And He Blogs

I thought about several ways to begin this post, and I was hoping the title wouldn’t scare people off thinking that I was going to vent. No, it’s not that kind of air. It’s actually Adobe’s AIR, or Adobe Integrated Runtime (yes, I’ll just use AIR from now on). AIR has actually been around for well over a year now. I first used it at the 2007 Faculty Academy here at UMW for a program called Twittercamp, which is a program that would aggregate “tweets” from Twitter and display them on a screen (preferably a large flat panel screen). Alan Levine and I have been using it for the conferences we’ve been involved in the past two years, including this year’s Faculty Academy and the NMC event in Princeton. AIR programs function like Flash programs do on the web, only you download them to your computer. You first need the Adobe AIR “runtime” program, then you can install and use all of the AIR apps you want, even use them simultaneously. There’s no need to open a web browser to use these programs.

The question for a while now has been is it worth downloading the AIR “player” and then installing the individual programs? Is there anything compelling out there to use? I can now say that it’s a definitive YES! The point of these programs is that they are small, and quickly installed. To use the programs, they require that you have a live connection to the Internet, but they function on the idea of working “in the cloud“. So after you get Adobe AIR installed on your computer, go install the following programs:

TweetDeck - I’m getting the feeling that this is going to be the next “must have” program, next to using Twitter of course. TweetDeck is one of the many (thousands?) Twitter intermediaries that pull in Twitter posts (tweets) and display them in a unique way. It’s still in early beta (0.151b as of this writing), but it already has some uniquely great features. It allows you to get a handle on how tweets get viewed. TweetDeck sets up as many columns as you need to view your tweets how you want to. The first column is usually the “all tweets” column, but you can move the columns around. You can set up groups by picking individuals that you follow and giving that group a name. Then you see their tweets in another column. You can create another column that is a search term. I used the term “edupunk” and now I get a column that updates automatically with tweets that have the word edupunk in them. You can have still more columns with replies to you, or direct messages. A recent new feature is the ability to collapse the view to a single column. I expect great things from this program.

Adobe Media Player - Now you might be saying, “who needs another media player?”, and you’re right. However, this is well done, and if you use Adobe software on a regular basis, there is enough Adobe content to make it worth it. Add to that clips from TV shows and some “HiDef” content, and it makes for a worthwhile download.

Destroying Flickr - OK, I don’t get why there’s the hostile name because DF is all about a pretty interface for viewing Flickr photos. Photos just look better on a dark neutral grey background, as opposed to Flickr’s all too white web page. Again, it’s a quick install of an Adobe AIR program and you have the many viewing options, called canvases. It remembers where you have been and saves those views in a history, called workspaces. You also have control of uploading and downloading photos to and from your Flickr account.

If you want to check out other AIR applications go to freshAIRapps and see just what the potential for the AIR platform is. Note: Because of a current negotiation with Adobe of the use of AIR in their website’s domain, another location for the FreshAIRApps may be at Refreshingapps.com.

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This is a post that I’ve been contemplating for a while and it will not just be a rant, but offer some advice for fixing issues with Windows Vista. I’ll also offer a little perspective to Microsoft’s new OS, something lacking in today’s blogospheric culture. It took an article in PC World to say enough is enough. That and the fact that today marks the last day you can purchase Windows XP in retail stores. In their latest issue, PC World declares Windows XP as one of their top products of 2008. OK, I get it. Very funny. XP is better than Vista - it’s “leaner, meaner and less bloated than Vista” says PC World. Let me give you one advantage that XP has over Vista. There weren’t any blogs around when XP was released. If there were, you would have seen the same gnashing of teeth that you see with Vista’s release. Today, what you have is a cacophony of users, mostly repeating the meme of Vista is a disaster/nightmare/abomination, the “worst version of Windows ever”. I’ve even heard the comparison to Windows ME. Meanwhile, a bizarre love affair with XP has begun.

Now I admit that I was ready to blame Vista for certain problems I was having. As I pointed out then, there were some audio issues that needed to be ironed out. There also was some weird behavior in the copying function, which has since been corrected with Service Pack 1. However, I have been mostly happy with Vista. I upgraded my Toshiba Tablet PC because XP was giving me fits. (I now believe, by the way, that the computer itself was a big part of the problem). So what’s so good about Vista? Well, let’s start with what was Windows XP’s biggest problem.

Security. It’s better in Vista. Have you read all the headlines about Vista being a security risk, and all of the people hacking Vista? Me neither. However, this has actually been turned into a complaint, with a generous amount of help from Apple with their “switching ads”.

