We won’t rehearse all of the problems with email attachments here (Can I open that file? What happened to my disk quota!? Which version was it?) Instead, let us focus on things that improve the experience. In fact, here’s a short video Top Ten list:

Links from the video

• Convenience: YouSendIt.com (and Scrivener, a fun writing application)
• Collaboration: Wikis (specifically the Laptop Leaders)
• Focus: Blogs (specifically the Digital Portfolios PLN — Seth, [and his colleagues] can help you set up your own)
• Reach Out: Google Docs (and Spreadsheets, Presentations, and more…)
• Brevity: The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

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As teachers, we are perennially swapping the hat that we wear: lecturer, confidante, counselor, coach, security officer, parent. With the ability publish work instantaneously to the entire globe with a single click comes a fresh and daunting hat: copyright lawyer. The Gordian Knot of copyright law raises its Medusa-like head at several times during the year: preparing readings, vetting student research and writing, and presenting student accomplishments. At this time of the year, it seems most appropriate to focus on the last of these…

What copyright concerns come along with exhibiting and presenting student work? What follows are some questions to ask yourself (and your students) to clarify this situation. (Remember: IANAL, so this is not technically legal advice, this is friendly, collegial advice!)

• Is this work original? If the student presenting work that is entirely original — not based on the work of any other being here or on Alpha Centauri, living or dead, then you can’t possibly infringe on anyone else’s copyright. It would behoove the student to include a copyright notice on their work to protect their own copyright!
• Are you using material in the public domain? If so, then you can do whatever you want, however and wherever you want. Always assume not, unless specifically labeled otherwise: figuring out public domain is tricky. Most of the time, it’s best simply to start with material that is licensed the way you want to use it — and simply owning a work does not give you license to reproduce it (you can’t use an iTunes song as the soundtrack to your YouTube video in the same way that you can’t base a poster on an AP photo without incurring the wrath of the AP).
• Are outside sources quoted parsimoniously? Fair use allows for quotation and reproduction for critical purposes — but if you’re reproducing entire works verbatim or using more than you need to make your point, you could be violating the rights of the author (and exposing yourself to legal action). There is no hard and fast rule (and there is no straight-up “exemption for education”), but a “reasonable man” test is a good guideline. In general, if you’re in doubt, you should hedge your bet and ask for/buy permission before exhibiting.

In general, if you can’t answer yes to at least one of these questions, your best bet is to not publish: you’re taking a risk not just for yourself, but for your student and the school. Treat work that doesn’t meet these criteria as a draft, available only within the school walls. Push your students to revise their work to meet these criteria in exactly the same manner that the editor at your publishing house would push you.

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Here are a few tutorials on animation (at a basic level) in Flash 8 Professional. They need to be re-recorded and cleaned up a little, but they’re a useful starting place for someone totally at a loss when faced with Flash’s ridiculous learning curve. The link to this post and to anything else I might have to say about Flash is http://battis.net/link/flash8

The videos in this sequence are (with links to higher-quality, but less-firewall-friendly, Screencast-O-Matic videos):

1. Create a Simple Animation — How to create a simple Flash Professional 8 animation using a Motion Tween between two keyframes.
2. Adding Complexity to a Motion Tween — How to use rotation (or scale, skew or other Transformations) to adjust a simple animation.
3. Adding a Motion Guide — How to add a Motion Guide layer to a simple animation in Flash Professional 8.
4. Shape Tweens — How to use Shape Tweens to animate motion (or, well, shapes) in Flash Professional 8.
5. Reverse Exploding Animation — How to have a scattered group of shapes “resolve” themselves into your design in Flash Professional 8 (this was a request from my media design class).

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The Complicated Abstract Reasoning Argument

This is often a sore spot for me: I see teachers bemoaning their own role as digital immigrants — they’ll never be able to keep up with their digital native students, who know so, so, so much about technology. I don’t buy this for an instant: I’ve worked with middle and high school students for a long time, and I am constantly appalled at the shockingly low level of technological literacy, media savvy and generally poor levels of critical thought demonstrated by teenagers. They’re not bad kids — it’s just that the car rental agencies are right: they won’t have any executive function until they’re 25 — that part of the braing ain’t physically there. It’s about where teenagers are at, developmentally and biologically.

Therefore, to say that these “digital natives” will outpace us is a fallacy: they know how to do things that are fun, but usually inconsequential (and here I must pause to salute students, teachers and individuals are the exceptions that prove the rule). The role of the digital immigrant teacher is to do the same thing that teachers have been doing since time immemorial: challenging our students to think a bit harder, analyze a bit more critically, and generally become less naive and more savvy — and hopefully a bit more knowledgeable about our own discipline. Note that technology and the digital divide don’t even come into play there: we digital immigrant teachers can teach this without needing to be “more digitally native” than our students. We don’t need to be the sage on the stage making the computer sing and dance: we just need to model critical thought processes and help our students aspire to be a bit more mature.

