Joan Vinall-Cox, Ph.D. is a lifelong learner, retired communications professor, rabid reader and poet who has taught in both the college and university systems.
Her Ph.D., in 2004 was an Autoethnographic Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry focused on moving from technophobia to technophilia.
She is a widow from a happy marriage and a mother to a strong and kind daughter.
Her interests include Centering Prayer, Multiple Intelligences, Attention Deficit Disorder and its connection to creativity, Jung, Campbell’s Monomyth, and Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry
An amazing research tool! Using VisualWikipedia can simultaneously open up a subject and give basic definitions of difficult vocabulary. It is especially good for exploring information. “VisualWikipedia is a visual, intuitive, and interactive web interface to encyclopedic knowledge/information. It is designed to provide a fun place to learn stuff in an efficient manner. Please watch the following video to get a good sense of how to use it.”
What a good idea! – “In a standards-based system, time becomes the variable and learning is the constant,” Selleck said. “When a kid can demonstrate proficiency of a standard, they move on. There is nothing magical about a quarter, semester or the end of school. That becomes blurred. Learning becomes much more 24-7.” via Stephen Downes
This looks very interesting, but I haven’t tried it yet. It sounds like it’s serious competition for the commercial LMSs. Let me know what you think of it please.
What students may know, and teachers should know about. Some I love and use already, like BibMe.com; some that are scary, like File Destructor 2.0 – Via Stephen Downes
Teachers with a passion for teaching are now facing competition from those with a passion for security, (especially as working with securities becomes less secure;->). The world will always need teachers, and I suspect that the increase in those looking for teaching jobs is increasing in Canada and the States too. Teaching always looks easier from the outside than it is when you are actually in a classroom. I’m ambivalent about this increase in interest. “Teaching has traditionally been a more popular career choice during recession – providing security when private sector jobs become more vulnerable.” via Stephen Downes
More on Twitter – “2008 showed an unbelievable growth for Twitter as THE place for microblogging. ” If you go to conferences, or you like quick news updates, or you’re in business, you need to pay attention to Twitter. via Stephen Downes
“Suggesting we abandon PowerPoint because it’s often (usually?) misused and abused to produce awful presentation visuals is like saying we should dump the idea of 24-hour cable news because so much of it is vacuous rubbish. But whether we’re talking about bad TV or boring presentations, shouldn’t we blame the content producers not the content medium?” via Stephen Downes
Interesting observation on the impact of the web and Wikapedia on education. – “Then Something Big and Important™ happened. It was called the World Wide Web. And the Web begat the wiki, and the wiki begat Wikipedia. And it was good. But it makes the way I teach, and the way I was taught, archaic. Why should someone be forced to memorize endless hierarchies as outlined above. If I really wanted to find out the differences in the digestive systems of animals in Phylum Nematoda compared to Phyum Annelida, I could just look it up in Wikipedia or some other reputable online source.” I agree completely. Why is memorization necessary when good research techniques and familiarity with the topic is more than enough. But perhaps Plato would disagree – http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/museum/plato.html – via Stephen Downes
Look at these results in conjunction with the research Gladwell reports in Outliers showing that low-income children learn as well as the better off during the school year, but lose ground during the summer when the better off get enriching activities, and the low-income kids do not. via Stephen Downes
The reality of learning today (IMHO!) “For educators and the schools in which they teach, the challenges of this moment are significant. Our ability to learn whatever we want, whenever we want, from whomever we want is rendering the linear, age-grouped, teacher-guided curriculum less and less relevant. Experts are at our fingertips, through our keyboards or cell phones, if we know how to find and connect to them. Content and information are everywhere, not just in textbooks. And the work we create and publish is assessed by the value it brings to the people who read it, reply to it, and remix it. Much of what our students learn from us is unlearned once they leave us; paper is not the best way to share our work, facts and truths are constantly changing, and working together is becoming the norm, not the exception.” via Stephen Downes
An interesting post on an important current learning dilemma. “There is a sense in which the VLE debate does bridge into a larger discussion about the validity of top down knowledge distribution from the knowledge depot… a model that started to lose its validity 10 years ago and is now working its way to the margins. We are in a post-knowledge-scarcity society and the VLE as it is currently conceived is still designed for transimitting knowledge scarcity. It presumes that the ‘value’ is in the knowledge itself, in the content provided by the university ,and that the contribution of the students is transitory and disposable. This is the old model, the model, ACTUAL student centredness not the ’students get to talk’ model we’ve been sold for years, involves the student s creating their own knowledge in their own space… a PLE or Eportfolio or whatever you want to call it is created as a manner of course. It is the natural result of learning.” via Stephen Downes
I’m a fan. I admire Gladwell’s reader-friendly structure and prose, his style. I am intrigued by his unusual take on things that are both below the surface of what is (allowed to be) conscious and yet are common sense, once you’ve read the narratives and the research references and explanations. So I enjoyed reading Outliers, just as I was delighted by Blink and Tipping Point. Gladwell is a communicator who makes me think.
