“Privacy”

Fingerprint (not mine – combination of this image and this image)

Maybe you’ve noticed that Facebook is separating its messenger application from its mobile application. “That’s strange,” you think, “I like things the way they are. They’re integrated, which works well. Why would they change that?” Good question. According to Facebook, there are lots of reasons that your new experience will be richer and better.

But, according to this article on the Huffington Post, users who download the Messenger app agree to terms of service that are “unprecedented and, quite frankly, frightening.” For example, by installing it, you agree that the Facebook Messenger app can:

• call phone numbers and send text messages without your intervention
• record audio, take pictures, and take video at any time without your confirmation
• share data about your contacts,
• share your phone’s profile information including the phone number, device IDs, whether a call is active, and the remote number you are connected to
• access a log of your incoming and outgoing calls, emails, and other communication
  

Some of these are a bit scary — recording me without my confirmation? who are you, the NSA? But maybe you’re not surprised that Facebook is collecting and sharing your information because users get the app for “free,” which basically means you pay for it by giving over your data. And anyone who agrees to those terms and conditions gets what they signed up for, right? Well what if something similar was happening on the World Wide Web? Spoiler alert: it is.

Think turning off cookies keeps websites from tracking you? Take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick. Even if you don’t let websites store cookies — small files that websites use to track you — on your machine, it’s likely that the combination of your operating system, browser version, browser plugins, time zone, screen size, fonts downloaded, and a few other configurations are as unique as a fingerprint. And websites recognize you by your device’s fingerprint every time you visit.

In fact, your browser history alone is another giveaway. Think about how links to sites you have visited are purple while links you haven’t are blue, then consider this thought experiment: If a website picked a handful of websites and linked to them on its webpage, it would learn about you when you visited based on your combination of blue and purple links. As the number of links grows, there would be a greater and greater chance that your specific combination would be unique. And, based on your combination of blue and purple, and the demographics of visitors to those sites, some information about you could be predicted. For example, if you have visited Martha Stewart’s website on your computer and I’ve visited Hot Rod Magazine’s website on mine, a website could predict a few ways in which we are different. And, again, the longer the list of links, the more accurate the prediction becomes.

All of this information isn’t intended to cause a panic, but rather to raise awareness. Before you bust out your tinfoil hat, consider other alternatives that are more likely to keep you safe online: Check your browser’s security settings, keep your operating system up to date, and look into antivirus and anti-malware tools. And, be aware that what you are doing online is likely trackable and traceable, so be thoughtful of where you go and what you do there. As a friend of mine recently observed in response to all of this, “It’s a scary world. But also a great one.” Be careful out there.

Tips and Tricks for DIY Educational Videos

Screenshot from Wistia.com/learning

Now that we have our $100 studio put together, we have to figure out how to use it. After a little Googling, I came across Wistia.com’s Learning Center, a “hub to teach, learn, and discuss video marketing.” Don’t let the term marketing trip you up. The tips on this site are categorized into video strategy and concepting, video production, and video marketing. The first two certainly apply to creating your own educational materials and parts of the third might also be helpful.

Not surprisingly, all of the tips are presented in well-crafted, short, edutaining videos. The overarching goal is to get you up and running quickly, cheaply and easily, so a wide range of options are presented — from $600 microphones to squeezing decent videos out of a camera you may already have — an iPhone.

Some highlights for me include the Down and Dirty Lighting Kit, which explains how to setup good quality lighting for under $100; Choosing a Microphone, which advocates for a shotgun mic over a lavalier, but anything over what comes with your camera; and Shooting for the Edit, which has lots of great ideas for recording that will make your life easier in post production.

There have been a couple of videos that don’t really apply to what I want or need to do (like Get Creative with Lenses, because we’re not planning to shoot with a DSLR camera) but even those are well crafted and interesting to watch. I’d recommend all of these videos to anyone making their own videos, with or without a studio.

Building a $100 Studio

Like many educators, we find ourselves producing more and more online content.  Currently, to record audio, we try to find a quiet room and record directly onto our laptops, which makes for pretty lousy audio.  For video, the process is the same, including stacking furniture and books to get the webcam in our laptops to the best possible position.  Far from ideal.  As we move to more and more audio and video production, the lack of a dedicated studio space is becoming and issue.  So, we decided build a dedicated studio.

Like most educational organizations, cost is big a factor.  We just don’t have thousands of dollars to throw at the latest 4K cameras.  We also don’t need a full-blown Hollywood studio to make materials for our students to view on the web.  We started by looking at acoustical foam as a way to insulate our space, but this quickly added up to hundreds of dollars for our 10′ x 12′ room.  Our search for other options led us to Justin Troyer, OSU’s resident media services expert and author of Medialogue, who showed us a studio on campus that he had insulated with mover’s blankets.  This looked to be a solution to some of our biggest audio issues because they would both help to block out external noise and reduce the echo within the room.

