Google Transcriber? Far from Beta
I have been using Google Voice for about a month now, and I'm really starting to like it. I have yet to use it for academic purposes, but it comes in handy for making long distance calls from work. I have also put a call widget on my family blog, and it's been fun listening to messages from family and friends from all over the country. I was also excited to learn that Google transcribes the messages into text, in case I want to get the gist of the message before listening to it. This would really come in handy in case I got any messages from angry students. 
One might assume that since Google has knocked just about every other project out of the park, then their transcriptions would be spot on. Well, think again. I have two examples below using messages from my mom and mother-in-law to my two sons (the transcriptions are below the audio widget):
Hi Tina, Kurt being Sam innate sense. This is granny Karen. We love you. Granddad night. Thought about you today. Labor day. We had a fun, Labor Day, so birthday celebration with the and that and for me. I would like to dominos tonight that we miss you all. We hope you had a fun day today. Also, Hi, Okay, I want to tell you bye bye. We'd love to seeing your pictures on the blog spot. Thank you. Bye bye. We love you.
Hey guys, It's G G. We're just hoping that you have sometime today to visit with us on skype. I'm fixing to go out grocery shopping. It's the 920 here 10:20 your time, so I should be. I'll be back here at noon, so if you have time before your afternoon match ups this afternoon. G. G in. Paul Paul would love to visit with you on the web cam. Bye bye.
I was thinking about using this tool to record some phone interviews for a research project I am starting, but obviously I will have to do some serious proofreading. Still, even if this tool gets 60-70% of the words right, I will have saved myself a bundle of time and effort. Using Google Voice, you can record calls and it will send you a transcription of the conversation. I am going to test it out this week and see how it goes.
Unrolling Prezi
I have dabbled with Prezi a few times, but tomorrow and the next day will be the first time I will use it as a presentation tool in my class. The interface takes some getting used to, but after awhile I found it very simple and now prefer it to the traditional menu format. Of course, the thing that really took some getting used to was how to think in a way that leveraged the affordances of the tool. Prezi enables you to make graphics using shapes, arrows and text. PowerPoint, though I don't use it that much for presentations, has really branded itself on how I approach lectures, talks, etc. After getting past the initial confusion with the tool itself, I had to rethink how to actually design a presentation with it. I kept wanting to default to linear, bullet-pointed lists of information. I don't think my first two attempts are that great, but they are a step in the right direction. I will keep learning this tool, not because I want to replace PPT, but because I want to bust my thinking wide open.
This is another example of how technology has imposed constraints on my thinking, rather than supporting my brain's natural way of looking at the world. Prezi still has its limits, but at least it has prompted me to get away from laying down one slide after another and to organize information in a different way. If I can think about new ways of presenting content, I am more likely to see the content in a new and fresh way. Here is an example of something I made today.
From a student's perspective, I think this would be a lot more interesting than PPT, even though it is really much simpler. There is no theme, no background, no images (though they can be added, as well as video and PDFs); just the content. I am also prepared for some of them to complain because PPT has dictated the way they take notes. For people who like to just write down whatever is on the screen, this will be quite frustrating. This may be a case where providing graphic organizers will be helpful. If done well, which mine really isn't, the content becomes the visual. Most people think of their content, then try to create or find a visual to go with it. Using this tool, the content can be arranged and navigated through as a visual. Pretty cool stuff. So, jump in there and give Prezi a try. You may just become a fan. And if you have examples of cool ways to use it, please share.
I actually used Twitter today
As an avid TechCrunch reader, I have a history of creating accounts for tools they mention without really thinking about what the tool does or whether I will actually use it. One such tool was Twitter. I honestly cannot remember when I created my Twitter account, but my inaugural tweet was almost a month to the day before my twins were born. I honestly have no memory of writing either of the two tweets recorded in my account, and I don't know why I decided to post a random comment about watching my twins play on the floor in late March of 2008. I have a really good memory, and both of these events, while permanently archived in Twitter, have completely dissolved from my mind. As if this can't get any stranger, I have 22 followers. I'm practically Ashton Kutcher. It's just weird to me that 22 people either saw or searched for my name and clicked the "Follow" button. I'm sure they are very disappointed.
I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident the lack of activity in Twitter can be attributed to two things: a) I don't have a cool phone that lets me tweet at anytime and any place, and b) I find it kind of obnoxious. (I try not to think that some people actually consider what I do on this blog essentially the same at tweeting.) When I see status updates on Facebook that are obviously from Twitter (e.g., @, #, bit.ly, misspelled words, etc.), I actually get annoyed and don't read what the person actually wrote. More than that, however, is the fact that I don't really have time to read up-to-the-second updates about what people are doing. Do I really care that someone I kind of knew in high school needs more coffee? Personally, I don't feel the need to tell the world that I am sitting at a traffic light or that I just ate too much for lunch. And I am suddenly feeling the need to confess that the most chronic Twitter addicts in my Facebook network have either been de-friended or hidden. Wow, that feels better.
However, today things changed just ever so slightly. It all started when a web tool I like (Google Calendar) wouldn't load. I tried refreshing several times with no luck. I went to the Google Dashboard, but they don't even have today's date up yet. So, I had to look in the only place I knew would have realtime information on this. And I found out that some people are experiencing the same thing. There is no explanation or clue as to when it be available again, but at least Twitter let me find out that I'm not alone. It seems that this is not affecting everyone, by the way. So, rather than obsessing about this and trying to see if the problem was caused on my end, I could let it rest and get back to work.
