Here’s the archived recording (47 min) of our meeting, titled “Privacy, Power, and Platforms.” The session description was:

As surveillance technologies expand and authoritarian impulses rise both in the U.S. and globally, digital privacy is no longer a niche concern—it’s an urgent classroom conversation. Join us for this timely Media Education Lab webinar where we’ll unpack the forces shaping our digital lives and explore how educators can help students understand, critique, and protect their privacy. Together, we’ll examine the ways platforms, policies, and power dynamics intersect to track, monitor, and influence behavior—online and off. Through engaging media, hands-on tools, and critical conversations, we’ll equip educators with strategies to help learners become savvy, empowered participants in a networked society.

Here’s the Zoom AI meeting summary, with added hyperlinks. WOW!

Quick recap

The Media Education Lab held a meeting to discuss privacy, power, and platforms, focusing on the implications of AI and surveillance technology in education and society. Participants explored various aspects of digital privacy, including the use of facial recognition databases, data privacy laws, and internet censorship in different countries. The group also shared resources, discussed teaching strategies for media literacy and privacy awareness, and planned future events and collaborations.

Next steps

• Wes Fryer to update the date for Part 2 of the “United States of Secrets” documentary in the optional media links.
• Media Education Lab members to use hashtags #MediaEducationLab and #MediaEdClub when sharing on social media platforms.
• Attendees to register for upcoming events: “Exploring Media Quiteracy” on July 17th and “Our Time to Lead” on July 29th.
• Attendees to consider registering for the Media Literacy Institute at the University of Washington, August 4th-8th.
• Attendees to prepare for next month’s meeting on August 4th, focusing on “Searching with AI”.
• Wes Fryer to add the Wired article “How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance” to the session resources.
• Attendees to provide suggestions for future Media Ed Club topics to Wes Fryer.

Summary

Media Literacy and Privacy Updates

The Media Education Lab held its July meeting to discuss privacy, power, and platforms, with Wes Fryer facilitating and introducing upcoming events. Pamela shared updates about a new AI tool called “Both Silos” (?) being piloted in media literacy classes, which helps teach about media bias through interactive AI-assisted activities. The group discussed digital privacy concerns and agreed to use specific hashtags to connect on various platforms, including BlueSky and Mastodon. Wes announced several upcoming events, including a webinar on July 17th about ‘Media Quiteracy’ and another on July 29th, as well as a paid media literacy institute at the University of Washington in early August.

AI Surveillance and Privacy Concerns

Wes Fryer led a discussion on the implications of searching with AI and the growing surveillance state. He highlighted the increasing control that platform owners have over speech and the potential for misuse of facial recognition technology. The conversation referenced a 2018 TED Talk by Kashmir Hill, who discussed the dangers of surveillance capitalism and the ethical concerns surrounding facial recognition databases like Clearview AI. Wes emphasized the importance of teaching media literacy and privacy awareness to students, while also addressing the need for legal reforms to protect civil liberties in the face of expanding government surveillance powers.

Privacy and Surveillance in Education

Wes Fryer led a discussion on privacy and surveillance issues, particularly focusing on Clearview AI and its ethical implications. He posed four questions for exploration, including how to engage students in caring about privacy issues, what rules should govern the use of facial images, how educational leaders should respond to these issues, and how to balance the benefits of sharing with the risks of living in a surveillance society. The group discussed various approaches to teaching media literacy and privacy, with one participant sharing their experience using the AI4All curriculum with 9th graders.

Data Privacy and Surveillance Concerns

The group discussed concerns about data privacy and surveillance, with Wes sharing his experience managing campus security cameras and noting how AI has transformed data analysis capabilities. The conversation touched on the need for better privacy education, particularly for young people, and the accelerating pace of technological change. The conversation ended with participants being invited to share their thoughts in breakout rooms for 15 minutes, followed by a return to the main session for further discussion.

Data Privacy Laws and Challenges

The group discussed data privacy laws and regulations, with Wes sharing examples of how different states in the US have implemented varying laws regarding image usage and AI technology. They noted that a provision in the recent funding bill that would have restricted AI companies for 10 years was removed by the Senate. The conversation touched on the challenges of navigating different national and state laws, as well as the difficulty of enforcing data privacy regulations. One participant, who lives in China, briefly joined to share her perspectives on the topic, though technical issues prevented her from participating extensively.

Addressing Privacy and Censorship

The group discussed internet censorship and privacy issues, particularly in China, where a participant shared an example of a student facing consequences for starting a sexual harassment petition. Wes Fryer shared his experiences with privacy concerns during international travel and emphasized the importance of teaching media literacy and digital ethics to students of all ages. The discussion concluded with Barbara highlighting the lack of privacy in modern society and the need to address these issues with young people, while Pamela shared a Wired article about protesting safely in the age of surveillance.

Exploring Digital Learning Resources

Wes shared resources and recommended podcasts, including Ethan Zuckerman’s “Reimagining the Internet” and Mike McCue’s “Dot Social Podcast,” emphasizing the impact of books and podcasts on learning and idea sharing. He encouraged participants to explore the Media Education Lab website for additional resources and invited suggestions for future topics, with the next session focusing on AI searching. Participants expressed appreciation and interest in collaboration, with some offering to share student work and engage in future discussions.

If you’ve ever needed to generate properly formatted attribution for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, you probably know about tools like ImageCodr.org or Alan’s Flickr CC Attribution Helper. These have been staples in my digital toolkit for years, especially for teaching students how to model good digital citizenship and give credit where it’s due.

But with Flickr’s recent addition of support for CC 4.0 licenses, I found myself wanting a streamlined, simple option that works specifically for CC BY 4.0 International licensed images — the kind I use most frequently, and formatted like ImageCodr.org. So, with a little HTML and Javascript help from ChatGPT 4o, I built a “CC BY 4.0 Flickr Attribution Generator.”

It’s a lightweight, browser-based tool that lets you:

1. Paste in a Flickr photo page URL (licensed CC-BY 4.0)
2. Preview the image and see proper attribution formatting
3. Copy clean, accessible HTML code for your blog, website, or project

It only works for CC BY 4.0 images (by design) and includes a clear warning for images marked All Rights Reserved.

Want to peek under the hood? The code is all open source and available on my GitHub: github.com/wfryer/cc You do need your own Flickr API key to run this code / script on your own website. I have my personal version running on wesfryer.com/cc/.

This was also a fun excuse to extend my AI-assisted coding skills — you can see more of those learning experiments over on ai.wesfryer.com.

Big thanks again to Alan Levine for blazing the trail on this kind of tool — check out his recent blog post for the full scoop on the Flickr license changes and his updated CC Helper.

If you give my generator a try, I’d love feedback or suggestions. Happy attributing!

After researching different approaches — including Feedburner (which, sadly, isn’t as flexible as it used to be) — I decided to try building a solution myself using Python. Spoiler alert: It worked, and I learned a lot along the way. You can find my project on GitHub, where I’ve named it, “rss-to-rss2-converter.”

AI “Vibe Coding”

“Vibe Coding” is a term for using AI tools (like ChatGPT 4o in this case) to write and help with the writing of computer code. I’ve documented a few of my past experiments with vibe coding on my “Learning AI with Wes” website. In this case, I used ChatGPT 4o to generate a short Python script using two libraries:

• feedparser — to read the original RSS feed.
• rfeed — to generate the RSS 2.0 feed.

The script fetches my Pinboard (RSS 1.0) feed, processes each entry, and writes a new RSS 2.0 .xml file to my web server.

Lessons Learned

This project reminded me just how powerful — and sometimes complex — working with a VPS can be. It also highlighted (yet again) how powerful it is to “vibe code” with AI! There is NO WAY I would have been able to successfully create this project / accomplish these goals without the help of an AI platform for vibe coding. Here are a few of my key takeaways from these experiences.

• Terminal Access Matters: I needed SSH access to my VPS to install Python packages and run the script.
• File Permissions Count: At one point, my feed wasn’t accessible because the output folder was owned by root instead of my hosting user. Fixing ownership solved that.
• .htaccess Confusion: WordPress .htaccess rules appeared to be blocking access to my .xml file. I experimented with rewrite rules, but the real fix was proper file permissions.
• Learning by Doing: I’m no Python expert, but this project pushed me to stretch my skills with scripting, cron jobs, and server setup. It felt good to get it working!
• Beware of Security Issues: Initially the AI / ChatGPT created code which included direct links to my Pinboard RSS feed and my web server directories. When I realized that I asked for updated, “cleaned” versions… but this was NOT something ChatGPT did on its own. I had to prompt for these changes.

Sharing the Process

To help others facing similar challenges, I am documenting my process through this blog post and some “cleaned up” script files (so no private links or server details are exposed) on GitHub:

RSS 1.0 to RSS 2.0 Feed Converter on GitHub

Feel free to use it, adapt it, or suggest improvements!

Final Thoughts

The open web is built on tools like RSS, and it’s satisfying to stitch together older and newer technologies to make them work for your needs. If you’re exploring decentralized platforms like Mastodon and want to automate link sharing, I hope this project helps.

For those interested in AI tools that can support creative problem-solving like this, I’ve also been documenting my AI experiments and presentations at ai.wesfryer.com.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions! And MANY thanks to the ever creative and innovative Alan Levine!

Listen to the original podcast episode on Pocket Casts.

Sam articulates his strong distaste for the harmful and unethical behavior of our president in 2025 and his administration, but he also shares his view that DEI and “wokeness” in U.S. culture were out of control and are appropriately being purged in many ways. He shares a view that our society today is largely colorblind, and while there are still disparities economically across the nation, especially in positions of power and authority, race is basically something that doesn’t matter anymore and we should stop talking about it. I do not agree with those views.

But I do think the focus on disinformation, misinformation, and the ways that information is shared and consumed is absolutely on point. I remember in the early days of EdCamps how, as organizers, we would typically make sure there was at least one session to help people who were not familiar with Twitter get on the platform and set up an account.

I have a sense that we need to find ways to do the same thing today with the Fediverse, with platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky. Although BlueSky was spun out of Twitter, it does not (currently) have advertising, and it offers “Federation” as an option for users.

I facilitated a webinar at the start of the month for the Media Education Lab, titled “Beyond the Algorithmic Feed”, discussing the Fediverse, and I was actually surprised how many of the participants were NOT familiar with it.

I think most users of social media today would agree that the shape of the “TechBro”-dominated social media landscape (think Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) has and continues to have a massive influence on how we as people see and consume ideas—and how we perceive the world.

In addition to having a “slow hunch” that we need to help others in our particular “spheres of influence” connect with more deliberate intention to others who share our values, I also think we need to “invest in influencers” and “empower influencers” who share our values.

A recent example that comes to mind is the “No Kings” rally in Charlotte, and the thousands of other “No Kings” rallies like it around our country. I was not only able to participate in the rally and subsequent march through the streets of uptown Charlotte, but also share a few thoughts with the crowd, which was both an honor and a challenge I welcomed.

There is so much about our world and culture that I do not understand, but there are some things I am quite positive about. One of these is the importance of building community, both personally and locally within our neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

Another thing I am sure about is the importance of finding and sharing “trusted voices.”

As Sam Harris mentions at the start of this podcast conversation, we are struggling as a society in part because we have discounted the importance and value of expert voices and expertise. So many people have opinions… and in some circles / on some platforms, those voices can have an “outsized volume” and an unwarranted level of amplification, especially if we think about expertise or the need to have constructive dialogue.

Another part of this podcast conversation I appreciated was Sam’s description of the radicalization and bad actor transformation of Elon Musk. In some of my middle school classes, I asked students to identify role models, and in some cases create media representations of those role models. These can be slideshows or webpages. They are so insightful. In years past, I have actually had students identify Andrew Tate as a role model, which led to an opportunity to have a conversation with that child’s parent. I had numerous boys this past year identify Elon Musk as one of their role models and heroes.

I want to continue asking students about role models and heroes they have for their lives, but I’ve also had a thought about inviting parents to share people they consider heroes and role models, including those they would like their own children to learn more about. I’ve been thinking of an assignment in which students identify two of their own heroes or role models—who could actually be social media influencers—and then select two of the heroes or role models identified by their parents. This would provide an opportunity for dialogue, potentially in families, and also invite parents to both inform and shape, even in a small way, the educational work of their child at school.

I recommend this podcast conversation with Scott Galloway and Sam Harris not because I agree with everything they said and shared, but because it served as a good catalyst for me, reflecting on the changes we are experiencing within our society and culture, and thinking about the actions that I could take personally and professionally in the weeks and months to come.

Who are your trusted voices? How do you obtain and read news about our world? How can we work together to co-create better social media and networking platforms that are less toxic and more constructive for our personal mental health as well as our constructive evolution as local, regional, national, and global communities?

To this latter goal, I recommend the following two podcasts:

• “Reimagining the Internet” by Ethan Zuckerman and the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
• “Dot Social” by Mike McCue and the team at Flipboard

I still like the slogan, “Let’s invent the future.” Sharing good ideas via social media as well as face-to-face conversations is an important part of this aspirational work.

“Preserving the Past Through Technology”

My middle school family oral history unit is available on my curriculum sharing website. Learn more about Bob Sprankle and his legacy of classroom podcasting with students on BobTaughtMe.com, which I talked about in this March 2025 interview.

Since I didn’t wear a lapel microphone and I turned from facing the camera from time to time during the recording of this video, I wanted to improve the quality of the audio in my video a bit. I used the web-based audio enhancer auphonic.com along with QuickTime Player for MacOS, in a fairly simple and quick workflow. I chose the default option “Voice Cleaner (keep music), Partial Reverb” as my audio normalization option.

You can visually see the improvement in audio levels in the waveform comparison which Auphonic displayed after processing my audio. The initial audio from my video is shown in the lower waveform, the final / output audio improved by Auphonic is shown above.

Here are the specific steps I followed to create this “audio-enhanced” video:

1. I recorded the different clips of my video on my iPhone 13 using a tripod and plastic iPhone mount.
2. I downloaded some free, copyright-friendly music I liked from filmmusic.io. (Saved to my iCloud FILES on my iPhone.)
3. I saved a screenshot of the “Carbona 2-in-1 Oven Rack and Grill Cleaner” product on Amazon which I mentioned and wanted to include as a “picture-in-picture” image in my video. I saved this to my iPhone camera roll.
4. I used iMovie for iOS to edit my video, using the downloaded song as background music during the time-lapse sequences. I also inserted the Carbona screenshot a couple places in the video when I mentioned it. (I call this a “Quick Edit Video.”)
5. I made a screenshot of the copyright-friendly music which I then used at the end of the video to provide required Creative Commons attribution.
6. I exported / shared the final video to my iPhone camera roll.
7. I airdropped the final video to my MacOS laptop.
8. I opened the video with QuickTime Player and EXPORTED the file in an audio-only version.
9. I uploaded that .m4a audio file to Auphonic.com and chose the “Voice Cleaner (keep music)” preset.
10. I downloaded that enhanced / processed file, and “dropped it” on my movie in QuickTime Player, and clicked DONE. (Whoa-la, like magic, now I had MUCH better audio in my video!)
11. I exported the edited video from QuickTime Player as a 4K video.
12. I uploaded the video to YouTube.
13. I uploaded the audio file to a new project in descript.com (to which I have a monthly subscription, it’s AWESOME) and then used the “Overlord” feature to create a YouTube description with time-stamped chapter marks.
14. I cook a couple screenshots of different scenes from the final video, saved those to my computer, then put them into Canva.com to create my YouTube video thumbnail.
15. I uploaded the final / audio-enhanced video to YouTube, using the Descript provided description, my own title, and the thumbnail I created with Canva.

Do you have a different workflow with different tools which you prefer for enhancing the quality of the audio your videos? If so please let me know what you use and do!

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to share an updated presentation about this project at the NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. This Saturday morning, I’m listening to an audio podcast version of “The quest to figure out farming on Mars,” an article originally published in the MIT Technology Review in October 2024 as, “The quest to figure out farming on Mars” by David W. Brown. (paywall free version) This podcast and article is encouraging me to consider new possibilities for additional lessons in our Coding Mars unit, including the ways my students could simulate some of the chemistry involved with Martian regolith and perchlorates, using the specialized chemistry, periodic table blocks available in Minecraft Education. I’ll share a bit more of my thinking in this post.

I’ve been using MinecraftEDU and Minecraft Education with upper elementary and middle school age students since 2013-2015, when I taught STEM at Independence Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, before serving as the Director of Technology at Casady School in OKC for 4 years. For the past six years, I’ve been teaching middle school STEM classes, and finding ways to creatively use Minecraft Education has become a major “passion project” for me as a STEM and computer science teacher.

One of the special features of Minecraft Education which I have not previously explored in-depth is the periodic table / chemistry blocks and block functions, represented (in part) in the 2018 Minecraft Education lesson, the “World of Chemistry.”

Use chemistry to create new Minecraft items like helium balloons and sparklers, view elements in the periodic table and build a custom laboratory.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. I can use AI (ChatGPT and/or Flint AI, which our school licenses) to create some basic lessons which will familiarize students with Martian regolith and perchlorates.
2. Students could potentially use a “custom Mars laboratory” in Minecraft to create these organic and inorganic materials, similar to the way Space Resource Technologies creates different variants or “simulants” of Martian regolith.
3. Again, using AI to help me better understand the science and “translate it” for my middle school students, they could potentially explore some of the chemical reactions involved in transforming perchlorates into non-toxic / plant friendly soil components which could support rather than destroy organic plant growth and farming processes.

The last few months (and even the past couple weeks) I’ve been amazed by the power of AI to serve as my personal lesson planning assistant, to not only format and draft my lessons for students in Canvas (our learning management system) but also discover / recommend new videos, web tools, and other resources we can use. My new assignment on creating a 15 to 30 second audio advertisement, part of a unit on podcasting for my middle school web design class, is an example of an AI-augmented lesson.

My own knowledge of chemistry is fairly limited. I had a bad experience with chemistry in high school, with a nice teacher who was unfortunately very ineffective, and this set me up for a bad experience when I went on to the US Air Force Academy. I was able to “test into” a higher level of chemistry, so we covered a year’s worth of material in an accelerated semester, but I struggled to understand the content and barely emerged from the class with C. I never took any more chemistry in college and became a “fuzzy” PoliSci / Geography major.

I contrast my own bad experiences in high school and college with those of two of our kids, in (respectively) a public magnet school and private school in OKC. One graduated from the Colorado School of Mines as a mechanical engineeer and now works as a contractor for NASA supporting the International Space station, and the other is majoring in Astronautical Engineering at the US Air Force Academy. Both LOVED chemistry in high school and used those experiences to fuel and propel their academic and professional journeys in STEM, which are ongoing.

I share this reflection and background because I am acutely aware of how important POSITIVE experiences are for students in STEM fields. I don’t entirely blame my high school chemistry teacher for arresting my own STEM studies in college (we still had to take a course in about 8 different engineering disciplines as part of the Academy’s ‘core curriculum) but I definitely remember the bad experiences of NOT learning helpful “concept development” in high school, and how that hurt me in my subsequent college studies.

I’m energized by the way AI can help give me some “lesson designing superpowers” with both topics I’m very familiar with (like podcasting and family oral history interviews) as well as topics I have a strong interest in, but not a deep background, like cutting-edge agricultural methods and farming off-world. Some of the articles and resources I might plug into AI tools like GoogleLM, ChatGPT or Flint AI include the November 2022 article from Arizona State, “What will it take to grow food on Mars? Anca Delgado says microorganisms and bioremediation could make the red planet’s soil usable” and Google Scholar referenced publications by Anca G. Delgado.

These possibilities for learning, and potentially TRANSFORMATIVE learning for my own middle school students this semester, are extremely exciting and motiving for me as a classroom teacher! Coding + Space Education + Minecraft + “Design – Create – Share” lesson planning Creativity = “My Pedagogical Happy Place!” I can’t wait to continue developing and co-creating these lessons with and for my students!

One of my goals as a STEM teacher and specifically as a web design teacher in middle school is helping my students become adept at using different kinds of multimedia to communicate effectively and tell stories online. In this unit I challenge my students to explore resources in one or more of the following online media archives, and learn to share them with proper attribution using my favorite free, ad-free citation tool, Zbib:

1. Smithsonian Open Access
2. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog
3. NASA Image Library

I encourage you to check out and review the full unit plan, which spans (theoretically) seven days of class meetings. Because of schedule interruptions and my own absences for different reasons, we ended up taking a little more time for this unit this year than in the past.

Today students shared their presentations about these projects with our class, and I was very pleased with the way this worked out. Yesterday I asked students (with their partner) to create a SINGLE slide in Google Slides, which included

1. The title of your media kit
2. Links to each of your WEBPAGES you created with your media kit
3. Your Media Kit on Google Drive

Then today in class, I shared a new Google Slideshow with them, giving all students EDIT rights to the slideshow. I asked them to copy / paste their SLIDE into the slideshow, and was then able to re-arrange the slides in the presentation order. This was efficient and relatively painless.

Partner teams shared a two to three minute summary of their projects, highlighting what they included in their media kit (in Google Drive) as well as their respective media kit webpages. Most created their webpages with Google Sites, but some used Adobe Express and one used Canva. I asked students to open the SHARED SPREADSHEET we used in this project, which includes links to each student webpage as well as their partner Media Kit.

