Learning is Change

eduMOOC: Online Learning Today… and Tomorrow:

“The Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois Springfield welcomes you to a Massive Open Online Class (MOOC) on “Online Learning Today…and Tomorrow.” It will begin June 27, 2011 and run for eight weeks. It is totally open, free, and collaborative. It can be totally asynchronous, or those attending can join in weekly panel discussions with experts in various aspects of the topic. This is an active and growing resource and networking center on the topic of “Online Learning Today, and Tomorrow.” You will have the opportunity to meet many people around the world who share your interest in this topic.

You are invited to register (see right column) with only your name and email address so you can be given access to all materials, panels and discussions. You can begin building your own personal learning network on the topic. We will use this information to register you in a Google Group (edumooc) which will allow you to enter into discussions and – if you so designate – to receive a listserv of postings. We will not use this information for advertising or promotion of any kind.”

Colorado Learning Network | Home: “The CoLearning Network (CLN) will provide a community for collaborative learning and work. The network will feature: • Collective work space for projects • Support for work and learning not necessarily available within members’ own school districts • A calendar of network learning events, including monthly conversations

CLN’s mission is to help transform professional learning… …from instruction to inquiry …from seat time to outcomes …from isolation to community By changing the way in which adults learn, the CoLearning Network will help change the learning we provide to our students.

The CLN will launch in September 2011. The theme for the first series of events will be Digital Citizenship. In September, CLN will offer 3 Learn/Build project groups: • Developing the Democratic Classroom • School and District Frameworks for Digital Citizens • Skills, Dispositions, and Responsibilities of the Digital Citizen”

+Pool: A Floating Pool in the River For Everyone by Family and PlayLab — Kickstarter:

“BACKGROUND (and why we think this is a good idea)

We started + Pool last June, during what seemed like one of the hottest summers of our lives.  As a New Yorker, you spend most of your time on an island surrounded by water, and when it gets as sweltering hot as it does in New York, you naturally start fantasizing about swimming in the river. But the rivers here aren’t the cleanest and swimming in them isn’t necessarily the best idea. We wanted to do something that could change that.

So we proposed a pool.  More specifically, we proposed a pool that uses and filters the very water that it floats in.  A pool that makes it possible to swim off the shores of New York. In river water. That’s clean.

During that summer we designed + Pool and launched it into the world with the main intention of building a team that could help us realize the project.  We figured it might attract attention from some engineers and experts that could help us out.

What we hadn’t anticipated was that within the first few days over 50,000 people had shown interest in the project and we were fielding calls left and right about how to make this pool a reality.  At the end of the first week, we got a call from Arup, one of the most innovative engineering firms in the world (and frankly, a firm we never thought we’d even get a chance to talk to) who basically said, “look guys, you’ve got something new here, and we want to help you make it happen.”  Arup offered to donate their resources and it was at that moment that we realized that this thing was really going to happen.

FILTRATION

The most important aspect of + Pool’s design is that it filters river water through the pool’s walls – like a giant strainer dropped into the river.

The concentric layers of filtration materials that make up the sides of the pool are designed to remove bacteria, contaminants and odors, leaving only safe and swimmable water that meets city, state and federal standards of quality.

This pool will be the first of its kind, which is of course very exciting, but really we just want to be able to swim in the river.

A POOL FOR EVERYONE

We wanted the + Pool to be enjoyed by everyone – at all times – which is why it is designed as four pools in one: Children’s Pool, Sports Pool, Lap Pool and Lounge Pool.

Each pool can be used independently to cater to all types of swimmers, combined to form an Olympic-length lap pool, or opened completely into a 9,000 square foot pool for play.”

I haven’t blogged for quite some time. Not quite as long as some of the times I have been on hiatus, but long enough to know that I haven’t actually reflected upon or written down what was going on for too many days to have it be a coincidence. I have been watching others reflect and write and create the things that I find valuable, but I seem to be finding more and more ways of procrastinating.

Here are the things that I am currently putting off doing:

1. Learning how to program for iOS
2. Editing the book I wrote last year
3. Reading the ebook I bought last month
4. Realizing that I really can’t eat whatever I want anymore
5. Cleaning the house that my children just destroyed for the sixth time during spring break.

While there are plenty more profound things going on, I think I will probably just fiddle around with one of my iDevices and wish that the app I was playing with would do what I want it to.

I’ve been toying with the idea of cutting the cord for a couple of years now, but in the last week I finally pulled the trigger.

No more DirecTV.

No Cable Box.

No high-priced DVR.

Instead, I have cobbled together a solution that I think works extremely well for our family and it is costing us exactly $0 on an ongoing basis. To be fair, there is some up front cost to this setup, but in the grand scheme of things, it is very minimal. Here are the materials I already had at my disposal before I pulled the plug:

• Wii – We use this for streaming Netflix on our TV downstairs, mostly for watching while we are working out or for when the kids want to watch something while adults converse.
• LG Blu-ray player (Model LHB953) – We received this a couple of Christmases ago and we use it to stream netflix on our primary TV. It works extremely well, but requires a very good internet connection in order to stream in HD.
• Apple TV (the original) – Something I bought after hearing that you could hack it and put Boxee on it. Up until we cut the cable, I didn’t really see how cool this device can be.