Immigration and Naturalization

That’s a longwinded way of saying what came to me naturally yesterday afternoon, in a room where the majority of the teachers were Israeli immigrants: let’s think about immigration in the real world. Let’s think about the naturalization process, and how much concrete information immigrants need to learn to become US citizens. Now let’s take a look at the natives:

Being a native in a country doesn’t make you smart, or resourceful, or a critical thinker… or even responsible. It just means that you feel entitled to be there. Immigrants, by and large, actually have to know how the system works and grok the abstractions of a new place from a more intellectual and analytical standpoint.

And so it is with digital natives and digital immigrants. Digital immigrants bring a lot of baggage with them, including maturity, experience analyzing media critically, abstracting complex arguments, and supporting their ideas with concrete evidence. These are exactly the same skills that the natives don’t have. Yet.

Grumpy Addendum

And these are the same skills that we call “21st Century Skills”… but which go back to the first art critic, sitting around the fire, arguing whether or not that painting on the cave wall really looks like a bison, or if it might be an antelope, and what was the artist thinking using that brown wash when clearly the horns are darker than that…

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One of the real challenges that we confront when teaching in a digital classroom is that there are a tremendous number of documents, spread across a tremendous number of computers, often in tremendously varying states of completion. A team of faculty is coalescing around digital portfolios this spring, and file management is the single greatest challenge that we’re looking at initially.

With that in mind, it seems timely to suggest some best practices for working with files in the My Classes folder on FirstClass:

• Email attachments hurt. If students are turning in their work an email attachments, it counts against their disk quota (which is pretty slim by this point in the year). And you have to open each and every single message to download the attachment so that you can read it. That’s a recipe for frustration. Instead, have your students upload their files directly to the Handins folder — they can just drag them from their computer desktop into the FirstClass folder (or choose Upload… from the File menu in FirstClass). Files in the My Classes folder do not count against anyone’s disk quota. The best part: you can now select a group of files in your Handins folder and drag them to your computer desktop to download all of them all at once (no more opening every individual email).
• File names matter. Ask your students to include both the name of the assignment and their name in the name of the file that they’re uploading. If the students don’t put their name on their files, it’s a hassle to figure out who turned in what. And likewise, if they don’t put the assignment on the file, you’ve got to open the file to find out. The file names don’t need to be Homeric epics: “Feb. 18 Essay – Seth B.doc” works great as a file name.
• Students can’t cheat from the Handins folder. They aren’t able to open other people’s work (or even their own), nor can they remove their work once it’s turned in (so no coming back with an “improved” version after the fact). In fact, the only person who can open the files in the Handins folder is… the teacher.
• Students need to be told about the Returns folder. Every class has a Returns folder that has an individual folder for each student in the class. You can drag files you are returning to those students directly into those folders (from, say, your computer desktop). Only the student whose folder it is can open the folder and read the files (and they can’t change them). Plus, now you don’t have student files cluttering up your inbox and counting against your disk quota as email attachments!
• Be clear, but firm. You’re teaching technical skills, and your students won’t get it right at first. Help them to turn in their files correctly (i.e. in a way that is easy for you to work with), rather than fixing their mistakes. Every mistake you fix will end up being a mistake you have to fix every time.

Obviously, the list goes on, but these five best practices should help cut through some of the chaos and confusion accompanied by the proliferation of documents produced by a digital classroom!

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Flickr Filename to URL Converter

Feel free to paste in your own Flickr filenames to find the URL of the original image. The script will send you directly to the original image page.

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The Model

I have long used Flickr for my own personal photo sharing needs — it’s pretty much a de facto standard in circles in which I travel: a clean interface, strong support for connections between Flickr and other Web 2.0 services, and very real support for innovation in terms of user-designed and coded add-ons. All this adds up to Flickr being a very flexible, very powerful photo sharing service.

My idea was that my students could get to know one of the standard photo sharing services as part of the new media design experience. Using Flickr would expose them to some of the new media concepts inherent in working with Web 2.0: hosting information online and then reusing that information in other forums (for example, embedding their Flickr-hosted pictures in blog entries on our blog server). As Flickr also supports sharing within groups, comment boards and tagging, my hope was to have the students engage with each other’s photos online via Flickr.

In Practice

Signing up for Flickr was a real challenge for my students. Partly this was because they needed more support from me in understanding how to sign up for access to a web site. Partly this was because Flickr is owned by Yahoo, so they needed to (confusingly) sign up for a Yahoo ID and then link that Yahoo ID to a new Flickr account. (I had signed up for Flickr so far back in the day that I hadn’t had to jump through those hoops — and had already had a Yahoo ID to link to my Flickr account when they merged). The sign up process provided an opportunity to discuss digital footprints and privacy online, to help my students think about both protecting their privacy (concurrent with the school’s legal obligations under FERPA) and about how they present themselves to future employers and the like.