I love this project and plan to use it again next year when I teach web design. I love how it gives students agency, voice and choice in selecting a topic of interest, but also introduces them to some new (and rich) media sources. It also gives them a chance to practice some excellent media literacy skills!

Feel free to use or modify this lesson with your own students, and let me know if you do! Also please reach out if you have any questions, either with a comment on this post or via social media!

The session description was:

Build a Mars Colony In Minecraft with Robots and Code? YES! In our middle school computer programming class, students are using Microsoft MakeCode in Minecraft Education to simulate the robotic 3D printing of buildings and greenhouses on Mars. Students are building 2D animations of Artemis space missions using Scratch coding.

Access referenced links from the presentation in the slideshow, and also on the unit / lesson website homepage, part of my lesson sharing website: lessons.wesfryer.com/lessons/minecraft-mars

If you have questions about this project I’d be glad to answer and try to help you use these lesson ideas with your own students. Reach out to me on social media or via my online contact form.

I shared the final results of my coding project tonight on GitHub, and you can run it from GitHub pages. Two example exports are available, one of just my NEWS list and another of ALL my current Mastodon lists. I added my documentation and archived Claude conversation links to my AI Tips and Tricks Google Doc. The catalyst for this AI-assisted coding project was one of our adult children, who recently joined Mastodon and asked me for help in finding news / journalism sources to follow. (She’s tired of algorithmic news feeds, and wants something different.)

Before you start getting too impressed at my coding acumen, please realize this coding project would have been ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for me to successfully complete this evening without help from artificial intelligence / AI tools. I initially tried to create this with ChatGPT, but it was making things too complicated and I almost gave up. Instead I turned to Claude.ai with a simple prompt:

I want a fast way to share my mastodon lists with my daughter.

It took some iteration (as I’ve found is ALWAYS the case, coding with AI) but in a short amount of time I had a working prototype HTML file. I continued to work on tweaking it, and didn’t successfully make all the changes I wanted, but I’m VERY happy with the initial release and am absolutely BLOWN AWAY that this even happened / was possible.

When you first open this single HTML file, you are prompted to enter your Mastodon server name. In my case, this is “mastodon.cloud” – without the quotation marks, of course.

Next, the page links to an OAuth authorization page. If you’re already logged into your Mastodon account in your current browser instance, you’ll be able to authorize READ ONLY access to your Mastodon account, including your LISTS.

Next, wait a few seconds while the HTML file loads all your current Mastodon lists! You can choose to deselect or select all, or individually select lists. If you make a selection change, click UPDATE DISPLAY. Once you have the lists displayed that you want to share, click DOWNLOAD SELECTED LISTS.

Then you can directly email those HTML files to others or post them online on a web host you use.

Ideally I’d like an option for users who receive the saved HTML files to be able to specify their own Mastodon server instance one time, and then have all the profile links to different Mastodon accounts be relative to THEIR OWN server to support faster following.

Mastodon does not support “Starter Packs” like BlueSky does, and I hope at some point developers add this feature. I still have a LOT of lists on Twitter / X, and miss them dearly since I rarely use the platform anymore. It’s exceptionally important for us to “serve as media filters for each other,” and one way we can do this is through social media lists like these.

If you do not already have a Mastodon account, I strongly encourage you to set one up (you can for free) and start using Mastodon. Federated social media is both similar and different from the “big tech platform” websites like Facebook, Twitter / X, Instagram, TikTok, etc. We’re still in early days of the “Fediverse” but I am SO encouraged by those who are developing it and working towards not only a more humane and less polarizing social media ecosystem, but also working in big ways to help support the causes of better governance and stronger communities.

Along those lines, I highly recommend you check out The “Dot Social” podcast hosted by Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. So much great work and so many great ideas about the Fediverse and other topics amplified there!

Happy Mastodon list sharing! If you use this code script, create your own or find something better, please let me know! Via Mastodon if you can, via other social media channels otherwise!

We have an old Bluetooth stereo in our car that does not support CarPlay, and it irritatingly connects automatically to my iPhone in the mornings before school when I start the vehicle to warm it up. This evening I successfully configured a NFC sticker (37 cents each in a 30 pack) to turn my Bluetooth back ON when I tap it with the phone… AFTER an iOS automation script turns Bluetooth OFF earlier on weekday mornings. It’s not a super-complicated workflow, but it did take me awhile to figure out.

I have created a range of different IoT automations via Google Home for our lights and WiFi enabled electrical plugs, but have only dabbled a little bit previously with Apple Shortcuts for iOS and MacOS. Now that I can use ChatGPT as a coding assistant and mentor, however, I’ve been trying out a variety of different scripting ideas.

I brainstormed with ChatGPT to figure out an easy way to get my BlueTooth setting on my phone to auto-magically switch to OFF just before I start my car. Initially I tried to create a shortcut script which checked to see if the Bluetooth had been turned off previously, like in the past 3 hours, and only turn off if that condition was false. I don’t want my BlueTooth auto-shutting off whenever I’m in the car driving.

That script turned out to be too complicated for my meager skills, however, and a more straightforward solution was just creating an automation which turns off BlueTooth every weekday at 7:15am (before I start the car) and then an automation which works with the NFC sticker when I actually get in the car to leave.

I wouldn’t have thought of or considered using a NFC sticker if ChatGPT hadn’t suggested it. NFC stickers don’t just automatically work when your iPhone is close by, you have to actually TAP the sticker to trigger it. By placing the sticker on the front dash panel on the driver’s side, I am able to readily tap it with my phone before putting my phone in the dash holder.

Now, truth be told, it’s really not that big of a deal to turn BlueTooth on or off on my iPhone using the Command Center shortcuts. However, I like the idea of having this automation to save me some steps and just make life a little easier, every school day.

Someday we’ll purchase a newer car stereo with support for wireless AirPlay. But for now, we’ll make do with what we have… and use a NFC sticker to automate our morning routine.

Now that I know how to use a NFC sticker and trigger automations, I’m sure I’ll think of other uses for these… Including automations that my spouse sometimes has trouble activating… Although if I need to trigger a Google Home automation, I may need some hardware to serve as a “bridge” between my iOS and Google worlds.

Last week on our EdTech Situation Room show, Jason Neiffer shared the open source home automation project home-assistant.io as his closing “Geek of the Week.” I may play with that in the months ahead, as a way to both bridge devices (between the Google and Apple IoT worlds) as well as create a home automation capability which (might?) could be resilient to Internet outages.

Have you created helpful iOS or MacOS shortcuts you like to use? If so, please share them!

Today I explored a few tools, with help from ChatGPT recommendations, to create my own “dynamic audio waveform video.” Here is the 12 minute video I created, which is a combined video created using several different tools: “AI ChatBot Ethics: A Webinar Prep Podcast via NotebookLM.” The waveform animation segment starts at 1:57.

I recorded the first introductory segment using Streamyard.com, which is a paid / subscription platform we use each week for the “EdTech Situation Room” podcast, to stream live on YouTube. Streamyard also supports video recording, including decent green screen effects for virtual backgrounds. I created a background image using a Google Drawing and logos for the MediaEd Club of the Media Education Lab, and used my iPhone as a “continuity camera” to record an almost 2 minute introduction.

For the second and longer portion of the video, I used Google’s NotebookLM AI platform to create an “audio deep dive” podcast conversation between two AI hosts. I uploaded 11 different “required” and “optional” media file transcripts and articles, all as PDFs, to a new project in NotebookLM. I provided a specific prompt for the “deep dive” podcast to prepare an audience for our upcoming webinar on “AI ChatBot Ethics.”

To create a video version of that NotebookLM audio file with a the “dynamic audio waveform animation,” I used a free account with headliner.app. This two minute video provides a good overview of Headliner, what it can do and how it works.

ChatGPT recommended some other tools as well to create synchronized audio waveform animations, but some of them had time limits unless you upgraded to a paid / pro account. I didn’t run into any time limit issues with the free account options Headliner provides, which was great. I learned one of my favorite AI audio and video editing platforms, Descript.com, also supports the creation of synchronized audio waveform animations, but I didn’t try that out yet.

Headliner let me upload a custom logo for the audio waveform video, and also customize the on-screen text using a template I selected. After downloading it, I appended it to my Streamyard-created introductory video using QuickTime Player software (provided by default by MacOS) and then exported as a 1080p combined video before uploading to YouTube.

Do you use or prefer other tools for creating synced audio waveform video animations for podcasts, podcast clips or other audio recordings? I think this is something I’ll continue to do with other audio files and podcast highlights.

Here is the full description I added to the video on YouTube. Please consider joining me for this upcoming FREE webinar on “AI ChatBot Ethics” on February 3, 2025!

On February 3, 2025, the MediaEd Club of the Media Education Lab will host a free webinar on “AI ChatBot Ethics.”

To help prepare for the webinar, we’ve created an approximately 10 minute “deep dive” audio podcast using the generative AI platform NotebookLM. We uploaded the eleven (11) required and optional podcasts, articles and videos listed on the registration page for this webinar into a new project library in Google’s NotebookLM, and provided a specific prompt to use these materials to prepare for our webinar.

Please check out additional upcoming MediaEd Club webinars and meetings.

Please also sign up for the newsletter of the Media Education Lab, so you can stay up to date on all upcoming events.

Many past webinars of our MediaEd Club are available in this YouTube playlist.

Here is a screenshot of the specific prompt I used with NotebookLM. This is actually the second version I created, I added my bio to the “library” of source documents, and also added some “career track clarification” which the AI seemed to need in the first draft / interation.

I created a transcript of this podcast “deep dive” conversation from NotebookLM using Descript.com. I especially love the way NotebookLM connected my passions for learning, sharing, teaching, and cooking barbecue!

There are so many implications to this “deep dive audio podcast conversation creation power” of NotebookLM. We highlighted some of these in an October 2024 webinar for the Media Education Lab, but I’m thinking of even more possibilities now. For the next hiring committee I serve on, we could upload each candidate’s application documents into separate NotebookLM projects, and then generate insightful audio “deep dives” about them.

Of course as with all AI tools, results should be fact checked and verified, since AI platforms can hallucinate and get things wrong. This experiment also highlights, however, the value of conducting AI experiments on topics we know well. Since I do know my own career path, personality and skill set pretty well, I’m in a good position to have an informed opinion about the quality of NotebookLM’s audio conversation.

No doubt, IT IS AMAZING. Wow. Just wow.

Transcript: NotebookLM Introduction of Wesley Fryer

Male Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to this deep dive. Um, today we’re gonna be unraveling the world of Wesley Fryer. He’s had a truly fascinating career in education and technology, but there’s way more to his story. 

Female Host: What I find most interesting about Wesley is how his journey goes through so many different fields. It’s not every day you see a U S air force Academy graduate and a Fulbright scholar decided to go into elementary education.

Male Host: Yeah, you’re right. Not exactly the typical career path. Yeah, but that kind of seems to be a recurring theme with Wesley Fryer. I mean, this is a man with a PhD in curriculum and instruction, which, you know, sounds pretty standard for an academic, 

Female Host: right? Until you dig a little deeper and you realize that his dissertation was on impact analysis of phone casted lecture summaries, not your typical research topic.

Male Host: It’s like he was podcasting before podcasting was even a thing, a true digital pioneer back in those early days of the internet. 

Female Host: And speaking of being ahead of the curve, you mentioned he was a Fulbright scholar. 

Male Host: Yeah. His Fulbright research was focused on Latin American security issues in Mexico [00:01:00] City.

Really shows you how diverse his interests are. He’s not just sticking to one field. You know, and when you look at his actual career path, it’s clear that he’s never been one to stay in a single lane. He’s been an elementary teacher, a STEM teacher, an instructional coach, a university instructor, and even director of technology at K City School in Oklahoma City.

Female Host: That’s really something. Experiencing education from so many different angles, I bet it gives him a really unique perspective. 

Male Host: One of the things that really struck me was his work on media literacy. Especially his project, Conspiracies and Culture Wars. It’s all about helping students navigate the crazy world of information these days.

Female Host: Super important skill, especially now. I mean, we’re bombarded with information constantly. 

Male Host: Totally. And Wes doesn’t just talk about these skills, he lives them. The man has been blogging since 2003, has a YouTube channel with over a million views, and has even written several books, including one called Mapping Media to the Common Core, which highlights 14 [00:02:00] different media projects.

Female Host: Wow. What I find really interesting is his concept of new civics. Giving students the tools to really engage in our world today. 

Male Host: That’s a good point. Schools need to be teaching this stuff. 

Female Host: Totally. But his interests go even beyond that. He’s a big advocate for STEM education too. Putting coding and computational thinking right into his lessons.

Male Host: Essential skills for the 21st century. For sure. And he believes coding projects can really help students become self directed learners. 

Female Host: For sure. But there’s another side to Wesley Fryer that might surprise you. Something completely different. 

Male Host: This is where things get interesting. Remember how we were talking about him being a big content creator?

Well, that creative energy goes beyond education. 

Female Host: Oh, what do you mean? 

Male Host: Wesley has another passion. Something you wouldn’t expect from someone so involved in education technology. He’s really into barbecue. 

Female Host: Barbecue? Wow, that’s not what I was expecting. 

Male Host: I know, right? It seems like a total 180 from his professional life.

But the more you learn about Wes, you realize he’s all about living a multi faceted [00:03:00] life. 

Female Host: So tell me more. What’s this barbecue enthusiast side of him like? Is he just grilling in his backyard or something? 

Male Host: Oh no, it’s way more than just casual grilling. He’s got this whole online persona built around his love of barbecue.

TikTok videos of brisket, Instagram photos of perfectly smoked ribs, even Facebook groups dedicated to discussing grilling techniques. 

Female Host: Wow, it sounds like he’s created a whole community around barbecue. 

Male Host: Exactly. He even has a blog, Cook with Wes, dedicated to everything barbecue. Recipes, instructions, even tips for troubleshooting common grilling problems.

Female Host: There’s that teacher instinct again, even in his barbecue. 

Male Host: It’s amazing to see how these totally different interests of his actually connect. Whether he’s teaching students about media literacy or sharing his love for barbecue, there’s that thread of creativity, community, and empowerment running through it all.

Female Host: It really makes you think about how your own interests connect to each other. 

Male Host: Wesley’s a great example of not being confined to a single box. You can be an educator, [00:04:00] a technologist, a barbecue enthusiast, all at the same time. 

Female Host: It’s inspiring. Makes you wonder how he finds the time for everything, though.

Male Host: That’s what we’ll be looking at next. How he balances it all and keeps that passion going. 

Female Host: It’s really amazing to see how Wesley’s passion for using technology and education really took off in the late 90s and early 2000s. 

Male Host: Yeah, it was like a whole new world was opening up and he was right there embracing it.

Female Host: Think about it. building websites in the mid 90s, one of the first bloggers. He even produced educational videos way before YouTube even existed. 

Male Host: He was ahead of the curve for sure, saw the potential of these tools right from the start. 

Female Host: And you can see that forward thinking approach in his work with organizations like the Texas Education Network and his role as director of distance learning at Texas Tech University.

Male Host: He wasn’t afraid to push for change, to get technology into the classroom. Even when it wasn’t popular. 

Female Host: And it wasn’t just about using the latest gadget. It was always about how technology could make learning better. 

Male Host: Exactly. It’s easy to [00:05:00] get caught up in the hype sometimes, but you have to ask, how does this actually help students learn?

Female Host: Right. It’s all about choosing the right tool for the job. 

Male Host: And talking about helping students learn, I have to bring up his work on cyberbullying and digital citizenship. Such a crucial topic these days. 

Female Host: Absolutely. We need to make sure kids know how to navigate the online world safely and responsibly.

Male Host: It’s not just about using tech. It’s about using it in a way that’s ethical and safe. 

Female Host: Like giving them the tools to explore this new digital landscape safely. 

Male Host: And that ties right back into his work with media literacy that we discussed earlier. 

Female Host: Being able to think critically about information is more important than ever.

Male Host: Especially now with social media and how quickly misinformation can spread. 

Female Host: His Conspiracies and Culture Wars project is such a great example of how to help students develop those skills. It’s 

Male Host: about teaching them how to think for themselves, not what to think. 

Female Host: And to be able to have respectful conversations even when they disagree with someone.

Male Host: And to realize that just because something’s on the internet doesn’t make it [00:06:00] true. 

Female Host: We have to be skeptical and question our sources. 

Male Host: It’s a skill that goes way beyond the classroom. 

Female Host: Definitely, and Wes has been a champion for that throughout his career. 

Male Host: But it’s not just about absorbing information, it’s about creating it too.

Female Host: You’re right. We talked about his content creation earlier, but it’s worth taking a closer look. 

Male Host: What’s fascinating is how he uses so many different ways to share his ideas. 

Female Host: It’s not just blogs and YouTube videos. He’s podcasting, presenting at conferences, writing books, even doing multimedia projects with his students.

Male Host: He’s a true multimedia storyteller. 

Female Host: Always looking for new ways to engage his audience and make learning more interactive. 

Male Host: And he’s not afraid to experiment with new tech either. 

Female Host: Always pushing the boundaries, trying new things. 

Male Host: And he encourages his students to become creators too, not just consumers of information.

Female Host: Giving them a voice and a platform to share their own perspectives. 

Male Host: It’s all about the power of storytelling. 

Female Host: Yeah, Wesley believes in the power of stories to connect with people, to teach, to inspire. 

Male Host: His work with the Story Chasers Project really shows that. 

Female Host: Using [00:07:00] technology to capture and preserve stories that might be lost otherwise.

sharing them with the world. 

Male Host: Such a great example of how tech can be used to bring people together and celebrate different experiences. 

Female Host: A reminder that everyone has a story worth sharing. 

Male Host: So we’ve talked about Wesley’s work in education, his passion for tech, his ideas about digital citizenship, and his belief in storytelling.

Female Host: But there’s another part of his life that we haven’t touched on yet, his faith. 

Male Host: Yeah, it’s a big part of who he is, and it definitely comes through in his work in writing. 

Female Host: His podcast, Stories of Faith, is a great example of that. It shows how much he believes in sharing spiritual journeys and finding those deeper connections.

Male Host: It reminds us that education is more than just academics. 

Female Host: It’s about helping someone grow as a whole person. Hmm. Intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. 

Male Host: Helping them find their place in the world. 

Female Host: And Wesley has really done that throughout his career. 

Male Host: He’s definitely an inspiration. But before we move on, I want to go back to something you mentioned before.

His varied [00:08:00] career path. 

Female Host: Yeah, it’s remarkable how he’s been able to move so seamlessly between being an elementary teacher, a STEM teacher, A university instructor, a director of technology, and a digital learning consultant. 

Male Host: It’s like he’s taken all these different experiences and woven them together.

Yeah, 

Female Host: it’s given him such a wide range of knowledge and expertise. 

Male Host: His ability to adapt and take on new challenges is something else. 

Female Host: He’s a true lifelong learner. Always seeking out new things. 

Male Host: That’s a great lesson for all of us in today’s world. 

Female Host: We need to be adaptable, curious, and ready to learn new things all the time.

Male Host: And to be open to the journey, even when it takes you in unexpected directions. 

Female Host: So what does all this mean for our listeners? 

Male Host: It means you don’t have to limit yourself to just one path or one passion. 

Female Host: You can be multifaceted, just like Wesley. Explore your interests and find those connections. 

Male Host: And that brings us back to his love for barbecue.

It might seem like a completely separate thing, but it actually reflects a lot of who he is. 

Female Host: In our next segment, we’re going to dive into that [00:09:00] culinary side of Wesley. We’ll explore how his love of barbecue connects to his values, his way of learning, and his desire to build community. 

Male Host: It’s a great reminder that our passions can really influence each other in surprising ways.

So 

Female Host: stay tuned as we fire up the grill and discover the delicious connection between barbecue and the world of Wesley Fryer. 

Male Host: Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We’ve been exploring the many sides of Wesley Fryer. We’ve talked about his work in education, his passion for technology, and his thoughts on digital citizenship.

But now, let’s switch gears a little and talk about something a bit different. His love of barbecue. 

Female Host: I have to admit, when we first started talking about this part of Wesley, I was a bit confused. It seemed so different from everything else we’ve discussed. But as we’ve gone deeper, I’m starting to see how it all fits together.

Male Host: It might seem unexpected, but Wesley is all about living a multifaceted life. He doesn’t limit himself to just one thing. And his barbecue journey is a great example of that. 

Female Host: So tell me, what’s [00:10:00] this barbecue side of Wesley like? 

Male Host: Well, it’s more than just grilling in the backyard. He’s really documented his barbecue experiments all over social media.

Tik Tok videos of sizzling brisket, Instagram photos of those perfectly smoked ribs, Facebook groups where he talks about all things barbecue. 

Female Host: It’s clearly more than just a hobby for him. He’s put a lot of time and energy into it and he’s sharing that knowledge with others. 

Male Host: And remember that blog we mentioned earlier, Cook with Wes is like a barbecue Bible.

You’ll find detailed recipes, step by step instructions, even tips for when things go wrong on the grill. He doesn’t just tell you how to cook, he explains the why behind it. 

