Yack Pack Begone! Voicethread, hello!

My inbox hosted a dastardly email this morning: Kim Cofino told me that Yack Pack has decided to go all capitalist on us and start charging for their service. Everyone has to eat, I guess. I was pretty bummed out, since a big part of one of my global collaborations projects was based upon the tool. But in the same day, I also learned from Kevin Jarrett that there's a new tool that could easily take its' place called VoiceThread. The demo is pretty exciting, but what's more exciting is that it's a lot like teaching class using a slide presentation. It integrates the sound and allows folks to comment on each page.
Imagine this: You post a slide presentation for the parents in your community about an Internet safety issue, like Facebook. You record your presentation material and parents can access it whenever they'd like. They may also post a comment or question for each slide and you can respond next time you log in. It's basically distance education. I like it. I like what it can do. I don't so much like that the world we live in requires/allows us to distance ourselves from one another. But I'll stop whining. This is GOOD NEWS.

Our First Wiki

This past week, spurred on by a post on NexGen Teachers Ning by Kristian Still, I finally got around to creating the Wiki our students will use to collaborate with our new international partners next year. It doesn't look like much...yet...but it's germinating. This weekend, I chatted with Samuel Yalew, the international relations coordinator at a school in Ethiopia. We met at 9:00am Maryland time on Memorial Day, but neither of us could connect via Skype. We confirmed via email that we were both online, but for some reason Skype showed us both as being offline. So, thinking quickly, I emailed him an invitation to my YackPack and Ta-Da! There we were, chatting as if we were old friends about how we could connect my fifth graders with his students of the same age. He's never heard of a wiki, so I look forward to showing him how powerful this tool can be for collaboration. Now, I've just got to develop some guidelines for introducing the tool to our students, and explaining how to use it safely and responsibly. Has anyone already done this?

Click me!
My mission today is asking my fourth graders (who will be in fifth grade next year) to help me design a better logo for our Wiki.

Second Life, Same as the First

The buzz about Second Life is deafening. I can't read a blog or go to a conference without hearing about how it's the next thing. I've read "Web 2.0 is dead" at least three times in the last month. Between the lines bloggers Farber and Dignan recently posted about Mitch Kapor's keynote at a recent Second Life convention. His message was essentially a warning: "The most important thing I want to say and leave you with is that with the privilege of creating a new world or new worlds, I believe, comes responsibility. And really the responsibility is to make that new world a better place." He dreams that Second Life can be a better, more inclusive and accepting world than the Real World. But, Mitch, we're all still humans living out our second life online. Idealist, you are. People are people. Existential Paine (really?) recently posted on the Tech Learning blog: You don't have to believe everything you Think. The post included a reference to a high school student's essay in her school newspaper about how Second Life separates us from one another. This girl, Carly F. has this to say:

Beyond the idea that Second Life does not exist are the consequences society will pay. If we lose human contact, we lose our social skills. If we lose honesty, we're only assuring ourselves that deceit is a natural human concept. If we forget how to accept others as their true selves, we're only promoting more prejudice and assumptions. And if we think cheating the real world to succeed in Second Life is okay, we're wrong. We can't always get what we want, we can't always be what -- even who -- we want to be. But that's life. Real life. Second Life only provides a false sense of assurance that all of our aspirations can be met. And I don't need to waste my money on an imaginary house so I can buy imaginary clothes to look good at the imaginary club in the imaginary world. Way too much imagining and way too little reality. For now, I believe the bad outweighs the good, and I won't be joining Second Life anytime soon.

Here I am, nodding my head in agreement with this high school girl. I have never been the early adopter unless it's glaringly clear how it will help me accomplish some task more efficiently or effectively. A good example is Yack Pack. I'm all over that like a cowboy on cheesy grits. It saves me money and time. I do have some perspective--I see that this is where we're going. I have read enough science fiction (eerily prescient) to know that the future holds ample virtual reality for our race. I'll be the one in the back of the pack, yelling with my megaphone about how to help children understand what it is they are winning, and losing in the Second Life experience. Until then, I'll be the hypocrite who hasn't read Harry Potter talking about what devil's work it is. Like these brainiac folks at ExposingSatanism.org. Maybe I understand that group a tiny, wee bit better because of this whole thing. That doesn't stop me from laughing at them....and definitely at myself.