Consider the information in the video above. What is the purpose behind the video? If we define the video in terms of the rhetorical situation, there’s certain analysis that is evident albeit if I then explain to you that it’s an advertisement for a paper book, how does that change your consideration for the above video?
For years I’ve worried about storage and losing files. I’ve been online continually since 1992 now and have way too many files. Everything anymore to me are zeros and ones, and a few years ago I moved to Google tools for most everything. I am a Google whore, just short of flying to a Google teacher day (missed December’s deadline). The one tool I’ve never hooked onto for Google is their photo repository, Picasa. It just never made sense to me, and by then I’d been enmeshed in Flickr for two years (please please buy Flickr from Yahoo, Google!). Everything else has been Google for me.
In 2005 my daughter, Claire, was born and I videotaped my parents meeting her at the airport for the first time. I exported that video to an external hard drive that proceeded to crash and burn. I lost the video. I lost everything. You cannot replicate that sort of thing. I needed the cloud. I recently talked to a photographer friend who suggested that Flickr is my cloud repository for photos, but I need something for all sorts of files. I checked out DropBox, but didn’t like the pay scale. I considered Mozy or something like that, but still, not what I needed.
And then today. Tonight, I saw the follow Tweet. “Google Lets Users Store More Files Online – NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/6isWSp” from Traci Gardner . I immediately clicked on it and was thrilled. The title reads “Google Lets Users Store More Files Online”. Google’s mythological GDrive that’s been floating around the ‘nets since 2006 is coming true. For free, 1g has been added to your Google account now to upload any type of file with a maximum of 250mb per file (sorry videographers). This storage, your Picasa storage, and Gmail storage will equal close to 10G for free. You want more? I know I do! It’s $0.25 a gig annually. That means for $40 a year I can back up my entire hard drive, and for me that rocks!
It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn cool. You access everything through Google Docs, which for me is just ok. I’d like to see a file structure similar to a gui in Windows or OSX, but that’s because that’s the design with which we’re all familiar. I’d like to be able to set some files (or even folders) to nonsearchable (i.e. I know they are there, but they don’t show up in my everyday file searches… like archives that I need to keep. For example, grade sheets I will never need unless a student contests something).
DropBox seems to be a biggie right now, and wouldn’t it be cool for the Google API to offer something similar between GDocs and your desktop (I can see the arguments against this right now with the cloud, netbooks, tablet PCs, mobiles, etc… why bother with files locally?) My thought here is I want to sync my new GDisk directly to external hard drives (yes, I keep THREE now as backups). Talk about redundantly important. I don’t think we need (internal) computer hard drives that match or are larger than our personal cloud storage or external hard drive backups, but why can’t the netbook/laptop/tablet act as a funnel between the cloud and external backup drives? I bet they can! (Disclaimer: I am not a coder, but I bet one can comment below and tell me if: 1) this is a pipe dream or 2) this is already being done (provide me a link!)
A few other notes I saw when researching the GDisk include a YouTube sync that includes, for example, a button “Do you like this video? Save it to your GDisk now!” Google doesn’t necessarily need to make another copy of the file, but it can give you, the user, access to that same file. The same with uploading music. If the song already exists, give us access to that file rather than wasting some of our storage space by uploading another copy of that file? One user on the Google blog even mentioned, and I paraphrase, “If I upload my whole iTunes library, then I’ll have my personal streaming music anywhere I have internet!”.
And I leave you with “I want my GDisk!” (sung in Sting’s Voice from 1981.)
After blogging last quarter for the independent reading project, some people wondered why we bother having kids blog. I enjoyed this article from last year. Check it out.
Recently my MacBook Pro has gone through a few trials and tribes including a fall from my new Timbuk2 Swig. See the Swig has a side swing out pocket and a top flap. So if I put it in top and forget the side’s open then it falls out. I have a nice heavy duty plastic case on it to keep it from bumps and bruises from every day use, but it still gets a few.
The latch broke recently and I’d been having problems with the superdrive since they installed a new one this summer. It makes this terrible screeching noise, so once the latch broke and it wouldn’t stay closed I took it in to the Apple Store. The man there said we needed to send it away and it’d be 5-7 days, but that wouldn’t work for me since I use it to teach. I decided to ship it in during Christmas while I had access to other laptops.
