduced my Zotero references down to well under 100. I discovered most references were captured web pages that:

• had content likely to be out of date
• could easily be found again by Google search
• occupied large numbers of small files
• only need their URL and title stored in a simple link database

It is clear the cost of storing captured web pages is only useful for transitory information that can later be recalled directly from local storage.

I therefore retained the bulk of the conventional references of journal papers, books, reports and similar for which Mendeley is primarily targeted. It was then very pleasing to see in Mendeley a direct import tool for Zotero as long as its database exists on the same machine on which the Mendeley desktop app is running. The only downside seemed to be that PDF files in Zotero references did not transfer automatically. Should you wish to continue using Zotero then this Mendeley tool will keep the two reference stores in sync.

In my case I bid Zotero a fond farewell even though multi-platform and smartphone support is promised.

Zotero Everywhere in the Nick of Time

I’ve been a Zotero fan for a number of years but just 10 days ago I reassessed its utility in the light of its Firefox-only access. I increasingly use Chrome and IE in addition to Firefox and I now need to create/edit references on the iPad – a Firefox desert. It was time to look for a better reference management solution.

My own use of Zotero is biased to recording web pages, literally. Zotero in creating a web link reference takes a complete copy of the page contents, HTML, style sheets, images, scripts, data files – everything. This means my roughly 1000 references occupies 900 MB across more than 70,000 folders and files! Definitely more than the 500 MB of free online storage available.

So as I have reported before I have used Live Mesh and now Live Sync to share the 900 MB across multiple machines. Unfortunately the newest beta of Live Sync (soon to be renamed Live Mesh – great job Microsoft, no) when upgraded in place has severe interface issues although the syncing still works in the background. My Zotero store with its 70,000 files is huge edge test case for Live Sync – a new machine added to the sync takes over a day to be complete!

In any case it was time to clear out old Zotero references and with a few hours work I reduced my reference store by 35% and looked around for a replacement. I had tried Mendeley and CiteULike before. However it was receiving a link from Martin Weller (@mweller) to his shared Mendeley library for his book on digital scholarship that made me look again. I discovered Mendeley to be accessible for all browsers and comes with a powerful bookmarklet with a wider range of successful reference capture particularly from the journals, open access sites, Google Scholar and the like that I tend to use.

The Windows desktop client for Mendeley is good and there is also an iPad client. Like Zotero a complete copy of a web page can be captured by Mendeley although more conveniently a single HTML file is generated rather than the plethora of tiny files in Zotero. Mendeley is designed to store PDF files from which to extract metadata so comes with 500 MB of online storage for free. My switch to Mendeley began and has been proceeding smoothly. The export of references from Zotero for import to Mendeley is near the top of my to-do list.

Then today, in the nick of time for me at least, comes the announcement of Zotero Everywhere:

Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries.

Funds from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation have made this possible.

Today we are announcing support for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, which account for 98% of the web’s usage share. Plugins for these browsers will soon allow users to add anything they find on the web to their Zotero libraries with a single click, regardless of the their browser preferences. Rather than use the Zotero pane in Firefox, users will have the new option of accessing their libraries via a standalone desktop version of Zotero, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

So I can happily continue with Zotero although it will now have to compete with a very competent Mendeley. In particular I will want to see the ‘blizzard of small files for web page capture’ problem eliminated.

Think Carefully about Self-hosted WordPress Blogs and Sites

This post has been gestating for months fuelled by the litany of frustrated tweets and posts from members of my social circles who administer self-hosted WordPress blogs. For a couple of years from the birth of my first and continuing professional blog in January 2006 I, too, supported the WordPress blogging engine on a hosting service.

As an IT academic teaching web technology I count myself a programmer and web page publisher, and have middling system admin skills. None the less I quickly became frustrated every 2 or 3 months at having to spend valuable time to update the installations of WordPress, MySQL and PHP, manage plugins, and generally to check on the health of the WordPress blogging engine. I had no real problems doing this and knew the support people of the hosting service could help out if necessary with more time spent.

