Live Content in Canvas: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, more

So, after a bumpy start (Canvas rejects Twitter widgets), I finally got a good set of dynamic content pages set up in my practice Canvas course. I made it public, so this link will take you there: Growth Mindset Playground. I found a hack to make the Twitter work after all (weird, but functional), plus it's easy to do YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, Blogger, and (my personal favorite!) Inoreader.

I don't really have any interest in using Canvas for a "course," and I don't have any interest in creating content in there, but these live content pages are different. Instead of creating content inside Canvas (I far prefer other publishing platforms), I am creating and curating content in real spaces on the Internet, and that content is then automatically displayed in Canvas. I don't have to do anything: it's automatic!

So, when I use Twitter, the tweets show up in Canvas. When I add a new video to the YouTube playlist, the playlist is updated. When I add new images to the Flickr album, they show up in Canvas. When I bookmark with Diigo, it's in Canvas. New Blogger blog post? It's in Canvas. New RSS items? Inoreader will display them in Canvas, along with other social network content, including Google+ and Facebook.

Some other formats I tried did not work because Canvas rejects javascript. That is frustrating (one of the main reasons I like Blogger is that it is very javascript-friendly), but I'm still very pleased with the live content sources that do work! And, of course, I am very happy that I can make the course pages public so that everybody can see how it works and decide what might be useful for their own Canvas courses.

Why live content?

To me, live content is something extremely important to include in an online course. Using live pages, you give the students a steady stream of new content to explore. This might be content that the instructor(s) create/curate, or you can have the students also participate in creating and/or curating the content as well. It all depends on the goals you have for your course!

In future posts, I'll have more to say about these specific content sources and also about content creation and curation. For now, though, I am really happy that I was able to get all this live content up and running. Even better: I am so glad to be able to share the pages with everybody... that was never possible in D2L!

HTTPS from Blogger: D2L is happy again!

D2L and Mixed Content. Right before Fall semester started, I went through a terrible time with my D2L homepage. For years I had used my blog of Class Announcements (updated daily) as the landing page that students saw as they passed through either to the Declarations (Quizzes) or the Gradebook, and I was really happy with that. But then, starting in Fall 2015, the "no-mixed-content" rule meant that my Blogger blog would no longer display inside D2L. It was a disaster!

My Twitter Solution. So, I switched to a static homepage with link on the left and a Twitter stream on the right using my class Twitter stream. That was an okay solution, and it certainly made me more Twitter-aware since Twitter was the only dynamic content I could share with my students as they passed through the homepage of D2L. I don't use D2L for content or discussions, but it is where students record and track their grades (they do the grading, not me), which means I do get a lot of D2L traffic as a natural part of students completing and declaring their work for the class.

HTTPS for Blogger! Well, as a special Thanksgiving present from Google today, I just happened to notice that Blogger is indeed offering an HTTPS option. I don't know how I missed this announcement; apparently it happened at the end of September: HTTPS support coming to Blogspot. The way I found out about it was that I was reviving an old blog for a new purpose, and when I went to adjust the Settings, there was the HTTPS option staring right at me. Wow!!! By default it is turned off, but you can turn it on with a single click from the Settings page:

So, I turned on HTTPS for my Announcements blog, and then set up a test homepage in a D2L course for next semester. It worked! The only content that was blocked was the randomizing widget of growth mindset cats along with some other randomizing widgets I had in the sidebar just for fun. So, I removed those other widgets, made the Twitter widget longer to fill the space, and then I put the growth mindset cats up at the top of the side bar with a message to my students that they just had to click to get a version of the announcements in a separate window that would show the cats. Since a lot of my students are into the cats, that will be a good incentive for them to break out of the D2L prisonhouse and view the announcements as they should be viewed: in a tab of their own.