Female Host: That teacher instinct coming through again, even with barbecue. 

Male Host: And here’s where it gets really interesting. Think about the similarities between barbecuing and everything else we’ve discussed about Wesley’s professional life.

They both need patience, attention to detail, a willingness to experiment, and that drive to keep improving. 

Female Host: You’re right. It doesn’t matter if he’s developing a coding lesson, working on a [00:11:00] media literacy unit, or perfecting a brisket recipe. There’s that same approach. Focus on the process, try new things, and share what you’ve learned.

Male Host: And that sense of community that he builds around everything he does, just like he encourages collaboration in his classrooms and online, he’s created a space for people who love barbecue to connect and learn from each other. 

Female Host: It’s a great reminder that learning can happen anywhere. 

Male Host: So what can we take away from Wesley’s passion for barbecue?

Female Host: I think it shows us how he approaches life. It tells us that we don’t have to keep our interests separate. Our passions can influence each other in ways we might not expect. 

Male Host: It’s a challenge for all of us to explore those hidden passions. What interests do we have that we can connect in new and interesting ways?

Female Host: Wesley’s story reminds us that it’s okay to be multifaceted, to keep learning throughout our lives, and to find those connections in unexpected places. This deep dive 

Male Host: into Wesley’s world has been fascinating. He’s challenged us to think differently about career paths, education, and even the role of barbecue in a well rounded life.

Female Host: He’s [00:12:00] shown us what it means to embrace our different interests, keep learning, and build communities around things we’re passionate about. 

Male Host: And as we wrap up, we want to leave you with this thought. What will your story be? What unique mix of passions and experiences will you bring to the world? 

Female Host: Think about it, explore it, and most importantly, share it.

Your story matters. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive into the world of Wesley Fryer.

This video is excellent, but it occurred to me as I watched it again with my students and they played the Kahoot, our class activities could be even more meaningful if students could play a game which included some of the vocabulary and terms from the video about TCP/IP, and involved simulated routing of Internet packets as well as cyberattacks.

Before attempting to create my own game, I used ChatGPT to try and find a free web-based game like the one I had in mind, but did not have success. I’m sure some must exist, so if you know of any or find any please let me know with a comment below or via social media.

This is a VERY basic 1.0 version, but after several hours of conversation and work with ChatGPT Pro (26 printed pages worth) I was able to create a working prototype. I went through at least 10 versions of this with ChatGPT.

You can play the current (1.0) version of “Packet Defender” on GitHub pages. Check out the javascript code on the GitHub repository I created for the project.

Here’s a game overview at this point:

1. Single player, text-based web game (single HTML file)
2. Scenario: 5 available packets needing transmission or cyber-defense are shown every 30 seconds.
3. Goal: Earn as many points as possible in the allotted time
4. Gameplay: Type and submit the source IP, packet name, and destination IP, then click TRANSMIT (normal packet) or DEFEND (intermediary server / router is under attack / colored red) and needs cyber-defense.

I’m excited to share this with my students tomorrow and get their feedback. Ideally I’d like to make this multi-player, team-based, and use a leaderboard.

Hi Allysia- Thanks so much for this thoughtful post and especially for the reflections on digital identity and sharing it with students. With my own middle schoolers this semester I am going to focus more on identity and digital identity. This is the Google Slides “identity collage assignment” I’ve been using for several semesters now and reflects some of the ideas from your post.

I really love how Dean has you all blogging and using WordPress, it’s been my go-to idea sharing platform since 2005. I definitely struggle and debate with myself when it comes to digital identity and figuring out what my “aspirational identity” is and should be. I like how you point out that using different media platforms to showcase different aspects of ourselves is not necessarily disingenuous or misleading, it is just natural, since there are different affordances to different platforms, and our identities are both complex and multifaceted.

For awhile now I’ve been attempting to reflect this on my “after page.”

I would guess this page of links probably comes across as overwhelming to many people. But it’s part of my journey of both becoming myself, and also striving to connect with others with similar interests. It’s also a good design challenge to figure out how to try and share my complex personality as it is reflected on the social web, visually and clearly.

Best of luck to you in the semester and years to come!

Additional notes:

• Here is the direct link to my comment on Allysia’s post on their class WordPress blog (it’s currently in a moderation queue)
• In addition to sharing a little via Zoom with Dean’s grad students last semester, I also had a chance to share some resources and links with Alice Barr‘s virtual high school students in Maine who were / are studying to possibly become teachers. I created a video, “Classroom Management Digital Tips for Middle School Teachers” in advance of that Zoom session, which may also be of interest.

Since January 2016, my friend Jason Neiffer and I have co-created over 340 episodes of “The EdTech Situation Room” podcast. It’s an almost-weekly podcast conversation about recent technology news “through an educational lens.” Jason and I have served in various educational roles through the years, and (perhaps predictably) we have strong opinions about a lot of educational technology related topics. In the past few years our themes have focused increasingly on AI / artificial intelligence, but we also highlight many other technology topics. We co-create an ongoing / running Google Doc with all our show notes / links, and stream our show to YouTube Live using StreamYard.com. For the past year or so, we’ve also shared our shows via a Substack newsletter, and recently we’ve been experimenting with sharing “video posts” on Substack.

Today as I continue to work on posting recent podcast episodes both to our blog and Substack, I noticed Substack supports the FREE creation of short video clips (approximately 60 seconds each) when you upload a video. Since our downloaded videos are VERY big from StreamYard (over 1 GB) I had previously uploaded a compressed version of our show to Substack, which I compress locally on my MacOS laptop using HandBrake software. (Handbrake is free and open source.) The video resolution of that version is very low (640 x 360) however, which makes for faster video podcast downloads from AmazonS3 (which I use to host the actual files of many of my podcasts) but it looks bad on Substack on a laptop or computer monitor. It looks OK on a phone, but I’d rather share a higher resolution version, especially since Substack does not charge for video hosting or (apparently) have file size limits. For our episode 334 on Substack, I downloaded the YouTube encoded video (directly via studio.youtube.com) and posted that version. After publishing the “video post,” I noticed the option to download auto-generated (and titled) 60 second clips from the hour-long podcast episode / video. Without any prompting or input from me, Substack’s AI identified 7 different 1 minute clips in our show that would make good clips or shorts, and provided a fast interface for me to download then and then use / re-purpose them on other social media platforms. Sweet!

I went ahead and posted all 7 of these to our YouTube channel, and organized them in a YouTube playlist so I could feature it on our channel homepage. I created a description which I could use for each one that references the original episode on YouTube, our podcast website, Substack newsletter edition, and has links to connect directly to both Jason and I.

I’m quite excited and interested in continuing to use these Substack AI powers to create short video clips because I know there are a lot of “good things” Jason and I talk about on our show each week, but unless people are listening to entire show (as a dedicated listener / subscriber) there are undoubtedly missed opportunities to share those ideas with others. Living as we do in an attention economy, filled with short-form content increasingly shared as “reels” on Facebook as well as other platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it’s valuable for part-time creators (like us) to have access to AI capabilities like this.

The other platform I’ve used to create AI-powered video clips is Descript.com. Unlike Substack which just auto-identified and auto-created those 7 video clips for me, Descript lets users specify how many video clips to identify and create, AND the duration of each video.

The 3 minute video, “Make Clips in Just a Few Clicks with Underlord” both makes the case about why MARKETING your podcast via clips, and the easy way AI tools like Descript’s “Underlord” streamline this process.

Do you use a different AI powered platform to create highlight video clips and reels from longer videos? If so please let me know with a comment on this post, via BlueSky, or another social media platform.

Last thought: I learned about Descript last summer when I was using ChatGPT to craft / edit / improve my “Audio Interviews” chapter of my almost completed book, “Pocket Share Jesus: Be a Digital Witness for Christ.” I asked ChatGPT to tell me what other innovative tools I should consider including in the chapter, and it recommended Descript.com.

The age of AI enhanced communication is here. There are downsides to this reality, but also big upsides. Quickly creating short video clips from longer videos is definitely an upside, IMHO.

Happy AI video clipping!

I’ll share this link again at the end of this post, but will share it at the start too, since you may not read (TL;DNR) my entire post: I’ve collected a variety of my past presentations and webinars on the topic of Internet Safety I recommend you check them out, and also share the link with family and friends.

From what I can tell, many issues with duplicate Facebook accounts for someone are caused when:

1. People (often older adults) forget and/or lose their password, and can’t access their account any longer, so they make a new one.
2. Hackers gain access to someone’s Facebook account, often because that person uses the SAME PASSWORD on multiple websites (which is on the “dark web” for any bad actor to look up and use) and fail to enable MFA (multi-factor authentication) on their Facebook and primary email account.

Let’s start with the basics of what you need to do IMMEDIATELY (if you have not already) to secure your Facebook account and primary email account. These are things you may need to share with family and friends, and even help tutor them through. That was the primary theme of my March 2021 TEDx talk, “Technology Fear Therapy” btw!

1. Use a Unique, Complex Password on Facebook

You should NEVER, EVER use the same password on more than one website. This is something likely everyone has done in the past, but it is a habit that MUST be broken. If you repeatedly use the same password, you are inviting hackers to take over your digital accounts, and speaking a bit harshly: That’s a very dumb thing to do.

Use the Pwned Passwords checker on Microsoft security researcher Troy Hunt’s website haveibeenpwned.com. You can put in “that special password” you’ve likely used for years, and see exactly how many data breaches / hacks include that exact password which are “ON THE DARK WEB” now for any bad actor to look up / download and use.

When you reset your Facebook password, choose something LONG and COMPLEX. Forget trying to remember it by using some kind of clever pattern. Today I favor using 30 character random characters with special characters for all my passwords. The more characters you use, the harder it is for bad actors / threat actors to crack.

Afraid you can’t remember so many long, random and unique passwords? Of course you can’t if you rely on your memory. That’s why you need step 2.

2. Use a Password Manager

If you’re not using a password manager like 1Password or BitWarden, you need to start immediately. If you are an iPhone and/or Apple computer user, you may be able to use the new Apple Passwords app instead.

The transition to regularly using a password manager is NOT something you should put off to a future date. Consider this: Thousands of hackers around the world are working hard to find “easy targets” they can attack and exploit for a variety of malicious purposes. These cyberattacks happen 24/7, 365 days per year. You don’t want to have your identity stolen and have to deal with that clean up mess. You don’t want someone taking over your Facebook account and posting advertisements with malicious links to cryptocurrency scams, as one of our good friends from our Oklahoma City days is watching right now.

For more about password manager options and why they are vitally important, see the November 2024 article in Tom’s Guide, “The best password managers in 2024”.

I know it can seem painful and feel like a big inconvenience to shift to using a password manager, but so was wearing seatbelts all the time in the 1980s. Safety and security is the issue here: Ignore this advice at your own peril. You don’t have to look far (or ask too many people you know) to understand why identity theft and hacked digital accounts are at EPIDEMIC levels and must be addressed immediately, individually, by each user of the Internet.

Yes, that includes you and your older parent / grandparent / friend.

3. Enable 2FA / MFA on Email and Facebook

When I was the Director of Technology for 4 years at our Oklahoma City school, I would sometimes get text or phone messages like this:

Help Wes! Hackers have taken over my personal email account and my Apple iCloud account. I can’t access anything, what should I do? Can you help me?

There are definitely a variety of things you can and should do if you are hacked, but the best thing to do NOW, before you are hacked, is “harden” and improve your security profile on as many websites as you can so you are not a “soft target.” In addition to the previous two recommendations (use unique, long and complex passwords – and use a password manager) you need to enable two factor authentication (2FA). TrendMicro has a short video tutorial (75 seconds from March 2024) showing how to do this on Facebook on an Android smartphone. The process is similar on an iPhone.

Facebook’s official support article, “How two-factor authentication works on Facebook,” provides additional details and steps for this process on multiple devices / platforms.

You need to follow these same steps IMMEDIATELY for your primary email account: Change your password to a unique, long and complex password, save the password in your Password Manager, and turn in 2FA.

Not everyone has a Google account and GMail account, but millions of people do. Google’s “Take a Security Checkup” page provides an excellent series of steps we should each take to secure our email accounts and ensure we can take them back over in the event they are hacked at some point by a bad actor / threat actor.

Now that we’ve highlighted immediate steps to take to harden and secure your own Facebook and email account, let’s highlight some issues with fake or misleading Facebook accounts.

1. Proactively “Train” Your Social Media Feeds

First of all, understand we each need to proactively TRAIN our social media feeds. Each time we open a social media app or webpage, we are ‘training the machine” on the kinds of content we like and the people whose content we want to see. As we watch, read, like and comment, Facebook (and other social media sites) are compiling data about everything we do. We are constantly under surveillance online, and especially on social media websites. If you haven’t already, watch the 2020 documentary, “The Social Dilemma” to better understand how the surveillance dynamics of social media work.

To “train our social media feeds” we need to be very intentional about the people and accounts we “friend,” follow and like. On websites like Facebook, by “friending” another account we grant that account access to our own collection of contacts and friends. This is why I’m seeing messages like the one below as a comment on Facebook posts:

I’m seeing you in my Facebook news feed but for some reason cannot send you a friend request. Can you please friend me so we can be connected and I can follow your posts?

Do NOT fall for this social engineering ploy. When you or I initiate a friend request, we are granting another account access to our contacts on a site like Facebook. This is valuable data to a bad actor / threat actor, who can and likely will use those contact links to share posts with malicious links that can lead to real world harms (like identity theft) for others. Block accounts which send you messages like this, then delete the messages from your Facebook profile / post.

2. Watch Out for “Sus” Second Accounts

My middle schoolers have taught me what “sus” means: It’s “suspicious” or “suspect.” On Facebook especially, but also on other social media platforms, we need to CONSTANTLY be on the lookout for “sus second accounts.” Here’s an example. The friend request on the right has a profile picture, and it is the SAME image this person (who I know from our first church in Oklahoma City / Edmond) uses on her REAL Facebook profile. However, this “sus” profile uses her first and last initial instead of her full name, and it only has six mutual friends.

The “actual Facebook page” of this friend is clearly identifiable as legitimate for multiple reasons:

1. The page has hundreds of friends and over 100 mutual friends to me
2. The profile is more complete with current city, colleges attended, city of origin, etc.

When I receive a NEW facebook friend request from someone I know and already follow on Facebook, or that looks “sus” for some reason, I first search Facebook for that person’s name. In many cases, the person’s active / “real” profile will come up, and I can compare the “new request” with the existing account to make a judgement about whether or not the requested account is legit.

It DEEPLY SADDENS ME to see multiple people who I know (they are mutual friends) of others on Facebook accepting and “friending” these kinds of fraudulent accounts. Those actions not only put others in the friends / contacts of those people at risk of phishing and social engineering attacks, but they also lend some credibility fo the fake account which make TRICK others into thinking is real / legitimate.

Please be VERY careful when “friending” new accounts, especially for people you ALREADY follow / are “friends with” on Facebook. It’s true people sometimes DO lose their passwords and their ability to recover their Facebook account, and as a result they create a new one. (I have a close relative who has done this, actually.) But in MANY cases, the second or third Facebook account is FRAUDULENT and has been created by a bad actor / threat actor.

3. Confirm a new account is legitimate with a PHONE CALL

This is a radical suggestion, I know, but I will make it anyway: Use your phone to CALL a friend from whom you receive a new or additional Facebook request. Or, even better, ask them in person the next time you see them. Confirm if they have set up a second Facebook profile.

They may not be aware a fraudulent / fake account has been created in their name, and this can help them move to step 4 as well.

4. Report the Fraudulent / Imposter Facebook Account

When you confirm or strongly suspect a Facebook account is fraudulent, please REPORT IT. See the official Facebook Help Center support page, “Report a Facebook profile or Page pretending to be you or someone else.” By reporting a fake account, you increase the chances that Facebook’s human (or AI / robot) engineers and content moderators will flag the account and eventually deactivate it.

These actions can reduce the chance others in your circle of friends and acquaintances may be tricked and exploited (via social engineering tactics) to “friend” that account.

Think of these small security-related actions on Facebook like picking up litter on the sidewalk in your neighborhood. As a member of a neighborhood, we have both rights and responsibilities. One of our responsibilities is to try and keep our neighborhood clean and safe. The same ethic should apply within the social media spaces we inhabit.

I hope these tips and suggestions are helpful, and I hope you will SHARE THEM with others. I don’t run ads on my blog, I didn’t write this as a “sponsored post” or for any kind of financial compensation. I’m a teacher and have been an educational technology administrator as well as early adopter for many years. Helping others stay safe online is something I do both “during my day job” and on my own time, because it’s the right thing to do.

Please check out the Internet Safety resource page where I’ve collected some article links, presentation videos and slideshows relating to digital security over the years. Share the link with others. Be a “technology fear therapist” for your family this week and during the upcoming December holidays.

“Let’s stay safe out there, folks. It’s a dangerous world out there, so we need to stick together and keep helping each other out!”

As you may be aware, NotebookLM is an experimental AI project by engineers at Google, collaborating with author and futurist Steven B. Johnson. I facilitated a webinar for the MediaEd Club of the Media Education Lab in October 2024 about NotebookLM which is archived and also linked on my “Webinars with Wes” website and my “Learning AI with Wes Fryer” website.

My AI experiment involved the following steps:

1. I downloaded the official, full PDF of Project 2025.
2. I logged into NotebookLM with my personal Google account. (It’s free, no paid versions / tiers are currently available.)
3. I uploaded the PDF to a new GoogleLM project, using it as my only “source.”
4. I clicked “customize” by “Deep Dive conversation” and entered a short prompt, asking NotebookLM to analyze the provided document and focus on impacts to our society, economy, political culture, etc.
5. After a few minutes, the AI audio conversation was finished and available. (Listen to it via my GoogleLM share link or via Google Drive. The first link requires a Google login, the second one does not.)
6. I listened to the audio, marveling at both the quality of the AI summary and analysis, as well as the deep pit of despair which we each risk falling into as we consider the content and potential impacts of the Project 2025 document.

After listening to the 15 minute summary and analysis of the official Project 2025 document, I created a second NotebookLM project and created an “audio deep dive” using the 48 page PDF “The People’s Guide to Project 2025” by “Democracy Forward,” which has also created the “Democracy 2025” project as a direct response to Project 2025 from The Heritage Foundation. That audio recording is 23 minutes long, but I actually found it to be a bit repetitive and not as concise.

Overall from an AI capability and analysis standpoint, I continued to be BLOWN AWAY by how good and insightful GoogleLM can be not only with its summary of key ideas, but also its analysis of complex, multi-layered topics. If you have not personally uploaded 1 or more documents to a GoogleLM project and created an audio podcast about it, you definitely should.

I read yesterday that ElevenLabs has updated its Reader App to create an even more audio podcasting tool than GoogleLM. I have not tried it yet.

As background for this AI experiment, I listened yesterday to a podcast I shared on my “Wes’ News Filter” public Facebook page. The podcast episode was “End of American Imperium: The Unsolvable Military Recruiting Crisis w/ US Major General Dennis Laich.” I shared a few of my reactions and thoughts about the themes of this podcast episode on a post on my News Filter Facebook page. One big thought was, “I need to read Project 2025 myself and spend some time learning about what it prescribes.”

Now is NOT the time for despair. It is the time for action. One of the responses to our era of political polarization and conflict, which I started last year, is the “Heal Our Culture” project. I started by collecting related resources and sharing them on a Google Site. I will continue building this project in the weeks and months to come.

Add NotebookLM to your AI toolbox. Please reach out and let me know what you do and learn! BlueSky is quickly becoming my favorite social media platform for conversation and idea sharing!

Today, I recorded a 5 minute video demonstrating how I teach students to understand and add alternate text tags (ALT tags) to images in both Google Sites and webpages created with the “new” Adobe Express.

I used the AI tool Descript.com to create a free transcript of my recorded video, and since I am “out of credits” with my paid Descript.com plan, I used ChatGPT to create a video description as well as time-stamped chapter titles and links. The video description is:

Learn how to enhance the accessibility of your web design projects by checking and adding ALT text for images using free tools like the Screen Reader Chrome extension. In this video, Wes Fryer, a middle school STEM and media literacy teacher, walks you through the process of evaluating ALT tags on student-created websites and how to ensure your designs are inclusive for visually impaired users. Whether you’re using Adobe Express or Google Sites, this guide provides actionable steps to improve accessibility in your projects.

The main Google Chrome extension I used and teach my middle school web design students to use is Chrome Screen Reader, paired with Extensity. (Both are free.) I also share a variety of other web accessibility checkers with them, and demonstrate several of these in class lessons.

Eventually I would love to empower my students to use AI tools to create draft descriptions for image ALT tags. This is a feature I love in the Ice Cubes Mastodon client app for iOS. With one touch I can create a useable alternate text description for any image I want to share on Mastodon, and readily edit that draft before publishing. I expect many web design tools and webpage editors (including Google Sites) will add this AI feature in the future.

Info about my middle school computer programming course I teach is available, with some links to many lessons I teach on my lesson sharing website.

My entire middle school coding course is shared in Canvas, from fall 2023.