The day I arrived in Pittsburgh I took it to the local Apple Store after taking off the case and wiping it down. It still had the few dings I knew it had and there were one or two I didn’t know where there. The genius at the Apple Store took one look at it and looked like he was going to laugh at me. He took it in the back for a few minutes, came back out, and told me it was $1280 to fix it since I obviously “abuse” my computer. He acted like her was Child Protection Services and I just beat a child. I told him I use it daily and didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and, for the the record, the Super Drive was noisy before I dropped it.
He shrugged and told me it was still $1280 to fix. I asked him where that was in the warranty policies. He said that was an “internal figure”, so I asked him to see it in writing. He asked me to wait a minute and went into the back again. After forever (and I felt like they were calling the mall cops to remove me!) he came back out. He said it took awhile for them to find my original work order from the Chandler, AZ store who said they’d send it in; he said because they didn’t tell me about the pricing that they were going to send it in anyway. He also threateningly said that he doubted they would fix it and probably send it back still broken. I just signed the paper that said we were sending it in, thanked him, and left. I’d let the Apple people figure it out at the repair center. I just wanted a new Super Drive and new latch. That was it.
Today, the first day of the week, 8 days after I sent it in (and mind you, Christmas fell right in the middle of that repair time), they called to say it was ready. I drove over there this afternoon since I’d been without for so long. I went in and gave the lady my ID. I saw the man who’d interrogated me the week before and totally ignored him. The woman came out a few minutes later with my computer. I asked her what they’d done, and she wasn’t sure. I flipped through the paperwork and saw lots of notes that said “Damaged/Replaced” in several places, so I thanked her quickly and grabbed my machine. I wasn’t even sure if it really was my computer because it looked brand new. The dents were missing. The dings were missing. All gone. Apple Repair had replaced every piece of aluminum on the outside of the computer. All of it! It looked brand new! The top is dent free and shiny clean. The keyboard was replaced (the form said there was damage, which could’ve been cause a few letters were rubbed off, like the “A”). They also replaced the battery, which they said was going bad. Cool. They replaced the entire bottom metal part, too, which included the scratches around the CDRom slot and the part that got dented near one of the speakers. It looks like a pretty good deal to me. Take that genius!
Reading Alan Levine’s blog post entitled “What? Another Do X A Day Project?” this morning got me thinking. See, I participated in National Novel Writing Month in 2004, 2005, and 2006, and last year I spent several evenings surfing through Alan’s (and D’arcy’s) 365 Flickr challenge. I knew nothing about this challenge and thought anyone who wanted to shoot a photo a day for a year would be crazy, but as Alan wrote, “I find these challenges very rewarding, especially the ones that you convince yourself that you can’t do before you try.” It’s true.
Today, a few hours after reading that post, it got me thinking again as I discussed Into the Wild and Chris McCandless’ foolish journey into Alaska that ultimately killed him. We challenge ourselves with those journeys we’re not sure if we can finish. Sometimes we don’t, like the young person who is not up for the challenge for a full year of AP and “drops down” to onlevel (most of whom come back later and tell me, honestly, that they’d made a bad decision). Sometimes we do, like my wife who isn’t an avid book reader and less of a writer (although I LOVE when she does because she’s hilarious!), who has just finished her own National Novel Writing Month novel.
We have experiences that make us who we are. These define us. They are rites of passage. For Chris McCandless, it was his “Great Alaskan Adventure”. For Alan, it’s currently the PF Chang’s Rock ‘n Roll Marathon here in Phoenix this winter. For others, it could be getting a driver’s license, going away to college, turning 21, or a first job. For me, it could be a blog post a day for all of December. It could be finishing my own 365 day challenge which included my own face in each photo, or it could be editing 2004 novel that I’d like to share with others to get feedback from people more successful than myself, so I can be more like them because maybe I am up for the challenge of publishing. Maybe I will succeed or maybe I will fail, but I will try and I will not give up.