I especially like Outliers because it is so Canadian – it is Gladwell’s explanation of his own success, a statement that is both humble and proud. It is typically Canadian to be reticent in an obvious way, expecting others to make the connections. Gladwell started Outliers, his book about success, with a Canadian hockey story, included the impact of culture, and ended with his grandmother’s success, (which is part of the web that allowed his). All books are ultimately about their author’s and this one shows both that Gladwell knows he has done well, but he is clear that he also knows how lucky he has been in his timing and his community. He knows and demonstrates that community, culture, is the foundation for success – more than/ instead of – rugged individualism.
I have read some criticism of Gladwell’s success, much of it saying he’s not smart enough, his books are too “thin”. What I see is a wise educator, someone who understands the power of narrative as a base to set information in so readers will be able to recall it. I like popularists; I see them as educators and change-agents.
I also find Gladwell’s prose exceptionally easy to follow. People who structure easy-to-follow ideas and information are not asking their readers to do the author’s work. Authors who write easy-to-read sentences are skilled rhetoricians who understand their audiences. Many people appear to believe that “difficult-to-read” equals “deep”; I don’t. I admire Gladwell’s ability to compose material and write well.
I recommend Gladwell’s books, Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point.
“”transliteracy”. The term describes the ability to read, write and interact on a range of platforms.” … “It’s not just about using the tools, it’s about using the tools effectively. We’ve got to bridge the gap between informal learning using digital technology and formal learning in the institution”
A free PDF tool for Macs. I haven’t played with it but it looks like it has interesting features, especially for researchers. Check out http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/manual/ for more information. via paulawhite on Twitter
Spoiler Alert: If you are my father or someone who knows my parents – stop reading now! You can read this after Christmas.
I’ve slowly become aware of the existence of photo books, but for a long time saw them as an oddity, and kind of egocentric. But eventually, after seeing some well-made ones of specific events, and watching people pour over them, my attitude began to shift. I also noticed that I rarely went through either my old photo albums, which had a discouraging habit of dropping photos because the glue holding them had dried, or looking at my picture files on my computer. And some pictures I just didn’t want to put up on Flickr, even keeping them private. Plus, my parents (the intended recipients) are more book-oriented, The thought of a photo book for my parents slowly emerged, and I decided to make one. Simple, right? As you will read, not-so-much!
My previous experience with book publishing sent me to Lulu.com photobook-publishing site,
Lulu Photobook
There are three things to notice:
The ‘tray’ at the bottom contains the already-created pages (I made many before …)
The page layouts available only sometimes allow text
The photos can be found and chosen from the field on the upper right (and searching for the one I wanted was annoying in this small space which took time for each grouping to load.)
You can see, if you have really good eyes, that some of the photos have small yellow triangles on the upper left. This means they won’t look good when published. After asking friends, I discovered this meant the dpi was too low, whatever that means;-> My husband informed me that my photos had to have a dpi of 300 or above, (whatever …) So I went to some old Photoshop software from years ago and tried to re-save the pictures. Didn’t work. These were pre-digital photos. I knew the paper originals were somewhere, which led me to the next time-expanding steps: scanning!
I pulled out our old, falling apart hard-copy photo albums and started scanning at 300 dpi, but soon changed to 400 dpi because I read somewhere that the photo book pictures should be between 300 and 600 dpi, and decided to go up a little rather than stay at the very basic.
Scanning is slow; you have time to think. I thought that I didn’t have a complete enough chronology. I phoned my parents and made up some lame excuse for borrowing their photo albums. I came home with a large shopping bag full of albums. I emailed their best friends and asked if they had photos of the four of them together, and was delighted to get some photographs in the mail.