Nevertheless I praise the day I switched my blog to the free WordPress.com service. Despite the WordPress blog export/import service which does successfully allow transfer of post and comment content and all metadata, the media files (images, documents) have to be transferred manually (a couple of hundred in my case). I can now concentrate fully on the content of my blog leaving the upgrades, backups, plugin checks and all other system troubleshooting to Automattic, the WordPress creators.

That today sees the emergence of this post is down to an Infograph from wpbeginner comparing self-hosted with WordPress.com blogs. The key points of comparison are well chosen but are no well targeted at the typical WordPress beginner but rather at the very very small subset who want to make money out of their blogs. Many of the comparison points assume a level of computing expertise and/or a considerable expenditure of time not available to most bloggers.

I add more important detail to some of the comparison points:

• Themes: there are 100 themes with significant customisation available from WordPress.com; detailed theme editing at the code level needs knowledge of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, WordPress page architecture and sometimes the PHP programming language, not to mention significant development and testing time
• Plugins: uncontrolled use of plugins can easily lead to conflicts requiring some programming skills to discover and correct; the 30 different types of plugin on WordPress.com are guaranteed to work together and meet most common needs
• Ads: it is true that ads on WordPress.com are banned, so you can’t use this method to generate income from your blog; ads are allowed on the paid premium service but WordPress takes half the revenue; in my view this is the only downside of WordPress.com blogs
• Site maintenance: as mentioned this needs system administration skills especially for upgrades, a backup schedule, a good knowledge of the online file management at your hosting service, and even database management skills in some cases; this is often a major imposition of time expenditure coupled with the forced learning of technical skills
• Control: the WordPress terms of service are anything but onerous if you operate a sensible blog and respect the copyright of others; a small loss of control in return for peace of mind seems a good deal to me
• Brand: promotion and information about your own brand is allowed on WordPress.com; as wpbeginner hinted, for modest fees you can use your own domain name, manage all media, customise CSS, add more space, support unlimited users and more – all supported on a free, fully supported blogging engine

Just consider examples of the types of WordPress.com blogs with business blogs highlighted:

• Personal
• Business: Professionals ranging from realtors to lawyers and stock brokers share their expertise, and to personally engage with their customers
• Schools, Non-profits, Politics, Military, Private, Sports, How-to, tips and reviews

Now I was interested to see that WordPress blogs split pretty evenly between self-hosted and free. I can’t help wondering though how many of those 9 million self-hosted bloggers wish they had the courage and time to upgrade the WordPress version or could be free of the constant upgrading, backing up and site maintenance chores. Of course hosting services provide WordPress install tools and are continually improving them to ease WordPress management but in my experience upgrading is not nearly so well supported.

I therefore urge anyone considering going down the self-hosted blog route to think long and hard before taking on the system admin tasks required for self-hosted WordPress. This applies particularly to small business and the army of volunteers who create and support WordPress sites for personal use, education, sports clubs and non-profits. Check out the WordPress.com terms of service and advanced services carefully before rejecting this option.

Latest Numbers on Students and Ebooks

Back in October 2009 I posted some simple stats I had collected about how students support the use of ebooks. When marking my recent mid-semester exam for a new core subject, Knowledge Society, with 162 students I was able to collect more data. The students were asked if they favoured the use of ebooks or not, and asked to give reasons for their choice. As before the students are drawn from all faculties in my university.

The results for August 2009 (N=372) and June 2010 (N=162) are:

The gap between students for and against is widening as might be expected as ebooks become more widely available and the number of different ereader devices grows. These results are probably biased somewhat because the main resource for this new subject is a CD-ROM consisting of individual chapters drawn from a number of different textbooks using the Cengage TextChoice service. We will move to a totally online solution for our January 2011 semester where students will be able to access and search the chapters via the web.

On this occasion I collected the reasons students put forward for their choice. I massaged reasons that occurred several times into categories for ease of display. Each advantage put forward is assumed to have the converse disadvantage for the other type of book. First the advantages of ebooks:

The the advantages of printed books:

The arguments for and against are well known and the above bar charts are only of interest in the relative frequencies at which the arguments are put forward. Some of the reasons put forward in favour of printed books such as threats to authors rights, reading affect on eyes, familiar feel of pages, putting publishing staff out of work, show a distinct lack of knowledge of modern ereaders.

