Random Thoughts

Imagine that you are an ESL instructor and you have $10,000 to spend this week.  What would you buy?  Just give me your ideas off the top of your head.  I’ll tell you the back story later.

I was reading my Bloglines feed from LXer, and came across an article from Linux Journal about Literacy Bridge.  The are getting audio devices in the hands of people in rural areas of developing countries.  Well, so far they are getting them into the hands of some people in Ghana.  But the potential is there to grow the initiative.

Literacy Bridge’s aim is very ambitious:

Our mission
is to make knowledge accessible
to people
living in poverty.

A low cost
audio player/recorder
with special features

for Knowledge Sharing

and Literacy Learning.

They have the cost of these devices down to under $10, according to the Linux Journal article. And they already have content that has been developed in Ghana that meets the needs of the region in which they are piloting the devices.  So far they have more knowledge sharing content than literacy learning materials, but they are working on it.

This seems like an excellent project that might really do some good.  If you are interested in learning more and possibly donating time or money to the project, you can get more information here.

I wanted to like the OLPC and even got 2/gave 2 back in 2007/8.  But that project seems to have been without a real plan for education.  (I say that even though I believe OLPC projects in different countries are doing a lot of good.  But I think it has lost what I thought its mission was.) This project is less ambitious in some ways, and I really think it has more potential to succeed.

I plan to find a way to help.  Won’t you join me?

I wrote a post on Moving Along about timeline tools.  If you have any favorite tools for creating timelines, please let me know either here or there.  Thanks!

Someone told me about the 999 Challenge a few weeks ago.  The idea is to read 9 books in each of nine categories in 2009.  I checked it out on Library Thing and decided it sounded like a good idea.  I am not sure I can commit to reading 81 books this year, so I am not committing to a specific number above 9, but I am hoping for at least 3 books in each category.

Here is my list of categories:

1. first novels
2. science fiction
3. short stories
4. history
5. classics I have never read
6. mystery
7. science
8. biography/autobiography/memoirs
9. best sellers

The idea, as anyone familiar with my reading habits will tell you, is to select categories that will stretch your reading.  I have a tendency to read books about education or mysteries.  But I live work at a university with a huge science fiction collection and where the science fiction author Jack Williamson both studied and taught.  So I should read some science fiction.  And I have always had a block when it comes to science, so I am going to try to read some books on science — I am not sure yet what branch of science (It will have to be a book I can read comfortably more than anything else.).  I chose “first novels” almost by accident: My sister-in-law loaned me The Giant’s House when I was at her house at the beginning of January.  I decided to include it in my list of books read, but I wasn’t sure what category I could put it in.  Since it was McCracken’s first novel, I decided to create a category for that.

I am keeping track of my reading on a site I did not know of until a week or so ago: Reading Trails.  According to their website,

Reading Trails offers tools to organize books in a new way. We are a community of passionate, thoughtful readers who use social networking and trails to share our reading experiences and create new ones.

I haven’t done much on the site except create a trail.  My trail for the 999 challenge can be found here.

Only a few weeks ago I wrote complaining that CoFFEE, which looked like a great idea, was not available for Linux.  Then, a Linux version came out.  And now, I am happy to say, a new version of CoFFEE, including a new version for Linux, just came out a few days ago.  As I said before, I am very impressed with the developers of CoFFEE and their concern for end users of their product.

I finally got a chance to download the new Linux version tonight.  My first reaction was that this version seemed much more complete.  Maybe I didn’t look at the other Linux version long enough, but this one seems to come with lots more documentation.  That will make it easier for me to learn about it.  I am a reader-then-experimenter usually; I like to read the manual.

Backing up a bit, though…  CoFFEE is a program that allows you to work with students on networked computers.  According to the website,

CoFFEE – the new groupware application for digital discussions in a live classroom situation.

CoFFEE offers customisable tools, such as a threaded discussion forum, graphical concept mapping, voting and more.

CoFFEE is open-source and free! Available in: English, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

CoFFEE comes with sample lesson plans and many other materials to help you get started using it.

The sample lesson plans that come with CoFFEE give you a good idea of what is possible.  They also give you plans to modify or totally rewrite for your own classes.  There is a lesson plan editor that allows you to do that easily.  You can also use the template to design your own lesson.

I can see lots of potential for CoFFEE.  I hope that you will look at it for yourself and see what you think.  I know I plan to continue to play around with it!

