Jumpcut Closing, Obviously.

I woke up this morning to this e-mail:

Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team

I can’t say that I was surprised. Although, 12 or so months ago I would have been.

I’m not sure what made me believe that all of these free services would just continue without any sense of a business model or support from their parent company. I think I had a special kind of naivete  that allowed me to believe that Web 2.0 would all just sort itself out without anyone really taking responsibility for millions dollars spent in development without any return on the money.

I don’t think that I can be so naive anymore. In fact, in the hopes that I will no longer be duped by the all flash and no substance of a new tool, I am writing down some rules that will guide my tool choice and promotion.

Strategy for Mobile Devices

Our district is starting to consider using student smart phones as a part of our overall device strategy. As we continue to think about leveraging this growing group of learning opportunities, I have gathered three ideas that I think are worth putting on the table (and not just our district table):

1. This is an amazing list of iphone/ipod touch apps that are split out by learning discipline. There is more than enough there to do a pilot in high schools and middle schools.
2. I have used Textmarks.com and Textthemob and a twitter backchannel (through texting, smart phones and the web) to great effect. Backchanneling should be a part of much of the PD and teaching practice in the future. (Putting texting into an assessment system isn’t quite ready yet, but I think it is going in that direction… it looks like you can already use sms for forums and communication via moodle: http://www.moodletxt.co.uk)
3. This video is a great example of what the future may look like in terms of mobile devices. It is youtube, so you will have to access it somewhere other than on a school network (depending on the school).
4. I also think that this blog is pretty much the coolest thing on the topic of cell phones in the classroom. Nice tools and a great focus on learning.

Let me know what other resources you are looking at in order to ensure that we can leverage these devices more in the future. And more than that, so we can actually have a strategy for how to do it.

Strategy Matters

I really appreciate all of the talk recently about how a district can use strategy as a way forward with connected learning. The conversations around losing Web 2.0 tools (or losing their “free” status) is warranted, especially with how much we have come to rely on them for our daily learning fix.

The two that I am the most interested in, at the moment, are:

Miguel’s articulate questions:

• Can we sustain this solution if it goes district-wide and everyone starts to use it?
  
• In the time it takes from start (one school) to full implementation (everyone), will our technical support staff have the opportunity+time+desire to learn how to support it?
• Will Curriculum and Instruction Dept’s choose to embrace these solutions as part of our core mission, or it will have the equivalence of a firecracker in an open palm (noise but minimal impact)? And, even if it’s clasped tightly, will these technologies help or damage the organization?
• If “minimal impact” from the initiative results, what are the resulting consequences for staff morale, perception of negative innovation quotient (i just made that up with apologies if some else did already)?

And

Bud’s wonderful podcast about how long and where we need to keep student creations:

As a language arts teacher, I rarely asked for something that wasn’t precious. What kind of schools are we providing if all our students do is throwaway busy work?

And if we are only asking kids to do meaningless stuff, then I want that documented, too, so that we can change.

Our kids deserve that. And so do our societies.

While I think that both of these posts are much better at handling this conversation. Here are my two cents:

Web 2.0 has never been about free stuff for me. Wikispaces was just a way to understand the power of wikis. Blogger was a way to understand the power of blogs. Podomatic was just a way of understanding podcasting. I didn’t think that any of those places were “district solutions”, but I needed them in order to see what was worth keeping and what wasn’t.
I moved on to a hosted wordpress solution, with podpress plugin, and a Google site. All three have backup plans, exports galore and solid business plans behind them (i.e., me and Google)
We need people to try out “the free” in order to figure out “the good”. But, I don’t think that districts can do these kinds of pilots. Individual teachers and other innovators have the flexibility and the direct contact with students to try things out, but the responsibility (and the part that is missing) is the communication with “the district” after those pilots actually happen. When a teacher figures out what “the good” is, the district needs to be able to analyze and see if it is scalable, responsible, and frugal.
Strategy should come from research… in the classroom.