I’m a middle of the road Twitter user (please don’t call me a Tweep, Twit or other cutesie-pie name). I post pictures of food and coffee and the places I go. I make observations about things in the media or in my fields of interest or I share links about the stuff I read. I retweet comments and links that are interesting or make me think. I talk to a few people, ask a few questions, respond to a few others. Somedays I am prolific; at other times I’m quiet. I read a lot more than I write.

I love Twitter because it’s about choice. I can dip in and out, engage or disengage. If I find someone who is really interesting or who posts stuff that makes me think, I can follow that person. If I find that someone that I already follow doesn’t interest me or posts too much rubbish then I can un-follow them. During an event I can follow a hashtag (#eqnz for the Christchurch earthquakes) or a specific user (eg, @acarvin who has been described as the man who tweets revolutions).

Some people mourn the days when it was just them and their friends on Twitter. This makes me laugh. You can choose who is on Twitter by carefully choosing who you follow. If that’s not enough then restrict who follows you – which I tend to think misses the point. It’s no different to blogs. If you engage only with people on the same wavelength then you will never be challenged to think in different or new ways.

I don’t like excessive retweeting. Some people go a bit crazy on the retweet button and copy everything a person says. This annoys me. If I find a retweet interesting I can go and look at the original stream and follow that person if I want to. I also don’t see the point of Kiwis retweeting archane news items from overseas. A lot of  BREAKING NEWS isn’t breaking for everyone. And just because it says PLEASE RT a lost or found  dog / cat / child … you don’t have to – especially if most of the people you interact with are on a different continent to the mislaid creature.

Sometimes I’ve discovered that my Twitter stream gets a bit unbalanced. I find that there are too many self-promoting journalists, politicians or celebrities pointlessly jabbering away at each other. Or like right now, I’m finding too much negativity in my stream. It’s easy to fix with a few judicious clicks of the delete button. After all if I wouldn’t enjoy it in real life, I don’t need to see it on my screen.

So, in order to finish on a positive note what do I like? New ideas, links and angles. Photos, music and videos that I’d never find on my own. The serendipity of making and meeting new friends (on and offline). And fun – good fun like the stuff in this collection of Kiwi gems. That’s what I love about Twitter.

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ReadWriteWeb reports a French study that says that people scan newspaper articles more quickly than iPad articles. Apparently newspaper readers retain more information than electronic readers. What are the implications of this research? Should we be thinking about what skills are required to read from a screen? Are students disadvantaged when they complete tests using a computer? Food for thought.

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Three Basic Rules for Online Safety from Krebs on Security. In a nutshell …

• “If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it!”
• “If you installed it, update it.”
• “If you no longer need it, remove it.”

Simple really!

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Instructions for removing Mac Defender if you have been infected with the little beastie. I saw a case of this earlier this month and while it’s not difficult to remove it does give people a fright. It’s easy to stop this kind of thing in its tracks by opening up Safari’s preferences and removing the tick that allows “safe” files to open automatically.

The Mac App Store has a few other benefits. Apps will be kept up to date, they be available later and if you have to reinstall your Mac. What’s not to love about the idea? I hope that Microsoft also bring out an App Store. Heck, I would love it.

The main reason that I’m keen is because I believe that people should be paid for their work. It is simple really – while I am a fan of Open Source Software, I’m also a fan of choice. If developers want to charge for their software, I think they should be able to have that opportunity. Afterall, most adults are in work and expect to be reasonably recompensed for that work. You don’t often find Open Source teachers, politicians or lawyers do you? Woohoo, I spent four years at university and got my degree and now I’m going to work for nothing?

That’s the reason that I do pay for a lot of the software that I use. I’ve paid for Apple and PC stuff. Commercial and shareware. I’ve also sometimes tipped a few dollars to people whose software is freely shared but who have a PayPal account for appreciative users. I also pay for a few of the websites/web apps that I use regularly. LastPass, Xmarks, MetaFilter, Flickr …

As the World Wide Web grew in popularity people got used to a model where everything could be found for free. I still have private clients who ask me how to find music and movies on the internet. When I point them to iTunes or the like they are incredulous because they already pay Xtra or Vodafone for the internet, and the other stuff is for free, right? This attitude extends beyond people who would never “illegally” download music or a movie. Many people sign up for websites and applications and then cry foul when the site changes the groundrules or worse, has the teremity to close.