“Oh, this sucks. Now my computer is too secure.” Like it or not, more people are trying to hack Windows. More than 90% of the people using computers in the world are using Windows PCs. User Access Control (UAC) can be frustrating. It can, and possibly should be tweaked. But compare it to XP. For XP to be functional, with the need to install plug-ins for web browsers, and the need to do other system file manipulation, it’s almost essential that it be used in admin mode. Not a good idea. Vista forces you to use a computer in protected mode. The additional (and maybe excessive) prompts are the trade-off for more security.

There are lots of other good things about Vista, not the least of which addresses the complaint of XP’s “Fisher Price” interface (remember that one?). Vista looks good and it functions very well on a relatively new PC. Search and indexing are much improved in Vista. Partitions are easily resized. It has very good Tablet PC support with much better handwriting recognition. It has very good built-in voice recognition. It does a much better job of isolating programs that have crashed, so that they don’t freeze the computer. Vista Media Center is much improved. And so on.

What will happen to Vista from here on out? Well, it will grow on people. Drivers will be improved and programs will be updated to run better on Vista. A majority of problems with Vista lie in poorly written drivers and software, and not with Vista itself. Sure, I want Vista to work better. I want it to work great. So in that spirit, here are some tips to get you there:

Ed Bott’s “Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time“, and

Vista Tweaks Part 1 & Part 2.

And here is some nice perspective on the similarities to when Windows XP was the new kid on the block:

Hasta La Vista, Windows XP

There I feel better.

UPDATE: After I published this, I noticed that Ed Bott had posted an audio interview with Larry Magid of CBS News, talking about XP’s last day and whether Vista is a worthy upgrade.

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Fellow Virginian and IT person David Carter-Tod wrote a post that was spot-on about setting a tone for customer service at a Comcast office. It’s the kind of post that maybe we all imagine writing while we’re standing in line thinking about how things work, or don’t. Well, as you can see, David wrote, and it doesn’t look like it took too long for Comcast to read it and respond. I had heard that Comcast has been lurking around Twitter, looking for these kinds of issues and responding. I’m going to ask David if he can follow up and report the results. That would be Comcastic!

UPDATE: Comcast gets right on it! Well done.

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So we’re nine days on in the era of Edupunk, and it appears things are perhaps calming down, but not before some rather intense discussions, conversations and kicking over some garbage cans. Let’s see there’s Jim’s original post, the comments, the definition, the critique, the defense, the “narcissism”, the Wikipedia article, the other article (and the comments), and finally the end. There have been lots of arguments about what Edupunk is, whether it’s even worth talking about, along with all of the other non-productive hand-wringing and smack-downs. In less than a fortnight we’ve gone from a made up word, to a term, to an ideology (puhleeze).

Look. See the picture at the top? It’s Jim Groom. Who on earth would take this guy seriously? This is the man, your hero, that coined the term Edupunk (or is it all caps - EDUPUNK?). Need I say more? Do you know what Jim posted about right before his seminal Edupunk meme (Jim says it’s not a meme, by the way) was born. He blogged about ME. What about me? How do I fit into Edupunk? Why didn’t I take off as a meme??? Seriously.

Hey, we kind of know what “Edu” is all about. Everybody is doing their best to make a difference, trying out things, making mistakes. You know learning. “Punk” is about anger. Sometimes misplaced. Often completely irrational. There were some very ugly people associated with punk in its early days. They were angry. Angry at authority. It wasn’t productive. They would eat their own. They would self-destruct. Think the guy in the foil hat is “punk”? Seriously?

So with punk already 30+ years on, Jim started a little revival, angry at the corporate hijacking of education. Um, in case you haven’t figured it out, Jim can be a hot head. Hyperbole flows in his veins instead of blood, but he’s a good man. Someone I am glad to have here at UMW, and proud to call a friend. Someone I take great pleasure in cutting back down to size once in a while . . . OK a lot

So here’s how it kind of happened, as portrayed in a scene from one of my all-time favorite movies Sid & Nancy.

Here are all the pretenders that think they know Edupunk.

So let’s go a little lighter with the Edu-”punk” mantras. We all know education has to change. Just let’s not be punks about it.

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I just got done re-watching Sir Ken Robinson’s terrific TED Talk on creativity in education. Here is an update that expands upon creativity by talking about the power of innovation, and how we systematically suppress it in our classrooms. There IS an education revolution taking place and it is what makes my job one that gets me excited to go to work on Monday mornings. I’ll have more on these ideas of creativity and innovation soon (with thoughts of the neonatal EDUPUNK movement), but I wanted this video to make the rounds as soon as possible.

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Just a quick post on a new discovery - Photoshop tutorials from a deeply disturbed individual entitled “You Suck at Photoshop“. Definitely PG-13 and abusive, but very funny - and yet instructional.

UPDATE: YSAP returns for “Season 2″ on June 27!

