Category: SXSW

Useful Links: Captions, your college on Facebook, Web Education Rocks at SXSW

The Future will be Captioned at the YouTube blog explains their new auto-captioning function, which works only for English videos at this point.

I saw a presentation from the social media team at Central New Mexico Community College last week. They talked about how they interact with the college’s 25,000 students on Facebook. The rule they gave for social media interaction was 80% fun and 20% serious. They are getting good results with what they are doing. If your college is not having much luck getting into social media, take a look at the way CNM is doing things. It’s an instructive model.

sxsw interactiveWill you be at SXSW Interactive? I hope you’ll attend the Web Education Rocks: 2010 WaSP InterAct Annual Meeting. In the past, this session was billed as the WaSP annual meeting, but this year most of the things going on within WaSP relate to InterAct–both the web standards curriculum and the web standards book. You’ll find out what the new courses are that have been added to the curriculum, and more about the book that will come out soon. Hope to see you there.

How to make a specialized widget of Twitter streams

You can make widgets for your own profile, for a search string, for your favorite tweets, or for one of your Twitter lists. Start at the bottom of your Twitter web page by clicking the “Goodies” link. Select “Widget” and then choose the type of widget based on where you want to display it.

Next you pick one of the four types of widgets: profile, search, favs, or lists. You customize it with choices about the number of tweets, the colors, and other variables. You can test your settings as you customize. When you’re finally finished, you grab the code and paste it where you want it.

Here’s one I made using the search function to find tweets about SXSWi.

If you have a particular interest or list that you want to feature constant updates about in a blog sidebar, this is the perfect way to create it.

Backchannel thoughts

Women and the backchannel on This is Rachel Andrew talks about the backchannel comments directed at female presenters at the recent 200th Boagworld podcast. A couple of good ideas were proposed to deal with the issues raised.

The chatroom on the Boagworld show was essentially a backchannel, and similar issues have happened in conference backchannels in recent months, I believe this is something that needs to be addressed in two ways. Firstly, the community need to be ready to stamp on this kind of behaviour as soon as it is seen. If you are in a channel that starts to go down this line make sure you are not contributing to it, and speak up against it. Can you help to turn the general mood to something more positive? Or offer constructive criticism? I’m certainly not suggesting we shouldn’t be able to disagree with a female speaker! Quite the opposite, we should be dealing with everyone in exactly the same way, I’m not a fan of positive discrimination either.

Secondly I think there are technical solutions to some of this. If you have a live chat or backchannel, people should not be able to post anonymously, or behind nicknames that do not link back to a real person. As a thought perhaps we could have a system where everyone has to sign in with Facebook Connect? Facebook is about real names, real people. Would yesterday’s commenters have been happy for their comments to go out next to their photo, real name and the company they work for? In a conference situation the organisers usually have all those details, so a system can be created that ensured that comments only go out on a live channel that are identified to individuals. There are some people who will quite happily stand behind unpleasant comments but I would suggest they are far fewer than those who switch personalities when they can hide behind an anonymous nickname.

I think her second idea would create much more success than the first. Everyone already knows they need to behave. The chances of getting them to actually behave are greater when there’s full transparency about who is acting like a juvenile jerk.

The reference to “similar issues” in the quote above refers to a backchannel event that gave danah boyd problems. Since I’m very excited about the fact that she is one of the keynoters at the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference and am really looking forward to her talk, I’ve been wondering about how that will go. Audiences at SXSW have been known to disrupt a keynote in the past using the backchannel. In one case the backchannel ire was directed at a woman. However, men have been on the receiving end of bad mouthing from the backchannel, too.

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Rewrite your textbook

The New York Times has a story on Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally.

Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

I’ve had many a textbook that I modified for my own instructional purposes, but I didn’t do it by rewriting an author’s copyrighted material. I’ve also written a few books that I fantasize are used as textbooks, so I’m wondering how this development is being presented to authors. What control do authors have over changes?

DynamicBooks are presenting themselves inexpensive, interactive, and innovative. Right now they have about 100 of Macmillan’s books that fall into this program. (This deal fairly screams iPad to me.)

Pearson, which is the parent company of Peachpit and New Riders, was quoted in the NYT article.

“There is a flow to books, and there’s voice to them,” said Don Kilburn, chief executive of Pearson Learning Solutions, which does allow instructors to change chapter orders and insert material from other sources. Mr. Kilburn said he had not been briefed on Macmillan’s plans.

While this idea may have the potential to bring improvements to education, I want to know a whole lot more about the details before I endorse it. Right now, the details are hard to find. It could be a nightmare.

Jeffrey Zeldman, who wrote a book recommended for use it just about every web design course in the world, is leading a panel at SXSWi on “New Publishing and Web Content” next month. I don’t think they had this development in mind when the panel was suggested months ago, but I hope editable digital textbooks will be among the things discussed during the session.