More scanning, more thinking. I decided to put all the photos I planned to use in one folder (duh!). I remembered the pain of searching in that tiny, slow-loading field and had a moment of brilliance (if I do say so myself).
Great Advice
I set up categories, in my case, chronological, and numbered them:
Growing up
Courtship
Wedding
etc. Then I put the relevant number at the beginning of every file name. Presto, photos in approximately the right order! Less searching among the photos because they were logically grouped together. See, brilliant!
Advice over, back to experience gaining!
I felt so good, I twittered about my photo booking. A very kind friend mentioned Scrapblog. Oh! More than one site creates photobooks! Who knew! thought the naif. I checked it out and was VERY impressed. I’m not THAT naive, so I poked around the site a bit. They are primarily for online albums, but they announced that they were now printing albums. After a faux start, I checked the printing page, and sure enough, there was a “country” field showing the U.S. but with a downward-pointing triangle beside it. That felt like enough research, so I took my folder of highly organized .jpg s and uploaded them.
Scrapblog building
Notice how much more flexible this is – I can angle photos, and add as many or as few as I want.
The intelligently-ordered photos are in a tray on the upper left this time
I can add text boxes anywhere, anytime, and backgrounds and frames etc. Nice.
The tray at the bottom contains the already created pages and makes it easy to navigate.
I loved setting up my Scrapblog! I recreated what I’d done in Lulu but with more creativity and fun. I showed the finished online version to my husband, and he was impressed! (Well, he had to be, didn’t he?) But no, he really was!
I went to the printing page, and began to fill out all the fields, feeling proud of myself, and virtuous because it wasn’t quite the last minute. I got to the country field. I clicked on the downward-pointing triangle. Nothing happened. Maybe that was connected with the state field only offering American states, I thought, and tried again. This got old quickly so I searched for the contact information. It was after business hours on a Friday, but what the heck, this is a hobby site, I tried to phone. Left a message. I emailed. Monday, mid-morning, I called. Left another message. Emailed again asking for a work-around. Monday, late afternoon, got an email explaining that the printing option was new and they would, sometime in the future, be expanding to other countries. They suggested I get some one in the States to order my printed scrapblog and mail it to me. I suggested they should mention somewhere that the printed option is only available in the States currently.
I thought of the daughter of someone I know, then looked at the calendar to see how close we were to Christmas. Swore. Swore some more. I thought of the amazing collection of knowledge and talent in the professional organization I belonged to, Halton-Peel Communicators Association, and Google-Grouped them. Within a very few hours, I was given probably 8 recommendations, including a graphic designer offering to do it for a third of his usual hourly fee! Very kind, but I was determined to manage on my own. I was delighted and impressed with the number of suggestions; there are a lot of photo book applications out there. I began to do the first thing I should have done after I decided I wanted to make a photo book. I researched and compared. I finalized on two.
Blurb.com
I really like the look of the Blurb site. I’ve found that the evidence of good design on the website often indicates the good design of the application. (I’m a Mac user, so you see where this belief comes from;->!) I checked out the printing and delivery dates, and felt it was a pretty tight squeeze, and if Murphy’s Law intervened, I would be in trouble.
I finally went for PhotoInPress, which is Canadian-based, and appeared to offer equivalent or lower pricing and much more attractive delivery times. (Fingers crossed!)
PhotoInPress Website
You can see the price for the fancy version, and the delivery information.
You have to download their free software and then design the book.
PhotoInPress Book Designer
This is similar enough to the others that I was able to quickly pick it up and create the third version of my family photo book gift!
I’m in the “Edit Book” tab and it’s easy to see where to go for what.
The layout is less flexible than Scrapblog, but a bit more flexible than Lulu. Layouts are based on the number of photos and whether they’re horizontal or vertical, and you can choose from a number, most include text space.
The photos are stretched along the bottom, so you see more at one time than in the others, and there’s a nice feature where there’s a check on any photo you’ve already used, but you can use it more than once, if you want.
Moving around in the book after creating it is a little klutzy – you have to go in sequence – but it’s clear.
So I made my order two days ago and paid for it with PayPal, and now I wait. I hope to get my copies next week.
Learning Living 