My current (fall 2024) middle school computer programming / coding course is also shared course in Canvas, but not all lessons have been shared / made public yet since the term is ongoing.

I continue to LOVE using Scratch with my middle school coding students! I’ve personally been using Scratch for over 17 years now. I’ve just updated this studio of student-created Scratch mazes, with many of the maze projects created by my students the past few years.

I also created a “Hall of Fame” page for student Scratch Maze projects, selecting two per semester since I’ve been teaching at my current North Carolina school.

My Scratch Maze lesson is also shared with lots of details about the project requirements, Scratch coding tutorial videos, etc.

I’m also using Minecraft MakeCode with students, and we are building an outpost on Mars with code in Minecraft! More details about that project, “Minecraft Mars,” including slides and recordings of conference presentations I’ve shared about it for NASA teacher conferences and other education conferences, is available.

If you have questions about any of these lessons or resources please reach out via a comment here on my blog, or via other means.

I love helping students get excited about CODING!

Unfortunately, when natural disasters like this take place today in our digitally connected society, some individuals choose to become BAD ACTORS and create FRAUDULENT websites and profiles on sites like GoFundMe.com and Venmo.com. As I explained this to my web design middle schoolers this morning and visited GoFundMe.com, I searched for the word “Hurricane” and immediately saw a GoFundMe campaign page which looked suspicious.

I modeled the use of the “lateral reading” media literacy strategy for my students, as well as the “SIFT web literacy” strategy, in which we STOP, INVESTIGATE the source, FIND trusted coverage, and TRACE to the original. We conducted REVERSE IMAGE SEARCHES on the image provided on the webpage using both Google Lens and TinEye.com, and looked for tell-tale discrepancies on the different websites we found for the alleged “organizer” of the GoFundMe campaign on sites like Facebook and Venmo. As the teacher and adult with logins to sites like Facebook and Venmo, I performed all these searches as a “modeled” lesson for students, and I think it was a memorable learning experience. Together we discovered:

1. No nonprofit exists in Charlotte, North Carolina under the name used for the GoFundMe campaign.
2. A nonprofit with that name exists in California, but it is focused on addressing homelessness.
3. The official North Carolina database of non-profits and charities does not list an organization in our state with the name used in the GoFundMe campaign.
4. A Facebook page with the name of the alleged “GoFundMe organizer” was inactive for a year until 2 days ago, when it posted a link to the GoFundMe page and a Venmo page with the name of this ficticious Charlotte charity. That Venmo page did not have a profile image, a profile banner image, or provide any type of organizational web link.
5. The GoFundMe indicated the nonprofit is Charlotte-based, but Facebook posts claimed it operates out of Hickory, Conover and Davidson NC.

I created a Google Doc including descriptions, links and screenshots detailing this “digital evidence” supporting the contention that the GoFundMe campaign is fraudulent, and I reported the suspected fraud pages / campaigns officially to both GoFundMe and to Venmo before lunch.

Here are the statistics which make this situation sad and even tragic:

1. At 11:33am this morning, the GoFundMe page had received over 1000 donations totaling $96, 729. The funding goal was $200,000, and had increased in class from $100,000 originally. The top donor had individually contributed $1500.
2. Now at 4:33 pm this afternoon, the same page has received over 1900 donations totaling $193,195, and the campaign goal has been increased to $500,000. A new top donor has individually contributed $5000.

GoFundMe sent an email confirming their receipt of my fraudulent campaign report, but indicated they may take up to two days to resolve their inquiry.

There is a chance I might be wrong with my “digital forensics” in this situation, so I’m hesitant to publicly share a link to my Google Doc of documentation or the link to the actual GoFundMe campaign. You can easily find it as of this writing, however, on GoFundMe.com.

I’ll update this post after I hear back from the GoFundMe admin / support team and they complete their inquiry.

Be CAREFUL out there, folks. We need to be generous with our money, resources and time to support those who are suffering from natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, but we need to be SAAVY and WARY of fundraising campaigns shared by individuals who do not appear, after some cursory “lateral reading” and “SIFTing,” to be legitimate, good-faith actors.

Basically all the Digital 8 and MiniDV video tapes which I recorded of our kids and family growing up are in the box, along with a variety of burned CDs and DVDs. I created a number of iMovie videos with a lot of this family video footage, and burned those DVDs we still have and posted them to a “Fryer Family Media Timeline” which I created with the Knight Lab’s Timeline tool. A collection of Zip disks and even a few audio cassette tapes are there, including one from 1978 which feature some creative stories I recorded as a 7 or 8 year old. Titles include “Terror Castle” and “The Ship in Deeper Water.”

Unfortunately, I do not have a cassette player or digital camcorders any more which will play these tapes. I should probably start looking in local pawn shops for players that might work. In addition to a LOT of video footage of our family, there are video tapes from my years working in the College of Education at Texas Tech (2001 – 2006) and some travel video tapes, including Shelly and my first trip to Shanghai, China, in 2007.

We have a local video and multimedia store, Create A Video of Mint Hill, which has equipment to digitize many analog media sources, including audio cassettes. They helped me convert a 1972 Analog Reel-to-Reel Audio Letter Tape recorded by my dad’s mom (my “Gram,” AKA Lydia “Tiddle” Fryer) which I shared this summer at our family reunion in Minnesota, and posted to our Family Oral History webpage.

The memories included in this box are truly PRICELESS, but today they are also mostly HOSTAGES of deprecated media formats.

It’s still possible we may have it, but I suspect my dad in Manhattan, Kansas, may have an audio tape recorded in Lubbock, Texas, in the late 1990s, of my mom’s mom and my other grandmother (Gertrude “Trudy” Waters Henley) telling some stories about her life and childhood, growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana. Boy I would love to find that recording and get it converted to a digital format!

Last night I was texting our daughter in Colorado, and she mentioned wanting the audio recordings she recorded in France when she was on an exchange trip there her senior year of high school. Thankfully, those recordings are still on my portable, battery operated Sony audio recorder, and I was able to find them and share them with her via Google Drive. She was so excited to have them!

I’m actually using Descript.com to create a French transcription of one of those files, to find out from Rachel how accurate it is. I’ve created some English transcriptions recently of long (1.5 hour) interviews I helped volunteers at a local historical society record over the summer, and I’ve been very impressed with the results.

It is SO important to convert precious media recordings of family and friends into formats which can “withstand the test of time!” But what, exactly, is that format?! For starters, it’s vital to convert analog media into DIGITAL formats. But that’s not enough… Just witness the ZIP DISKS in my box of treasures tonight. Since we didn’t move with my much beloved Blue and White “Yosemite” Mac Pro computer, my ability to “read” and access antiquated Zip disks has evaporated.

Don’t let this same fate befall your own family media recordings! Convert them while you can!

More resources about preserving family oral history and creating a variety of “digital stories” are available on the Storychasers website, which I continue to maintain as a personal passion project.

I predict many of these media recordings which are “format hostages” today will one day be set free… and again be enjoyed by our family, but this time, as DIGITAL files!

As an example, I used the website Flickr to upload the image I’ve embedded (above) in this post, and I used ImageCodr to quickly format the citation for this Creative Commons licensed image.

Check my “Favorite Digital Utilities” webpage for newer updates, especially if you’re viewing / reading this webpage a few months or more after I post this today in August 2024. As of today, my favorite digital utilities, categorized into three groups, include:

AI Tools

1. ChatGPT – I pay a subscription fee
2. Claude.ai – I pay a subscription fee
3. Ideogram.ai (generative AI visualization) – I pay a subscription fee
4. Upscale.media (increase image resolution)

Other Websites

1. Text Prepper (chunk / thread longer social media posts)
2. Flickr (photo sharing)
3. ImageCodr (format image CC license attribution)
4. The Noun Project (get icons to use in image collages) – I pay a subscription fee
5. ColorZilla (copy exact HTML colors from an image / webpage)
6. Adobe Express for iOS (create InfoPics)
7. Google Sites (update webpages like this one)
8. Zbib (quick citation formatting)

Software Programs

1. Skitch (screenshot annotation, still downloadable but officially discontinued)
2. Handbrake (open source video transcoder)
3. XSplit Vcam (use iPhone as webcam)
4. BBEdit (text editor, grep search/replace)
5. Paprika Recipe Manager 3 (paid app, but no subscription required)

This week I also created a separate webpage to share the paid subscriptions my wife and I have and maintain. This is shared on my “presentation handouts wiki / website,” along with the podcast subscriptions I have currently.

It can be SO valuable to “serve as filters for each other,” sharing things like:

1. Favorite Digital Utilities
2. Favorite Paid Subscription Services
3. Favorite Podcasts

At some point I also need to create a similar list for my “favorite books” and “favorite YouTube videos.” Many of the videos that would go in that list are somewhere on my LONG webpage for class “Wonder Links.” Many of the books that would make the list are in blog posts here I’ve shared under the category “books.”

What are YOUR favorite digital utilities, paid subscription services, and podcasts which I’m missing from MY lists?!

This article is cross-posted to Medium.

“Emergency Remote Learning” was challenging for everyone, but there were definitely elements of it we appreciated and enjoyed. I never imagined our entire family would “have” to stay home together, and both Shelly and I would teach our classes (and in my case, also provide educational technology support remotely to our teachers) from our house.

These photos, by themselves, tell a powerful story. My wife is an amazing teacher!

"Floydada iBook Rollout: October 2004" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

Today that teacher (who is me, Wesley Fryer) found a couple old videos on a hard drive backed up in 2011, and shared those videos on YouTube. I also updated the West Texas TxTIP website I created back in 2008, fixing broken links to the original grant proposals and budgets I wrote / created. I added links to these videos as well as a few photos.

If you have connections to any of the students, teachers, administrators, Apple employees, or others included in these photos or videos, please let them know. They might enjoy this digital “blast from the past.”

In October 2024 this year, in just a few months, it will be the 20 year anniversary of this FIRST rollout of student laptops in the TxTIP grant project in Floydada. My how time flies.

I especially love the student voices in this second and longer video from February 2005. The male student, Ben, is SO empowered by the new role as “the technology expert” which he was able to realize as a result of this laptop initiative!

On a technical note, the audio in this second video was VERY quiet, so I exported just the audio (using QuickTime Player for MacOS) and then imported that file into the website Auphonic.com. I’ve used Auphonic a lot in the past to “normalize” podcast audio files, and I still had some credit time available. It did a GREAT job boosting and normalizing the audio from these interviews, which made a SIGNIFICANT improvement in the overall quality of this video. I’m so pleased with how it turned out!

"Audio Improved with Auphonic.com" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

As I recall, I checked our oldest child (Alex) out of his kindergarten class at Murfee Elementary School in Lubbock for the day on October 5, 2004, when the students at Floydada Junior High School received their iBook laptops. I wanted him to experience and witness this historic event with me.

Now Alex is a 27 year old robotics engineer working for Booze Allen Hamilton as a NASA contractor at the Johnson Space Center, leading the MAGIK team as they (among other things) conduct the pre-engineering analysis for all the uncrewed SpaceX missions resupplying the International Space Station. I wonder where some of those students in junior high school in Floydada and Post in 2004 are now? I bet they’ve gone to some amazing places and done some great things.

As teachers and dreamers, we make a difference.

"Wes Fryer and Alex Fryer in Houston, Tex" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

Please share this with others in our greater Charlotte, North Carolina community who might be interested!

More information and free resources about FAMILY ORAL HISTORY and community oral history is available on the Storychasers.org website, which I continue to maintain and build as a personal passion project. I’ll be linking the workshop curriculum / handouts on that site prior to part 1 of this workshop series on Saturday.

I hope you can join us!

I have loved using Google’s Jamboard platform for class interactive, digital brainstorming, and have been mourning the announced sunset of Jamboard in October 2024. I’ve considered using FigJam (which Eric Curts touts as a great replacement) but as a service requiring 3rd party authentication approval from our IT Department, it would take some time and coordination for me to be able to use it with my students.

Enter Canva.com. This year I’ve used Canva in my web design as well as computer applications / media literacy classes, and it’s AMAZING what students have been able to create and do with images! Previously I taught my media literacy students how to use Google Drawing to create basic, custom size image collages, and while that’s still a valuable skill, Google Drawing is VERY limited in its graphic design potential compared to Canva.com.

Today I wanted to collaborate with my students in a digital space, reflecting on the JP Sears video, “13 Reasons Why the Moon Landing Fake,” which we’ve watched as part of our unit on the SIFT web literacy framework and how to avoid being deceived / drawn in by WILD conspiracy theories. I did a Google search for Canva whiteboard, and discovered that Canva has a robust and wonderful interactive Whiteboarding option!

Here is a short screen recording at the start of our collaboration this morning on a Canva Whiteboard, using this file as a template.

I modified an existing whiteboard template in Canva to create a multi-column layout to contain our “sticky notes.” Initially I shared this file with students with READ ONLY settings, but after demonstrating how they can add sticky note ideas I allowed them to EDIT the document. It’s always a little wild when everyone in a class starts editing the same document, but Canva handled our collaboration well today and students were successful in avoiding “stepping on” each other or interfering with each other’s work.

I’m very pleased to add Canva whiteboarding to my digital teaching toolkit!

In the past when I’ve taught this unit on “Froot Loop Conspiracy Theories,” I’ve required my students to create SKETCHNOTES about each of the main three videos we watch in the lesson series. This time, I had students create a sketchnote about our first video, “Conspiracies and Crazy People” by @The Odd1sOut, but not for the second one by JP Sears.

I’m following a two lesson cycle for each of our videos, so last lesson I introduced SIFT and we watched the JP Sears “Moon Landing Hoax” video.

The day before, we watched and discussed the outstanding (but somewhat “creepy”) 4 minute video from 60 Minutes, “Meet a puppeteer with a gift for pulling strings.” I love how this sets students up with a metaphor for understanding how some people and organizations try to use information to MANIPULATE us and “hack our minds,” just like a puppeteer controls a string puppet or marionette.

Today before we analyzed the JP Sears “Moon Hoax” video, we watched and discussed the 3.5 minute video, “Sort Fact from Fiction Online with Lateral Reading” from the Civic Online Reasoning group at Stanford University.

I also used my nerf football so we could practice LITERAL “lateral passes,” and we watched part of the 4.5 minute video, Most INSANE Football Laterals (NFL & College).”

As we brainstormed our sticky notes to go into column 3, I put a prompt into ChatGPT to see what suggestions it could provide. This was my prompt, and this is the archive of our chat conversation.

I am trying to come up with a clever way to encourage people to check the sources for online information. Please complete this phrase in 20 different ways, making it sound poetic and clever: “check the source before you ….”

ChatGPT conversation by Wes Fryer, 2 April 2024

Many of the initial suggestions do NOT follow the spirit and intent of the SIFT web literacy framework, but they provided some excellent conversation starters with students and also inspired some of our InfoPic phrases.

What an energizing media literacy lesson today! I love teaching media literacy and middle school students in 2024!

In December 2012, I published the 3 minute photo story, “Live Internet Radio Broadcasting from a Bus.” In it, I shared “a story about webcasting a live radio show from a bus in Canada in August 2012 following Unplugd 2012.”

UnPlug’d 2012 was an incredible experience for me, partially documented in this Flickr album as well this 20 minute podcast from Northern Edge Algonquin. As a teacher and a learner, I have been transformed by many people and experiences, but perhaps none were as powerful as the free K-12 Online Conference, which I helped organize from 2006 to 2017. In those early, “heady days’ of the Internet and the “read-write web,” I connected with hundreds of other educators from around the world who were exploring ways we could learn together with the amazing tools and websites borne from fiber optic communication connections, mobile computing devices and algorithms. Today in 2024, these tools and digital highways are more powerful than ever, yet these potentials for interactive learning remain largely unexplored for many teachers and students in our schools.

One of the most powerful things I learned as a result of these #k12online powered connections was that I LOVE “digital storytelling!” I’ll never forget hearing David Jakes share a presentation about digital storytelling an an Austin “TechForum” back in 2007. I was fortunate to continue learning from David and being inspired by him both in person and virtually in the ensuing years. Alan Levine, Joe Lambert, Amy Burvall, and Dean Shareski are others who have not only sparked my own passion for digital storytelling, but also modeled for me and encouraged me to become a generous online sharer of ideas and resources.

Since I started my YouTube channel and published my first video in October 2006 (“How to create a Skypecast”) I’ve published 1338 videos in all, of which 1216 are public and 122 are private. That’s a LOT of video content!

As I’ve been playing extensively with generative artificial intelligence / AI tools over the past year, I’ve wondered how some of the 5,877 blog posts shared on “Moving at the Speed of Creativity,” audio podcasts I’ve recorded and shared over the years, and videos I’ve published could be summarized, synthesized, and/or “reborn digitally” to both share “old ideas” as well as inspire new ones. After the tragic death of my friend, colleague, and mentor Bob Sprankle in 2015, I started the website BobTaughtMe.com, which I still maintain. Before his death, Bob shared with me “the keys” to several of his websites and podcasts which he published with his students and colleagues, and there are TONS of amazing as well as inspiring moments in those paragraphs and audio waveforms which I’d both love to experience again myself, AND share with a new audience that may have never heard of Bob Sprankle and his work in education and educational technology before.

Now that it’s possible to create a subscribable podcast using YouTube and a YouTube playlist, I’ve wondered about re-publishing Bob’s audio podcasts on YouTube and bringing those inspiring audio creations to a new generation of educators and learners.

I also recently updated my own “Follow Jesus Curriculum” website, which includes archived adult Sunday School classes (with many recorded video lessons) from 2019 through 2022. These are already shared as YouTube playlists which I now “feature” on my own YouTube homepage, for “Finding Jesus in Media” and “Jesus and Science: Curiosity and Questions.”

Here’s my big thought, which is essentially a “slow hunch:” I’d like to use the ds106 radio model and recommended open source technologies to create my own “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” Internet radio station. Some of the ds106 radio backstory links are broken and not backed up by the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, but I did find this post by Ryan Brazell from 2014, “Creating Radio in the Language Classroom,” as well as Alan Levine’s 2014 blog post, “World Radio Day: ds106 Radio Magic.” The Google Doc “How to….ds106 radio, Alan’s July 2013 post, “It’s On Us to Manage ds106 Radio,” and the 2011 NetworkEffects post by Grant Potter, “Distributed, freeform, collective webradio” all contain a wealth of links and instructions which can potentially animate this idea and “slow hunch” of mine.

“Speed of Creativity Radio” is not at the top of my priority list, but it’s on the list.

Powered by connected digital learning tools, it’s amazing what’s possible.

Updates 1 Aug 2024: After sharing this 4 months ago, learned about an open source Internet radio platform, which may have been Azuracast, I’m not sure. (I can’t find the social media post which references this now.) Back in 2022 I learned about some community radio examples. This is still something I’m keen to do at some point!

First, Here are some key quotations from the article. This first one reflects the broad popularity of TikTok among many people in the United States, and the significant amount of time they spend watching videos on the app:

“Congressional staffers told Politico. “It’s so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They’re teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can’t take it away,” one House GOP staffer was quoted as saying.”

Brodkin, J. (2024, March 7). US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/house-committee-votes-50-0-to-force-tiktok-to-divest-from-chinese-owner/

Secondly, consider the next quotation, which immediately follows the first, highlighting the power which Chinese owners and operators of TikTok, as well as the Chinese government that influences them, have at this point over many people in the United States:

“House Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said that TikTok enlisting users to call lawmakers showed “in real time how the Chinese Communist Party can weaponize platforms like TikTok to manipulate the American people.”

“This is just a small taste of how the CCP weaponizes applications it controls to manipulate tens of millions of people to further their agenda. These applications present a clear national security threat to the United States and necessitate the decisive action we will take today,” she said before the vote.”

Brodkin, J. (2024, March 7). US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/house-committee-votes-50-0-to-force-tiktok-to-divest-from-chinese-owner/

This situation strikes me as remarkable for multiple reasons.

1. Required Divestiture Amounts to a Threatened Ban

The discussed debate over whether or not this is a “ban” of TikTok (as TikTok characterized it to its users) sounds like a mafia extortion conversation: “If you don’t divest / sell your company to non-Chinese owners, you will lose all access to the US market.” 

2. This is “LikeWar”

This article highlights the incredible power TikTok has over users and US citizens. For more on this see the book “Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media” by Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer. I referenced “LikeWar” in my November 2023 post, “Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism.”

3. 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

This proposed legislation reminds me of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. I asked ChatGPT this morning to summarize that legislation and it’s impact. (Archvied ChatGPT conversation.) While the current proposed legislation does not involve immigration, it definitely does relate directly to US perceptions of China and the Chinese people. It remains to be seen, of course, if the proposed bill will be enacted by Congress, signed by the President, become law, and withstand legal challenges based on freedom of speech and Constitutional rights.

While those things will likely take quite a bit of time to unfold, the perceptual effects of proposed legislation like this may be more immediate. Members of our Congress from different political parties, unable to agree about almost anything else, can agree about the national security threat posed by Chinese-owned TikTok. This topic is likely to become an even bigger political issue in 2024, particularly if it fails to become law or is struck down in our courts.