Probably the only reason that was missed by all in favour of printed books was that they can be easily loaned and/or sold to others. Also it appeared many students assumed they would be expected to read ebooks on their laptops, netbooks and mobile phones where they can be constantly interrupted with emails, social media and other alerts. This is a significant benefit of Kindle-like dedicated devices, the ability to be cut off when reading.

I look forward in anticipation to the numbers from next year’s question.

Slide Presentations and the iPad

On 5 June I attended Barcamp Brisbane 5 which was by far the best Barcamp in SE Qld to date. As usual for a barcamp I was working on a few slides on Cloud Computing with less than a day to go. I contemplated presenting my slides from my iPad acquired just a week earlier and even bought an iPad to VGA cable the night before in Brisbane. As it transpired my confidence left me and I used PowerPoint 2010 on my trusty Samsung netbook instead.

Since then I have been experimenting with slide presentations on the iPad. In part this was triggered by a post I recalled from Jane Hart about iPad presentations and MightyMeeting. I used my Cloud Apps Ascent slide deck (Office Live public link) from the barcamp as the example presentation. It should be admitted this does use the excellent PowerPoint SmartArt feature quite heavily. In particular the last slide uses a Stacked Venn diagram from SmartArt and should appear as shown.

So I followed Jane’s lead and acquired the free MightyMeeting iPad app and uploaded the sample slides. MightyMeeting converts PowerPoint slides to images and worked perfectly for every slide.Verdict: MightyMeeting is very good and has a couple of extra features of note: you can upload slide shows and download then by email, and conduct online meetings sharing the slides amongst participants. Great!

Jane’s updated post mentioned Slideshare Mobile so I tried that next. Slideshare is one of my favourite Web 2.0 apps and the upload was no problem from a PC, and my Slideshare presentation functions flawlessly in Firefox, IE8 and Chrome. I accessed this Slideshare presentation in iPad Safari, and was pleased to see the first slide showing well in Slideshare Mobile. Sadly the content of a couple of slides didn’t display at all and appear as a twinkling question mark.

Worse the slides with the missing content are different each time I visit this presentation in Slideshare Mobile. Sadly this means that Slideshare Mobile is not yet at production quality.

My next obvious next step was to purchase Keynote for iPad, something most owners will inevitably want to do. Keynote imported my slides quickly but suffered some blooper conversions, a couple shown here:

The inverted arrow text is on the left and Keynote’s attempt at a Stacked Venn on the right. Of course Keynote is very effective in creating slides from scratch but it’s PowerPoint conversions need more work. As well as storing the presentation in Keynote format or PDF via file sharing locally on the iPad, Keynote can send presentations by email or to the free iWork server that offers 1 GB of free storage in the current beta version. It was disappointing to see that a 620 KB PowerPoint file is eventually uploaded to iWork as 5.2 MB, an 8-fold increase. The transfer time to and from iWork is definitely noticeable over 3G.

Finally I gave the free Office Live a try on the iPad not really expecting a positive outcome. Having uploaded the slides to Office Live I visited my account on iPad Safari to find the folders and files work well. Clicking on the slide show eventually leads to a Thumbnail Index, a narrow list of 5 slides at a time in perfect format for small mobile phone screens. Pressing a thumbnail shows one complete slide per Safari page with navigation controls.

As you might expect Office Live converts all PowerPoint slides perfectly. This ability to round-trip – upload to Office Live, do simple edits, and download again- is a significant benefit of the Office Web Apps missed my many reviewers. The slide shown uses a Vertical Block List and is another example of a format that Keynote currently can not support.

So my journey through some of the obvious possibilities of the support of presentations on iPad has left me with mixed feelings. To exploit my large collection of PowerPoint presentations, and when I need to make full use of power of SmartArt, it looks like MightyMeeting is currently the answer with SkyDrive and Office Live a close second. However we can assume Keynote will improve over the coming months and my investment will doubtless prove its worth.