Jane’s list of the top 100 tech tools for learning is out.  It is interesting to me to see the changes from last year and from the spring of this year.

Some things surprise me, like the fact that Second Life, which was 101 in 2007 and soared to position 41 in the spring of this year, was down to 54 in this list.  I wonder if that is because it is going out of fashion or because the respondents this time just weren’t into Second Life.

I was happy to see that delicious and Firefox are still up there at the top of the list.

I have a bone or two to pick with her information, like not including the fact that there is a Linux version of Skype available (and there has been for years!).

PowerPoint was the only Microsoft application in the top ten.  I am not sure why it is still there when there are so many other options. Internet Explorer was down to 83 this time around!

In general, wikis seem to be losing popularity, or at least going down in the rankings.

It is an interesting list.  I am not sure I am going to rush out there and try any of the tools I am not currently using, but you never know!

I have been working hard on my Strategic Vision today, and I needed a break.  Checking Bloglines, I found a link on Jane’s E-Learning Tip of the Day to a site where you can turn your name into an avatar.  Not able to find a greater waste of my time, I decided to check it out.

I tried Nancy and got a really ugly little face.  Then I tried Nancy McKeand, and the face got even uglier!  Slightly concerned about what the results might be, I tried my whole name and got a perfectly plain face that I would be happy to live with as an avatar.  When I added my maiden name in there, it changed again — to a warrior.

As I said, it was a complete waste of time, but it was fun.  Check it out!

Meanwhile, I have to get back to work!

D’Arcy Norman has deleted his twitter account.  I found it pretty interesting.

I have tried Twitter, but I have to admit that I have never been able to get it.  But I always felt that there must be something wrong with me.  I know part of it has to just be me and my personality.  I am not one of those real chatty people you run into from time to time.  I also have never been able to think that my life was so interesting that other people would want to know about it on a minute by minute basis.

I had never, though, thought about it to the degree that D’Arcy has.  He said:

I keep coming back to one thing. Who is paying for twitter, and why? It’s not advertising. At least Facebook is clearly partially financed by advertising revenue.

The only value I see in twitter, from a financial point of view, that even comes close to justifying the expense if providing the service, is to teach The Machine. The constant tweeting, linking, geopositioning updates are providing a vast database which can then be mined. But why, and by whom?

That kind of Big Brother idea is a little creepy.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Well, I am excited to say that CoFFEE for Linux is out.  I was sent the link yesterday and have downloaded it.  I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but irt looks every bit as exciting as I thought it would be!

I really want to thank the members of the CoFFEE development team and the Linux programmers for their great work. And I cannot thank the developers enough for listening to me and being as responsive as they were.  If you haven’t done so yet, check CoFFEE out!

Also, I must clarify something I said before.  CoFFEE was not developed for or by a company but rather, as one of them told me:

Actually, CoFFEE is not made by a company, and is not a commercial product. It was made as part of LEAD, a publicly funded European research project, by passionate university researchers. My boss and I are the only ones who are not: we’re involved in the project as an industry partner, and we’re not allowed to make a profit from it…

That, to me, makes it even more impressive that they are so responsive.

So please, if you have access to networked computers, check CoFFEE out!

I am nobody special.  I blog because I love to write and because I care about a lot of things in this world.  And I love to engage in conversation.

A few days ago I blogged about CoFFEE.  I was disappointed that it wasn’t available for Linux so I couldn’t look at it at home on my Linux machines.  So I said I would never use it. And I got comments.  Three of them, as a matter of fact.

The first one, the one that didn’t get marked as spam, was from a guy who told me that he had worked on the development of CoFFEE and that they had been told there were no schools in their target market using Linux.  He suggested I write the company developers.  Which I did.

And then I checked my spam and found 2 comments from people associated with CoFFEE telling me about their reasoning and the fact that they were happy to hear from someone who wanted to use it with Linux.  They sent me the link to the thread they opened on Sourceforge about my request.

It is so cool to me that I can read a blog and hear about a product.  Then I write about it and hear back from the developers!

Even cooler, though, is the fact that they are actively working on a version for Linux that should be available very soon!  So I guess I need to change the title of that post to “Another product I won’t use yet but hope to in the very near future.”  Be sure that I will let you know when I find out the Linux version is available and again when I have had a chance to check it out.

Blogging gives us access to the whole world and it gives a voice that, because it is public, carries more weight.  How could I ever give it up?