4. Brewing Peer-to-Peer War

This article and situation is another chapter in the brewing conflict and (potentially) “peer-to-peer war” between the United States and China. This term, “peer-to-peer war,” is one I heard a couple of weeks ago from a military General officer I respect. If we pay attention, there are numerous signs that China is ‘primed for war’ and likely to move against Taiwan in the next 5 to 10 years. While we can hope and pray that this confict can be deterred, the situation does not appear optimistic at this point.

I think many US citizens today under-appreciate the ferocity of current conflict between the US and China, the stakes of that conflict, and the importance of cyber warfare / information campaigns in shaping conflict as well as outcomes.

5. War in 5 Dimensions

This situation involving information warfare and “LIkeWar” reminds me a book we read in military studies at the US Air Force Academy circa 1990, titled “War in the Fourth Dimension.” I’m not sure if this is the same book in a revised form from 2001 or another one, but the theme is the same: “War in the Fourth Dimension: U.S. Electronic Warfare, from the Vietnam War to the Present” by by Alfred Price.”

A primary, salient point of that book is that warfare does not merely take place today in the air, on land and sea. Warfare is fought and arguably won and lost through the information landscape. Social media and mainstream media play a HUGE role in not only shaping public perceptions but also shaping public policy.

We need to spend more time in schools (and not just at US Service Academies) studying warfare, how it is conducted today and how it is won. The battlepace today includes at least FIVE primary dimensions: Air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.

6. Grandstanding or Real Security Threat?

The fact that many young people who are TikTok users, as well as older adults, appear to not understand the underlying gravity of this situation is troubling. For years on my weekly podcast with Jason Neiffer (“The EdTech Situation Room”) we have discussed articles like this, and through different Presidential administrations it HAS been challenging to decide if proposed legislation regarding TikTok and China are just “grandstanding” by different actors, or represents attempts to address real and pressing US National Security concerns.

Today in March 2024, I definitely believe the security threats posed by TikTok are significant and dangerous. However, the path to address those threats effectively is challenging and difficult.

7. More Than Chinese Ownership

The issues here are not just with Chinese control of TikTok. The hyper-polarized political environment in which we live is a product of multiple factors, but also the changes in regulation of US broadcasters, which led specifically to the rise of political talk radio. One book on my reading wish list related to this is “The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement” by Paul Matzko.

As the United States, we cannot simply ban TikTok (which is a likely outcome of this legislation, since China is almost certainly sure to refuse to completely sell it to non-Chinese owners) and solve our polarization crisis. Ultimately, and I think this will take many years and sadly only come AFTER we see heightened levels of political violence and conflict, we have to address (through government regulation) both the ownership issues surrounding large media companies (think Fox News and Australian Rupert Murdoch or Twitter/X and Elon Musk) as well as the requirement for news organizations to provide balanced perspectives on issues, instead of extreme, partisan perspectives.

8. No Short Term Optimism

I’m not optimistic we can ‘put the genie back into the bottle’ when it comes to social media and related forms of information dissemination, like podcasting. It does, however, seem that government regulation needs to play a larger role in these dynamics. While issues of Chinese ownership of a prominent social media company may be acted upon by our Congressional leaders, other underlying issues are unlikely to receive similar, unanimous action.

Another chapter in “LikeWar” unfolds.

For More Reading On This…

It will be interesting to read commentary and analysis by Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer in the days and weeks ahead.

For some additional related reading on this topic, I recommend, “Welcome to Cyber Realism: Parsing the 2023 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy: by Emerson T. Brooking and Erica Lonergan” (War on the Rocks, 23 Sept 2023.) I also recommend the excellent podcast, “Angry Planet,” and joining the private Facebook group I moderate for the “Conspiracies and Culture Wars” media literacy inquiry project.

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The main resource I’m excited about from tonight’s meeting is the 2020 documentary, “Trust Me.” It reminds me a lot of the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which was also released in 2020. Here’s the trailer for “Trust Me.”

In 1 of our Zoom breakout rooms tonight, we looked at some of the video clips and suggested questions / classroom activities in the “Trust Me” documentary Classroom Guide for Grades 4-12. The activities are described as, “A unit on manipulation and misinformation.” That classroom guide includes a direct link to 15 “Educational Segments,” which are combined into a single 1 hour and 33 minute long video on Vimeo.

Some of those same clips are available as public videos (not “unlisted”) on the “Trust Me” Documentary’s official Vimeo channel. 34 videos are included as of today. 1 of the examples we watched tonight was 2 minute and 44 second clip, “Citizens Misled by Disinformation on the Internet,” which (among other things) dramatically introduces the facts surrounding the “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory, including when “Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, arrived at Comet Ping Pong and fired three shots from an AR-15 style rifle that struck the restaurant’s walls, a desk, and a door.”

As a middle school media literacy teacher, I’ve been teaching students about the SIFT web literacy framework, lateral reading, and how to avoid “Froot Loop Conspiracy Theories” (wild, outlandish theories) for the past 4 years using the Apollo Moon landings and allegations by conspiracy theorists that the landings were hoaxes. I don’t teach my middle schoolers about Pizza Gate.

However, I’m now eager to watch the entire “Trust Me” documentary and see what elements of it could be integrated into my media literacy lessons. I’m just finishing up a 6 week micro-credential course for adult educators on “Teaching the Conspiracies” for the 2024 MediaEd Institute, and I definitely think some of the clips here would be great to use in our week focusing on “Contemporary Conspiracy Theories” when I teach this class again.

One of the ways teachers can stream the “Trust Me” documentary for students is to use Kanopy. That is also addressed in the educator guide, and I hadn’t heard of that streaming platform previously.

The Code.org lesson on “Societal Impact of Generative AI” was highlighted in another TIP Zoom breakout room tonight, but I was not able to attend all of that presentation. This is another resource I’m interested in exploring further.

The last resource which was mentioned, and I’ve heard about but not yet explored, is the “Minecraft Digital Citizenship Kit.” My students are using Minecraft Education and these lessons would likely be a great way to explore some of our media and digital literacy course themes through Minecraft. I just need to make some time to explore these lessons personally!

The last thing I’ll note is that the EXPERTS section of the “Trust Me” documentary website is worth exploring. They include:

1. Jimmeka Anderson, Founder & Executive Director – I AM not the MEdia, Inc.
2. Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education, Stanford University
3. Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, Executive Director – National Association for Media Literacy Education
4. Sherri Hope Culver, Associate Professor, Temple University. Director – Center for Media and Information Literacy

Since finally leaving Twitter in November 2023 I’ve been investing (time-wise) heavily in Mastodon, Threads and Blue Sky, and building lists of media literacy experts (and others) on those platforms. I’m eager to learn more about these media literacy advocates and their organizations, and hopefully follow each one on social media.

One serendipitous discovery which followed tonight’s TIP Meeting and drafting this blog post was discovering:

Jimmeka Anderson received her Ph.D. from the Curriculum and Instruction-Urban Education program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and her Master’s degree in Educational Media with a focus on New Media Literacies at Appalachian State University.

Jimmeka anderson. (n.d.). New America. Retrieved March 4, 2024, from http://newamerica.org/our-people/jimmeka-anderson/

It turns out her organization, I AM not the MEdia, Inc., is based right here where we live in Charlotte, North Carolina! I had no idea!

Thank you TIP Teachers for another evening of great learning about media literacy and media literacy resources! If you’re also interested in these topics, I encourage you to visit www.TIPteachers.net and sign up to become part of their wonderful media literacy community!

You can also find more resources related to media literacy on my website, medialiteracy.wesfryer.com.

The background for this is: I co-host an (almost) weekly podcast with my friend, Jason Neiffer, called “The EdTech Situation Room.” Before each episode, which we live-stream to YouTube and Facebook using StreamYard, we add a variety of links to technology-related news articles from the past week to a shared Google Doc. At one point I used a IFTTT recipe to auto-copy Twitter links I shared using the hashtag #edtechSR to a separate Google Doc, and then I referred to that Google Doc when preparing for each show to copy / paste and format my links. Since I completely abandoned Twitter / “the bird site” in November 2023, and never got a custom IFTTT recipe to work for Mastodon posts with a specific hashtag, for the past year or so I’ve just been scrolling through my Mastodon feed for #edtechSR tagged posts, and manually copying / pasting / formatting article links over to our Google Doc before each show. I’d like to find some ways to automate more of this process, so that’s why I’m wanting to get help from a custom GPT.

In the course of my testing and experimentation this evening, I discovered OpenRSS.org. Unlike the “default RSS feed” contents from a Mastodon account (Example: https://mastodon.cloud/@wfryer.rss) the website OpenRSS.org allows users to create full-text feeds.

As an example, here is a webpage viewable version of my latest posts on Mastodon using the hashtag #edtechSR:

• https://mastodon.cloud/@wfryer/tagged/edtechsr

The RSS version of this feed has the following syntax, just changed at the end with an appended “.rss”

• https://mastodon.cloud/@wfryer/tagged/edtechsr.rss

That RSS feed, however, is not “full text.” It includes links to each Mastodon post, and some meta-information like date/time and “categories” (tags) but the entries do NOT include the actual article titles or links.

Enter OpenRSS.org. The website allows anyone to create full-text RSS feeds of the 5 most recent posts:

• https://openrss.org/mastodon.cloud/@wfryer

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to include MORE than the latest 5 posts, or how to limit those included posts to ones with a specific hashtag. I can create a full-text RSS feed for #edtechSR tagged posts on my entire Mastodon server, but theoretically that could end up including posts by other users in addition to myself. It’s also still limited to just 5 posts.

• https://openrss.org/mastodon.cloud/tags/edtechsr

Another related (and potentially exciting) discovery I made was “Pipes,” which is self-described as “a a spiritual successor to Yahoo! Pipes.” “Back in the day,” I used Yahoo Pipes for several creative customized blog feed projects. This “child of Yahoo Pipes” project and website may be helpful in constructing the RSS feed(s) I’m wanting, but it’s too late to play with those options more tonight.

The good news is that using the OpenRSS.org version of my Mastodon account feed, I AM able to successfully get my custom GPT to parse my posted links in ALMOST the exact format I want / needed. (Here’s an archived example.) Rich media links of article titles don’t work for some reason, but it does work to just include the full URL after the other article information, and this will still save me some prep time.

Here are the questions I’d love to get answers for:

1. Can Mastodon output (by default, without the use of a 3rd party app / website) FULL-TEXT RSS feeds?
2. Is it possible to get a full-text OpenRSS.org feed to display more than 5 entries?
3. Can OpenRSS.org display a user’s feed items WITH a specific hashtag? (As Mastodon can…)

If you have insights or suggestions on these questions or this overall project, please let me know!

The screenshot above shows the original post in the “Food Truck Charlotte” Facebook group, asking interested food truck proprietors to email “vendingevents2023 [at] gmail [dot] com” to reserve a booth at the SHALLOTTE, North Carolina (note: NOT “Charlotte, NC” which is the focus of this Facebook group) Holiday Weekend Pop-Up Market. Rather than a direct form link and website to connect to for more information, interested parties are asked to just email a consumer Gmail account which anyone on our planet with Internet access could have registered and be using. This was and is warning sign number one.

1. Beware of “Events” Without a Website Link

Full disclosure: I did NOT initially realize I was dealing with a BAD ACTOR when I emailed the provided address. After I received an email response a few days later, after I sent a SECOND follow-up email (also strange they did not reply sooner) I became suspicious when “they” asked me to fill out an Office365 web form (which had several typos and errors) and then requested I send an $80 booth registration fee via PAYPAL, marked as “pay as friends and family for faster processing.” That, of course, would have been a LIE, and was a clear red flag.

This highlights several more bad actor “red flags.”

2- Be wary of PayPal or CashApp Direct Payments for Event / Vendor Registration

3- Never agree to LIE and mark a payment “for family and friends” when it is really for a business expense

When I became suspicious this could be a scammer / bad actor and not a genuine event organizer, I Googled, “Holiday Market SHALLOTTE, North Carolina December 16, 2023” and found their official event webpage on the domain townofshallotte.org. I also found the Official “Market on Mulberry” vendor application form, which is in MS-Word format and indicates the vendor booth fee is $25 per day, not $80. At that point, I called the Shallotte Town Hall phone number on the officiial form (910-754-4032), speaking to two representatives and confirming that they were NOT soliciting booth fees of $80 on the “Food Truck Charlotte” Facebook page. This highlights warning sign and object lesson number 4:

4- Don’t hesitate to make a PHONE CALL and talk directly with government or organizational representatives

After I spoke with the helpful Shallotte Town Hall representatives and confirmed that I was dealing with a BAD ACTOR on Facebook, I looked more carefully at the profile page of the original poster so I could report them to Facebook group administrators as well as Facebook generally. This was the user’s profile:

I clicked the “three dots” beside VIEW PROFILE to view the PROFILE SETTINGS for the account, shown below. Note the descrepancy between the profile name (“Anne Corinne”) and the profile link (“evans.kipkemmoi.39”). A Google Search for “evans.kipkemmoi” does not yield any direct hits, so both of these names may be entirely invented.

5- Click THREE DOTS by a Facebook User’s Profile to view SETTINGS and more information

6- Be WARY of Facebook accounts which have different names in the public PROFILE and the actual profile LINK

I used the PROFILE SETTINGS screen in Facebook to REPORT the account to group administrators as a bad actor / scammer. I also used that screen to report the account as a FAKE ACCOUNT. Unfortunately I could not submit any additional details, but if/when the account report is reviewed by a human being (or an AI bot, I suppose) hopefully that “entity” will see that group admins in “Charlotte Food Trucks” deleted the post in question, and that will be viewed as evidence the account owner is acting in bad faith.

7- Use the Facebook REPORTING options to call out scammers / bad actors / fake accounts

Since I was interested to find out, and also teach my own media literacy students how to “trace to the original” as part of our unit on conspiracy theories and the SIFT web literacy framework, I used TinyEye.com to perform a reverse image seach on the profile photo of the “Anne Corinne” profile in question. The result (not surprisingly) was that the image was not found ANYWHERE else online, leading me to suspect it is FAKE and was created with a generative AI tool like thispersondoesnotexist.com.

8- Use websites like TinyEye.com to “trace to the original” when investigating an unfamiliar web source (SIFT!)

In addition to reporting this specific post on the “Food Truck Charlotte” Facebook group as a spam message which violated community standards / group rules and should be deleted, I also posted a comment on the original Facebook group post to provide more information for administrators as well as other group members who might see the post before it was taken down. In the message, I explained my “evidence” for the post being false / fake: It solicited $80 instead of $10 for a vendor fee, and I provided the “official” city of Shallotte vendor form which includes that information.

9- Add comments to false / misleading posts on Facebook to help others avoid scams

Another warning sign that this “event organizer” was a bad actor was the fact that he/she used multiple email addresses to solicit and collect a vendor booth payment. The original email address posted to the Facebook group was different than the PayPal email address they asked me to send $80 to as “friends and family.” I reported these GMail accounts directly to Google as “abuse” and also reported the address they asked me to use with PayPal to “phishing@paypal.com.”

10- Report email addresses used for scams / phishing attacks to organizational security teams

Unfortunately, all of these steps took more time than many of us often have to dedicate to an attempted or actual phishing incident. On the good side, platforms (like Facebook and PayPal) provide relatively straightforward links and processes for reporting bad actors and fraud, so it doesn’t take TOO much hunting around to find and use those procedures.

Try and stay safe out there! If you’re not already, you should be using a password manager as well as turning on “multi-factor authentication” on as many websites / for as many web accounts as you can. For more on this topic, check out my TEDxUCO talk from March 2021, “Technology Fear Therapy.” My slides (including all referenced links from the talk) are also available!

Here are the problems I wanted to solve with this web-based software application:

1. I frequently want to share ideas on social media platforms which exceed the respective “individual post character limits.”
2. I want a quick way to break up / separate longer posts into different chunks, AND append the number of that chunk (or “thread”) as well as the total number of chunks / threads in the series. Example: (1/12) or (2/5) etc.
3. On the formerly 8 (now 7) social media platforms where I regularly share ideas and links, post character limits vary. For example, Instagram’s character limit is 2200, Mastodon’s is 500, Threads is 500, Blue Sky is 300, Twitter/X is 240.
4. The iOS app I previously used (and still have on my iPhone) to break longer posts into separate chunks (“threads”) has been removed from the Apple iOS App Store.

Enter ChatGPT 4.

I’ve used ChatGPT since Spring 2023 for a variety of small coding projects, mainly for the STEM courses I teach for middle school students. I’ve read that the coding knowledge and tutorial capabilities of AI large language models, like ChatGPT, are formidable and impressive, and I’ve previously experienced moments of surprise and elation as I coded with these “AI Superpowers.” My 5 Photo Random Image Generator” script is an example.

In the case of my “Social Media Text Prepper” coding project, however, I had to really ARGUE with ChatGPT 4 to get it to produce the code I wanted. My entire conversation with the ChatBot is archived and accessible. Initially, ChatGPT just wanted to provide some starter-code to get me going on the project, but not write ALL of the code. This felt like a “Khanmigo approach” to coding, which is fine for some situations, but I actually wanted ChatGPT to write ALL of the code for me. Here’s what I ended up finally saying to it (with a little ALL CAPS yelling, no less) that resulted in the successful code I eventually shared on GitHub:

Hey, you are an incredibly capable software coder and your skills far exceed mine! I realize that there is some complexity here, but I’m wanting to leverage your coding skills and abilities, and that’s part of why I’m paying the monthly fee for access to ChatGPT 4. So, please do not respond with, ” I can certainly help guide you through this process.” TO BE CLEAR: I AM POLITELY ASKING YOU TO CREATE EACH OF THESE HTML, CSS, AND JAVASCRIPT PAGES IN THEIR ENTIREITY. Yes, this is more complex than a “Hello World” webpage, but it’s also not rocket science and this is something well within your capabilities to script and share. Please help me! These are functions that I want for my own use, and as a current middle school computer programming instructor (we mainly use block-based coding like Scratch and Microsoft MakeCode in my classes) I want to be able to show my students some of your capabilities as a LLM.

“Create HTML & JavaScript App.” ChatGPT, https://chat.openai.com/share/8f518dd9-daab-4753-882c-5fd0bf1b34bf. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

Although not as dramatic as the much longer conversation which New York Times journalist Kevin Roose had with ChatGPT’s Bing variant, “Sydney,” and certainly NOT as “creepy,” my intereactions with ChatGPT 4 in creating the “Social Media Text Prepper” code was definitely jarring and surprising. I had to use my best skills of text persuastion and argumentation to convince a large language model AI to create functional javascript, CSS and HTML code which matched my detailed specificiations. WOW.

This was also a delightful experience.

In addition to accessing, downloading, and (if you choose) modifying / forking my shared code on GitHub, you can also access (and demo) these webpages on my personal website with this link: wesfryer.com/textprep. Give it a spin!

I’m actually very proud of this AI coding experiment and project. I use this web application multiple times every week, sometimes more than once per day. It’s super useful to me.

And I created it with the help of AI.

The future has arrived.

I titled yesterday’s video, blog post and audio podcast, “Reflections on Hernan Cortes, the Aztecs, and Mars Colonization.”

Here are detailed steps for the “AI Bionic Blogging” workflow I followed yesterday:

1. Plan / outline the message you want to share.
2. Record a video of your message on a smartphone. (I used an iPhone14, an inexpensive tripod, and $11 hardwire lavaliere microphone.)
3. Add a text title in iMovie, export the edited video and upload to YouTube. (Android phone users can currently add text titles via “YouTube Create.”)
4. Wait for the YouTube algorithms to transcribe the video. (In this case it took about 30 minutes after the uploaded completed.)
5. Use AI (ChatGPT, Claude.ai, or Bard) to “clean up” and improve the writing. (I used ChatGPT 4 but had to perform this cleanup in 4 different parts / chunks. My full ChatGPT transcript is available.)
6. Copy and paste the AI generated “draft blog post” as a new blog post.
7. Format and edit the post, adding relevant hyperlinks when helpful.
8. Use AI (DALE-E3 by ChatGPT 4 in my case) to create a visualization of your final blog post text. (Mine is posted to Flickr as well as included in the blog post and podcast as episode show art.)
9. Create an audio-only version of the video. (I used QuickTime Player for MacOS to export as MP4 audio.)
10. Upload the audio-only version to your podcast channel. (I used my “Class with Dr. Fryer” Anchor / Spotify channel)
11. Use AI to create an accurate and engaging summary of your message. (ChatGPT transcript available)
12. After manually reviewing / copyediting / adjusting the AI summary, copy and paste it into the YouTube description and audio podcast description.
13. Use AI to extract and format all the hyperlinks from your blog post and share (if it does not exceed the character limit) in the YouTube video description, as well as in a published Google Doc.
14. Share links to your media creations (blog post, video and audio podcast) on social media (I used Facebook, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Threads, and Blue Sky. But NOT Twitter!)

Here is a summarized, visual graphic (Created with Google Slides, but resolution upscaled with AI using upscale.media) of the “AI Bionic Blogging” Workflow:

These steps are:

1. Plan
2. Record / Upload
3. Transcribe / Draft
4. Edit / Hyperlink
5. Visualize
6. Share

AI tools will continue to improve the quality and efficiency of “AI Bionic Blogging” in the months and years to come. Loom already utilizes AI to optionally “remove filler words” and “remove silence” from recorded / uploaded videos. (In my test, it removed 2 filler words and 32 seconds of silence.)

