Embedding Slideshare presentations here, too? Yes!

I started Seamless Services? at blogspot because I needed a place to embed objects that WordPress restricted. After Theron led me to Teemu Arina’s presentation at Slideshare, I wrote about how Slideshare provides code to embed presentations. This post tests that function for this WordPress blog.

Sharing good works over time and space

I have discovered service-learning projects in MSAD 75 fortuitously through articles in the newspaper or stories that people have relayed. I wrote about ways to improve documentation of projects. I keep learning about other projects through new routes.

This week, I met with Dr. King, Principal at Mt. Ararat High School, to talk about history and prospects for the High School Project Pilot, an informal service-learning project that our District Leadership Team started in December 2006. After the meeting, he walked out of the building to show me the new benches and landscaping in front of the school. He proudly described how three groups of Mt. Ararat students had designed and built the brick walkway, the wooden benches and plantings. He also told me about a plan for high school students to learn environmental sciences and mentor elementary school students at a local nature center. The district leadership team would benefit from having these and other examples in a form that is easy to search and share.

Sally Loughlin and I have discussed how we need a way to celebrate and share such contributions to the community more broadly and permanently. The Times Record has started publishing a series of brief descriptions of service-learning projects from Brunswick High School. While useful, they don’t serve the need for institutional memory.

With new developments at Zoho Creator or other tools that make it easier to collect, share and chart data, we should be able to improve our institutional memory for contributions that our students make to their schools and broader community. I recommend that we make this a priority for the Leadership Team and the KIDS Planning Conference.

Real PBL Case: Saving a dairy processing plant

Real Problem Based Learning Case Study:
In September 2002, Bonnie Brady faced a serious problem at her work. The dairy processing plant lost several thousand dollars per month because products expired before they sold them to retailers. The parent company considered closing the unprofitable plant. Fortunately, Bonnie needed a course in Operations Management (Decision Sciences 340) to finish her undergraduate degree in business management thorough WSU’s Distance Degree Program. The course encouraged students to find and solve real problems using the concepts and methods of Operations Management. She collected historical data on the losses and convinced two classmates to help her analyze the data and propose a solution. By the middle of the semester, the group convinced the plant manager to implement their plan. By the end of the semester, they had reduced losses from 1.5 to 2% per month to 0.57%. And the situation improved during the following months. By the end of the year, the company promoted Bonnie, started using similar analyses in other plants, and encouraged additional employees to take courses through the Distance Degree Program. She estimated that the project saved the company $250,000.

Learning how-to map

Earlier today, I wrote about how Nils and I have sustained a long-running conversation about collaborative mapping. He recently found some time to explore Google’s new mapping tools and after experimenting sent this email message describing challenges in one of his maps.

—–Original Message—–
From: Peterson, Nils
Sent: Thu 4/12/2007 1:59 PM
To: Spaeth, Stephen
Subject: Google Maps — leave something to be desired
So I tried making this map
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8
&hl=en&om=1&mssort=5&z=19&t=k&msid=111
apairofrandomnumbers.thatidentifyNilsandhismap&msa=0

And I can’t get it to have the zoom I want. Whatever fooling around I do it seems to keep the highest zoom. The save button is always grayed out

Nils:
Yes, they have a few glitches that need work but it shows great promise for the kinds of projects that we have discussed. Did you find my new blog post about collaborative mapping yet? I am most excited by the ease of use (appropriate for middle school and maybe upper elementary?) and the fact that we can recover the data as we urged Wayfaring to do but they never did.
Your map worked better than you thought. The url you sent took me (after refactoring the url which was truncated through the email message processing) to the closest zoom level. Unfortunately, Moscow has not yet had images taken at that zoom level (so I got the grey “Sorry we don’t have images at this level… Try zooming out for a broader look.”). I only had to back off one zoom level to see your additions to the satellite view. Did you use the “Link to this page” link? Since these map pages are created using AJAX technologies, the url does not update with changes in the map. So, if you try to copy the url from the address field, or try to reload the page with the browser’s refresh, you will revert to an earlier map. The “Link to this page” link loads a current copy of the data necessary to recreate the page into the url field. Likewise, the “Email” link creates the message with current parameters in the url so that the one you sent worked for me.
But, when I flipped to the map view, I found an error in the map. A map technician at NAVTEQ (the company that supplies Google Maps with the roads and driving instructions) seems to have misinterpreted your driveway as a mirror image dogleg that is displaced one lot to the west on Travois Way. NAVTEQ admits that their database is not perfect and invites users to give them feedback on mapping errors. Note that they support feedback in the following languages:

• Deutsch
• English
• Español
• Finnish
• Français
• Italiano
• Japanese
• Nederlands
• Svenska

I learned about NAVTEQ’s interest in improving their maps because I have been working on a map that shows how NAVTEQ “lost” Stovers Point, an important local educational and recreational resource. Note that the satellite view in my map of Stovers Point goes all the way to the highest zoom. The Maine Office of GIS decided that accessible high-resolution maps are an important public resource and supplied the data to Google/NAVTEQ for use in gMaps for Maine in place of the similar generic source that Idaho and Washington have been using.

Steve

Note: I turned this pair of email messages into blog posts as part of an ongoing experiment in converting channels to platforms.

Collaborative Mapping: Google Earth | Darfur

Nils Peterson and I have been discussing ways to engage students in collaboratively building useful resources for several years:

Collaborative mapping

Steve Spaeth has been exploring Wayfaring and ideas of collaboratively created maps. One example is the voyages of the pinnace Virginia. I just added to another of Steve’s maps on Contra dance venues, and it got me thinking of the work Steve and I discussed in 98-99 about how to get kids involved in the travels of Lewis and Clark. A wayfaring map of campsites, where the site’s name is the LC name + date could be created by local school kids. At the waypoint kids could take a photo of the area, and answer some question(s) in the waypoint details, such as how does the site differ today from what LC reported. Links could be added to the description pointing to another website where the students could develop more of their project. While all of this could be done for the return trip (we are in the bicentennial of the 1805-06 encampment in Oregon, its not clear how to get the work kicked off at this late date.
posted on Monday, January 23, 2006 8:51 AM

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth have teamed to show the promise of collaborative mapping.

Google Earth | Darfur
Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative
The Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative seeks to collect, share and visually present to the world critical information on emerging crises that may lead to genocide or related crimes against humanity.

Beginning with Darfur, we are building an interactive “global crisis map” that will provide citizens, aid workers and foreign policy professionals with a new tool to share and understand information quickly, to “see the situation”, enabling more effective prevention and response.

Think your company, organization or university can help? Contact us at: gpmi@ushmm.org.

The USHMM Mapping team is broadcasting a request for help. I think that they could target their message to a more receptive audience by soliciting the members of the more than 500 Facebook groups who have expressed interest in the issue.

Web 2.0 Apps Student & Teacher Productivity

The Online Education Database has identified tools for improving academic productivity for students and professors. They focus on post-secondary online education but the principles apply to face-to-face secondary as well. How can we reconcile the goal of improving student and teacher effectiveness with the schools blocking of sites that provide tools they can use to do it?

Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Improve a Students or Professors Productivity
Twenty-five “Web 2.0 applications mostly free that should help you on your quest as a student or professor in being productive.”

The primary list includes Zoho Project, Zoho Creator, Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Google Reader. The “others in this category” include several others of the Zoho services. I suggest that we give students and teachers access to these tools and find out how they use them for collaborative learning.

Thanks to Raju for sharing this resource.

Retesting Kelly-Zoho publishing innovation

Blogger surprised me when it rendered the Zoho Writer script in the published version. Here, I follow through with what seemed like a failed experiment earlier. My piece in Writer should show up below:
If you see this text, it did not work.

Kelly-Zoho co-innovation in real-time

Owen Kelly and Zoho are documenting an outstanding real-time example of collaborative innovation between an advanced user and a company willing to listen carefully to the insights of its lead users. In Distributed Publishing with Zoho Writer, Arvind, an official Zoho blogger, describes Owen’s contributions and suggestions:

Owen Kelly has come up with a great post on how Zoho Writer can help publishers publish their work online easily. He has a very good set of points on how easy the embeddable script code that Zoho Writer provides can help achieve this as against other methods available online currently. For the system to work, he recommends a few improvements to the present Zoho Writer. And he sees the implications as far reaching. From his blog post :

I found something that completely surprised me, and left me wondering what exactly was going on. The Zoho design team seemed to have solved a major problem without even realizing it. …

Eric von Hippel anticipated in his book “Democratizing Innovation” that we will see more examples of this phenomenon as people and companies realize the value of open collaboration.