Here are the things we purchased to fill out the rest of what we needed to be completely free of a monthly service fee for Television:

• HD Homerun Dual – This is the key piece of equipment in our setup. It takes two cable feeds (just the run of the mill, unscrambled cable that cable companies want us to forget about). It then pumps both signals to any computer on your network (wireless or wired). This means that any computer can receive the two Television signals and if it has tuning and recording software on it, it can become a DVR.
• EyeTV – I didn’t want to have to purchase DVR software to make my setup work, but the open source alternatives (MythTV) did not do everything I needed them to. This software lets me set up smart recording options tied to an electronic program guide on my computer (recording two programs at once if I want). It can also automatically sync these recordings with my AppleTV so that once each recording is done it is ready to watch on my TV rather than on my computer. Oh, and you can also stream to your iPhone or iPad if you so desire, so I can do the same things as a Slingbox from this single software program.
• A 2 TB hard drive – I realized pretty quick that with the power to download and save all of my favorite television programs I was going to need some more space to do so. I was able to find one pretty cheap, so now I don’t have to worry about clogging my computer with a bunch of Little Einsteins episodes.

Other things that didn’t cost money but took me a little while to figure out:

• etv-comskip – This is an open source project that is basically a plugin for EyeTV that edits out all commercials for recordings (or at least marks them for your review so that you can delete them with a single click). This is nothing short of awesome.
• There are more cable channels available for free than you think – We are able to receive channels like The Discovery Channel, Bravo, The Disney Channel, TBS, Hallmark, Speed, The Outdoor Channel, Altitude, WGN and about 60 others (some of which you definitely won’t want to watch). I tried to see how many channels I got with a digital antenna and it was closer to 30 and none of those “premium” channels are offered. I am not entirely sure why The Disney Channel is unencrypted (meaning you don’t need a cable box to receive it), but my children are thankful for that.
• You will want to have a way to watch live TV- Just because I have an awesome set up for recording TV and exporting it to the Apple TV, doesn’t mean we are going to want to wait for that process to complete to watch. Because Cable is infinitely splittable, I was able to split the cable coming from the wall into three (two for the HD Homerun and one for the TV).
• Get Hi-Speed Cable internet – We have had DSL for the last 6 years and the fastest we could get in our area was 1.5 MB/s. This seemed okay until I started working from home or until we wanted to start streaming lots of Netflix video. Once both of those things happened, the bandwidth just wasn’t enough. For roughly the same price (cheaper for the next 6 months), we are getting 12 MB/s which quite simply screams.

So, here is what media consumption in our house looks like now:

1. If we want to watch a movie, we stream from Netflix, watch a DVD, or stream from Boxee on the Apple TV.
2. If we want to watch live TV, we watch one of the 70 free channels we get through our unscrambled cable. Now, we can watch these on the TV, on any of our Computers, or on our iPhone or iPad.
3. If we want to watch recorded TV, we open up the Apple TV and watch any one of the programs that have been recorded and synced over the last few weeks (withe 2 TB of storage, the limit for recording almost doesn’t exist). Even though the Apple TV only has 30 GB of internal storage, you can stream from my computer for any of the other video. Or, we open up our EyeTV apps on iPhone or iPad and watch any of the recordings as they stream to our fingers.

I think that the only thing we are really missing so far is HGTV and The Food Network. I have a feeling, though, that most of our favorite shows will be available on Netflix soon enough.

Here is a cost estimate for our solution:

1. HD Homerun Dual – $150
2. EyeTV – $80
3. 2 TB Hard Drive – $99
4. (Because we already had the Apple TV and the Blu Ray player, these were not a cost but they would cost another $250 if you didn’t have them and wanted them)

This means that for $329 we have a complete solution for cutting the cord that anyone in my family can use (from pretty much anywhere in the house). While this is a pretty hefty up front cost, we will be making this back in the first 6 months of this setup. While it took some technical knowhow and some time to play, this seems to work so well that I can’t imagine going back to paying “per TV” for the pleasure of having access to programming or a DVR.

I would love to hear from others who have cut the cord as well. This is going to be a big year for it and I think that a new community of interesting solutions is afoot.

Today I was given the assignment of measuring twitter influence. Here is what I did. All in all, it seemed to work well:

1. I pulled the entire TwapperKeeper archive for the username (both @ mentions and mentions without the @)
2. I went to The Archivist and looked at the analytics for the username and search term, looking for amount of retweets and mentions
3. I went to Friend or Follow and downloaded the CSV files for the friends and fans of the given username. I looked at how many followers were following my followers and what their influence was.
4. I went to Klout and looked at the individual achievements of the user and of the user’s network.
5. I went to Twitter Grader and checked out the trajectory of followers (in beautiful line graph form, no less)
6. I pulled all of the retweets of blog post announcement tweets from Disqus just for good measure.
7. I went to Twitalyzer to see what other people consider influential about the user’s stream.

After all of this, I have a huge amount of data and I know quite a little bit about how a network has knit itself together. I can see just how far the influence reaches, and what are its boundaries.

But, the real question is: If you aren’t on Twitter, does Twitter influence matter?