Planting my ideological flag

A month or so ago I unapologetically revealed my Top 3 Tech Hate List on Twitter – Facebook, Blackboard and Apple. The ranking of these companies is frequently subject to change – but all of them in one form or another, at least in my view, place corporate interests over those of the user community.

• Blackboard is designed to exert strict control over when, how and in what form people learn, with most resulting content tied to the learning management system.
• Facebook has notoriously tyrannical user administration policies; equally strict prohibitions on pulling your own content from the system; and a very liberal approach to privacy and what is done with user data.
• Apple advocates DRM; subjects iTunes apps and content to a set of criteria that complies with their corporate interests and subject matter ideologies; and pursues perceived trademark infringers with a fundamentalist zeal of self-righteousness.

I recently deleted my Facebook account; am constantly at odds with myself over my relationship with Blackboard; and have a personal moratorium on purchasing of any Apple product. For me, these ideologies are far more important than any functional benefit or opportunity these three companies could offer.

Pedagogy First

However I also firmly believe that my role at UNSW is more significant than my opinions. This is ultimately what has led me to justify assisting the faculty with use of Blackboard. I see it as my responsibility to point out alternatives and other ways of working, however if people are interested in leveraging the LMS to assist in the learning process it is my role to help support that.

Concerns about Apple

It’s Apple that has me in conflict at the moment. The emergence of the iPad has seen an explosion of interest from the educational community – both positive and negative. Many people see it as a tremendous opportunity for mobile learning and tout it as “revolutionizing,” while others, such as myself, see it as a potentially powerful idea soured by corporate interests and another example of Apple trying to control and dictate our experiences with technology – and arguably the information we have access to.

In that sense I see an inherent danger in the close relationship that my university has begun to cultivate with Apple. iPhones are being afforded more recognition as mobile phones than other providers, both in terms of available support and considerations for web site optimisation; iPods are the assumed standard for portable media players to the extent the two phrases are used synonymously; we have also become an “iTunes university,” with a large proportion of media downloads expected to go through iTunes rather than other software. This all gives me a very uneasy feeling.

Contempt prior to investigation

On a personal level I continue to have no interest in the iPad and perhaps reactionarily unfollowed anyone who proclaimed the device “game changing” on Twitter in the days following its release. How anyone can see an immediate need for something they haven’t even touched, let alone used is still beyond me.

And yet, in many ways I am guilty of contempt prior to investigation. There may be real, tangible learning opportunities in the iPad that I am overlooking because of my passionate hatred of the company. As with Blackboard, I am beginning to think I need to look past this bias in favour of an objective evaluation on behalf of the faculty.

And yet this idea is a bitter and tough pill to swallow. I fail to see how open education and diversity of information can truly flourish in an environment based on locked down, filtered systems. Surely educational solutions should be easily transferred and transferrable between systems and circumstances, rather than restricted to or dictated by technologies or companies?

Then again, how can I make an informed decision or recommendation without having experimented with all the available options – open or locked down?

What do you think?

In the end I gave up. After many days of looking and searching – first for an easy solution and then progressively more and more complex ones as the week drew on – I ultimately realised I was developing an increasingly convoluted design merely to stay with a free public blogging service.

As it turned out this issue affects both WordPress.com blogs and Blogger/Blogspot blogs – there does not seem to be a solution in place for either platform. I have a sneaking suspicion this restriction is to combat spam abuse – because really it doesn’t arise from technical constraints. Services like Diigo have shown us how incredibly easy it is to set something like this up, the point is someone has chosen not to let us.

As proof of this, once I made the decision to go with a self-hosted installation of WordPress on my ISP, I had the solution up and running in a matter of minutes.

At a very basic level, all you need is a vanilla installation of WordPress (most commonly available through CPanel on your web host’s admin area), and a plugin like Twitter Tools, which is the plugin we ended up using.

Once these two elements have been installed it’s just a matter of configuring the Twitter Tool settings within the WordPress Dashboard area (using the Experimental Digest options), and you’re up and running.

What really sucks in all this is that the average Joe or Jane Blogger are unable to implement this sort of system because the business rules of the blogging providers are getting in the way.