We had also been struggling with what sort of background to use for video production.  We were leaning towards a velvet or velour curtain in a neutral color because it would help to further absorb the echo within the studio.  But that fabric is expensive and it would lock us into a single background for every video, which is not ideal.  Justin suggested a green screen, which can be removed digitally and replaced with almost anything.  He has several different-sized pop-up green screens which are easy to put behind the video subjects.  But in the end we decided to got with another option he suggested: paint a wall green.  This saves both money and space because the wall does not have to be set up or stored when not in use.

So, after starting with an empty office space, we used the following items to create our studio:

Item	#	Cost	Total
Mover’s Blankets – Harbor Freight	6	$7.99	$47.94
Light-Duty Ceiling Hooks – Home Depot (4 pack)	4	$1.49	$5.96
Gallon Behr Premium Plus Ultra Interior Latex Paint – Sparkling Apple	1	$30.98	$30.98
Assorted painting sundries (roller covers, masking tape)			$15.87
Total:			$100.75

We came in just over $100, which is pretty close to our target.  Included in the costs are items that got used and disposed of while we were painting (roller covers and masking tape) but not items that I already had at home that I brought in to use (paint roller, roller tray, brushes).  I also filled in a few holes in the wall with my own putty and putty knife.  You may need to factor in additional costs if you don’t have access to these basic tools.

In the end, we incurred one final cost which was to purchase a short curtain rod and rings to which allow us to slide the mover’s blanket out from in front of the door, which makes getting in and out much, much easier.  The rod and rings cost just under $22.

Now the real fun begins.  You can see from the picture that we already have a small table, chair, microphone stand, and camera tripod.  The table will be used for straight audio recording, which is why we wrapped the end of one mover’s blanked around it to enclose it on three sides.  We still need to find a microphone or two, a video camera, and some lights.  Stay tuned as we work on acquiring these items to complete our studio.

Book Me

Sometimes, particularly when it’s raining, I like to wander through as many university buildings as I can on my way to my classroom or office to avoid getting wet.  And despite how much has changed since I was a student, I’m amazed to still see professors who set up appointments with their students by pinning a piece of paper to their office doors.  We can put a man on a blog, but we still rely on paper to schedule appointments?  There must be a better way!  In fact, there are several.

One option is an website called YouCanBook.Me.  It can be used in much the same way as the strip of paper on the door with 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, etc. written down one side, but with many more features.  The most obvious is that none of your students have to physically travel to your door to see what appointment times are available.  Appointments are made online and can be synced with everyone’s Google calendars, which each user can then sync to phones, online office calendar systems, other Google calendars, etc.  The system can also be set to send email alerts when appointments are booked and to automatically close appointment windows when it’s too late to sign up.

There are other systems out there as well with many of these features and more.  If you like something other than ycb.me, leave a link in the comments.

CALICO 2013

In May, I attended the 2013 CALICO Conference.  CALICO stands for the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium.  According to the CALICO website, the organization “includes language educators, programmers, technicians, web page designers, CALL developers, CALL practitioners, and second language acquisition researchers–anyone interested in exploring the use of technology for language teaching and learning.”  The diversity of the conference attendees leads to a wide range of interesting sessions.  Here are a few of the highlights:

First, was a pre-conference workshop called “Place-Based Mobile Game Design for L2 Learning and Teaching” presented by J. Scott Payne and Julie Sykes.  Scott and Julie have been working in a mobile game design platform called ARIS, which can be downloaded for free to iOS devices.  Julie has developed a place-based augmented reality game called Mentira which requires students in Spanish classes at the University of New Mexico to venture into local Spanish-speaking neighborhoods to solve a fictional murder mystery.

Scott has worked on modifying the ARIS platform so that it can function offline and can work with historical maps for projects like Immigrant City.  It’s amazing to see the little blue circle that represents you on your phone’s map move around a hundred-year-old map while you walk through the real city.  Some roads and structures on the map are still there, while others are not.  Workshop participants signed up for free accounts and used the ARIS editor to begin building place-based games.  Although the editor is simple and easy to use, very complex games can be built with it.  (If you would like to build your own mobile game, visit http://arisgames.org/make/)

“Eye Tracking for Dummies: A Practical Overview of Options, Affordances, and Challenges in Conducting Eye Tracking CALL Research” was a panel that described several options for conducting eye-tracking research.  In language learning, eye-tracking can reveal how readers’ eyes move over words, where they pause, and where, when, and how long they go back over words they have read.  Although this kind of research typically requires sensitive equipment which costs thousands of dollars, one of the panelists, Jeff Kuhn, built his own eye-tracker for about $150.  (For more on Jeff’s DIY eye-tracker, see my earlier post.)