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Since I’ve had a blog, I haven’t ever used it to solicit pledges for the annual MS Ride that I do. However, this year is somewhat special in that it will be my 10th year of riding for Team BRUCE (Bikers Ride Until a Cure Exists). BRUCE is actually Bruce Lowery, who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1992. Bruce’s wife Pam works here at the University of Mary Washington, and she was at one time my boss in the early days of Instructional Technology on this campus. She recruited me back in 1999, and since Lance Armstrong narrowly beat me out to lead the new U.S. Postal Cycling Team , I told her I would love to do it.

Every year when spring comes and I really think of training seriously for the 2-day, 150 mile ride, I always struggle trying to balance the end of the semester, getting ready for Faculty Academy, and training for the two consecutive 75 mile rides. Then I think of Bruce, who struggles daily with his disease, and Pam, who struggles with him. We ride from Richmond, VA to Williamsburg, VA the first day, and then back again the next. Quite by accident I have established a streak of finishing first in Williamsburg for the last 8 years (I rode a mountain bike the first year - ouch). I consider it a challenge to not just ride, but to finish it as fast as I can and push my body for about 4 hours. I’ve ridden through a lot of weather - rain, heat, and even Tropical Storm Barry just last year. We ride because it’s a little bit of suffering to highlight the larger suffering that goes on daily with people with M.S.

So in honor of my 10th ride, I’d like to take advantage of my larger network and encourage you to help me raise finds for this year’s Virginia Credit Union Ride 2008 (formerly the “Virginia Dare”). Please visit my MS Participant page and click the Donate button. You can also throw me some good vibes on May 31 and June 1. Although I will ride in any weather that they tell me is safe to ride in, I prefer sunny and about 75-77 degrees. You can also check out some photos from Bruce’s Flickr photostream.

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I usually consider myself a video guy, as well as an audio and imaging guy too. You know a New Media Specialist. So a new document publishing service shouldn’t deserve much of my attention. Unless, of course, the system enables the use of video in documents. Well, enter Calameo into the conversation and you might see why I’m excited. First, what Calameo does is allow you to share documents online, just like Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos. You can upload Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, or the equivalent in Open Office documents. PDFs and text files are also allowed. You can make your documents public or private. Once you uploaded a few documents, your Calameo home page will have that familiar file sharing look to it (again, think Flickr or YouTube). From here you have lots of possibilities to share you documents. You can embed thumbnail versions in web pages or you can invite friends via email to view your documents. There’s even a direct publishing link to aggregation services like Delicious. An RSS feed of your publications is also available.

But now for the reason, I am excited. You can embed Flash (FLV) video within documents. You can also embed Flash animations or MP3s as well. However, with video you can create a flexible document that offers all of the advantages of an online document with a video component that helps the document come alive. Viewers can then print out the document (minus the video, of course) and have a hard copy of the how-to instructions, report, or term paper (to offer some examples).

The documents use Flash technology and the viewing of an online document gives a much better experience than a PDF in Adobe Acrobat. You can zoom in and get a more detailed view, and then the view follows your mouse around the screen. It’s a much more intuitive way to see a document online and much more of a pleasure. Videos embedded in pages can be played automatically, or started with a click of the play button (which can get somewhat obscured because the controls are a bit faint). The service is in beta, but you can sign up and get an account right away. As usual I blew by the terms of service so you may want to read them before you find out you are giving away the rights to your document. There is, however, a section to add a Creative Commons license to your publications. They seem to have thought of most everything. Much more play by yours truly is in store for this service, but I can see educators who might want to share documents in a more flexible way, taking advantage of this service.

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I’ve been reading and hearing a lot lately about new video products now that NAB is going on. NAB is the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. I’m always interested in the new camcorders that get introduced. What is gaining in popularity are the h.264/MPEG4 AVC based solid-state memory card cameras. The format that they use is what is known as AVCHD. This relatively new MPEG4 format is being used in a wide variety of ways from DirectTV’s HD compression, to Blu-ray’s new HiDef disc technology, to cell phone video. The advantage of using h.264 (or any of those other names that get used) is that it results in a high quality picture in a smaller file size. For example a video using an MPEG2 format (as in a standard DVD) will require a file that is about twice the size of a file using h.264, at the same quality.

Now you’ve heard me blather on and on about that “other” MPEG4 codec known as DivX. It remains a popular format for online movies (legal, and well, not so legal), and a popular format that is include on many DVD players. Where it hasn’t caught fire is with web video, despite my excitement about it in the past. I had hopes of it being the Yang to Flash (FLV) video’s Yin, but it means a separate plugin to play DivX encoded video. Wouldn’t it be nice if a high quality format could be supported, along with Flash video, in one player/plugin.