Blogger Homepage in D2L. So, here is what the Announcements homepage looks like in D2L; notice how there are no cats in the right-hand corner, but there is a link to pop open the Announcements blog in a new tab:

Then, if you look at the Announcements blog outside the D2L prisonhouse, you see a random cat:

THANK YOU, GOOGLE! Discovering Blogger HTTPS is like getting an early Christmas present from the Google Mind itself, and I am really happy about it! The Twitter solution I was using was okay, but it was not great, and the students who most needed to see the announcements were missing out on them because it required an extra click to get to the Announcements blog from inside D2L. Now we are back to the "nowhere to run, nowhere to hide" approach to the Announcements blog. And since the announcements are an important part of my class, I am very happy that those announcements now have a better chance of reaching the students who most need to read them.

A Blog Randomizer for my Online Courses

Well, I have been very neglectful of this blog of late... but I've been busy, I promise (see the stream for details day to day). Anyway, on my walk today I thought of something really nifty to try: a blog randomizer using iframe. I'm not really into iframe as a tag, but that's how Inoreader does the HTML clipping view of RSS streams, so I've come to appreciate how useful it can be.

So, what I did was to grab the list of addresses for my students' blogs (which I have in a spreadsheet), and then I popped them into iframe tags (that was easy), and with that I built a RotateContent.com table around those iframes... but I made sure not to open that table in my browser: THAT would have been scary, eeeeek. Instead, I just created the table in a text editor, and then converted the table to a randomizing javascript using RotateContent.com and ... it worked!!! If only every half-hour were that productive, ha ha.

The results will not look good here in a skinny blog panel, but you can see the vanilla pages I put up:

Myth-Folklore — Indian Epics — BOTH classes

And I linked to the random blog pages at the Blog Directory and also at the Myth-Folklore hub and the Indian Epics hub.

I am a big believer in the power of random for navigating lots of content, and I would say that the blogs in my classes count as a LOT of content. I'm not quite sure what I will use this for next semester, but I am sure I will use it for something! :-)

Here's a screenshot that shows how the random blog fills the screen with just a single line across the top to let people refresh and reload.

Thoughts on Content Development and Curation for the New Year!

The past couple of years have been a BIG transition for me in terms of my content/curation habits, so before 2015 is upon us, I wanted to share some thoughts about that.

Latin Days Officially Over. For about 10 years, I spent most of my content development time on Latin. That was partly because I had some projects related to fables and proverbs that were really important to me personally, but it was also because I hoped that I could persuade my school to let me develop an online Latin course. Those hopes led nowhere, unfortunately; the Classics department really has stuck to the vow made by the department chair back in 2001 that "Laura Gibbs will never teach Latin in this department again!" (after I resigned my job as a professor there); the departmental resentment has not lessened over the years, even though that department chair is long since retired. Over the course of those years, I wrote five books for Latin students and teachers: one book I did for a traditional publisher, but the other four books I self-published so that I could give them away for free.

You can read about my book-writing process here; it was very much a combination of content development and curation interwoven: Websites, Blogs, and Books. I also created a long-running blog and built up a big readership there: Bestiaria Latina. The blog is the one Latin project that I have kept up with, but I'm no longer doing any new Latn content development (just the occasional new Latin LOLCat) — instead, I recycle the thousands of proverbs and fables that I worked on in those years, reusing them there at the blog.

It was a really hard decision to give up the Latin but finally, two years ago, I did give it up. I was a bit adrift for a while, doing some work on English proverbs, but not really sure which way to go. Then, I came up with the idea of redoing my Myth-Folklore class with the UnTextbook, and that has led to a fabulous new phase of content development that should easily last as long as my Latin phase... or even longer! Plus, I learned a lot from all the Latin work that I did which has let me make really fast progress, learning from old mistakes as I start these new projects.

New Projects, New Tools. Another thing that has happened over the past decade is the explosion of new tools to help me do a better job with all my content development and curation. When I did my first Latin proverb book back in 2005, I had GoogleDocs to help me (spreadsheets rule my world!), and I had just started blogging, but I did not have the amazing digital libraries online that I do now; all my current projects are powered by online libraries like Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. Most important of all, I am now involved in some great social networks online, so that I no longer feel like I am working all alone. It's ironic: when I lived in Norman (where the University of Oklahoma is located) I actually felt far more alone and isolated than I do now, when I am living over a thousand miles away from Oklahoma in very rural North Carolina, but connected to so many inspiring and helpful colleagues online at Google+ and other social networking sites.