Another interesting session was “Semiotic Remediation and Language Learning through Place-based Plurilingual Gaming” with Steve Thorne and the 503 Design Collective.  Steve described a mobile game his group created called ChronoOps in which players must survive the future past by becoming agents sent back from 2070 to document the dawn and dusk of environmentally friendly technology.  This game, which was also developed on the ARIS platform, requires players to document green technology with pictures, text, and audio which are geotagged and saved within the game.  When other players play the game near the same locations, they can see what in-game artifacts other players have created and recorded within the game.  By playing the game, players are collaborating to collaboratively augment their reality.

A complete list of conference sessions can be found on the CALICO website.  But it’s not just the sessions that make for a good conference; it’s also the people you meet and the conversations you have outside of the scheduled sessions.  One of the conversations I had was with Mat Schulze, a German professor at the University of Waterloo.  We sat and talked for over an hour about building an English learner language corpus.  In linguistics, a corpus refers to a large body of or collection of language.  A wide range of applications have been developed to analyze these collections of language that can find almost any trend or pattern you would like to examine.

For example, if we examine every placement composition that English as a Second Language (ESL) students write, we could potentially investigate anything from differences between speakers of different first languages (Chinese vs. Arabic speakers, for example) or at what point in students’ learning specific grammatical errors no longer appear indicating that they have learned how to produce a specific structure.  Building and analyzing our own corpus could lead us to a big data-informed curriculum as well as to research opportunities for other language educators and linguists.  Attending this conference helped to connect me to people who can help us build this corpus.

I was able to attend the 2013 CALICO Conference through the generous support of ESL Programs and the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University.  I also received matching funds from an OSU eLearning Professional Development grant.  For move information on this grant, visit http://ocio.osu.edu/blog/grants/apply/pd-grant-application/.

This post was originally published on OSU’s Digital Union blog.

Writing MOOC

Recently, the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies program in the Department of English at Ohio State was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a “Writing II: Rhetorical Composition” MOOC.  Read more details on the OSU Department of English website.

What’s a MOOC? MOOC stands for Massively Open Online Course. So, imagine an online course that is open and (typically) free to anyone who wants to register. In essence, MOOCs bring information technology’s promise of exponential scalability to education.  And, obviously, there are some administrative challenges inherent to this kind of teaching.  The recent spectacular failure of the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” brought MOOCs attention from mainstream media, in part because the course topic made the failure irresistibly ironic.

Can anything be taught in an online classroom with tens of thousands of students?  Apparently, yes.  I have friends who have learned programming languages this way.  Of course, programming languages are much simpler and easy to test (Does your program do this?  Good!  You pass the quiz!) than most human languages and particularly the advanced rhetoric of a language.

MOOCs frequently crowdsource some of the evaluation of student assignments — think peer editing — which may work well for advanced writing.  But, students who enroll with the expectation that they will receive 1/20th of the instructors attention, which they might receive in a traditional classroom, might be surprised by some of these techniques.

This is truly the cutting edge / Wild West of online learning.  The good news is, if you’re interested in learning more, you (and all of your friends) can sign up for the course yourself via Coursera, a “social entrepreneurship company” that has partnered with OSU and many other universities to offer MOOCs.

So, maybe the question is, can everything be taught with MOOCs?  It’s too early to answer that question.  But lots of people are asking it.

Will MOOCs eventually replace traditional brick-and-mortar institutions?  New technologies rarely replace old ones completely. For example, you have a television, but you probably still listen to the radio sometimes (in your car, when your iPod battery dies, say.)  But, if even moderately successful, it will be difficult for every school to compete with a free course offered by Harvard, MIT, or Stanford.  Or Ohio State.

Communication Goes Visual

You know that feeling that you can’t put into words?  Like when your mind reels with an overwhelming realization.  Or when you’re too tired to do anything except stare blankly.  These sentiments, and thousands of others, are being expressed across various social media a GIF.

What was once just a snappy way to let visitors know your newfangled website was still under construction, the GIF has been embraced for its ability to compress not just a single image into a manageable file size, but also several frames of animation.  Though these images are not high quality, they look fine online and load relatively quickly due to their small size.

These simple animations can be created using desktop software such as Photoshop or in any number of newer online services.  (Google it.)  So now, when you’re looking for the perfect way to express something like the feeling you get when you do something clever but no one is around to notice, you can do it with one perfectly succinct animated image.