Ever since last year, when Adobe announced the beta Flash player that supported not only FLV format, but also h.264, I had this “ideal” situation in the back of my mind. Now, as I’ve been working with video so much in the past few months, I’ve wished for a bit of consolidation. I was almost on to it when I discovered YouTube was encoding a high quality version (h.264) of their standard (FLV) video. I’ve also been wondering what format the “high quality” versions of the Great Lives videos would be, and what format would be used as the “archive” format. Finally, there was the question of how would I implement this on a website? The answer was right there. H.264!

The Jeroen Wijering Flash player is everywhere. Actually, it’s a media player, but it’s referred to as the FLV Media Player. Maybe that’s why it took me so long. It isn’t called the FLV/h.264 Media Player. So how easy was it to use? Well, thanks to Jeroen’s Setup Wizard, it was simple to do some testing. What source material to use, was the next question. How about the best looking video on the web, Apple’s Movie Trailers. I saved the trailers on my hard drive and then uploaded them back to my server, then I plugged the URL of the file into the Wizard. Wow! Gorgeous video! Alright, let’s get this into a blog post right away. So which plugin uses JW’s player? There are plenty including the WordTube and Anarchy plugins, but WordTube isn’t quite what I’m looking for because it is geared toward displaying a playlist of videos, and Anarchy uses the FLV Media Player, but not for h.264. It uses QuickTime. Don’t get me started on the crap that is QuickTime for Windows. No, the best choice for ease of use is the Viper’s Video Quicktags (VVQ). I made one modification to the Javascript code to give fullscreen capability and then produced a post using the FLV button. I filled in the URL to the h.264 video, supplied the width and height, and it was up and lookin’ good. Thanks to Jim Groom, VVQ is working in WordPress Multi-User, allowing anyone at umwblogs.org to take advantage of h.264.

The point here is that the h.264 video acts just like FLV. The file extension can end in .MOV or .MP4, as long as it is an h.264 encoded file, it will work in the FLV Media Player. I even did a test using Hi-Def content (another movie trailer). The file is 1280×544 pixels, weighing in at 85MB, but it does prove the concept. The whole scenario does require that you install the latest Flash Player plugins (version 9.0.115.0 or 9.0.124.0) on your system, but it’s available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Conceptually, if you have a beefy enough system, and a display to go along with it, you can watch videos that are 1920×1080 pixels. On other words, true 1080P HiDef. It’s a breakthrough that’s been around for a little while, but it holds great promise for having Home Theater quality video playing from a little old blog.

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Have I ever told you how fortunate I am (we are) to have a colleague like Gardner Campbell here at Mary Washington? There are many examples of sparks that have fired from my head after listening to a Gardner talk, or speech, or riff, or even watching him in a jam session. However, the one I witnessed tonight will be, I think, THE most memorable. People attending the Great Lives Lecture Series sponsored by the Department of History and American Studies witnessed a happening on April 8, 2008. At least I did. You would never expect Gardner to give an ordinary talk at a Great Lives event, as his lecture on Elvis in 2005 indicates. This was a unique example of “I went to a lecture and a concert broke out!”

He came with his “A” game tonight, as the “Gardner Campbell Dancers” (my name for them) started things off with a short Beatles Medley. Bill Crawley then introduced Gardner with the pride that we all feel in having him on this campus. Gardner, of course, took the stage and immediately showed us his self-effacing humor. He then began his talk. No, that’s such a meek word. He began his sermon, and I mean that in the most agnostic, and yet old tyme gospel hour way. He mocked the Apocalypse by imagining how the world would end, “Beatles Style.” Would it be “Here Comes the Sun”? The brief horn part before the chorus in “Penny Lane”? How about the ending piano chord from “A Day In the Life”? Or, just “THE chord” from the opening of “A Hard Days Night”? Where did that chord come from anyway?

From then on it was a history of the Beatles driven by pure energy. The years 1962- 1970 passed by at a frenetic pace. I think Gardner took a breath in there somewhere. When it was all over, and it was over waaaayyy too soon, he took questions. He answered them like an excited kid who had all this information bottled up inside. It was apparent that each answer could go on as long as the original talk, but he exercised great restraint. I had no doubt going in that I would learn something new. The birth of the “drop T” Beatles logo was my little nugget. The audience that was in attendance seemed to be quite knowledgeable as well, but they were there as much to re-affirm their vows to this great band, more than 40 years on. After the final question was asked, “Are the Beatles still relevant?”, Gardner and crew gave us our answer. Gardner’s trippy, psychedelic shirt was donned for a rendition of “Hey Jude”, and soon the auditorium was filled to the gold UMW crest on the ceiling with choruses of “Na, na na na na na na, na na na na, Hey Jude!” Still relevant? I would say amen, and Amen!

UPDATE: The video of Gardo’s talk is finally up! The “Hey Jude” song is cut off because of what I believe would be a “sync licensing” issue.

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