“What about MY bookmarks? I have this many and I’ve had them there for all these years!” was the cry when it was leaked that Yahoo were looking to change Delicious.

“Have you paid for the service?” was my answer. And even then, does paying for something really give us any rights?

Nothing has changed. Webspace, bandwidth, customer service and support all cost money. Money that can’t always be recouped by advertisements. If a service appears free to use, someone is paying for it – and why should they subsidise your use?

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. (MetaFilter user blue_beetle)

Think about it. You get what you pay for.

St Kilda Overpass panorama from my digital Magimix

Artichoke is blogging again! And because I have decided to attempt to write again I am going to comment on her posts here in my own space. Arti has written a post entitled Pedagogical Promiscuity and “Assessment for Learning” where she talks about a number of current issues in modern teaching and learning.

Interesting points that Arti makes are about the continued importance of traditional literacies and how new digital literacies can only be developed on a foundation of knowledge and understanding of how things work. The post takes me back to my brief teaching experience this year when several of the 12 and 13 year old students that I worked with were unable to find their local MPs address in an internet treasure hunt (after we’d spent some time looking at advanced search techniques). The issue wasn’t that they couldn’t use their new found skills. It was because they didn’t know the name of their MP – who happened to also be the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key.

During that same teaching experience I spent a lot of time working with the kids looking at different ways to express their learning. We explored websites and blogs, photography, slideshows, audio stuff (I hesitate to say podcasting) and movie making. My brief from the school was to look at ways to help these students become creators. This was all well and good, except that the kids didn’t really want to create. They wanted to consume. If they did want to share something they wanted to be able to feed their photos, videos or music into a digital Magimix and have a product plop out at the end.  Any form of thought or editing was designated boring because they wanted to move onto the next Chuck Norris joke website or Justin Gaga YouTube.

Of course there is nothing wrong with using a food processor. It certainly speeds up the tedious job of chopping vegetables for soup or smooshingup avocado, chili and onions for a guacamole. The thing that the food processor doesn’t do is add the special ingredients – the long simmered ham hock for the soup, the special chili and lime oil that I made last year. The digital Magimix is no different; pulse for too long and you have digital pap, forget to season with judicious editing and it’s same-same and boring.

While we have been holidaying, I have spent a little time (and a lot of my precious mobile bandwith) watching and listening to music mashups like this from DJ Earworm and this MJ piece.

When you examine these clips carefully and think about the skills that are needed, it removes the idea from “something all the kids are doing” to an artform. I couldn’t even start with the beat matching to make a mashup like this. And the video skills – these clips aren’t made on the family computer with MS Movie Maker or on a 13″ MacBook with iMovie 09. These are professionally crafted pieces that have taken hours to complete.

I have been playing with MS ICE software and the photo-stich function of my camera. The results are pleasing but nowhere near the professional results that a “proper” photographer would achieve. I’ve made them for my own amusement and to show to my family and friends. My son brought his little HD video camera to Melbourne and has spent a few minutes compiling his aeroplane taking off clips into a dream sequence. Again, his short video pieces will amuse his family and his friends and maybe garner a few hunderd view on YouTube.

What my pictures and my son’s videos won’t do is display anything much more than the fact we have some nice consumer gear and that we can hold them still occasionally and press the right buttons at the right time. Even if I had a flash new Canon EOS or bought him the latest “proper” video camera, we couldn’t produce more professional material because we haven’t the necessary post-processing equipment or the indepth understanding of how to put pieces together.

I think it’s time that we stopped conflating the ability to throw some pictures, videos and music together with digital literacy. There are a ton of programs and applications out there that allow you to pour digital stuff in one end and then get a manuafactured product out of the other side. All these are is the digital equivalent of a Magimix that is able to turn ingredients into something more easily digested.