I was hired to shoot a Christmas family portrait session and frankly I was nervous. See, I’ve been paid before but it’s usually candid, or sports. Nothing where I set it up or anything, and the “customer” has always been faceless. This time it was a friend who wanted family photos for the holidays. She’s always loved my work (sometimes more than I do) and I really want money for a new lens, so I agreed. I shot it today, and I think it went ok (yes, I looked at the photos before writing this) but I have some things I would do differently next time and things I have learned today. Here they are in no particular order.
1. Don’t be late. I didn’t anticipate how far away I was when I left, and they were early so I was more nervous. Things were ok probably because I knew the people. If I hadn’t, I am sure the impression of being late would’ve been worse.
2. Know your location. A good photographer would be there early, know his landscape, have shots in mind, etc… The woman who hired me had in mind what she wanted to see, and I bet since I was late they may’ve walked around a bit to check things out beforehand.
3. Learn everyone’s name before you get started. There were two grandparents, four cousins, and two sets of adults. I called one young boy “Malcolm” half the time, and I still don’t know the matriarch’s name. I just called her “Grandma” all day. Had I been early, I probably would’ve had more time to formally get names.
4. You will get dirty. When shooting children outside, be prepared to get dirty. I was lying in wet mud/grass for some shots near a lake today. I was kneeling to get down at their level (don’t shoot from above children!) and my knees and hands came home dirty/muddy.
5. Politely ask parents to let you work. No matter how much the adults want to help by calling to their children while you shoot, ask them politely not to. The kids only look towards the noise and not the camera. To rectify this, you can a) get some sort of noise maker to use yourself (‘cept my camera is heavy!), b) talk to a single parent beforehand (the mother if it’s a single child) to get her to be behind you and at your level if she wants to help get the child’s attention or c) bring an assistant with you.
6. Bring an assistant. That last part brings me to #6. For the first couple of shots, I forgot my fill flash (it was on and ready, but I had the camera set so it wouldn’t go off). Had I had an assistant he or she could’ve a) got the children’s attention for me and b) held a reflector to catch the natural light so I could forego the flash all together. (I’d prefer assistants who you don’t have to pay.)
7. Shoot selectively. shooting portraits with people who are posed, you do not need to take 500 photos. I just kept shooting. I already had a great shot of grandma (nope, still don’t know her name) and the baby but I kept going. Finally she said, “did you get the shot?” Yep, 50 of ‘em.
8. Use a good zoom. If there were not children, I would’ve popped on my 50mm f1.8 EF II prime and went for it. But with children you never know what you need to do or what the child(ren) will do.
9. Time matters. Pick a better time of the day. 2:00pm is not a good time of the day. Too many harsh shadows, squinty eyes, etc… The customer’s husband’s face was blown out on some shots (with and without fill flash), and when a storm began to roll in (we were able to finish before it hit) he commented about being worried. I was just happy it diffused the sun for me.
10. Don’t be afraid to give direction, but don’t always give directions. The customer knew what she wanted, but she’s a dominant personality and was the money. I was fine with that, plus she knew I was nervous. I gave very little direction myself, but there were a few times when I should’ve/could’ve said more. At one point Grandma and Grandpa wanted to get some shots of just the boy and girl (girl must’ve been about 1) and kinda held them up above them near a tree. I am not sure what amount of editing will remove the adults’ arms and shoulders from those shots.
I think these are my top 10 rules for now, but I have not edited the photos nor have I met with the customer for a debriefing (yes, she will read this). I’d love to hear your comments about your own experiences with this.
Last year several of my tech geek friends kept talking about this PodCampAZ thing, and I said “well that’s not really for me since I don’t podcast that much” (Been trying to this year, but it’s a shot in the dark). I didn’t pay much attention, and I didn’t want to pay for another conference. I like the ones where I present and they don’t make me pay since I am presenting. Others cost too much. Of course, I did no research.
Suddenly it was November and I was home with my kid. It was a Saturday afternoon and the tweet feed exploded. Suddenly all my friends were talking about this phenomenal conference in Phoenix, and I was jealous. Why wasn’t I there? By dinner time I was itching to get out of the house, and people began to converge on Chino Bandido’s in Chandler. I told the wife to watch the kid, I was going out. I got there, checked in on Brightkite (as I do anytime I go anywhere) and waited for my few friends to show up. Suddenly my phone began to beep. Other people were checking in. People came into the restaurant in droves. They looked like me. Acted like me. I didn’t know them.
