Category Archives: Technology Resources

Interactive Fiction Experiment: A Rvl Story Cube

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Interactive Fiction storystarts
I saw someone in my RSS feed share a link for this beta site — Rvl — that allows you to create virtual-cube-shaped presentations, and I wondered if it might work for interactive fiction. You have to envision the project as a cube that has sides up, down and to the right when creating (although you can go left to view). It does work, somewhat, but the inability to see a master plan, or concept map, of the various slides in orbit around the virtual cube made the writing of a story quite tricky. I had to make sure the narrative folded back in on itself a number of times (and there may still be some potholes in the story as a result. Sorry.)

You can access the story directly here, too. Use your arrow keys on the keyboard to toggle around, or you can mouse-click it, too. Let me know what you think …

Peace (cubed),
Kevin

 

Bye, Bye, Busy, Annoying School Website

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A few years ago, our principal hired a web designer to work on our school’s website. What came out of that venture was one of the annoying school websites I have seen, and it has driven me crazy for years. I get what the guy was trying to do: create a site that was kid-friendly. What he created was a mess of colors and images that are a prime example of what you should NOT do when designing a site for an organization.

See what I mean:

old norris

Among the most glaring deficiencies, in my mind, is the lack of audience. He built this for the kids. He should have built it for the parents. Students almost never have reason to visit the school website, except for the summer, when they are trying to get a glimpse of what is in store for the year ahead.

No, school websites are for parents, and the old design was the worst possible message to parents. I lobbied hard over the years to our principal, who admitted the web designer came cheap. (I won’t even go into the designer’s claim that teachers could easily update new content for their pages … if you know HTML … we might agree that some knowledge of HTML is good — see Paul Oh’s piece over at The Digital Shift — but the reality is that few teachers know what HTML is, never mind what it does.)

So, I was pleased as punch this week when our school’s website got a complete overhaul and now looks more professional than ever. It’s not perfect but at least it has potential. I don’t look at it and want to shoot the screen, as I often did with the old animal-themed one. And the audience has shifted back to parents.

new norris

Now, if we can just get classroom teachers to move on beyond using Teacher Class Pages (which reflects the early 1990s in their feel) and into the 2010s …. (actually, my colleague Gail Poulin has been doing just that, teaching a group about how to use a WordPress blog for their class site.) And maybe updating news from last year is a good start, too.

🙂

Peace (in the site and in my sight),
Kevin

On the Cover of the (Fake) Rolling Stone (Website)

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Duker Rushmore on RS1

I decided to have some fun with the Hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles application, which allows you to layer in a hack on websites, by adding my band — Duke Rushmore — to the news feed page of Rolling Stone magazine (I am sure Jann Wenner won’t mind. Right?). In typical tongue and cheek, I created a series of news stories that poked fun at each of us in the band. If you knew us better, you’d get all the inside jokes. But I’d like to think the hacked Rolling Stone is still fun to read. I tried to make the writing I was doing in the form of short stories, thinking of the activity more as short story writing than information text. And let’s face it: humor writing can be difficult to pull off.

I didn’t leave myself out of the picture, either. (I’ve had my saxophone break apart on me before. Really. But I did not use Gorilla Glue. Really.)

Duke Rushmore on RS 2 Kevin

Logistically, the most difficult part of the hack was the images. While X-Ray Goggles allows you to change most images, you need to have the image hosted online with a .jpeg extension. We have plenty of photos online but none that were in a format that worked for what I wanted.  And we needed our own images on the site for the hack to work as I intended (as if we were really in the magazine). So, I ended up finding this site — Postimage — that hosts images, and allowed me to create thumbnails of the band.

One thing that is intriguing is that anyone can remix my hack, too (as long as you have the X-Ray Goggles button on your browser) and it would be cool to have my bandmates give it a try. (I actually rehacked my original hack to add more details to the stories that came to me later in the day, so this is final is the second itteration of the hack.) I’m not sure they will take me up on the offer, although they all loved what I had done with the hacked site.