Re-Use and Wider Audiences. Luckily for me, it is very easy to repurpose the kinds of content I create (fables, proverbs, etc.) because the content comes in such small pieces! By re-using that content in different spaces (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.), I am able to reach more people. In addition, that process enables me to curate the content at the same time, correcting errors, adding links, and so on. Over the years, I've learned some really good tricks for keeping track of what content I've used and where I've used it. The main way I do that is with Blogger blog post labels, since Blogger has turned out to be my main content hub. Blogger is where I create new content and then, as time goes by, I update and republish that content while also sharing it again in whatever social networking spaces I am participating in. For 2015, it looks like those spaces are going to be Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. I like the fact that I can use these different spaces to reach different audiences. Google+ is where I reach my own colleagues online, while Pinterest and Twitter are good ways to reach my students, connect with my school (that's why I started using Twitter), and also encounter complete strangers — Pinterest is really a new world for me that way!

Plans for 2015. My main content development project for 2015 is the upcoming Indian Epics UnTextbook, which will occupy the summer. By having decided on my summer project already, I can get my students this spring to help me find the right materials to focus on. So, I am busily seeking out new India-related books for the students to browse and comment on (growing list of books here), and I am also starting to post some Indian stories at a new blog: Ocean of Stories. Plus, just for fun, I am also doing a Doctor Who project: Doctor Who Quotes.

In terms of content re-use for the coming year, I will be republishing one of my LatinLOLCats every day at the Proverb Laboratory blog. I'm also trying to make better use of the images at my Indian Epics Resources blog by republishing those images and sharing them via both Pinterest and the Twitter stream for Indian Epics. Another re-use project is revisiting the free Kindle books that I originally collected to use in my Class Announcements two years ago; now I'm updating those Kindle book listings with additional bibliographical information based on the availability of the books at digital libraries like Internet Archive and Hathi Trust. These public domain online books are the engine that will be driving all my content development in future years, so I'm excited about revisiting these free Kindle books as a way to refocus and then expand my digital bibliography efforts.

The Evils of the LMS. As you can see, I have not even mentioned the LMS that I am supposed to be using for sharing content with my students (we use D2L BS at my school). From my perspective, the LMS is the worst possible content repository that I can think of: to put content in D2L would be like nailing it inside a coffin and then burying that coffin deep in the digital ground. Ugh. Sadly, as long as my school keeps promoting the LMS while failing to promote other kinds of tools for content development, sharing, and re-use, we are — in my opinion anyway — failing in our mission as a PUBLIC university.

So, I'm expecting great things for my own content efforts in 2015, but will we see any change at my school in terms of faculty and students breaking out of the LMS and taking advantage of the open Internet for connecting and sharing...? Sadly, I doubt it. But Jim Groom is coming to give a keynote address at the University of Oklahoma's January Academic Tech conference — and that's something I wish I were in Norman to see! If anybody can shake things up, it would be Jim Groom... so maybe he will manage to shake loose some of the cobwebs and help us break out of the darkness into the light. What a great 2015 that would be!

I'll include here the video of my favorite session from Connected Courses which features Jim Groom, along with other folks who have great ideas and energy to share about using the web as our shared educational space: Connecting to the IndieWeb Movement.

Happy reading and watching in the New Year, everybody! :-)

Doctor Who Quotes: Co-Learning and Co-Blogging

One of my fun projects for the holidays is a Doctor Who quotes project, which you can see here at this brand-new blog: Doctor Who Quotes. I'm reading through the scripts of Doctor Who episodes and pulling out lists of quotes, and then turning some especially nice quotes into graphics using Quozio and similar tools (details). Here's an example of one of the quote graphics I've made so far:

More info: Fear is like a companion.