Suddenly what I thought was a small geek community in Phoenix was much much larger. I also realized that this PodCampAZ thing was for real, and I was missing it.
By Sunday morning I was at PodCampAZ, in my new, cool t-shirt and ready to rock ‘n roll. I spent a great day with all of these people, and quickly registered for PodCampAZ 2009. Next up was the call for presenters. What did I want to say? I had to say something? Why just sit there and not share? Something. Anything.
I found new ways this year to contact parents and communicate through the high school community as a teacher who is obsessed with technology, but as a parent I knew too few teachers thought like I did. Therefore, my market was both. Here’s Devon the teacher. Here’s Devon the parent. Which are you? Come find out. My proposal was accepted and I even get to present on my birthday! Woohoo! I am ok with that, since I’ve done it before in a former life.
So here are the basics for the conference, and I hope you can join us. It’s free. The only pre-req is to have fun, and if you have something to say, well then say it. I will see you there. Come say hello.
PodCampAZ is at the University of Advancing Technology on Baseline Road (just past Fry’s Electronics for all of us geeks out there). It’s next week November 14 & 15 (wow, I will be 35. Odd.) Some of the people will include YOU (yeah, you). … and New media innovators, enthusiasts, participants, and newbies who are interested the role of the internet in interactive communication. It really is two crazy cool days of learning, sharing, and people meeting. And Phoenix metro is gorgeous in November. An the coolest part is, it’s free!!! Totally free. But you could buy a t-shirt and support @podcampaz for years to come.
So here’s the skinny from my buddies around the valley who wrote the media kit for this event:
It’s that time of year again – PodCamp AZ is coming to the University of Advancing Technology November 14th and 15th! PodCampAZ is a FREE networking media unconference, dedicated to blogging, video blogging, podcasting, social networking, and all other relevant media. At the heart of the unconference is the opportunity to have a conversation at large with those innovators which have created a successful blend of relevant media and put it to work for them. Speakers will address emerging trends and best practices on everything from print and radio to mobile, interactive web, and in real life information exchange. During PodCamp sessions, attendees are free to drop in, listen and learn about what is relevant to their needs, and if they choose to, move on to other sessions. You can also become an interactive part of the experience by sharing your knowledge as a speaker or stimulating ideas and asking questions as an active attendee.
If you are an established or aspiring blogger, podcaster, video blogger, or social media advocote and want to meet hundreds of people with the same interests, head over to podcampaz.org to get more information about this exciting event. And above all else, register to attend PodCamp AZ!
Other Links and Topics
If you want to go beyond the basic information, there are several areas that we currently focused on developing. We’d love you forever if you picked one or two to highlight in your article/cast to help us spread the word.
Sponsorship – We are actively seeking sponsors for everything from rooms to metals to after-parties. Find information about sponsor levels and contact Paul Valach sponsors@podcampaz.org.
Speakers – We have an awesome speaker lineup already, and are still taking submissions, but only through Saturday. The schedule gets published Monday! If you have questions, contact Sheila Dee and Lawrence Riddick at greenroom@podcampaz.org.
PodCast AZ – Every year we have live podcasting throughout the entire session. Contact Dani Cutler and Dan and CJ Feierabend at onair@podcampaz.org to get on the airwaves.
Volunteers – We’ll need a small army of people to help on event days. We might even have some cool swag for you, like a t-shirt and other unidentified stuff. If you want to march in our army, contact Crystal O’Hara at volunteer@podcampaz.org.
Tees – We have 600 t-shirts to give to registered attendees, and over 500 people are already registered. If you want in on the goodness, get registered.
This year, there will also be a monitored Help Desk area to handle your issues as they arise.
Registration
Registration is open. Please make sure you link to the registration page. The event is free to attend, but not free to put together, so we have a pre-registration and donation option.
Graphics
For all your official PCAZ 2009 graphics desires, see our digital swag.