Some authors and innovation analysts contend AI / artificial intelligence represents the most significant technological advancement in the history of humanity on our planet, rivaling even the discovery of fire and the industrial revolution. Time will tell.

What I know today, and demonstrated yesterday, is that it’s now possible to “speak some words” and with a few mouse clicks, a little time, and access to our latest consumer AI tools, transmediate those ideas into well written, hyperlinked articles and audio podcasts.

What a great day to be alive as a multimedia communicator!

(This article is also cross-posted to Medium.com)

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one group of digital communicators to discontinue use of the secure user IDs and passwords which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the the right and responsibility to affiliate with others who are kind and strive to not speak or act in ways that are ugly,  racist or misogynistic, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

This, then, is my “Dear John Letter” to you, Twitter.

Oh, how I have loved thee, since I first set up my first account in the summer of 2007 at NECC, to today, at the dawn of the Thanksgiving holidays in November 2023.

Oh, how I have loved thee, EduTwitter: You motley band of educational technology early adopters and pioneers, generously sharing so many ideas and links and words of encouragement throughout the years. I owe much of my transformative digital education to you.

Pre-Elon Twitter: You were the digital network that connected my blog to the wider world. You escorted me into the K-12 Online Conference, an amazing gathering of innovative educators, sharing ideas in a free, annual conference for over a decade. Twitter was one of our most important tools, along with hashtags, to amplify and aggregate the conversations in our creative communities.

As I read and heard the stories of trolls and online harassment on Twitter in the past decade, I wondered what parallel universe these authors were discussing? That was not my EduTwitter! Those were not MY experiences! Yet it became impossible to ignore the horrific and terrible experiences of others on the platform. This was true especially after Elon fired so many Twitter employees focused on thoughtful and deliberate content moderation, re-platformed racist and misogynistic voices, and, in the name of “elevating free speech,” removed the vital guard rails which kept much of the evil darkness at bay in the digital halls planetary communication. 

It has become untenable and impossible for me to remain a contributing voice in this former bird-site dumpster fire of pollution and poison.

And so, dear reader, I invite you to “Meet me on Mastodon.”

It’s true, you can also still meet me in many other online spaces. I’m still on my blog and on a collection of regular and intermittent podcasts. I’m on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, Blue Sky, TikTok, and YouTube. All these links are available on wesfryer.com/after/.

But I am finished with thee, Twitter. Today I am posting this, my “Dear John Letter,” on all the channels I have ever created on you. This is the end of my communication on your platform.

Having contemplated this decision for many months, now, you might be wondering what finally push me over the edge to leave my approximately 40,000 Twitter followers behind?  What was the tipping point?

It was the three things: 

1- Elon‘s clear and unrepentant anti-Semitic post last week, documented in this Washington Post article:

“Antisemitism was rising online. Then Elon Musk’s X supercharged it.“ by #WashingtonPost 

2- The decision of Apple Computer, formerly Twitter‘s largest advertiser at over $50 million per month, to discontinue all advertising on the platform.

3- These persuasive words by Casey Newton, a journalist and podcaster I deeply respect, speaking truth to thousands of users and former users of the Bird Site:

“It’s the only way I know how to send the message that no one should be there (On Twitter / X), that this is not a place where you should be going to get news or to discuss news or to have a good time,” he (Casey Newton) told The Post. “It is just over. If you wouldn’t join Gab, or Parler, or Truth Social, there’s no reason you should be on X. I think it’s time for journalists and publishers, in particular, to acknowledge the new reality and to get the heck off that website.”

Dwoskin, Elizabeth, et al. “Antisemitism Was Rising Online. Then Elon Musk’s X Supercharged It.” Washington Post, 20 Nov. 2023. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/19/antisemiticism-internet-elon-musk-israel-war/.

Farewell, Twitter. Farewell “X.”  I love the conversations you empowered and enabled me to have over the years as EduTwitter and our beloved Birdsite. I will miss your format, the opportunity to directly interact with journalists and authors, and especially the lists which I built on you for countless hours over the past decade. 

But now, I turn to invest my digital time elsewhere. Especially on Mastodon. An open source, federated platform, like email, defined by technology standards, and not controlled by a single technology company.  Twitter like, but thankfully without the overpowering influence of a racist, misogynistic, and deeply disturbed human owner, with whom I do not care to ever directly associate.

Come and gather, my friends and co-learners, let us meet on Mastodon!

Urbie and I both use a “Linktree” profile (this is his, here’s mine) on Instagram to share links with other people. One reason for this is that links are not clickable in Instagram , either in posts or comments. So it’s more common now, when someone shares a link in Instagram, to see “(link in my profile)” at the end of the post, or after the link.

As my own social media use has become more diversified and even “fractured,” thanks to the ongoing dumpster fire at Twitter HQ, I’ve started using my Linktree profile on more social media websites than just Instagram. The power to share LINKS is fundamental to web culture and the Internet itself as we’ve come to know and use it for over two decades now. I still maintain “the power of interactive writing / hyperlinked writing” is one of the most undervalued and under-taught skills in our U.S. K12 schools today, and that needs to change.

Here are the AI and media creation links which Urbie shared with me this morning!

Gamma AI: Create Presentations, Documents and Websites

The first is Gamma App, a generative AI platform exhorting potential users:

Never start from scratch – Generate docs, decks & webpages in seconds
Create a working presentation, document or webpage you can refine and customize in under a minute, using our powerful AI generator.

Gamma app: Generate ai presentations, webpages & docs. (n.d.). Retrieved October 22, 2023, from https://gamma.app/

Gamma App does offer a free trial with “400 credits,” and other features (as well as limitations) detailed on their pricing / plans page. I’ve played with it a little this afternoon and my MIND IS BLOWN.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gamma App (@meetgamma)

I recently started a project I’m calling “Heal Our Culture,” and so far I’ve just registered a domain and started building a resource webpage on Google Sites. By simply copying and pasting a TOPIC less than 100 words, I was able to generate fairly incredible websites which not only look slick and professional, but also have excellent content relating to my inquiry project goals and objectives. I ended up creating three different versions, here is the link to the third one which includes more about education reform. Version one doesn’t include a reference to education reform, and version two merges education and healthcare reform because I combined them in my provided topic paragraph.

When it comes to generative AI tools and examples like this, I think it’s tempting to remain in a “OMG This is Incredible” or “OMB This is the WORST thing for Schools, Teachers, and Homework EVER” mode. Just as the Kübler-Ross model asserts there are “five stages of grief,” I think we likely have a natural “OMG Stage” when it comes to AI understanding and acceptance in education. While this stage is natural and expected, we should remain there.

Consider that generative AI tools like Gamma AI are the WORST versions of AI we are likely to use in our lifetimes. These tools are incredibly powerful and are getting even better fast.

In addition, consider that these AI tools, as other kinds of technology tools do, can literally provide us with SUPERPOWERS when it comes to design, content creation, and communication skills. These tools “raise the floor” and allow us to set new expectations, for ourselves and our students. Their output can definitely be mind-blowing, but I’m even more excited to think about what we can build and do together with these tools in the weeks and years ahead.

I’m definitely going to be showing these examples to my own middle school web design students and media literacy students next week, during our “Wonder Links” starting time in class.

The New Adobe Express

The other resource Urbie shared is “The Adobe Express page shared by Martin Ricardo Cisneros at #TechTober23.” Martin’s website is TheTechProfe.com, and the resource page he created at #TechTober23 is pretty amazing. I’ve taught my middle school web design students how to create “narrated slideshows” using Adobe Spark Video for the past 4 years, as it’s now been migrated into “The New Adobe Express.” (The Adobe Spark Video and Adobe Spark Page apps for iPadOS are still available / online, btw.) All of my web design students (and I) have created “sandbox media pages with Adobe Express” this semester. This is a sample “flow page” I created with the New Adobe Express on the topic of “Barbecue Brisket Perfection,” using my own photos and text. All of these tools effectively add “jet fuel” to our personal media creation toolboxes and learning vehicles!

I encourage you to check out Martin’s Adobe Express page from #TechTober23 for lots of additional links to creative design challenges from Adobe and lesson / project ideas you can readily do with your students using the free tools in Adobe Express.

Conclusions

It’s amazing how much discovery and learning can be facilitated by “mere hyperlink sharing!” Many thanks to Urbie Delgado for sharing these with me! If you’re looking for more AI tools which can be used to create and share media, and for educational / teaching purposes, definitely check out Jason Neiffer’s ever-updating Google Doc of AI tools. You can hear Jason and I discuss and share AI tools ALMOST every week on our “EdTech Situation Room” podcast and webshow. We broadcast most Wednesday nights at 9 pm ET / 8 pm CT / 7 pm MT / 6 pm PT. This YouTube playlist includes all of our 305 (as of this writing) past episodes, which are usually just over 60 minutes long.

Hackathons take different forms. In our case, they are offered twice per year, and provide opportunities for area students to practice a wide variety of skills. These include collaboration, communication, “design thinking,” coding, web development, problem solving, divergent thinking, and presentation skills. The primary organizer of our school hackathons, Dr. James Edge, was interviewed on our local WBTV television station last week, sharing more information about our PDS Hackathon and how area students (not just those enrolled at our school) can get involved.

Our PDS Hackathon is open to elementary, middle and high school students in the Charlotte area. The “prompt” this year focused on addressing poverty in our Charlotte, North Carolina, area. The specific prompt was:

“One of the most pressing issues Charlotte faces today is extremely limited economic mobility. A 2014 study infamously placed Charlotte dead last (50th out of 50) for upward mobility, meaning that any child born into poverty in Charlotte was more likely to remain in poverty than any other location in the analysis. Social networks, transportation, career readiness, education, power and resources, child and family stability, property values, and food access are all deeply connected to this issue, and the future of Charlotte will largely be defined with how the city’s population attempts to address these matters. While some people disregard this issue, your goal today is to produce a solution to one aspect that affects economic mobility in Mecklenburg County. You may choose, for example, to focus on raising awareness for a new transportation initiative, partner with a local organization that aims to push educational efforts, engineer a new program for career training, or even monetize a service or create a good where the profits will go towards directly supporting an organization already addressing this issue. There are unlimited opportunities for you to design, innovate, and establish an entrepreneurial plan to address this issue. Participants must use data to support their solution, and this data should come from the sets we provide or reliable sets found by competitors. Priority will be given to participants who support their solution with programming, technology, and coding. Please do your best!”

Initial Data Sets

How We Rise

Charlotte Family Housing

Leading on Opportunity

Crisis Assistance Ministry

Upward Mobility

Charlotte Opportunity Initiative-2020 Report

Charlotte Works

Charlotte Regional Traffic Data Program

Charlotte, NC Education Data

Mecklenburg County Demographics

United States Census Bureau-Mecklenburg County

I served on a panel of three judges for our middle school division, and we heard 23 different student groups “pitch” their ideas. It was both inspiring to see the skills and abilities of participating students on display, and also informative to me as a media literacy and STEM teacher, to identify some gaps and opportunities for skills which students can further develop.

Here are my primary reflections.

1. App Development

The judging rubric we used this year placed more emphasis on programming and coding. The score teams earned for programming and coding in their “pitch” was multiplied by a factor of two. Other rubric categories included:

• Effective oral communication
• Curiosity and imagination
• Critical thinking and problem solving

Some of the coding platforms middle school teams this year used in their Hackathon pitches included Scratch, Code.org, and CodeHS.com. Website development platforms utilized included Google Sites, Wix, Durable.co, SquareSpace and Website.com. Some students used Canva.com to create interactive, animated mock-ups of mobile apps they proposed as part of their pitch. Bubble.io was identified by one team as their proposed mobile app development platform for their project.

Of these tools, I have not used Canva or Code.org very much in the past on my own or with students. Both of these platforms are VERY powerful and extensible, and deserve more of my time and attention as a middle school STEM teacher. I particularly would like to help more of my students develop some basic applications using the Code.org “App Lab” specifically.

2. Presentation Skills

The ability to effectively present and communicate to an audience is so important! One of the primary skills which students not only have an opportunity to practice, but also WATCH and learn from in the Hackathon “Finals” (in which 5 teams from each competition category “pitch” their solution) is presentation skills.

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds was one of the most influential books which shaped my own design philosophy as a keynote speaker, workshop presenter, and teacher of both younger students as well adults. Some of the presentation design concepts Garr teachers include:

1. Avoid large blocks of text, use minimal text with bulleted texts
2. Use large images which relate to the presented topics
3. Don’t read text from your slides!

Most of our student presenters today used Google Slides, but some teams also used Visme.co and Tome.app. In addition to teaching my media literacy students about presentation skills, watching today’s Hackathon pitches also reminded me about the importance of teaching students about effective visual communication, different resources to find images to use in presentations, as well as generative AI platforms which support “text to image” creation. Padlet is the primary platform I’m using for AI image generation currently, using its new “I Can’t Draw” feature.

When I was in high school back in the late 1980s, “Speech” was a graduation requirement. I took a semester of cross-examination policy debate as a senior, which encouraged me to participate in competitive speech and debate for four years in college at the Air Force Academy. Watching and judging student Hackathon pitches last spring and today reminds me of the importance of speech and presentation skills, and the value of having speech as a GRADUATION REQUIREMENT for all students.

3. Awareness About Khan Academy

Many of our student presentation teams today at the Hackathon proposed tutoring programs for students, but none of the elementary or middle school teams mentioned Khan Academy. In tackling a problem as big and complex and poverty in our community, the importance of exposure to existing programs and solutions was highlighted repeatedly to me today. I’m not sure that most of our students who proposed creating tutoring programs for students, or providing video tutorials for students, are aware of Khan Academy.

Particularly as Khan Academy continues to integrate AI technologies into its offerings, with the goal of providing each student with a “personal AI tutor,” it seems important to share Khan Academy and help students of all ages know and access their free resources.

4. Awareness About Poverty

I really love the focus on addressing community poverty in our Hackathon this year. It was clear in listening to so many student groups talk about poverty, however, that a wide variety of stereotypes and misconceptions about poverty exist.

Many student groups proposed “solutions” to the prompt that involved providing people in poverty with more information and access to resources. Some suggested that AI powered mobile applications would be able to provide customized information to help those in poverty get help and assistance. Lots of students proposed tutoring programs, and many suggested doing a variety of local fundraising initiatives to support these tutoring programs as well as other nonprofits serving the needy.

Only one group I heard today talked about the chronic UNDERFUNDING which we see for public schools today in our area, and the need to address these issues. They proposed some local educational exchange programs, in which students and teachers from more affluent schools (like ours) would trade places with peers in local public schools which receive comparable lower levels of funding support. That student group suggested that these exchanges would highlight disparities in educational opportunities in our community, and could lead to positive changes in educational outcomes.

I LOVED this proposal and line of thinking, but would have liked to see this group talk about how these exchanges could lead to advocacy campaigns for higher levels of funding for public education in North Carolina. Our teachers not only need to be paid more in North Carolina, but we also need to build and grow our cadre of professional teachers so we can reduce class sizes and improve the educational experiences for students as well as teachers.

Poverty is VERY complex, and simple solutions are (unfortunately) inadequate to significantly change societal economic trends. That said, today with our access to generative AI tools as well as other algorithmic approaches to problems, it’s possible to study and analyze very complex situations using multi-variate analysis which would have been difficult or impossible for many people in the past.

I have a LOT of thoughts and reflections on this, but overall am emerging from this Hackathon experience wanting to find ways that our students as well as faculty and other community members could have opportunities to learn more about the realities of poverty in our community. It’s great to have access to data sets and to use them for analysis, but understanding poverty (and constructing empathetic, effective strategies in partnership with those experiencing poverty and homelessness) requires experiences, conversations, and relationships between those in different economic circumstances.

I’m thinking it could be helpful to offer a “pre-hackathon prep workshop” for students, focused on the overall theme of the semester’s prompt / challenge. How do we address stereotypes and assumptions which many more affluent people may have about people experiencing homelessness, or poverty, and deepen that understanding?

In our Sunday School class at our church currently, we’re reading Kevin Nye’s book, “Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness.” Kevin advocates for the “Housing First” approach to addressing homelessness and affordable housing. My own understanding of these issues suggests that being exposed to and understanding these ideas are key to addressing poverty in our communities today. I didn’t hear anything about “Housing First” in today’s Hackathon, and I’m wondering how this awareness could be promoted in our community in the future?

5. Teacher Professional Development

I would love to see a professional development day at our school in which we, as faculty, engage in these exact challenges of the Hackathon with our peers. Hackathons (as our school offers them) are phenomenal opportunities for participants to access, use, synthesize, and communicate ideas with analytics. Like cross-examination policy debate, and perhaps other forms of competitive speech events (like “Public Forum,”) our school Hackathon provides a great opportuntie for participants to intersect with “wicked problems” and take on the challenge of proposing specific solutions or strategies to solve or improve those complex situations.

As teachers, we need to be stretched in our own uses of digital tools to access, analyze, and communicate ideas. A “Hackathon PD Day” would be an engaging, fun, and challenging way to stretch our skills as professionals and citizens, and also learn a great deal about important issues. It also could lead (as our student hackathons have) to follow-up activities and initiatives which move beyond theoretical proposals. Hackathons like ours are inherently empowering, and it’s exciting. to both see how participants have been empowered in the past to take the ideas they’ve cultivated out into the world… as well as how future participants may. be similarly empowered in the future.

6. Provide Detailed Feedback to Hackathon Participants

In competitive debate tournaments, participants receive details feedback from their judges in both preliminary as well as elimination rounds. As a parent volunteer on the debate teams of our own kids. in the past decade, I learned about Tabroom.com and. the way debate judging has “gone digital.” Today and in past hackathons at our school, we’ve used paper rubrics to assess and evaluate student team “pitches.” I’m thinking it would be good to use an electronic format for judging, mainly to provide each team with specific feedback they could use to reflect on their work and performance, and improve in the future.

Overall Conclusions

I am so thankful our school offers Hackathon challenges for our students and students in the Charlotte community! I’m also thankful for the chance to volunteer and participate, since it not only provided opportunities to work with and get to know students in different grades / divisions, but also many of our parents. The skill sets cultivated by our Hackathon are FANTASTIC, and it definitely challenges me to think about the lessons and units I’m teaching to my own students as a middle school STEM teacher.

Long live the PDS Hackathon!

Daily Dedication

I love having “class meetings” with my advisory classes to build classroom community and develop stronger relationships with and among students. I’ve had “class meetings” in the past with undergraduate as well as graduate classes I’ve taught too, and they have always been valuable and memorable sharing times.

This year, our advisory coordinators shared Henry Seton’s EduTopia article, “A Daily Ritual That Builds Trust and Community Among Students,” which includes the idea of a “Daily Dedication.” Basically, a member of the class shares a photo, video, or media collage, often of a family member or friend. The subject can also be a favorite author, artist, or other influential, respected person. The speaker then shares a little bit about that person and why they want to dedicate our time today to them, in around 30 to 60 seconds.

For our first “Daily Dedication” of advisory this year, I chose to share about our daughter, Rachel, who completed Basic Cadet Training this summer at the Air Force Academy and is now a fourthclass cadet in the Class of 2027. I used Google Slides to create a media slideshow including some photos of her from the summer, as well as the video of her “acceptance into the Cadet Wing” earlier this month and a recent selfie she took after she got her first flight suit.

I shared with my advisees that I’ll be inviting them to share a “Daily Dedication” for upcoming meetings, and I’m hoping this will be a good way for us to learn more about each other and build our sense of classroom community together.

Check-In Question

One of the traditions we have at mealtime in our family at home is often having a “question of the day” that everyone has to answer at the end of the meal. I usually come up with this, and the questions can range from being fairly random to serious.

Since Hurricane Idalia just made landfall in Florida this morning and is headed for the Carolinas right now, I announced that our check-in question for today was, “Share a memory or story you have from the past about a thunderstorm, hurricane, tornado, or other severe weather event.” I went first, and then selected another student to share. Students continued to “tag” each other after they shared their story or memory. We heard stories about tornados, fallen trees in thunderstorms, hail storms, hurricanes, lightning strikes, earthquakes, and house fires. Students in our advisory this year have experienced a wide range of severe weather events!

Selfie-Bingo

Paper-based “Student bingo” games are common “getting to know you” activities for the first day of class. Since we are a “1 to 1 iPad School,” last year I created a “Selfie Bingo” Google Slide Deck, which includes 36 different prompts like:

1. Likes Dr. Pepper
2. Have a dog
3. Has caught a fish
4. Knows how to swim
5. Loves video games
6. etc.

I challenged students to take selfie photos with a classmate on their iPad, directly on the appropriate slide, for as many advisory classmates as they could. (To provide additional incentive, I also told them if they were able to get a minimum number, I’d have a treat for them at our next meeting.) Students shared their slideshows with me at the end, and I shared some of them with the entire class at the end of our advisory period so we could learn more about each other and also get some additional information too. I learned a lot about my advisees! I also combined all the slides students created into a single slideshow, and I’m going to share this again at upcoming advisory meetings.