My students also wanted a significantly more structured guide to how to upload photos and share them to our class group on Flickr. Note that I say “want” — they were not eager to explore and figure out features on their own (or to read the help documentation from Flickr itself). I gave them a (privately throw-away) assignment to post their first few pictures that only one student completed, who already had a Flickr account before the class.

When it came to linking our class blog to their Flickr accounts, my students also ran into difficulties. The process, while well-documented on Flickr, is somewhat technical and they did not have a clear enough idea of the purpose or desired outcome to really dig in and engage with the process. Plus, they had a lot of typos trying to enter the blog XML-RPC address by hand. It was not a confidence-inspiring performance. Similarly, when it came to posting to the class blog from Flickr, very few of the students really grasped that this was a one-click process — almost all opted for much harder (and, frankly, lower quality and more annoying, approaches to embedding their photos in the blog initially).

By and large, once photos were uploaded, students were successful in sharing those photos to the group photo pool. They were also good about going in and providing comments to each other, when assigned to do so. Interestingly, they could spend an entire class totally obsessed with flipping through each other’s photos online, but actually adding comments was not a voluntary instinct.

After the first few photo uploads, we ran into Flickr’s free account limitations (which, again, I had forgotten about because I don’t run up against them): only 20MB of uploads a month, only 200 photos per account maximum. Complicating this was that the Flickr interface (uniformly reliable in other environments), routinely hung when attempting to upload files from the media lab (probably having to do with the school firewall). Students would spend 20 minutes trying to upload three photos and find that the process had, in the end, failed. To get around this, by the end of the first quarter, I was uploading the lion’s share of the classes photos to my own Flickr account.

In addition, once uploaded, the photos in free accounts are not available at full resolution. My hope had been to use Flickr as a repository for the class’ photos. Instead, it was at best a secondary viewing area: the students didn’t have access to the full resolution images for editing purposes via Flickr. Worse, several of the students didn’t grok that they could download photos from Flickr at all and opted to take screenshots of the photos at very low resolution on the web. And then edit those screenshots. Rather than working with their original files. And I discovered this not because they asked me how to do this, but because I saw them at work editing the screenshots. Enterprising. Stupid, but enterprising.

Flickr did provide a great basis for discussion of photography, composition and style. Flickr’s gallery function allowed me to collect sample photos “live” from the web to present concepts and be the focus of class discussions. This could be a useful tool for having students do a photo scavenger hunt, for example.

Reflection

I was distinctly underwhelmed by the experience of trying to use Flickr in the classroom. I think that there were really three things that were a marked failure in this:

1. I really failed to anticipate all of the limitations of a free account on Flickr (and the complexity of needing a Yahoo ID to play the game at all). This was totally my bad: I knew all of these limitations, but either didn’t think that they would be an issue (“oh, we won’t take that many photos…”) or just didn’t process their ramifications (“20MB a month should be enough!”). I had actually looked around at other photo sharing sites, including Google’s Picasa, SmugMug and using our FirstClass class conference and decided that Flickr provided the best interface and flexibility for what we were doing in class.
   In retrospect, I think I would have separated the photo sharing from the photo archiving plan and explicitly started my students off using the Classes share as a repository for all their images, and then having them post images directly to the class blog for discussion and portfolio purposes.
2. I mistook “digital natives” for web experience. Which is pie on my face, since I’ve long made the argument that these are not one and the same, and that our students really benefit from our teaching in terms of critical analysis, literacy and just plain common sense online. The students just didn’t get how to sign up for an account on a web site online by themselves, and they weren’t really interested in learning. I should have structured that process differently, and, well, in a more structured manner.
   I think that I came in with misplaced expectations about both the background and attitudes of the students. I anticipated a more web-savvy crowd and they were not. In retrospect, I was rushing through much of my material at that point, trying to “stay on top” of the course outline as I understood it. Everyone would have been better served if I had taken a day or two out of my outline earlier in the semester to sit down and talk through:
   • Sharing files online. Literally: where are those files and how do you put them there.
   • Accounts on web sites, how to get them and how to use them
   • How different web sites can be made to work together.
3. The school firewall and web filter did me no favors. As I learned over the course of the first quarter, any time that I decided to rely on sites not directly hosted by the school, I was in for a world of pain at some point along the way. Usually, this pain took the form of problems signing up to use the site (as happened with Flickr) or uploading content to the sight (as happened with Flickr). On the one hand, this is a strong reminder that the school does host a number of useful tools and that I should turn to those tools first, where appropriate. On the other hand, this was just infuriating — I was having experiences with web sites that I have not had ever before — and that I didn’t have when I left our campus network. They claim that the the home crowd is the 12th player on the field at football games. The school network was definitely the 12th player on the field in my classes this fall.
   Using external sites does raise very real and very consequential privacy concerns — and concerns that need to be presented clearly to faculty at the outset in the form of simple guidelines. The rule of thumb that students’ last names never appear online is great, and workable. But cutting us off from free and useful technology is really just exasperating.

In the end, I came away from this experiment feeling pretty dejected.

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