So, as I was working away on this over the weekend, I realized that it could be a perfect project to fold in with the Tech Tips for my class. As I explain here — Tech Tips — I encourage students in my classes to learn how to use different web-based tools, especially meme makers and other content generators. That means I can share with the students the quotemaker tools I am using for this Doctor Who project, and they can look at my Doctor Who quotes to see just which quotemaker tools they might like best.  In addition, they can see me using a blog for an online project, much like what they will be doing in class. Co-learning... and co-blogging!

And, of course, it's a way for me to share my own interests and eccentricities with the class in a fun way. There are always a few Doctor Who fans in the class to start with, and I'm guessing pretty much all the students have heard of Doctor Who. With the shows being so readily available at Netflix, I might even be able to tempt some students into the Whoverse.

Meanwhile, between now and the start of school, I'll focus on the different quotemaker tools so that I can get those lined up for the students to look at and choose from as Tech Tip options. If anybody reading this has some favorite quotemaker tools to suggest, let me know! There are so many of them out there, each with its own pluses and minuses. I don't really even have a favorite yet, although I am a long-time fan of Automotivator, a "motivational poster" style of quotemaker. Here's a Doctor Who quote made with the Automotivator ... and cue TARDIS sound effects in the background for this one! :-)

More info: The most beautiful sound in the world.

Students as Co-Creators of the Next UnTextbook!

So, things are really rolling along already with the Indian Epics UnTextbook... what a great 48 hours this has been! I wanted to post an update here because the latest development is something inspired by Connected Courses AND powered by blog technology, so I thought that would make a good #ccourses post.

Here's the latest: as I started to set up the Indian Epics Online Book Library in my Indian Epics Resources blog (more about that blog), I realized that I could involve the students as my co-creators right from the very start! When I did the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook, I did not have enough lead time to do that (I got the idea in April and created the UnTextbook over the summer). This time, I have all of spring semester to select the materials for the UnTextbook, which means the students can be part of that process — and since I use Indian materials in my Myth-Folklore class, that means I can involve the students in both classes, which will in turn create more bridges between the two classes also. The students already interact with each other through their blogs and projects, so this will be yet another way to build more back-and-forth between the two classes!

Here's the basic idea: in a happy frenzy of biblio-sleuthing, I have already found over 100 full-text books that could contribute to the Indian Epics UnTextbook, in addition to the dozen Indian books I already use in the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook. You can see that list of books here: Indian Online Books. These are all full-text, public domain books available from online providers like Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg; there are even 22 books that are available as free audiobooks from LibriVox, and 23 books that are available as free Kindle ebooks. I'm using Diigo to track things right now, as you can see.

Some of the books are extremely long and difficult for a non-specialist to work with, so I will be the one responsible for sorting through those materials and extracting the materials that can be useful in the UnTextbook. The literal translations of the Puranas, for example, are something that would be kind of mind-boggling for the students... but I can seek out the good materials there and write the notes that will make those stories work.

There are plenty of books on the list, though, which are written for a general audience, and those are the ones I need the students' help with: it will be very useful to hear from them which of these books most grab their attention! So, as I wrote up the individual blog posts for each book, I will include an overview and some specific feedback questions for the students, making it possible for them to spend some manageable amount of time (maybe 15 minutes or so), doing a check on the book to see what they think; it will be a perfect extra-credit type of assignment to use in both my classes for those students who enjoy the reading part of the class and want to learn more. Here's an example of a book blog post that would pertain to students both in Myth-Folklore and in Indian Epics:  Indian Idylls of the Mahabharata by Edwin Arnold.

As you can see there, I am asking them to respond by commenting at the blog with their thoughts about the book, giving them some specific items in the book to focus on. By having this happen in the open at a blog, students will get to see each other's comments, which will increase the value of the reviews. In addition, because these are blog comments, I can subscribe to the blog feed for the comments and use Inoreader to syndicate those comments all together so that students can see what other students are commenting on overall and perhaps make their reading choices based on what they see in the comments stream.