Last year when I did this activity with one of my academic classes, I let students just take photos of classmates. I definitely think it’s more fun to have students take selfies TOGETHER. There are more smiles and the students just seem to enjoy it more.

I allowed students who didn’t want to take selfies or be in photos to opt out, and in those cases they could just take photos of classmates or type classmate names into their slideshow. It’s important to give students this option to opt out of photographs. This models the same type of respect we always want to give people when taking their photo and also sharing photos.

I’m excited for another year of middle school teaching and advisory this year! You can access many of my media literacy and other STEM course lessons and curriculum on lessons.wesfryer.com.

As a middle school STEM teacher, I am particularly interested in Stephen’s take on “computational thinking.” This is my paraphrase of how I understood him to define it: Inherently algorithmic, yet more than just algorithms—it’s a unique perspective through which we can approach any topic or subject. By employing a computational lens, we can innovatively pose questions, paving the way for the generation of data, graphs, and other valuable analytic information which relate to a question or topic. This information is ripe for computational manipulation and visualization. The QUESTIONS we formulate at the outset of an investigation are key, however.

This aligns with some of the pedagogy of inquiry-based / project-based learning which I’ve heard through the years. Helping our students imagine and formulate their own questions about a given topic or content area is even more important than having them successfully “learn” specific, discrete elements of content.

Stephen asserted that the most proficient “prompt engineers” working with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT today, demonstrate excellent “expository writing skills.” He sees the evolution of LLMs as a pivotal moment, reigniting dreams from the 1950s—dreams of a “thinking machine.” The patience demonstrated by LLMs, particularly when faced with misunderstandings, he highlights as valuable. While they aren’t without their flaws, like the occasional hallucination, he gave the impression he thinks those issues are ones we can work with and around in many contexts.

Stephen emphasized that in our age of rapidly advancing automation, the value of “a generalist” has skyrocketed. It’s those individuals who possess broad knowledge and the ability to think critically across domains that are becoming indispensable. Narrow skills, while useful, are arguably not as important for students in today’s classrooms as the ability to demonstrate flexibility, adaptability, and the capability to learn how to use new tools on the fly.

These insights inspired me to wonder how I might encourage my students this year, especially those in my coding classes, to delve deeper into data representation and visualization. I want to provide opportunities for my students to develop skills within the “analytics” arena of our “IDE@S department.” (IDE@S = Innovation, Design, Entrepreneurship, Analytics and Sustainability.)

Interestingly, Stephen championed the idea of computational thinking as a liberal art, intricately intertwined with philosophy. It’s about introspection, the act of “thinking about thinking,” and cultivating the skill to ask probing questions and analyze responses critically.

On a side note, I’ve added to my reading list Stephen’s book, “An Elementary Introduction to The Wolfram Language.” It’s available online for free and provides “a non-mathematical approach to computational thinking.”

Stephen also shared a practical use-case for LLMs. He currently employs them to distill a weekly, linked list of 25 news articles about research on LLMs, handpicked by humans, into concise summaries. He finds this to be more efficient than sifting through abstracts penned by the original authors.

One anecdote that particularly stood out was about LLMs crafting “hallucinated” functions for Wolfram Alpha. Intriguingly, their developers found one of these ideas so groundbreaking that they’re now in the process of implementing it—a testament to the unexpected creativity these models can exhibit.

AI Attribution: I used Apple’s iOS speech-to-text technology to dictate an initial draft of this blog post, then used ChatGPT 4 to refine and improve that narrative article. I further edited that result to create this final blog post.

1 – Stephen Wolfram. (2023). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stephen_Wolfram&oldid=1154844581

Here’s the video description I used on the YouTube video:

In this video, I will show you how to import your class schedules into Google Calendar from the “Blackbaud SIS” using the Apple Calendar program as an intermediary app. By doing this, you will be able to synchronize your class events and have them show up as available or busy on your calendar. This will work within Google Calendar and also using the 3rd party application, Calendly. I also demonstrate how to “bulk edit” events in Google Calendar, in case (like me) you have some events showing that you’re busy ALL day, when you are actually not. I mention that if your entire school / organization is interested in syncing calendars between your SIS (including BlackBaud) and Google Calendar, check out the paid services of SchoolCal. I recorded a 2 minute interview with the CEO of SchoolCal at the ATLIS Conference in Orlando in May 2022. I will guide you through the process step by step and provide some tips along the way. The methods I demonstrate are free and easy to follow. Let’s get started! All my social media links to connect and continue learning with me are available on: wesfryer.com/after/ My Middle School STEM and media literacy lessons are shared on: lessons.wesfryer.com

YouTube video by Wesley Fryer: “Importing Class Schedules into Google Calendar” (1 Aug 2023)

I recorded this video using Loom software, and tried to use my fancy iPhone webcam software setup with XSplit Vcam. However, I didn’t realize until I finished the tutorial I neglected to select my iPhone camera as my Loom webcam source, so it used my laptop’s webcam that recorded an off-center view. Oh well…

I was SUPER impressed with the new AI-powered features of Loom! In addition to creating a decent summary of my tutorial video (which I used as an initial draft for my own YouTube description) it created accurate time-stamped chapter markers for my video as well. I copied and pasted these into my video’s YouTube subscription to make those clickable by viewers.

If you find this video tutorial and the resources I reference here helpful, please let me know with a comment on this post, on the YouTube video, or by reaching out on social media.

1. DEFINE

The first step in creating your own audio podcast is not creative, it’s consumptive: Identify one our more podcasts created by OTHERS which you enjoy, like a lot, and want to emulate in part on your own podcast. I subscribe to a lot of different podcasts which address eclectic topics, and the formats of the shows vary. Some are interview-based, some are just one person talking, some feature “on-site interviews” with others, some are recorded livestream videos. To create high quality, engaging podcast content, it’s important to CONSUME a large quantity of diverse podcasts, so you can better understand the different possibilities which podcasting offers.

Find and use “podcatching software” which can not only keep your subscriptions and track your listening history, but also make recommendations to you about other podcasts you might enjoy. My favorite podcast listening app is PocketCasts, but there are many other good choices. My wife likes listening to podcasts on Spotify. Apple’s Podcast App remains one of the most popular in the world, and when it was still integrated into iTunes, is the podcatching app I started with. Google Podcasts is available on the web, for iOS and Android. Amazon Prime features podcasts as part of its music service. Downcast is a popular podcatching app for iOS. There are many other options too.

After you have a sense of what you like and don’t like about audio podcasts, and what you might want to create yourself, it’s time to DEFINE your own show. These are REQUIRED things you need to define:

1. Show title: Make it short and sweet! You can also have a byline to provide more information about your topic(s) and focus. For the EdTech Situation Room, our byline is, “Where technology news meets educational analysis.”
2. Target Length: Pick a standard length for your shows so audience members will know what to expect. Podcasts like “Clockwise” are exactly 30 minutes every time. “This Week in Tech” (TWiT) shows often last over two hours.
3. Format(s): Will your show be a solo act or co-produced? Will you have an interview style with guests? Will you have different “segments” each episode?
4. Frequency: Podcasts are, by definition, episodic. How often will you create and post / share a show? What is your planned schedule? Most successful podcasts (with notable exceptions, of course, like “9 Days in July,” “Wind of Change,” and “Moonrise.”
5. Audience: Who do you want to make your podcast for? While you can never be certain who will listen to your public / openly published podcast, it’s generally good to define your target audience to help you hone your message and develop focused content.
6. Description: Write a short (several sentence) description of your podcast. What are your usual topics? What are your podcast goals? Who is your audience? Why are the conversations and ideas in your podcast important for others to hear?

In addition to these required items, several things are OPTIONAL to define but can be helpful as your podcast grows:

1. Domain / URL: Do you want to create a separate website for your podcast which you can share and is easy to mention online? If so, you’ll want to register a CUSTOM DOMAIN (for about $10 per year) and pick a web host. One affordable option is to register your domain with Google Domains (relatively affordable amidst many other domain registrar options) and host your site with Google Sites (free). I use WordPress to power most of my websites, but if you self-host you have to have more technical skills and may have to deal with your website getting hacked. Creating and maintaining your own website can get complicated and very technical pretty quickly. Web hosting services like WordPress.com, SquareSpace, Wix and Weebly can make the experience easier, but you may have to pay a monthly fee. Podcasting specific web hosts like Libsyn and Podbean can be better for podcast-only websites, but again, commercial costs must be paid.
2. Social Media Channels: Do you want to create separate social media channels / accounts / pages for your podcast, or just share it on your existing channels / accounts? Jason and I have separate / unique channels on Twitter and Mastodon for the EdTech Situation Room, as well as a Facebook page. Keep in mind the more channels / accounts you have, the more UPDATING you have to do each time a new episode is created.
3. Hashtag: I love using a variety of hashtags to share different kinds of content across different social media platforms. It’s easier to use a hashtag on any social media platform with an existing account, rather than create and update a new one. For our “Wes and Shelly Share” podcast, we use the (relatively) unique hashtag, #wsshare on Twitter and Mastodon. Keep in mind that ANYONE can use a hashtag, however, so there is less control with hashtags rather than unique accounts. Hashtags can increase your discoverability, but also include some risks, which can be a bigger deal for organizational podcasts versus personal ones.

2. Practice

After you’ve defined the basics of the podcast you want to create, you need to spend some time practicing the creation process before making and sharing your first “REAL” show. This is the philosophical essence of my 2011 book, “Playing With Media: Simple Ideas for Powerful Sharing.”

If you have an iPhone and just want to start practicing audio recording, download a free copy of “Voice Record Pro” for iOS and view this tutorial to get started. I use this app in the “Family Oral History” unit I teach to middle school students in my media literacy classes.

Consider recording an “intro” and “outro” audio snippet that you will use at the start and end of each of your shows. For “Wes and Shelly Shares,” as well as my “Moving at the Speed of Creativity Podcast” which I started in 2005, our children recorded the outros we use, which is fun. You can record these audio files or ask others to, or hire someone to make one professionally using a project outsourcing service like Fiverr.

The number one tool I recommend using today for a new podcast is “Spotify for Podcasters,” which was previously called, “Anchor.” It is completely FREE to use. Even though the tool is branded for Spotify, the podcasts you create with the app can be published and shared for global distribution on any podcast network or website. The “Quick Edit Podcasting” breakout session I shared in September 2019 at the Oklahoma City podcasting conference has some helpful resources for using the app, even though its name has changed from Anchor. This 9 minute tutorial video can help you get started with the “Spotify for Podcasters” / Anchor podcast creation app.

3. Create

Now that you’ve defined the key elements of your podcast and practiced recording, it’s time to create your first show.

Just like writing an essay, it’s always a good idea to brainstorm and create an outline of each podcast episode first. For our (relatively) new podcast, “Wes and Shelly Share,” we try to pick a Children’s picture book to use as our show theme, and then plan two “halves” of our show with topics to discuss. We also include a “Wonder link” and “Wander link” at the end of each show, similar to how Jason and I include a “Geek of the Week” segment at the end of each EdTech Situation Room episode. As a carryover from my college days of preparing exemp speeches and flowing CX debate rounds, I still enjoy brainstorming podcasts (and blog posts like this one) on yellow legal pad paper. Shelly and I now use the “Notes” app (built into iOS / MacOS) for each of our #wsshare shows. However you want to do it, PLAN your shows in advance at least a little bit!

The podcast production “workflow” can get pretty complicated, as shown by this flowchart I created in August 2016 for a presentation about podcasting for our local Oklahoma City WordPress meetup group. A “linked version” of this workflow (created and shared as a Google Drawing document) is also available. Thankfully today in 2023, you don’t have to use so many different software tools and manually go through nearly as many steps to record, edit and post your podcast episodes.

I like using the following four step model for creating podcasts:

1. Plan
2. Produce (record)
3. Post-Produce (edit)
4. Publish (share)

By using the “Spotify for Podcasters” app and service, you can do the last three steps of this process all on your smartphone. You can record your podcast segments, edit them as needed, insert audio bumpers and intro / outro clips, and publish the final show. It’s really pretty amazing. This is the workflow Shelly and I use each week for “Wes and Shelly Share.”

If you do not use the Spotify podcasting app, you’ll need to use some software (unless you want to create a “no edit audio recording” to edit your show. This is often easier on a laptop or desktop computer, rather than a smartphone or iPad. Audacity is free / open source software which I’ve used to edit hundreds of podcasts over the years, and works GREAT. Adobe Audition is an example of a commercial software solution specifically focused on audio projects, like audio podcasts. I’ve used Apple’s GarageBand software (the MacOS version) to create some podcasts over the years, and it’s free. I prefer using GarageBand to create music, however, and stick with Audacity for laptop-based audio file editing.

4. Share

Once you’ve recorded and edited a podcast episode, it’s time to PUBLISH or SHARE your file for the world to download and enjoy.

If you use the Spotify podcasting app, you can simply click PUBLISH to share your file publicly online and allow others to access / download it. If you do not use the Spotify podcasting app, however, you’ll need to POST it somewhere so it can be shared and downloaded. This is to a “web hosting service” which I previously addressed.

This is important: Simply putting a link to an audio recording on the Internet is NOT “podcasting.” That is just “file sharing.” To be a podcast, your audio file (or other rich media file) needs to be EMBEDDED within a “subscribable feed,” which is updated each time you publish a new episode.

For my “Moving at the Speed of Creativity Podcast” through the years, I’ve used separate MacOS software programs for this, as well as (now) a plugin for WordPress called “PodLove.” Doing this is geeky and requires a lot more technical expertise than just using Anchor / Spotify for Podcasters. I’ve also hosted by podcasts with a variety of web hosts. At some point, I figured out that I could host my actual podcast files on the Amazon S3 Cloud, and then LINK those podcasts to my website, wherever that was hosted. (I’ve changed my main web hosting company several times through the years, and it’s wonderful to NOT have to migrate multiple gigabytes of audio podcasts to a new host.)

Sharing your new podcast episode is more than just posting your audio file online. You also should “share your feed” for your podcast on multiple podcasting platforms. As an example, Shelly and I share our “Wes and Shelly Share” podcast on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, PocketCasts, and Amazon Music.

This process is called “podcast distribution.” This support article from Spotify describes the process of finding and copying your “feed address” for your Spotify-hosted podcast, and then submitting it to as many other podcast listening platforms as desired. Once you’ve submitted your podcast to these different platforms (like Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts) then those respective directories of your podcast episodes should AUTO-UPDATE each time you release a new show!

5. Amplify

The last step for podcastings is to AMPLIFY or share your podcast via email and social media. Copy the DIRECT LINK to your latest podcast episode and post that on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or other social media platforms you use. If you’ve setup separate channels / accounts for your podcast, you’ll also want to create a new POST on each one for your new podcast episode. While this step isn’t required, it definitely can help “get the word out” about your new episodes and your podcast overall.

Share links to your podcast on email newsletters! This is one way hosting guests on your podcast can be helpful, after being on your show, you can invite your guests to share the link to the recorded episode with their followers / fans on social media and via email newsletters. I am personally rather terrible maintaining email newsletters, but they remain today (in 2023) a HUGELY important way many people receive information and updates about many things, including new podcast episodes to check out.

If you don’t have an email newsletter already, consider setting one up for your podcast or for a larger project or theme. Substack is a free platform that sends email newsletters, and does NOT require a monthly fee. Jason and I use a Substack newsletter to help amplify / get out the word about the EdTech Situation Room.

Concluding Thoughts

Podcasting can be wonderful and transformative. I have learned SO many things over the years because of podcasts, and I’ve made many fantastic connections with other educators and friends through podcasts I’ve shared. I hope these tips, links and ideas are helpful to you in your own journey as a podcaster and sharer of ideas that matter! Please let me know via a comment here (or via other means) if this article was helpful to you.

Happy podcasting!

In the realm of social media, Twitter has become a hotbed of controversy for numerous reasons, primarily due to perceived mismanagement by CEO Elon Musk. However, the Herculean task of moderating a gigantic social media platform with a single set of guidelines is formidable, regardless of who is at the helm. While centralization offers an impressive level of control, it also demands a staggering degree of content moderation, particularly when millions of users are generating and sharing vast amounts of content daily.

Decentralized, or “federated,” alternatives to Twitter’s centralized model, like Mastodon and Bluesky, are gaining traction. The controversies surrounding Musk’s management of Twitter have likely boosted awareness and usage of these relatively new platforms. However, these decentralized platforms present their own challenges. While Mastodon delegates content moderation to individual server managers, it also introduces a greater level of complexity and technical requirements for users, compared to Twitter. This recently prompted Mastodon’s nonprofit parent company to begin onboarding new users on a central server, allowing them to migrate to a different server later. This approach may help Mastodon expand its user base faster, but the unique benefits and challenges of moderation in a federated or decentralized environment persist.

The social media platform Blue Sky, an alternative to Twitter, defaults new user accounts to a comparatively stringent set of content moderation choices. Users can also subscribe to “block lists” maintained by other organizations or individuals. However, the platform’s standards mandate transparency for these block lists, which may stir up drama and controversy as the platform moves out of beta and gains more users.

As an aside, I’ve been using Mastodon intermittently since 2017, and extensively over the past year. I’ve only been using Blue Sky for about a week. I prefer Mastodon due to its larger user base and its support for list-like features, similar to Twitter. Anticipating either the collapse of Twitter or my eventual decision to abandon it, I find myself sharing most of my social media links on up to seven different platforms, including Mastodon, Blue Sky, Twitter, K-12 Leaders, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. This approach feels somewhat ridiculous and may not be sustainable in the long term.

In addition to these social media dynamics, we also see the potential promises and threats posed by AI, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), under both centralized and decentralized management. Nearly every expert in AI has publicly called for government oversight, regulation, and “guard rails,” yet it seems we are content to let companies and nation states race toward an AI-dominated future. The exception to this trend is Europe, which leads us to the discussion about challenges posed by decentralized AI models.

The May 15, 2023, article in Stratechery, “Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles,” raises many of these issues and suggests a thought-provoking comparison between our emerging age of AI and the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of the printing press.

The rate of change in artificial intelligence is staggering. Thanks to a November 2022 presentation by an OpenAI leader and former graduate of our school, I learned a bit about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, which are significant AI models in their own ways.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, continues to receive the most mainstream media attention of all AI platforms as of the first half of 2023. DALL-E was also developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is a centralized AI platform, meaning that OpenAI independently makes decisions about how to train, develop, release, and share its models and codebase. Microsoft, due to its substantial investments in OpenAI, undoubtedly has a voice in those decisions, but that doesn’t change the fundamentally centralized nature of ChatGPT and its AI approach.

In contrast to the centralized AI model of ChatGPT by OpenAI, Stable Diffusion operates as a decentralized AI platform. The owner and controller Stable Diffusion openly released it in 2022 with the explicit aim of disrupting and accelerating AI development. His stated reasons were to challenge the centralized control and dominance of AI technologies by a handful of big tech companies and nation-states.

Here is the rub, as highlighted in the previously mentioned Stratechery article: AI platforms absolutely require guardrails and limitations. Videos showcasing early versions of ChatGPT, where the AI had no hesitation in answering harmful queries, are alarming. (See “OpenAI’s GPT-4 Discussion with Red Teamer Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg.”) While Stable Diffusion has arguably democratized access to AI platforms, it (and other decentralized AI models) also open a Pandora’s box of potential misuse. This includes greater volumes of disinformation and misinformation, and potentially, harmful physical impacts.

In addition to the dangers posed by malicious actors using AI tools, the emergent behaviors of AI systems are a black box that we ignore at our own peril. Sundar Pichai’s recent interview on 60 Minutes serves as an example, where he describes an AI model spontaneously learning a complete foreign language.

Drawing a parallel with the printing press and the Protestant Reformation, as highlighted in the Stratechery article, we see the disruptive influence of technology. The printing press enabled an explosion of ideas in print, much like how the decentralization of AI platforms, fueled by actors like Stable Diffusion, is opening a Pandora’s box of diverse and uncontrolled use of these technologies.

The stakes, I believe, are not just comparable to those in the age of the printing press, but are likely much higher. AI is arguably the most potent technology ever formulated by human beings. To hear commentators like Ezra Klein liken the experience of developing AI’s capabilities to “summoning the demon” is both sobering and disturbing. AI developers are unleashing technologies upon the world that they do not fully understand, and the power of these systems is potentially existential.

This is a long post, and if you get to the end, you have my compliments. I would love your thoughts and feedback. Like my weekly conversations with Jason Neiffer on our EdTech Situation Room webshow and podcast, blog posts like this (which are admittedly much more infrequent these days) provide an opportunity for me to “process out loud” some of my observations and ideas relating to new technologies. My opinions are very much under development and still forming. There are a few things I can say with confidence, however, when it comes to AI, social media, and decentralized disruptions.

We are undoubtedly living in the midst of a highly disruptive and transformative era. AI platforms and technologies are just beginning to have an impact on our lives and shared culture. We need privacy regulation in the United States and globally. The proposed bills in the European Union, aiming to limit the abilities of companies to use AI platforms for any purpose, may significantly impact the growth arc of these CENTRALIZED AI systems. The decentralized platforms, on the other hand, might be able to evade those restrictions, potentially leading to the most disruptive (and hopefully non-catastrophic) changes brought about by AI technologies in the years ahead.