Twitter can count this as a score in their favor. I still refuse to tweet, but if a widely-used web page won't work for me I will likely look on Twitter first. This is by no means comparable to the protests in Iran and the subsequent military crackdown, but I did get to experience firsthand the benefits of realtime data. I'm still trying to get my head around the implications this has for children growing up in the 21st Century and how these technologies will shape how they define "news." But it's an interesting thing to think about. And one more thing from curbyalexander @somerandomdude: We're all tired and ready to go home at the end of the day. But thanks for sharing.
Cookies in a Flash
When I read this article, I chuckled a little. Developers of web content and sites that host web content are getting better and better at collecting data about how people are using their tools. Some examples are Youtube's Insight and Visible Measures. The latter of these two examples actually will display in a graph when people are rewinding the scrub bar and re-watching portions of the video. Granted, I think a person has to have about 50,000 or so views for this to work, but it does give a pretty accurate display of audience engagement with a video.
In the tool I helped design for my dissertation -- PrimaryAccess Storyboard -- we used something similar to Flash cookies to collect data about how the students were using the tool. This tool is built using Flash, and Bill (the programmer) was able to add in some code that records everything the user does while logged into this application. I was able to get detailed information from each student, such as when he or she logged in, whether or not they logged in after school from a different computer, every single move they made with the mouse or keyboard (I didn't know what they wrote and deleted, just the number of characters typed and deleted). I was even told how much time each student spent on task. Of course, we who have been teachers know that a general number for time on task, such as 52 minutes, does not really tell me much about what the student was doing. Using the rest of the data, I was able to see the differences in how the students used their time. Some would experiment with different images, layering them on top of each other and tinkering with the order. Other students were just playing with the tool, adding characters, spinning them around and deleting it.
This approach to data collection was not perfect, and Bill and I are still thinking about ways to make this data more useful to teachers, but it did answer a longstanding issue I have always had with technology in the classroom. Computers, just like in other contexts, make it easy for students to look busy when they really aren't. As an observer, I was able to see how students would deftly switch between their work and Solitaire without the teacher ever noticing. Even though the data told me how long they stayed on task, I was able to infer from the rest of the data that they really weren't very engaged. And even if they looked engaged, I could see how they were spending their time. Some used the tool creatively to make the best product possible, while others played around but did not put a lot of thought into their final product.
I see a lot of potential in this kind of data collection. We can learn a lot about how students use different tools and scaffold projects in a way that anticipates these patterns. This also opens the door to looking at how teachers make instructional decisions based on the feedback they get from the students' tool use. Given what they know about how a student is using his or her time, can they make better decisions for directing student effort before the final product is turned in? I think there are lot of good questions, and hopefully some answers, that will come from this kind of data.
Why does the Web just keep getting cooler?
It's not the massive changes in the Web that keep me hooked. Sure, I've jumped on just about every bandwagon so far, with the exception of MySpace. I attempted Twittering (but I'm too wordy), I friend people on Facebook and I blog about every little detail in my children's lives. These things are great, but it's the little things the Web lets me do that make me giddy. And yes, I was giddy when I saw this hack.
What I found was a blog post demonstrating how to send RSS feeds to a PDF directly from Google Reader. This actually has some practical applications. During my job search, when I used The Chronicle of Higher Education RSS feeds to keep updated on job postings, I would star the jobs that looked interesting. My wife would then go into my account, look up the starred items and copy-n-paste the job details to our massive spreadsheet. This wasn't a horrible system, but it would have been much easier if I could have sent the job posting directly to a PDF for Gina to read later. This would have reduced the amount of logging in and clicking.
As a disclaimer, the end result of this RSS-to-PDF conversion is not perfect, as you can see here. The formatting is all jacked up, which makes it a little cumbersome to get to the actual story. But, this is nice for saving content on my hard drive that I think I might want to keep. The aforementioned blog post mentions several other Google Reader hacks that I may try later.
Their tools vs. Google’s tools
As I was working on finalizing course materials today, I was faced with a dilemma. Do I use the tools the university provides, or do I use the Google tools (docs, sites, calendar, etc.) I'm already so familiar with? Well, I checked their tools out, and for now I think I will use the tools I already know. It's not that I have anything against the proprietary tools my school provides, and, despite what my students may say, I am not a Google fanboi. I have actually come to like Blackboard quite a bit, especially compared to the course-management software I was using before. My current school offers quite a nice suite of tools and provides training, so I will definitely keep learning them and find ways to use them in my classes. But when deciding what tools to use this semester, I kept coming back to two main criteria: ease of use and portability.
The ease of use issue is a no-brainer if you have ever spent any time using Google Docs or Sites. Once you learn the interface, they are easy and FAST!
Then there's the issue of portability. Have you ever uploaded a document to Blackboard, then decided you wanted to make a change? What if you did this, say, 4 times? After you have changed the original, you have to go into Blackboard and delete the old file (and any metadata you may have added to the item) and replace it with the new one (and re-type the metadata ... unless you thought ahead to copy and paste into a Word doc). This gets pretty old. Now, imagine the same scenario with Google Docs. You make the change and save it. Since you have already added the item to Blackboard as an external link, the changes will show up there automatically. No deleting, re-typing and uploading current versions.
My former institution (wahoo wa) made the leap to Google Apps, and the students took to it like crazy. They were already using these tools, so the switch required basically no reconditioning on their part. It made my job a lot easier teaching ed. tech. classes because they didn't have to open a Google Account to access all of the tools we used throughout the semester. So, I look forward to introducing this next batch of preservice teachers to open source and free tools, while learning how to use a whole bunch of new tools myself . This should be pretty fun.
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