My Technology Addictions

Timely warning for students

Today my students received a timely warning on personal security on the internet. In class we have created Gmail accounts then gone onto create iGoogle personalised home pages. They have created del.icio.us accounts and signatures for the Gmail email accounts. One task required them to email all of their class mates and their lecturer (me) and send a link to their del.icio.us accounts. This was as way of all students getting each others contacts and del.icio.us links.

As always in these sort of classes I go over security, guarding your personal information on the internet, logging in and our procedures and student code of conduct and internet usage policies that they have all signed and agreed to at the beginning of term.

On Thursday several students and myself received an email full of swearing and sounding very upset at the rest of the students in the class from one of the other students. I spoke to this student to ask if they were having trouble with the other class mates? No and the student when shown the email knew nothing about it. On further investigation we found the student was not at TAFE on Thursday and when going through the history on the PC where the email originated we found that the browser automatically signed into his Gmail account. Now after this episode all the students in the class Sign in and Sign out of their Google accounts. Just because a browser is closed and internet connection is also closed does not mean your account is also closed especially if you have selected to ”Remember me on this computer” then someone else can come along and log into your accounts. Beware.

Sign in & ALWAYS  Sign out

Yawn 6am get up for trip from Mandurah to Perth on a Saturday and first day of my holidays was hard to take but it proved well worth the hassle. After much trepidation about attending a new event where I only would know a couple of people I walked in the doors of Central TAFE to attend the 1st BarCampPerth on Saturday. I had recently become a Twitter convert or maybe addict just days before the BarCamp so was good to get the f2f experience with these people.

I Googled most of the names that kept appearing on the Wiki as presenters and read through their blogs to find who what etc about them, what I found before I went was that they all had far more experience in web than I did. Other than when I attended the MEDC in Melbourne this would have to be the best event I have attended, cant really call it a conference as it is classed as an unconference. It was well organised and thanks must go to Myles for all the great work and of course to Jordan for the constant supply of coffee. I have never met such a relaxed group of people willing to share and listen to others, no cliques here and because of all the wonderful sponsors it was free and Bronwen handed out free PerthNorg t-shirts.

mmmmm Coffee                           TShirts

Food

Sue Waters started off with a session on MLearning and roped me in to do it with her but I just added a few side comments. As usual she did a excellent  presentation and we had lots of group discussion about the issues that we are all faced with when trying to “engage not enrage” with these new technologies and ways of teaching.

Sue                                 Sue Presenting Me with PDA

Web 2 for n00bs (which is defiantly includes me) was presented by Constance and Kate and made the mud a little clearer for me.

I have had a small introduction to Second Life when I watch the SBS series on Future Focus and was interested to hear what Kathryn Greenhill had to say about its place in education.What’s the use of Second life in Education ? It is certainly a very controversial topic as to whether education has a place in the virtual world and the debate on this is sure to continue for a while. Kathryn summed it up well with her opening statement “I am really into Second Life, and I am going to explain why but I don?t necessarily expect you to share my excitement.?

Problems with the Mobile Web was presented by Nick Cowie and he had some interesting facts about the number of these devices being sold, in the classroom situation most students will own a mobile phone but some may still not have access to a computer at home. Developing web apps for mobile devices is a virtual minefield with so many different devices and OS and mobile browsers that are available and the speed that these devices are being released to the market is mind blowing. I have also come up against these issues developing applications for PDA’s but not to the same degree, think I will stick on my side of the fence and leave web development to these guys.

Then we had lunch…. Pizza Subs, Coke, Coffee and Redbull gave us all a chance to chat and spring back into action for the afternoon sessions. Me right down the back pizza and a chat with Nick Cowie.

All ready to go again and I went off to the presentation on Running successful industry projects with Software Engineering Students. by Tiang Cheng It was interesting to hear the Uni way of handling industry projects with their students. Our TAFE diploma students also have industry projects for their major assessment in the last semester of their study. Our industry clients end up with a finished product while the Uni seems to head towards proof of concept outcomes. Uni and TAFE both have different ways of operating but they are both engaging the students with industry in “real world” projects before they have finished their study. This is an essential part of their study as it brings home to them that this is where they have been heading all these years, there is a “real world” out there and if they think we are tough as lecturers wait until they are in the workplace. It also gives many of them a boost as they realise that they are capable of completing the projects and have come a long way since they walked through the doors to start their study.

The last presentation I attended was by Ruby On Rails by Matt Didcoe and Myles Eftos. Excellent presentation that outlined the strong and week point of using ROR. Before reading the Barcamp Wiki I had heard of ROR but not taken much interest, well that has definitely changed now. I have three weeks holidays now so this is something I will be getting into. Great job guys!!!

So summing in up one sentence says it all for me “When is the Next BarCamp guys?” Well Done by all

There are lots more photos from the day on Flickr

I even got my son Harri to come along for the day.

Backs of the Geek’s Harri Me and Sue

Several years ago I discovered the Internet Archive Wayback Machine this is an archive of the internet and other digital content. It allows you to enter a web address and visit archived versions of web sites, you can also link to sites you find in the WayBack Machine so it can be a great to use with students.

With the rapid changes of websites and digital content having an archive of what has been done and where we have been is not something many of us think about. We create our web pages and then add changes as we need, these changes then overwrite the original pages so previous information is lost. The WayBack Machine allows you to view the previous content and keep it for prosperity, by creating this archive of digital content they are preserving our culture and heritage that in this digital age may otherwise be lost.

When I first found this I thought it would be a great teaching tool to use with my student who were learning about the internet and creating web pages. To be able to view websites and pages that are no longer being hosted is a great service. I soon discovered that access to this site was blocked and students could not access it on campus (and yes I did request to get it unblocked) So I ended up taking screen dumps and creating power point presentations to show the students how websites have developed and changed. How moving graphics and a lot of unnecessarily information has been coming off a lot of sites when the owners of these sites have analysed who their viewers are and how long it can take to view the site. This of course is not always the case with many big business’s still having large images and pages full of text when all you want to do is log in and check your account.

Anyway back to the Wayback Machine they were founded in 1996 and are a “non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format”. So they are” building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.” This archive currently includes includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages .

The way it works is that you can enter the web address of any website and view an archive of all their pages. There automated systems crawl the web every few months so a continual archive of the web is compiled. You can also contribute digital content to be archived. Check out their FAQ’s for more information about how it all works, and just if you were wondering how big it is it contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month.

Go have a look and just to get you started go visit my first website from 1999 & 2001., its enough to make me cringe, jumping dolphins and dancing email boxes…..How things have changed since 1999 my current website is now very plain and definatley less flashy and I think I like this better. Some would differ with me in this as my friend Sue has pointed out we should be adding more glitter and jazzing things up, I think I will leave that to her.