Check out our hacked Rolling Stone webpage, and if you want the real news (which is not nearly as exciting), you can check out our band’s page on Facebook.

Peace (in the muse),
Kevin

 

Hackjam with WMWP

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Our Western Massachusetts Writing Project is in the midst of a year-long inquiry around digital literacies. It began back in the fall with a running theme through our Best Practices conference, and has continued with a few inquiry sessions with our WMWP leadership team. The other day, I facilitated a Hackjam session, as a way to get us talking and thinking about the hacking and remixing culture of young people and how it might connect to school-based learning.

We began with an activity away from the computer. I call it Hacking the Writers, a version of Hacking the Poster that I did at the National Writing Project meeting (thanks to Chad Sansing and Andrea Zellner). I brought in a poster that I have of cartoon characters of famous writers (the poster is very funny in itself) and handed out sticky notes and said, add your own comments to the poster. The room got sort of silent, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But soon enough, there was a lot of laughter going on and the poster got hacked.

WMWP Hackjam2

Next, we had the privilege of having Rafi Santo skype into our meeting for about 40 minutes. Rafi has done some very interesting work around “hacking literacies” and the consideration of systems, and how to think about participatory media in a meaningful way. (We all read a piece by Rafi about hacking literacies to set the stage — you can find a link to the article here). Rafi was wonderful, helping to open up some eyes around why teachers should be considering this topic. His talk moved from social justice issues (giving power to change the media message and the issue of access) to the reclaiming of the word “hacking” as a positive endeavor to a rationale for at least understanding the technology we use on a daily basis. The topics of privacy and ownership were also featured.

My hope had been that Rafi would establish a case for why we should care, and use, hacking literacy ideas in the classroom, and he did so in a meaningful way.

Next, I introduced two tools: one was the Lego Gender Remixer, which allows you to remix Lego commercials in order to uncover marketing techniques. The other was the Hackauraus XRay Goggles, which is a hacking tool that allows you to hack websites (not really — it is an overlay) and craft new messages. We went into Education Week and hacked our own messages about teaching, and you should have heard the giggling and chatting that was going on in the room. There was excitement about some easy tools that would help students and teachers understand the larger concepts.

WMWP hack

These kinds of sessions help lay the groundwork for consideration of our classroom. I don’t expect hacking to suddenly explode in their schools. But getting situated on the possibilities, and flipping the concept to a positive idea around empowerment of student voice, is a step in the right direction.

Peace (in the hack),
Kevin

 

Program or Be Programmed: Quotes from Douglas Rushkoff

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This afternoon, I am facilitating a session with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project around hacking literacies. It’s part of our year-long inquiry around digital literacies. I’ll share out some of the work (playful work) we will be involved with, and the sites we are using, tomorrow. But I created this slideshow of quotes from Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Program or Be Programmed, as a teaser for the start of the session. (The book is great, by the way, and I highly recommend it).

Peace (in the code),
Kevin

 

Encouraging Kids as Digital Makers

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I wasn’t there but Doug Belshaw shared his slideshow for a presentation he co-facilitated around supporting a new generation of digital makers. I’m fascinated by this direction, and wonder (again) how to balance this idea of technology, creation/making and school curriculum. Doug’s presentation reminded me of the resource that I had developed over at NWP’s Digital Is around a similar concept — of connecting the Maker’s Movement with the Digital Composition concept.

Peace (in the making),
Kevin
PS – I get an email newsletter from Doug that is just consistently full of interesting and wonderful resources. You might want to consider subscribing, too.

Hacking Education Week with X-Ray Goggles

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I am going to be leading a Hackathon session with the Western Mass Writing Project in a few weeks and so I wanted to try out (again) how X-Ray Goggles (from Hackasaurus) work as a browser tool to allow you to “hack” websites (basically, you are messing around with the overlay of text and images and making a copy). I was pleased to see that you can now publish your hack right through the tool itself (that will be handy for sharing).