There is much to process and contemplate here, indeed.

AI disclosure: I initially dictated this post on my iPhone in the iOS Notes app, then used ChatGPT 4.0 to lightly edit and polish my prose.

Before delving into specific techniques and support links for storychasing important events like this, let me first share the platforms where I posted over 100 photos today from this weekend’s family festivities, accessible to us and other family members.

1. Since we are an “iPhone family,” I created a shared iCloud photo album and invited family members to join. I’ve uploaded about 105 pictures to it. By creating this album, I not only allow other family members to access the photos and videos I share but also enable them to contribute their own, turning the album into a shared, cloud-stored repository of our weekend family media. How to use Shared Albums in Photos on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac
2. My wife and I love watching various photo albums of family events and our adventures as empty-nesters on our living room television via a Chromecast. To prepare for enjoying these weekend photos, I used the Google Photos app on my iPhone to create a new album there and added all the weekend pictures to it. I have Google Photos for iPhone set to automatically sync all my pictures in the background. By the time we get home, all these pictures will be synchronized in the cloud and available as an album we can display on our living room TV as well as our Google Nest smart home displays. Google Support: “Back up photos & videos” Ambient Mode for Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra
3. Before Apple iCloud shared albums and Google photo albums became available, I used Flickr. I started using Flickr around 2005, and I believe I have shared close to 60,000 pictures on the service. Privacy is essential, and some people may not be comfortable sharing personal photos publicly. If that’s the case for you, don’t share on Flickr. However, I have found great benefits in sharing photos with a Creative Commons license on Flickr, so I also created a Flickr album with most of our weekend pictures. Over time, I’ve discovered that family members have gone back and rediscovered (or discovered for the first time) photos of family events through my Flickr channel. So, I think it can be wonderful to share pictures there as well, which is what I did this weekend! Create and manage albums in Flickr App

It’s worth mentioning that all the photo sharing I mentioned above was initiated from my iPhone because I decided not to take my laptop on this trip. As “Storychasers,” it’s fantastic to be able to share both text and various types of rich media using a mobile device without relying on a computer. In many cases, including this blog post, I will likely go back later to further edit and enhance it using a laptop. However, it’s possible to create and share rich media using just a mobile smartphone, which I find incredibly beneficial and powerful!

To assist you in your own family event storychasing, here are direct hyperlinks to support articles and services:

1. How to use Shared Albums in Photos on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac
2. Google Support: “Back up photos & videos”
3. Ambient Mode for Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra
4. Create and manage albums in Flickr App

For more resources on storychasing and creating different types of rich media, you can visit the following three sites that I maintain:

1. Storychasers Examples
2. Show With Media: What do you want to CREATE today?
3. Playing With Media Video Library

By exploring these resources, you’ll find additional guidance and inspiration for your own storychasing endeavors.

In conclusion, documenting and sharing important family events like graduation is a meaningful way to preserve memories and create a lasting legacy. Through the use of various media tools and techniques, such as shared albums on iCloud, Google Photos, and platforms like Flickr, we can easily capture and share our experiences with loved ones. With the convenience of smartphones, we can accomplish these tasks without the need for a computer, making it accessible and powerful. So, embrace the concept of storychasing and unleash your creativity in capturing and sharing the moments that matter most.

AI Attribution: This blog post was lightly edited and enhanced with the help of ChatGPT 4.0.

"Storychasing Graduation" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

As I’m primarily dictating this post on my iPhone today, the hyperlink formatting and shared media won’t be as comprehensive as they could be. I plan to update this post’s formatting later and create a new page on the Storychasers website dedicated to live events. In the meantime, please visit the “Storychasers Examples” page for a look at post-produced digital stories.

Live vs. Asynchronous Media

While it’s simpler than ever to broadcast live from a location with strong internet connectivity, creating high-quality, long-form content in a live setting can be challenging. As a co-creator of a weekly hour-long webcast and podcast, I’ve experienced firsthand the level of planning each episode demands. The convenience of creating these episodes from our homes, aided by access to our notes in Google Docs, undoubtedly facilitates our content creation process.

However, broadcasting from a live location can also be highly valuable. This format allows for immediate sharing of experiences, utilizing the human brain’s capacity to recognize and share details right after an experience. Both post-produced media products and live events have their respective places, challenges, and limitations.

Media Production and Social Media Platforms

Media production can be complex. Simplifying it can be even more challenging. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have made this process easier by supporting live and archived streaming of events, while also notifying followers of a live broadcast.

Previously, live streaming events required setting up blogs and using tools like Ustream. Now, with platforms like Facebook notifying followers of live events directly in their news feeds, this process is much simpler. However, the choice of a specific social media platform inevitably excludes those without active accounts on that platform.

One way to circumvent this issue is by using a streaming platform capable of posting simultaneous streams on more than one platform. For our Edtech Situation Room show, we use StreamYard, which lets us simultaneously broadcast live on both YouTube and Facebook. StreamYard also allows streaming from mobile devices like an iPhone, accommodating those who refuse to use Facebook by cross-posting to YouTube.

Recommendations for Live Event Sharing: Summer 2023 Trip to Europe

1. Set up a Facebook page for your trip and invite others to follow it.

2. Plan to share a mix of both live events and edited media videos.

3. Schedule live events from different locations, work out the timezone conversions, and use an email list to notify interested parties in advance of your broadcasts.

4. Check the cellular network connectivity at your broadcast locations. At a minimum, 4G connectivity should be available, though 5G is preferable. If connectivity is poor, consider recording offline and publishing later.

5. Survey your potential audience to ascertain how many already have a Facebook account. If a large number do not, consider using a tool like StreamYard to cross-post to both YouTube and Facebook.

6. Practice creating asynchronous, edited media in advance. Simple audio interview recordings can be incredibly valuable, either shared as is or used later in post-production to create narrated slideshows or more elaborate videos.

7. Two software programs I recommend using and practicing with are Adobe Spark Video and iMovie. Adobe Spark Video allows for the quick creation of narrated slideshows with photos, offering an efficient and powerful way to create short videos. iMovie is more powerful and flexible but also slightly more complicated. Both are excellent tools for Storychasing using an iPhone or iPad.

These are just a few suggestions to help you effectively share live events during your summer 2023 trip to Europe. Remember that each platform and method has its advantages and limitations, so it’s essential to find the right balance that best serves your needs and audience.

AI usage disclosure: This blog post was polished and edited with help from ChatGPT 4.0.

"Who Tells Your Story?" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

For many years now, I’ve set my iPhone photos to auto-upload / back up to both iCloud / Apple Photos and to Google Photos. Granted, this setup requires that we pay some monthly fees for larger amounts of cloud-based storage with both Apple and Google, but it’s TOTALLY worth it IMHO. First of all, our family photos are SUPER important to us, and the thought of losing these photos due to a hack or malware / phishing attack is super-scary to me. Second of all, this provides me with amazing (and ever-improving) AI-powered search access to all our photos. Not only can I readily create photo albums of every picture we’ve ever taken with our golden retrievers, or every Christmas time picture, or all my cooking photos, I also can enjoy image collage and slideshow creations with Apple and Google developers are now “baking in” to their photo products.

Until this weekend, all our digital photo frame experiences with our family pictures have been with Google Photos. I’ve only used Apple photos a little bit. However, I didn’t bring a Chromecast with us on our weekend getaway, and I wanted to put some family photos on the living room TV this weekend we could enjoy as background ambiance. It turns out (at least in the current iteration, from what I can figure out) the iPadOS Google Photos app does NOT support dynamic slideshows at all. In contrast, the MacOS Photos app DOES support slideshow playback of albums, and these also “auto-play,” so once you get started, they just keep playing! They also auto-magically add some instrumental background music, so if you want that added ambiance, you can just turn up the TV volume.

Here are the “digital supplies” you need to do this yourself, along with the specific techniques.

1. You need a WiFi or strong cellular data connection to stream your photos and live photos from iCloud on your iOS device.
2. You’ll need your iPhone or iPad, and you’ll need to have the “auto-upload” feature turned ON (“Turn on iCloud Photos”) so tons of your past photos are available in iCloud. (You don’t want to do this on a trip, just before you want to start a photo slideshow like this, because… depending on how many photos you have… this can take a LONG time to upload / sync. Do it NOW if you have not already!)
3. To connect an iPhone or iPad directly to a HDMI television, you’ll need both an HDMI cable (get a cheaper one at WalMart or Target, or order from Amazon) as well as an Apple Lightning to HDMI video adapter. ($50 from Apple, the “Lightning Digital AV Adapter.”)
4. The TV remote control, on which you’ll need to find the SOURCE CHANGE option. After plugging in the HDMI cable to an available port on the back of the TV, you’ll select that port with the remote control after plugging in your iPhone or iPad.
5. To start the slideshow in the Apple Photos app on your iOS device, tap the icon at the bottom of the screen titled, “FOR ME.” Select a desired “memory” and then it should start to auto-play. It will just keep playing more memories, so your background digital slideshow is underway!

One of the side benefits (or drawbacks, depending on your perspective, pantry supplies and cooking talents) is that your Apple Photos slideshows may totally make you hungry for a variety of past recipes you’ve cooked and documented! For me, many of these are shared on my @CookWith Wes Instagram channel, YouTube playlist, Twitter channel and via the #CookWithWes hashtag on Mastodon.

To learn more about our Easter weekend getaway and our lessons learned as parents who are now “empty nesters,” check out the latest episode (“Episode 10: The Velveteen Rabbit”) from Shelly and my new podcast, “Wes and Shelly Share.”

Here’s an 11 minute video screencast I recorded (using Screencastify) to highlight some of these lessons. Here’s a OneTab created webpage of 11 of the 12 links I shared, which I will also include at the bottom of this post. Please let me know if you have questions about anything I discussed or shared in this video!

Links shared in the video:

1.  Lessons by Dr. Wesley Fryer @wfryer
2.  2023-04-03: Robotics, Media Literacy & Engineering by wesfryer.com/after – Google Slides
3.  Wonder Links (from my shared lessons website)
4.  The swagged-out pope is an AI fake — and an early glimpse of a new reality – The Verge
5. ChatGPT Interviews (from my shared lessons website)
6.  Transcending Political Polarization (blog post written with ChatGPT)
7.  Conspiracy Theories (from my shared lessons website)
8.  Dr. Fryer’s Sample Portfolio – GeoMap
9.  Launchpad WikiPedia (from my shared lessons website)
10.  Sketchnotes. – MidJourney and Generative AI (CA 2-8) – Google Slides
11.  Introducing InfoPics (from my shared lessons website)

I shared a presentation at the March 2023 meeting of TIP Teachers entitled, “How To Teach About Conspiracy Theories without Getting Fired.” That recorded video is available on YouTube, and my slides are available via Google.

The living room television is most likely the largest digital screen in most of our houses today. While many of us have used screensavers on our laptop and desktop computers for years, similar functionality is available for our televisions if we use media player devices like a Chromecast or AppleTV.

To take advantage of these features, if you are an iPhone / iOS user I recommend uploading all your personal photos to Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud. I recommend uploading to both services because of the need for BACKUPS. Many people today rely entirely on cloud-based backups of essential phone data, including photos. While it’s still a VERY good idea to keep LOCAL backups of essential data (including photos and videos) I recommend keeping MORE THAN ONE BACKUP, whether you just backup to the cloud and/or to a local storage device.

If you share your photos to Google Photos, the service offers powerful capabilities to create albums of photos either manually or by using Google’s facial recognition and other artificial intelligence enabled technologies. That’s the way, in the screenshot of my Google Photos albums below, I was able to create a “smart album” with over 5700 of our “family and friends,” an album of photos with our dogs over the years including over 1500 photos, and a “smart album” of photos including my mother of over 250 photos. When I needed to create a slideshow for mom’s memorial service earlier this year, the process was MUCH faster because of these Google AI image technologies. It’s an absolute JOY to use these technologies to rediscover / re-encounter old photographs of our family members, which we otherwise might not see or remember!

Check out this tutorial from Google for specific instructions on how to setup “Ambient Mode” on a Chromecast. This Google tutorial explains how to create and manage albums (including “smart albums” in Google Photos.)

I personally enjoy using Google Photos and our Chromecast more than iCloud photos and AppleTV for family living room photo viewing. These tools and technologies are frequently changing, but based on my experiences, Google’s AI-powered search capabilities in Google Photos are superior to Apple’s in iCloud photos. If you invest considerable time creating your own albums (and even “smart albums”) in the Apple Photos app on a laptop or desktop computer, you may prefer AppleTV’s screensaver options. Either way, they are great tools for enjoying family photos and even discovering older / forgotten photos via “smart albums” which search for faces or other things. (Like family pets!)

If you have a family member in the hospital or a long term care facility, like my mom was for about five months, being able to see continually rotating photos of family members can be both a welcome visual diversion and a source of joy. After a bit of research early last fall, I picked the $220 “Pix-Star 15 inch WiFi Digital Picture Frame” as a great solution for my mom’s situation. Both my sister and I could remotely add / upload new photos to the picture frame from our locations in Missouri and North Carolina, and mom’s digital picture frame in her Kansas care facility room could be immediately updated.

I configured the Pix-Star digital picture frame to automatically turn on each morning, and turn off at bedtime. I also was able to export over 1500 photos from my mom’s Apple Photos app on her iMac computer, into different albums which I uploaded to Pix-Star. To save on storage space and expedite that upload process, I used the built-in “Quick Actions” in MacOS (part of “Automator”) to bulk-edit all those photos, making them have a width of 1024 pixels. That is the maximum resolution of the 15 inch Pix-Star digital picture frame we were using, so this process maximized image quality (for the available screen) but minimized file sizes.

In the early 1990s when my mom’s mom (Grammy) lived in a retirement community in Lubbock, Texas, I helped my mom get her setup with an early-model digital picture frame. I don’t remember the name of it, but it accepted photos with a maximum size of 640 x 480 pixels, and connected to the Internet via a modem and phone line. Each night, it would “dial in” to a server and download any new photos we had uploaded for Grammy to see. That digital picture frame could show a maximum of just 20 photos at one time.

Compared to that modem-powered digital picture frame from the early 1990s, the Pix-Star digital picture frame we gave my mom last year (and my dad still has and enjoys) represents an INCREDIBLE leap forward in digital technology. While the capabilities of the digital picture frame are leaps and bounds better than the one Grammy had in her cottage at John Knox Village of Lubbock, the basic idea remains the same. Family photos can bring us JOY!

I hope the ideas and technologies I’ve shared in this post are useful to you! I encourage you to use your new knowledge and digital skills to bring family photo joy to others you know and love!

Jim’s four tips for writers are:

1. Audience FIRST: How do you serve the audience you are writing for?
2. GRAB ME: What is the most important reason you’re writing / the ONE THING you want me to remember?
3. Keep it Simple
4. Be Human
5. Just STOP! (Give others’ their time back, use as few words as humanly possible)

I feel both indicted and liberated by this message. Since I started blogging in 2003, I’ve posted 5580 times, and guest bloggers / others have posted 63 times. That’s 5,848 posts. Yikes. But it gets worse, considering things from Jim VandeHei’s perspective. Because many of these blog posts are LONG.

In my own defense, I do enjoy writing, and sometimes I enjoy writing FOR MYSELF. Jim argues against “selfish thinking” in his TEDx talk, when it comes to writing. I recognize that’s a potentially valuable and certainly valid perspective.

It can also be helpful to write to PROCESS and CLARIFY our thoughts and perspectives, however, and to allow others to experience a “hyperlinked deep-dive” into a topic and the ideas swirling around in our heads. This is a powerful aspect of interactive writing.

But writing long-form blog posts or other articles can also be intimidating for many, and it can create a psychological “high bar” for ourselves, because of the TIME requirements longer written pieces have.

So, thanks to Jim and James, I’m thinking about writing LESS, but thereby being empowered to write more frequently. I like that idea.

10 years ago, in 2013, I shared my first TEDx talk titled, “Becoming Your Family’s Digital Witness.” My opening story was about Fred McPherson of Itasca, Texas, and a priceless interview my parents had recorded back in October 2005 when they drove down to visit Fred from Manhattan, Kansas.

At the time I prepared for that TEDx talk, I shared a 90 second audio clip from that interview with Fred to Soundcloud. However, the full interview was never shared online, I had just “burned it to CD” and shared copies with family members.

When we moved from Oklahoma to North Carolina in August 2022, we had to leave a LOT of things behind, including multiple computers. Today when I looked at our “Family Oral History” webpage, I noticed that under Fred’s picture, it still said, “Link coming.” I was afraid maybe that audio file was on one of the hard drives I had to abandon in Oklahoma City, and that full-length oral history interview with Fred might be lost to history.

Thankfully, I still have an external USB hard drive with backups of many of my computer files dating back to the 2000s and 2010s. Buried deep in the “Multimedia – Other” – “Other Audio” folders, I found Fred’s interview!

When you choose to share a family oral history interview online, it’s important to consider where the file will be HOSTED and whether or not the continued availability / permanency of that media file is dependent on someone paying a monthly or annual hosting fee. In the case of the Storycorps website and audio recorded / shared with the free Storycorps app, hopefully those audio files will be shared forever. Some audio websites, like Audioboo / Audioboom (a long-time web 2.0 favorite of mine) have been discontinued, and audio not downloaded and saved / shared elsewhere has disappeared forever.

For these reasons, I’m now a big fan of posting audio interviews to YouTube, as videos which have a single “poster image.” Voice Record Pro for iOS (free) is my favorite app to use to convert an existing audio interview into a video file uploadable to YouTube.

To share Fred’s October 2005 audio interview on YouTube today, my workflow was to:

1. Upload the mp3 audio file to Auphonic.com for normalization and to reduce background noise / buzz / hum.
2. Air Drop the normalized audio file from my computer to my iPhone, opening it up in Voice Record Pro.
3. Air Drop a photo I downloaded and cropped, which I wanted to use as a “poster image” in the video version of the audio podcast
4. Added the image to the recorded audio file in Voice Record Pro, then exported as a MP4 video to the iPhone camera roll.
5. Uploaded to YouTube.
6. Link and embed the audio interview video on a new “Fred McPherson” child webpage on our Family Oral History page of our family learning blog.

In addition to finding and “digitally resurrecting” that interview with Fred, today I also:

1. Fixed a broken podcast link on my May 2008 interview with my dad, “Implications of Transfer of Wealth for Schools and Communities (Interview with Tom Fryer)“
2. Embedded the January 2016, 50 minute interview with my dad from on the “Tom Fryer” page of our family oral history / family learning blog.
3. Added four videos to the “Angie Fryer” page of our family oral history / family learning blog:
   • Mom’s 2016 interview about being an educator
   • Mom’s 2007 interview about reading MilBloggers (military bloggers)
   • My memorial service Eulogy for Mom
   • Mom’s recorded memorial service (18 Feb 2023)
4. Added the following links under “Other Oral History Stuff” on our family oral history page
   • My 2013 TEDxOU talk
   • A link to my Family Oral History” media literacy unit on my updated media literacy lessons website
   • A link to our son (Alex’s) 2015 Eagle Scout project website, in which he and other Boy Scouts conducted oral history interviews with local retirees in Oklahoma
   • A link to a short video I created at that time with Alex and some of the scouts, sharing about their experiences conducting oral history interviews (StoryCorps style)
   • The following text and links: “A number of videos created by teachers in the “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” state centennial and oral history project are available in this YouTube playlist. More information about that project is available via Storychasers.org.
   • My March 2020 webinar, “Family Oral History Projects.”

Yay Family Oral History!

As part of the NCTIES 2023 educational technology conference in Raleigh, NC, Wes Fryer attended a session titled “Drawing as a Thinking Process” by Manuel Herrera, a teacher and professional artist from St. Louis, Missouri. During the session, Manuel discussed the value of drawing and sketching as a tool for making student thinking visible and “sticky.”

One aspect of the session was the examples of sketched objects and people, which were all combinations of simple shapes.

Manuel also shared some amazing sketched people, some more technical student sketches, and even a sketch of the US Supreme Court.

Another focus of the session was the science and educational research value of sketching ideas, with articles provided by Manuel. He also shared a great student sketching lesson idea that was similar to his own lesson called “Identity Collage,” but with drawing. Wes Fryer found it particularly inspiring to hear Manuel’s focus on making student thinking visible and sticky through drawing and sketching.

To further assist educators, Manuel provided a mind map drawing example and a free educator’s guide on wakelet.com. The guide focuses on how to incorporate various strategies which encourage students to make their thinking visible through drawing. Michael regards sketchnoting, the practice of combining words and images into class notes, a subset of his focus and passion on visual thinking.

As an educator himself, Wes Fryer found himself inspired by Manuel’s session, especially with regards to his 6th-grade engineering students and their current Pinewood Derby car design and TinkerCAD 3D printing project. In summary, Manuel Herrera’s “Drawing as a Thinking Process” session at NCTIES 2023 provided valuable insights and resources for educators looking to incorporate sketching and drawing into their teaching and learning practices.