How do these GIFs relate to ESL learners and ESL teaching?  Well, if your students are venturing out into the wilderness that is the Internet, they are likely already encountering this form of communication.  Do they understand it?  Many of these animated images express universal sentiments such as surprise / exasperation, not wanting to hear what someone has to say, or that awkward moment when no one has anything more to say.  But, as you can see from this list alone, some of the meaning is somewhat complex and layered.  Also, many of the images are taken from popular culture which some students may not be attuned to as well as a native speaker.

But, perhaps we’re not giving our ESL learners enough credit.  They could very well be communicating with GIFs regularly because they appreciate the ease with which they can communicate complex ideas which they may not have words for in English.  Ask them.  Or ask students to describe these emotions as a classroom exercise.  You might be pleasantly surprised by what they say.

For lots more animated GIFs, visit reddit.com/r/reactiongifs.

Bulletin Board 2.0

An article in our student newspaper on Pinterest.com caught my eye this morning.  It is described as an online pinboard for sharing photos, recipes, and other content.  Content is shared when users pin content from someone else’s pinboard onto their own.

In this way, Pinterest is a bit like Tumblr or even Twitter in that content can echo around and be amplified as more users repost it.  Interestingly, most (if not all) of the content is image-based.  In some ways, this is limiting because a recipe is actually a picture of food that you can click on to get to the site that originally posted the recipe.  In effect, Pinterest actually feels more like a different interface for photosharing websites like Flickr.  There are lots of interesting boards that are pictures organized by color or by different topics.

From a quick glance, it seems like Pinterest is a very good internet meme incubator.  I’ve already been sucked into looking at pictures (and the blog posts they link to) that include hilariously ugly knitted shorts and a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made from over 4000 Rubik’s cubes.  There are also plenty of funny and inspirational signs and slogans as well as the requisite cute and funny pictures of kittens and puppies.

Could Pinterest be useful to ESL students?  Perhaps.  It could provide a way for them to store and organize web content that can be shared within the classroom community.  It’s very smooth and clean and the opportunity to interact with the site-wide community could be interesting.  And the site terms and conditions prohibit nudity and hateful content, which can be reassuring for teachers.  If a course is not using a web-based course management system, Pinterest could be a quick and interesting way to build a community that could generate some interesting discussion.  But is it the next Big Thing?  Probably not.

Flickr is Saving the Whales

Flickr is a popular online photo sharing website that allows users to attach information to the pictures such as keyword tags, date, time, and location the picture was taken, and even the kind of camera that took the picture.  Although pictures can be made private, many are uploaded publicly.  This online public database is now being used to help save the whales.

I first came across this project on the CNN website.  People are using pictures of whales, particularly pictures of their tails which have unique markings that can be used to identify individual whales, combined with the date and location information of the pictures to track whales’ migration.  One whale that was tracked via Flickr was found to have a longer migration route than any other previously recorded migration route.  These citizen scientists are helping further scientific research.

Crowdsourcing solutions to problems is no longer uncommon, particularly via games.  Newspapers have made a game out of combing through online documents on government spending, thereby turning readers into investigators.  Fold It is a game in which players twist and untwist actual molecular structures to further science in ways that computer modelling cannot.  Jane McGonigal has created a game called Evoke that challenges a community of players to share and evaluate solutions to the world’s problems.  The U.S. Navy has adopted a similar approach to fighting piracy.

Can language teachers and learners make use of crowdsourcing?  Of course.  Forvo.com, a pronunciation dictionary created by users, is one example.  Creating an online dictionary that includes pronunciations for every word in a language would be a nearly impossible task for one person, which is why it took a crowd of hundreds to create Forvo (which includes pronunciations for scores of languages.)

Can language teachers create similar games for language learning?  Perhaps.  Julie Sykes has created a location-aware game called Mentira which sends students into an actual Spanish-speaking neighborhood near the University of New Mexico campus to solve a fictional mystery set decades in the past.  Students who have finished the game are now involved in writing and rewriting it to add more detail and different possible outcomes.

Given the game-like nature of language learning (learners learn skills to level up) there are lots of options for teachers– from encouraging students to become involved in the above activities to creating new games for students.  If you know of other examples, leave them in the comments.

Know Your States

I don’t recall how I first came across the Find the States game on jimspages.com, bit it has become one of my go-to sites for demonstrating interactive whiteboards.

The game is simple: states appear in random order and the user is asked to place them on an empty U.S. map.  Scores are tabulated based on how many miles away from the correct location you place each state.  Some states are much easier than others.  For example, it’s relatively easy to line up unique features on the coastline, but very difficult to place Colorado without any of the states that border it already in place.

This game is simple, but it demonstrates the use of IWBs quite naturally while providing a fun geography challenge.  Can you average less than 100 miles of errors in your placement?  Less than 10?  Give it a try.