I’ve been teaching for a decade now, was in college for 11 years writing research, and before that spent the required amount of time in high school. I’ve probably written 4-5 dozen researched papers and have probably taught the form to at least 25 different courses. Mr. Morgan in 11th grade English class back in the early 1990s taught me how to use notecards and bib cards and also how to cite in MLA. I never officially learned how to cite in MLA and still look things up, and it wasn’t until graduate school that I had to use APA. My family and colleagues say that APA is easier, but I am use to MLA. A lot of college instructors I hear about don’t require a certain style; they just want the students to pick one and go for it. I’ve had colleagues tell me they teach APA because it’s easier or more relevant, so sometimes I wonder if I don’t teach MLA, will they see it in college? Which brings me to to question really: Does a certain citation format matter? Is there a standard anymore, or is it slowly going by the wayside? I’ve seen several different citation formats recently in different venues, and a recent district workshop instructor in response to my question about adding citations to a lesson unit required of me that included required images from the internet told me, “don’t bother with that. No one will know.” Now, the discussion of copyright is another story all together for a different post, but let’s talk about citations here.
My friend and colleague Shelley Rodrigo recently published the 2009 MLA updated The Wadsworth Guide to Research with Susan Cochran-Miller. In that book she covers the big three at length: APA, MLA, and CSE. But the strong thing they did was begin to make these styles relevant. The citations are for things like Flickr comments, YouTube videos, etc… media and resources relevant today. There’s a subsequent website, too. Moreover, her book is more about how to build citations than just how to look them up in her book.
Shelley and I present together often, and we typically use Creative Commons images we find on Flickr for our presentations. When citing this work I’ve followed Shelley’s lead with citations, but for the traditionalist this can become concerning with authors like “ferretbaby” and “billybob69696″. In terms of Web 2.0 all students are also teachers, all writers are also authors, everyone with a camera becomes the photographer, and this is really ok albeit not everyone is ready to embrace non-refereed publication of the neophyte’s work.
As I continue to attend workshops, I watch how presentation images are cited. Sometimes there’s full pages in formal MLA or APA, other times there is a hodgepodge of information that may include the URL, may include the name of the creator, and may include date information. I say “may include” because many times this information isn’t there. I’ve seen huge discrepancies from all sorts of people to colleagues who model writing styles daily in their classes to some of the top instructional technologists in my field. I was surprised recently to realize 1) many of my high school colleagues don’t even know where to begin with writing styles and 2) many of them don’t teach documentation style at all.
Some presenters I see make up their own citation style based off of real styles. If we as educators learn to understand these styles, then when something new emerges, we can work through the citation format. Shelley and I have been pulling creative commons images from Flickr for most of this year now to use for presentations, and below you will see the citation style we use.
As you can see here the syntax is different than you’d expect, but you have the creative commons denotation (CC), the uploader’s name (we call this person uploader because we can’t differentiate who has shot the photo versus who has upload privileges), how we can to find the image, the title, and the link (embedded). One thing to note here is that it’s more important in understanding the different parts of a citation to learn how to do build this rather than just arbitrarily pasting a URL under a photo they snagged from who-knows-where on the web. That personally scares me. Of course, I always hear the argument of “why bother?”, but think of it this way. If I shot that photo, spent time downloading it, spent time composing it, and spent more time editing it in CS3, then you better damn well believe I want attribution. If we fail to keep this in mind, then powerful collective concepts like creative commons fails and you can go back to using clip art or buying stock photos. None of us want that.
Presenter at state conference whose data citation included ONLY the URL.
Notice that this man has used this famous image of Barack Obama and provides a link only. He didn’t even attribute the artist. This presentation image was shot by me at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco in March 2009. Not even at this prestigious conference does some presenters both with writing style citations.
Now that MLA has released their 2009 updates, and with the recent release of the 2009 APA updated style guide and all of the controversy over the blatant errors with that guide, I have no idea where we’re headed. I do know only that as the few strive for consistency of the seas of writing, for me, the beacon of light of the holy writ of style guides is muddied by the clouds of the academy who cannot make up their minds.