• I started post-graduate studies. Moving from the field of education to computing proved to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I have passed both of the papers that I sat
• I fought a couple of internal stoushes in 2010. I won a big one, and am in maintenance mode on another
• After several years of work with the Ministry of Education ICT Professional Development clusters, I decided to move sideways and work on the technical, infrastructure side of ICT in schools. This hasn’t always been easy. I now work in both Mac and Windows schools and administrate Windows, Mac and Linux servers. I am still more of a desktop specialist than a server technician. This might change in 2011 as I intend to do some study around networking and server environments
• At Christmas I was 10kgs lighter than at the same time last year. I may put on a kilogram or two the way we are eating at the moment
• I spent some time back in the classroom working with real, live kids. Much as I enjoy teaching, I re-discovered that it’s not for me
• I lost my photography mojo this year. For a long time I stopped taking pictures. Thankfully it has come back at the end of the year and I am Ms Paparazzi again, stalking my grandchildren, shooting everything in sight and even getting some passable shots
• In November I became a New Zealand citizen. After 37 years in the country it was time that I showed that I wanted to stay
• 2010 saw the usual round of illness. The spots have come and gone, reminding me when I need to slow down. I’ve had a couple of bouts of asthma and my kidneys reminded me how important they were in July
• We saw Carole King and James Taylor at the Vector Arena, Lydia Cole, Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot and Diana Krall out at Villa Maria and The Topp Twins at the Auckland Zoo. Sarah MxLachlan cancelled her concert. I was quite upset about that
• In April I got a new (to me) car – a lovely blue Subaru Impreza
• My grandchildren continue to be a delight. Olivia is now 8, Keziah is 7 and Camryn is 6. Michael is almost 4. Their parents are doing a fne job bringing them up with love and wonder. Georgia Jane, my newest granddaughter was born on 4th November, 2010. Her parents, Esther and Andrew delivered the baby themselves in his old family home. I am far, far too young to be the grandmother of five
• My youngest daughter, Jesse, moved back to Auckland. It’s been lovely to have her closer to the family
• My youngest child, Ben, turned sixteen. I am enjoying guiding him to adulthood
• Holidays! We have travelled a lot in 2010. We flew down to Wellington early in January and then spent a week in Tairua before school started. In May we visited Dunedin. The July school holidays saw us in Tonga on a professional development trip. In October we spent a weekend in the far north. We visited Melbourne in November and, now, just six weeks later, we are ending the year (and starting the next one) back in Melbourne
• The Tonga trip was a huge big deal. Thanks to the staff at May Road School for including us in their professional development journey. I learned a lot. I confronted a lot of my beliefs about teaching and learning and about the role of technology. Most importantly I learned about myself and dealt with some demons
• I also made a very quick trip to Hastings after my mother became unwell. My parents’ health is an ongoing concern
• I went back to the tablet PC. My beloved 7 and 10” netbooks have gone to my children and I’m now using an HP TouchSmart. It’s not perfect but the multi-touch screen is well advanced from what I was using in 2005
• After losing my beloved Nokia E71, the insurance company gave me a Nokia E75. I hated it so sold it and bought a cheap Samsung Spica Android phone. Only one thing to say: Android phones rock. I am writing this whilst tethered through PdaNet (my Samsung is still stuck on Éclair)
• Blogging has slipped almost completely away in 2010. Instead I am using Facebook to communicate with friends and family (on a personal level) while my Twiter accounts are more open and general. I am reasonably comfortable with the mix although, like the rest of the connected world, privacy is a big concern

And finally, in contradiction of my opening statement, this is the most important …

• Our home continues to be a place of peace, love and happiness. I dearly love the people that I live with and the way that we live. Thank you both for putting up with me. May the love and laughter continue in 2011

Here goes!
Kevin Kelly on Wired Magazine‘s early predictions …

… it is clear that all predictions of the future are really just predictions of the present.

Read the post, it’s an insight to what was imagined in the mid-nineties. Some great sound text-bytes for a journey in your head.

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The Oatmeal on why it’s better to pretend that you don’t know anything about computers …

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ZScreen – an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. Really simple to use!

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And … check out @Astro_Soichi’s Twitpic stream for the most out of this world photos around at the moment.

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QR (Quick Response) Codes have been around for about 15 years (Wikipedia). They are a black and white image that can be found on all sorts of things. When I thought about it I realised I had seen them on posters and packaging for quite some time. Apparently they are very popular in Japan – while the rest of us have been slow to catch on.

