Failure to Communicate: Profile Facts

Today in my fifth grade class, I tried to help them grapple with the realities of truth and fiction on online profiles. We sat in a circle and discussed, in an open ended fashion, whether or not you should use facts that are real or facts that are fake. In the end, the class was victim to my own teaching! It turns out that they really believed me back in second grade, third grade, etc. that they are never to share their real name, their birth dates, their addresses and their sports team names. However, they somehow generalized that to believe you should never share anything real about yourself. I can't help but feel I have failed them. Part of it is that there is no clear answer. I think they got the message that people do lie on their profiles in order to make themselves look better. They also got the message that some information is unsafe to share. But I'm not sure if I didn't teach them all it's okay to lie online. Oh my goodness, what have I done? I better work on this.

Image used with permission from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalpotato/2714653723/

Notawiki: Update

I've been using Notawiki for a new partnership project for World Leadership School between Groton School, American School in Marrakech, and Welham Boys and Girls School in Dehradun, India. Our project focuses upon geometry in art and architecture between three different countries/cultures. The primary mode of sharing project outcomes will be the wiki and I was so excited at the streamlined and graphic interfact offered by notawiki.

Here are some lessons learned:
1. It gets hung up sometimes. For no clear reason, it will not load pages in the "notebook" (what they call a site) when linked together. The only solution I have come across is to close the browser entirely (not just the page--that doesn't work.) This is annoying.

2. Their integration of youtube videos is amazingly seamless. I created a screencast using Camstudio (my first time using this tool) and uploaded it to youtube. From there, I searched for it in the embedded notawiki searchbox for youtube and voila! It appeared instantly.

3. I can't figure out how to embed other Widgets. I emailed the staff, but no response yet.

4. One of the awesome features is that you don't "SAVE" the pages. They are autosaved. Here's the tricky part of that. Let's say you drop in two text boxes. One is the title of the page and one is navigation with links to other pages. If you UNTHINKINGLY position the navigation box slightly above the title box, then the autosave function will rename the page with the text in whatever box is highest on the page. This makes it MIGHTY tricky to try to link pages to one another in the "link" box because it's not obvious what the page name is. EASY Solution: Put the title box highest on the page. Note to notawiki makers: This would make a great FAQ question.

5. Next week, we'll be trying out the highly touted feature that many users can update at the same time. Please, please live up to the hype!