This past weekend I was accepted to speak both days at the Arizona English Teacher’s Association, which occurs in central Arizona each fall. Shelley Rodrigo and I had decided we’d present on Embracing the Chaos of Web 2.0, but I also had some other ideas. Sometimes I find there are certain technologies I’ve used for so long (in Web 2.0, this is like months) that I take then for granted. I decided to discuss the use of Google Docs in collaborative peer writing and editing and creating a paperless classroom. I wasn’t sure how that would go over, albeit the people who came to see this session were wildly engaged and some were returning to entire school to implement my ideas. Pretty cool. As for the Creative Chaos presentation, at the last minute, Shelley could not attend so I asked my colleague from Scottsdale Community College, Lisa Young, to join me. She and I discussed various scenarios of how students technologies seemingly interrupt learning in the classroom, and how teachers can embrace these technologies (i.e., mobile phones, iPods, etc…) to enhance learning in the classroom.
The coolest part of the conference though was seeing PJ Haarsma, author of The Softwire Series, again. He and I have presented together a few other times, and I’ve written about my work with him HERE and HERE before. This time he brought fellow author, Frank Beddor, with him to Arizona. Frank’s primary, current work is The Looking Glass Wars. He, as I’ve written here, posited the What If Alice Liddell really did come from Wonderland and was in fact the last remain heir to the Hart throne, after her wicked Aunt Red (think Queen of Hearts) had her family slaughtered. This narrative became the The Looking Glass Wars series and the Hatter M comic series.
Jim Blasingame, board president of Kids Need to Read and ASU professor, invited several people to his home the evening of conference, including yours truly. PJ and Frank are those rare breed of author who truly cares to engage children in reading and finding innovative ways to excite children about reading. Moreover, they are just nice guys.
Recently I was speaking with a colleague at Arizona State University who was eager to buy her first Kindle. I asked why she’d not considered an iTouch. She just shrugged, and I shared some researched I’d done last summer. Simply put you could buy a Kindle and read books, and that’s cool, but if you buy an iTouch you can use the same Kindle software plus do much much more.
The Kindle’s form factor is thing and larger than the iTouch, and all it does is allow you to read, download text, and and annotate. Plus it is damn expensive and for the price, foughetaboutit! Not too mention it’s easier to break because of the fragility of the factor. For me, I enjoy several different sorts of applications for my iTouch. I use educational mobile apps, games, travel apps internet utility apps, obviously my eReaders, games and some other random things.
My daughter, Claire, spending an evening out with dad at an event, playing games on my iTouch.
I’ve installed Evernote, which my friend Alan discusses at length HERE, as well as Shmoop LINK which is a mobile study guide system for history and English. Many of the games I have installed are for my daughter, but her favorite is Word Magic which allows her to learn to spell by giving her an image and a word with letters missing. She fills it in and wins virtual medals and ribbons. She can play this for hours. My travel apps were a huge deal last summer when I toured Europe, and these include Skype (which you can use easily with a miced ear piece), translators for the languages of the countries I visited, Google Maps, language dictionaries, and currency converters. Some of the coolest internet utilities I have include, obviously, Google Apps, Google Voice (before it’s ben embargoed by who knows whom), Tweetdeck, Yelp, Twitterific, Facebook, Remember the Milk, and Tumblr. My eReaders include Sony eReader Pro, which is absolute favorite because I can bookmark a page by “dog-earing” it, Stanza, which has a powerful file converter application for the computer side, and, of course, Kindle, which I actually find myself using infrequently.
I am a self-proclaimed bibliophile and was apprehensive to begin reading books electronically, but you know what? After reading a chapter, I was hooked. I could take as many books with me anywhere in the world, read in the dark (think LCD screen), and I completely forgot it wasn’t paper in front of me. No issue. I have now read about a dozen books in three months on my iTouch and haven’t look back.
Did I mention free wireless anywhere there’s a signal in the world? It’s like a mini-computer in my pocket!
After I finished talking to my colleague about that, her response was “Looks like I have a lot more research to do before settling for a Kindle.”
January 14, 2010 
Posted in culture, online, reviews, rhetoric, student2.0, technology, video 
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