I should pre-empt all this by saying that I am not a programmer.  I’m good at troubleshooting technical problems based on observation, trial and error – but I’m not a programmer.  So there may have been a far easier way to resolve this problem – as well as a more technically appropriate solution – however this is what I experienced, and what I did to fix it.

Suggestions on better solutions are wholeheartedly welcome.

Background

By design, the site incorporates a large number of pages (not posts).  In this sense we’ve used WordPress as more of a content management system (CMS) than a blogging platform.  Having used Drupal in the past, I find WordPress quicker to set up and easier to maintain, and thought it might be sufficient for this particular project – especially given the fact the primary users were relatively inexperienced technical users. (I still love Drupal though, no doubt about it.)

By and large WordPress has indeed been a great solution, however due to the nature of the number of pages (over 20), using the default menu option just wouldn’t have worked.  So we instead opted to go with the Multi-level Navigation Plugin.

By and large for the last few months it’s been a fantastic plugin that’s done everything we need it to.  However all of a sudden within the last little while it stopped working, and I wasn’t sure why.

Variables and Uncertainties

The fact is I’m not sure exactly when it stopped working, which posed some major challenges in the troubleshooting of the issue, since I’m not the primary user, moderator or administrator of the site and am not sure what changes may or may not have been made recently.

I do know that the primary users are not ones to mess around with source code or WordPress Dashboard settings, run updates or install additional plugins – only add and edit content.  So while it is possible that someone changed something, I’d say it’s fairly unlikely.

That said though, I do not believe the issue resulted from a bug or fault with the plugin.  Truth be told I have no idea what’s caused the problem, only what the symptoms where and what I’ve done to fix it.

This is why I’m documenting this problem.  The root cause is unclear, and as such I didn’t find much information available on how to go about troubleshooting it. Only through sheer force of will did I manage to narrow down the search to the header.php file in the theme I’m using.

The symptoms

In short, the links in the menu were not clickable; nor could you browse down through the page hierarchy.  The first level menu items were displayed as you’d expect, but that was the extent of things.  It’s as if they were just static text.

And yet the plugin settings all checked out, and the pages all existed; plus you could load them in the browser if you knew the direct URLs.  The page links were also displayed properly in the page source.  Swapping back to the native/default WordPress menu also worked successfully.

Additionally Internet Explorer displayed the menu properly, but all other browsers on the PC didn’t.  These included Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

To confuse matters more, I attempted to reproduce the error by exporting the pages and content from the main site, importing them into a test site, installing the Multi-level Navigation Plugin and configuring the settings in the same way – I even used the same banner graphic.  However the test site worked perfectly across all browsers.

The workaround

In the end the workaround lay in the header.php file of the theme I was using (Irrigation).

During the set-up process for the plugin, in addition to activating the plugin you also have to add a single line of code to the header.php page:

<?php if (function_exists('pixopoint_menu')) {pixopoint_menu();} ?>

You then have to either remove the native theme menu code or comment it out using

<!-- [original code here] -->.

Both of which I’d done some time before.

For some reason in order to fix the problem this morning I had to precede the plugin’s code with two additional break tags – <br><br> – before the menu was clickable again.

In other words:

<br><br><?php if (function_exists('pixopoint_menu')) {pixopoint_menu();} ?>

Lo and behold, once I’d made that change the menu started working again.

Non-techie explanation

My current theory is that the banner graphic was obscuring the portion of the menu that recognised the mouse cursor and which was needed to show you the menu options, and then click on a page.  In effect, the menu didn’t know you were trying to bring up the navigation options because the banner graphic was somehow in the way (even though it didn’t look like it).

While this does resolve the issue – or at least provide a workaround – what it doesn’t do is explain why the menu stopped working in the first place…

GoAnimate.com: Animate Yourself by mikebogle

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

What is Kaltura?

For starters, Kaltura is a comprehensive framework designed and developed to support the production, editing, hosting and delivery of online video. It is also open source, with the company structure based upon an open model.