Like any barcode, you need a scanner to capture and decode the information. My Nokia E71 has a barcode scanner and I wondered why it didn’t work on ‘normal’ barcodes. It’s because it’s a QR Code Reader. There are lots of QR Code scanners out there! i-nigma make applications for lots of phones. Their Symbian Series 60 application is a lot faster than the one that came with my E71.

So what can you embed in a QR Code? Quite a bit of information!  Many companies simply embed a website address so that a consumer can use their mobile phone to scan the barcode and see extra product information immediately. Someone like me could add a QR Code to a business card. Some one who sees my card could scan the code, go to the website and see an up to date resume or contact details. The embedded data could contain competition information or treasure hunt clues.

Download a QR Code scanner for your phone and scan one of the codes on this page – better yet make your own!

Note: The two codes on this page were made with two different generators. I used http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ for the top one (which links to a page about my work) and I used http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code-generator/ for the second code (which is a message about my Twitter accounts).

My catch of the day at the Huka Falls Prawn Park

A new decade – a new start?

It would be nice to be able to resurrect this space and do some “fun” writing again. The pressures of the last eighteen months have meant that, apart from tiny Twitter-bytes, I haven’t done any real writing about the things that I care about. These holidays have been tagged for a bit of R&R&R – Rest and Recuperation and Resurrection.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing the things that I love. We’ve done a lot of travelling around the place recenttly and I have uploaded a ton of photos to my Flickr account. Visits to Wairoa, Hastings and Wellington have been photographed, tagged and put online. I’m uploading some shots that I took around the lower Kaipara Harbour after an amazing cruise we did on Thursday. There are family photos too.

I’ve been geeking around too. Dropped 500GB hard drives into my laptop and netbook and upgraded them both to Windows 7. I’ve been playing with some Linux and Windows PE live CDs and looking at how these environments can be used in my world. This week I finally got around to setting up some extra network stuff so that our whole house has the right kind of internet access. Benn and I have taken on the task of stripping down all of our old junked computers and sorting out which parts go to TradeMe, which we can use and what just needs to go to someone else to recycle. Our home network is pretty shoddy at the moment – I need to think about placing our equipment more efficiently so that it serves us rather than we serve it.

We bought ourselves a Wii for Christmas and have really enjoyed playing some of the games and activities. The Wii Fit is getting a daily workout too! I’m planning to have a play with the ideas behind the Wiimote Project.

Porthole to history at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea

This year sees a bit of a change in direction for me. I’m going to start my post graduate studies. After several years heavily immersed in the educational ICT arena it’s time to step back and take another look at the world of silicon, ones and zeroes. I’ll still be doing my schools’ tech support work, my websites and looking after my business clients, however, it’s time to get thinking again and to think more widely.

The world of educational ICT is a great place to visit but it’s not the world that I want to stay. There are a lot of amazing thinkers in that world but unfortunately there are also a lot of people who can’t see beyond their own sphere. I think that it’s time for me at least to break out and to see if I can get a wider perspective on things. So that’s what I hope to do this year. I’ll still be on the fringe of the education world but by being outside of the ICT PD network, hopefully I’ll be able to see things with more clarity.

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Speaking of Kiwi Culture, said ex-mother-in-law’s eldest child was Pixie Wiliams who was the vocalist on New Zealand’s first ever ‘pop song‘ Blue Smoke. I took this photo of Ben with his Aunt’s record on a visit to Te Papa a couple of years ago.

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The Creative Freedom Foundation has had lots to talk about this week. Earlier it was the way that school students have been fed one side of the copyright debate. By the end of the week they were looking more deeply at some of the Public Library copyright tensions.

Within ten minutes my son, who attends the same college came into the kitchen to ask if I remembered a student that I taught a couple of years earlier who has chosen to shave her heair off to raise money for cancer.

I spent the day surveying teachers about Inquiry and Problem Based Learning. It’s easy to think that what is taught in the classroom stays there. I would like to think that the today’s lesson of the day is that we have a far greater impact than we realise. I hope that we, as teachers develop learning experiences that allow kids to think about how what they have learned can make a difference to other people.