Here is what Education Week looked like before I got busy on it:

Kevin EdWeek Hack1

Here is how it ended up when I was done:

Kevin EdWeek Hack2

So, why hack? Why teach it? Well, it has to do with a form of literacy, right? We remake media messages, deconstruct it and revamp it, and in doing so, we understand the original source even as we are making our own message. This is all about critical thinking, and engagement, and putting creativity into the hands of users — of helping to make the shift from passive consumer of media to creator/remixer of media.

What do you think?

Peace (in the hacking),
Kevin

 

Composing Interactive Fiction 2: Playing My Story

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(Note: This is part of a short series I am sharing about trying out Interactive Fiction as a writer. Yesterday, I shared out the overall experience. Today, I want to share the first story that I wrote, and well as provide some advice on how to play it. Later in the week, I will try to share out resources that I have discovered and maybe tinker with some other Interactive Fiction possibilities. – Kevin)

(Click on the image to get to the story, but I suggest you read my post first.)

I named my Interactive Fiction story What To Write With When You Are Writing because my initial idea was to create a story where the player needs to choose a writing device, and the end result would be to make fun of technology and end up with a pad of paper and pen. Things did not quite go as I had planned, though, and I ended up simplifying the idea considerable.

What you need to know to play the story (that sounds so odd, doesn’t it?):

  • You navigate by using compass directions. In this case, writing “go east” or “go west” will move in that direction.
  • If you there is an object (such as, oh I don’t know, a key, maybe?), then you need to “take key” in order to have it in your hand.
  • To open a door, write “open door.” Unless it is locked, then you need to “unlock door” before you can “open door.”
  • Once a door is unlocked, you need to give directions again on which way to go (east, west).
  • The same thing is true with a locked box. You need to “unlock box” before you can “open box.”

I think all of these hints will help you navigate my story, which ends in a cloud of ideas (you’ll see). Let me know how it goes, please, and what you think. Even in a small, simple story like this, the amount of thought and planning that I did was pretty intense. I had this whole visualization of the hallway and rooms, etc, and creating that experience for others was tricky and challenging (in a good way).

Peace (along the paths),
Kevin

 

A Collection of Avatar Creators

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Last week, we were talking about online identity and avatars, and my students are now working on creating a visual representation of themselves for our Glogster space. Here is the list of avatar creation sites that I shared with them (the Lego one was the most popular).

Peace (in who you are),
Kevin

 

 

Educator Portfolios, Student Work and Privacy Concerns

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Like many school districts out there, we are in the midst of changing the ways us teachers are evaluated by our administrators. For us, this is not a huge shift, as we began a semblance of this new model a few years back — we set goals, have discussions with our principal, await a series of quick classroom visits, self-evaluate on a rubric, and have another discussion with our administrator, who evaluates us along numerous lines. One of the main changes is how we collect and share our “evidence of practice” with our principal, as our new system requires us to construct a portfolio of our work as teachers complete with student samples.

Our principal is moving us into digital collections, so that he and we can have access to a digital file of the evidence. Ideally, it will save us paper and time, and make shared access quick for both of us. Our district is moving into Evernote, the sharing site, as a way to make this happen in a logical, coherent way. I am all for it.

Except …

I keep raising the idea of privacy. While our Evernote spaces will be private (accessible only by the teacher and the evaluating administrator), I keep wondering: will it always be private? Who owns the content once we upload it into Evernote? It is Evernote or is it us? This is not a diss to Evernote but a real concern when it comes to not just our own work but also our students’ work. While Evernote is independent now, you can be sure it is on someone’s radar: Google, Facebook, Pearson. Someone is no doubt taking notice of how Evernote is being used more and more by schools. So, I keep wondering, what happens to student work if Evernote does get bought out?

We don’t know.

And I think we should.

Or at the very least, we need to have a school district policy about how to format materials for Evernote (no names of students, no images of students, no videos of students) so that if the unknown becomes reality (if Evernote is bought out by a company whose policies are not in tune with our own), we have some safeguards in place. My principal “heard me” and made some phone calls, and has our district technology coordinator on the issue, as we try to sort this all out before the digital portfolio idea takes hold.

How does your district deal with this issue?

Peace (in the privacy),
Kevin