Organisationally and in terms of process and activity, Kaltura is divided into two broad spheres of activity. Kaltura.org is the community wing, which is where many of the projects see their inception, development, and ongoing evolution. As with most open source endeavours, the projects are developed by a network of programmers, only some of whom work for the business side of Kaltura.

From what I’ve seen so far Kaltura is comprised of a variety of projects, including the server-side software necessary to host and deliver the media; web-based video editors used to produce new content, incorporate transitions and post-processing and create mash-ups of existing videos; plugins that enable integration with other open source platforms such as Drupal, WordPress and MediaWiki; and other supporting, peripheral elements like uploaders that facilitate the workflow processes.

In all cases, the software is available for download free of charge, thus enabling people to construct their own video hosting solutions withtin local IT infrastructure.

Kaltura.com is the second wing of the organisation, and generally speaking constitutes the business side of things. They use the developments that emerge on the Kaltura.org side in order to establish an enterprise level service for organisations who do not wish to maintain their own installations locally. This includes User and Technical Support, Service Level Agreements, and other agreements that guarantee base levels of operation and support.

Some of the income derived from the business activities is funneled back into the community activities in the form of sponsorship of open video groups such as the Open Video Alliance.

I believe this also helps fund the 10 GB’s of hosting space allocated to users of the Kaltura plugin for WordPress.

Roll Your Own Platform

One of the aspects of Kaltura that confused me initially was the question of where the video’s are displayed and therefore viewed. I had mistakenly expected to go to the Kaltura website and have access to a vast library of video clips in the way YouTube does it. In the wake of this morning’s webinar it’s become clear to me that this is not what Kaltura was created to do – or perhaps more accurately, it was created to let you roll your own video site.

My impression now is that Kaltura aims to provide all the necessary infrastructure required to upload, produce, and deliver online video – including the players, processors/transcoders and servers – however it does not appear to include (nor is it restricted to) its own native web platform. In other words, use of Kaltura must be accompanied by a platform or website within which to embed the players and/or widgets.

As mentioned previously, plugins are available for several popular open source platforms: WordPress, MediaWiki and Drupal.

Questions and Ideas

In finally gaining an accurate grasp of what Kaltura is, I’ve begun to consider how it might be used in an educational context. As it turns out, there is another Kaltura webinar on the horizon that will address this exact topic, so I’ll undoubtedly explore this idea more at that stage.

In the meantime some of the key questions that comes to mind is whether elements of Kaltura can be integrated into existing video solutions.

In the case of UNSW, development of UNSWTV has been ongoing for nearly a year now, and there are a number of obvious points of replication – such as processing/transcoding, hosting, streaming, and playback – where similar functionality isn’t necessarily needed. However personally I see a fair amount of potential for integration of the advanced editor – and perhaps the plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Mediawiki as well.

For example, if the advanced editor was linked to UNSW TV, students could use the tool to collaborate on the production of videos for assignments, assessments, student organsations, or other visual/creative activies – with the output of the collaboration then uploaded the existing central media servers and/or pass on to subsequent publishing points, therefore harnessing the existing functionality that has been designed and developed specifically for UNSW.

Likewise with the WordPress, Drupal, and Mediawiki plugins. These plugins supports a number of other options that expand the functionality of the native platform and could conceivable be of tremendous use if they integrated into existing infrastructure. From our standpoint it would make far more sense to use Kaltura in conjunction with existing infrastructure than add duplicate elements.

So what I’m interested in exploring is how (or indeed whether) these aspects of Kaltura could be added into the existing mix. That said, the UNSW TV project managers might consider these ideas to be out of scope, or technically prohibitive; that’s just where my head went this morning.

I have just finished experimenting with Screenr and am so impressed by the quality of the service I wanted to pass along my recommendation in case anyone is interested in taking a look.

Screenr is a web-based screencast tool that enables you to quickly capture tutorials, demonstrations or other videos and have them processed and made available on the web. Having tried to use similar services in the past, I haven’t always had the best results – so going into my experiment with Screenr I was somewhat apprehensive about what to expect. However I can happily say that the service has completely blown away my lukewarm expectations and left me seriously impressed.