Kelly’s work is part of a project to develop the concept of a Memi, a developmental portfolio for learning:

This page is the starting page for a thesis that proposes the design of a new tool, embodying visual knowledge building techniques as well as linear narrative, to facilitate learner-directed education in a digital age: an age in which the gaps between production and consumption are breaking down, as are the supposed gaps between education and entertainment.

I look forward to seeing more and being able to compare it with CTLT’s work on ePortfolios.

Notes: I just tried to use Kelly’s method for distributed publishing in three places: it did not work in either Co-producing Innovation at WordPress.com or Seamless Services? at Blogspot.com but did work at Moscowwiki at jot.com. WordPress stripped out the script, Blogspot kept the script but did not display the document and only jot.com rendered the page. If this approach makes sense, I will need to upgrade to new blog services.
But neither Kelly or Arvind addressed the issue of the influence on notification methods. Blogs implement trackbacks as ways to establish connections among authors’ writings. I have used several in this document. But the blog or wiki “see” only the script so they have no way to “know” that the post should invoke the trackback mechanism. Since I want to connect this piece to others’ writing, I will revert to convention and copy this post to my blog.

Google indexes my Creator database

I commented recently about Charles, the Zoho Creator programmer, using some kind of alert for “Zoho Creator” so that he found my post about integrating Creator and Exhibit. His offer of assistance was so helpful, I decided that I should create a similar alert so that I can reciprocate in my niche. So, I used Google Alerts to notify me of uses the combination of “zoho creator exhibit.” It may need adjustment in the future but currently it seems to serve reasonably well; it finds my blog posts and comments about my work. This morning, it alerted me to my use of the terms in my demo database in Creator.

Google Web Alert for: zoho creator exhibit
MoviesExhibitManual
But I started using Zoho Creator as a venue for creating Exhibit databases. So, when I started to use it to create log of my experiences using Creator and …

The Exhibit development team describe strategies required to make exhibits that are search engine “friendly”. They describe various strategies and the trade-offs inherent in each. If we adopt this approach, then we will need to consider this one as well.

Creator-Exhibit: 6.5X and rising?

Andrew McAfee wrote, and I reflected about the challenges of getting users to move from channel technologies (email) to more effective and efficient platforms (blogs, wikis, photo sharing, …) in “The 9X Email Problem.“

The greatest challenge here, I think, doesn’t have to do with making the browser sufficiently application-like (AJAX is a pretty powerful set of technologies). It has to do with making technologists sufficiently user-like — getting them to stop thinking in terms of bells and whistles and elaborate functionality, and to start thinking instead about busy users with short attention spans who need to get something done, and who can always reach for email. From what I’ve seen (and learned from Gourville) this isn’t easy, but it is critically important.

I want to end this post on an optimistic note, so let’s concentrate on the biggest advantage Enterprise 2.0 technologies have over email. As I wrote in my initial SMR article, email is a channel technology. It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don’t know that the email was sent, and can’t consult its contents. Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members.

Developers of Zoho Creator and Exhibit have produced elements of such a platform. I have shown that Exhibit can directly use json output from Creator. The combination facilitates the both the production and the use of visible and accessible resources.

Prior to the arrival of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, companies had few effective platforms for sharing knowledge work, and no platforms that fostered emergence. So the new tools are not direct substitutes for email; instead, they’re intended to provide capabilities that email can’t. Will they succeed? It depends heavily, I believe, on whether companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration. This desire will be an important factor in solving email’s 9X problem.

While some technical issues still need to be resolved, we have in the suite, the means with which to determine whether “companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration.” I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges. Michael Bergman provides a promising glimpse of the future with his Sweet Tools. And it sounds as if Pete Thomas really plans to push the envelope with his Zoho Creator as platform plans.