Not only is the service easy to set-up, easy to use, and quick to process – the quality of the output is extremely impressive. I’ve been messing around with screencasts using CamStudio for quite some time now and haven’t managed to get anywhere near the same quality – even with files that are upwards of several hundred megabytes. I’m not sure how Screenr does it behind the scenes exactly; what I do know is that it’s an incredible tool that I’ll be using far more of.

I should note that during the recording of this particular clip I hypothesised that the recordings take place via streaming through Screenr. I then continued on to wonder what affect latency might have on the quality of the recording. However having just completed the process from start to finish it’s clear to me that I was incorrect in my assumptions. Recordings appear to take place locally and are then uploaded to Screenr afterwards. This has the effect of really smooth flowing transitions that are really easy to watch.

Videos are limited to 5 minutes in length, and are processed in two formats – a web version and an HD iPhone/iPod version. Amazingly no client-side software installations are required to set things up – you’re merely prompted to allow the use of an applet.

Upon completion of the recording you are given the opportunity to distribute a link to the recording via Twitter (account creation is a snap since you can authenticate using your Twitter credentials), upload the clip to YouTube, download an awesome MP4 version of the clip, use an embed code snippet for use in 3rd party websites, as well as a link.

Truly, Screenr is an incredible piece of work, and I’m really looking forward to using it more in the near future. Awesome job ladies and gents!

The announcement indicates that this option is available as an account setting to members of their Partner Program.

Creative Licensed works will be identifiable by the standard Creative Commons logo and links to the full license, and will include download links. Google continues:

“…if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.”

Google’s post indicates that a few authors have already taken advantage of this option, including Lawrence Lessig, whose book “Code: version 2.0” is embedded below.

The download link doesn’t seem to appear in embedded instances, so to access the book or see how and where the license is displayed please see its Google Books page.

I must say, that for all the criticism that Google cops from people concerned about it holding too much of the world’s data, Google seems to have a great deal of dedication to the open community. Google images recently included the option to restrict searches by open licenses , Google Code continues to offer a workspace for collaboration on software and application development, and they continue to support the Summer of Code program.

This is not to try and discount peoples concerns or fears about one company knowing so much about it, merely to suggest that Google does a lot to try and contribute to the open source community as well.

SSO essentially lets you login to many different sites or applications without re-entering your username and password each time. From the standpoint of speed and convenience of access SSO is pretty nice, however there are issues with it that I think need to be borne in mind.

The issue that’s come to mind this afternoon is what happens when SSO goes down. If you are reliant on a central database or portal to provide you with access to many different sites, and the portal goes down, your access to each site is completely severed and you can no longer get in.

To me this is a major single point of failure that warrants a contingency. In the instance of sites that support OpenID for example you tend to have two sets of login credentials that you can use – a native account for your activities on that individual site and a second account that is recognised across many sites. If the OpenID provider goes down you’re not dead in the water, you just login with your set of local credentials.

Unfortunately most university services don’t work that way. You have a single username and password that’s recognised everywhere – but only one. Perhaps it’s time that these models are reconsidered.

YouTube is in the process of rolling out an update to their user interface in which the player takes centre stage and many other elements can be dynamically navigated without interrupting existing videos, and forcing a page refresh.  It looks pretty schmick in some respects, but I’ve notice certain elements have been seriously affected.

Case in point is locating the embed code for playlists. Via George Siemen’s blog I discovered a collection of really great interviews with a dozen educators who attended this year’s ED-MEDIA conference in Hawaii.  I’ve yet to watch them all, but of the ones I have seen they’ve all been insightful and well worth sharing.  So I tried to locate the embed code for the playlist.

Unfortunately this information is not displayed when viewing the playlist on the default page, and clicking on Playlists in the header simply restructures the clips into a series of thumbnails, again without revealing the elusive embed code snippet.  I was growing quite miffed about it until I finally discovered a workaround.

Note, NO CODE SNIPPET!

Workaround

Near as I can tell, you no longer have direct access to the unique pages for playlists from the user’s channel (though this information is available to the accountholder in the My Account area – just select a playlist and then click edit playlist info from the middle of the screen). Why on Earth YouTube has decided to do this is beyond me – but I hope they fix it.

No, it appears that what is now required is a general search.  However having tried to search for the playlist title alone, I’ve discovered you are innundated by irrelevant material.

The best way to do it seems to be to go to the Playlist search area and search for the playlist title followed by the username of the channel owner.  For example “learning with technology gregaloha.”  The search results tend to display the playlist you’re after right at the top of the list.

Clicking on the title of the playlist then loads the unique page which contains the embed code snippet right at the top.

Note WE HAVE EMBED CODE SNIPPET! Yaaaay!

User Feedback for YouTube

As a fairly loyal user of the YouTube service may I humbly offer the following feedback: Fix this nonsense! Embedding of playlists may or may not be particularly common, but one thing is clear – when you introduce an “improvement” or new feature it shouldn’t come at the expense of existing features, especially embedded media.  The current system is ridiculously complex and warrants some serious reconsideration.

The End Result

At long last after all that stuffing around, I can finally give you this:

No iPhones here, thanks.

Unlike many of my esteemed colleagues, I have no desire whatsoever to acquire an iPhone.  Despite its sleek and sexy mystique, I have far too many ideological hangups about the amount of lock-in that’s required in order to use  it – from the reliance on iTunes as the gatekeeper to any and all applications you wish to run on it, the fact you’re tied to a single machine when synchronising media, and the entire DRM ethos that has been Apple’s historical basis for the technology. Granted DRM is increasingly being recognised as a silly model that is slowly disappearing; even so it’s left a seriously bad taste in my mouth.

There may very well be ways to work around the iPhone lock-in to hack the phone and thus open it up to the light of day, but I didn’t have the time to investigate them.  More than that though, I don’t think it should be necessary.  I don’t like the idea of Apple having that much control over what I do with my phone.  This goes for my iPod Touch too, which has been rendered more or less obsolete by my new mobile.

In reality I would have preferred to purchase a mobile that runs Google’s Android software, both out of curiosity and the fact it’s an open platform.  However ultimately financial pragmatics had me settle on a Windows Mobile-based phone. Literally the upgrade cost me $1, and that was for shipping; whereas the iPhone would have cost $200.

Yes this is Windows, which isn’t exactly open either.  Yet I have a heck of a lot more control over this phone than I do my iPod Touch – and presumably an iPhone too.  After installing Microsoft Active Sync software, which is as much a driver needed in order for a machine to see the phone as it is a piece of software, I’m now able to upload whatever I like to the phone – media, images, documents, games, whatever.

Granted the spec of the handset limits what you can do with the files once they’re on the machine (you can view office documents for example but not edit them), however the fact remains that sync’ing files and media can be done through any machine that has the Active Sync software installed – you’re not tied to a single one.

Have mobile, will travel.

In the wake of this purchase, I’ve fully embraced the mobile lifestyle – and it’s been fantastic.  Moving from a 5-year old archaic phone to a relatively new model, I’ve been amazed at how much you can actually do on a mobile device these days.

Through a combination of mobile internet access, 3rd party software, and web-based applications I can now:

• Connect, send and synchronise my email, tasks, contacts, and appointments with the uni’s email exchange
• Send, receive and synchronise my Gmail messages via IMAP
• Use ShoZu to send images, video and updates to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter
• Administer my blog and create new posts
• Play a variety of games including Doom, and classics using Super NES and NES emulators
• Watch videos and listen to music
• Use Google Maps
• Browse the internet and chat via IM
• Even make ordinary phone calls and send text messages

It is in the truest sense of the word a Pocket PC.

Now for some research…

Having said all this, I’ve only owned the phone for about a week, so there is a whole lot of experimentation and field research I’ll be doing over time.  What is glaringly clear to me is that there is an enormous potential in portable devices to connect and facilitate.  However there are also challenges and obstacles for the most effective and efficient ways to harness this potential.  I’m looking forward to exploring these, and will almost certainly be chiming in with ideas, thoughts and experiences here as time goes by.

What are you thoughts and experiences with mobile technology?