Being able to involve the students in the project like this from the very start will make for a much better UnTextbook. I am very good at finding the online books that could be included, but of course the students are the ones who are experts at deciding which books would be the most successful. Since I am already familiar with Indian literature, that means I am very much swayed by my own personal obsessions (and yes, I have some serious obsessions when it comes to Indian literature, ha ha). As a result, I am in some ways not the right person at all to be choosing what goes in the UnTextbook: the students should be the ones doing that! I can share my enthusiasms with them... but that doesn't mean they will enthuse in the same way.

So, extra credit is an important part of how my classes work (that's the most important safety net for helping students keep up with the course given their hectic schedules), and what an awesome form of extra credit this will be! It will both deepen and broaden their reading experience in the class, it will help them to connect with one another at a new blog space, AND it will give them a forward-looking sense of helping to make this a better class for future students!

YES!!!

So, I am very happy with how the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook happened last summer... but having the students' help with this project right from the very start, the Indian Epics UnTextbook is going to be even better!

If you are interested in following this project, I'll be posting about my progress over at the Anatomy of an Online Course blog, with the label Indian Epics UnTextbook.  And hey, you can even subscribe to just that RSS feed, thanks to the magic of labels and RSS: Indian Epics UnTextbook RSS.

So many things to love here: I love Indian literature! I love the public domain! I love RSS! And I love getting to share all of this with the students so that we can keep on learning more together!

HAPPY.

Drona trains the young warriors, from the

illustrated Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists

Reasons Why I Blog

So, I think I have become a fan of the "10 Reasons Why..." genre of blog posts! I like lists in general, and I like it when other people write these kinds of posts, but it hasn't really been my style... before now. Writing the Top Ten Reasons Why I Love Teaching Online post at Medium was a really good experience for me, helping me to think and prioritize, so now I feel inspired to try this "Top Ten" approach for other aspects of teaching and working and learning. Today I will tackle an easy one: The Top Ten Reasons Why I Blog.

As you can see, some of the reasons I have for blogging are purely personal, such that I would blog even if I had no readers at all, while some of the other reasons are reader-oriented. So, if you are reading this, I thank you for taking the time to do that! And if you are reading this blog and don't have a blog of your own: give it a try! (See especially reason #7 below: it's easy!)

The Top Ten Reasons Why I Blog

1. I blog because I am inspired by other people's blogs. I probably wouldn't have started blogging without the inspiration I found from others. There are some blogs I have been reading with great interest for years and years now, like Alan Levine's CogDogBlog, Lisa Lane's Teaching and History blog, or the great group blog that is eLiterate. I'm also discovering wonderful new blogs all the time, and meeting new bloggers has been one of the best things about Connected Courses for me, which is why I am tagging this post with #ccourses. Take a look at the Connected Courses blog and Twitter stream, and you'll see what I mean!

2. I blog because it helps me think. This blog post is a good example! By blogging, I take some time to slow down, collect my thoughts, organize them, and attempt to reach some conclusions, at least for the time being.

The mind is nourished by learning and thinking.

3. I blog to remember things. My many (MANY) blogs are the best archive I have of my past work. Sometimes I need to look something up from just a week or two ago (my new series of news round-up posts has been great for that), and other times I am looking for things I worked on months or even years ago. Relying on my own memory is just not going to work, but blogs are something I can rely on!

Read books; what you read, remember.

4. I blog because I want to share the things I love. I am a person with a lot of curiosity and a lot of passion for the things I study. As I result I am finding things all the time that I want to share with others: books, images, online resources. Blogging is a great way to share things with others — and good things want/need to be shared!

When knowledge is hidden away, it rots;

when it is shared publicly, it grows.

5. I blog in order to help others learn new things. I blog for my students (as in the daily announcements, for example), and I also blog to help total strangers as they learn new things, like at my Bestiaria Latina blog. I miss teaching Latin in the classroom, yes, but the many years of blogging at the Bestiaria, with its hundreds of regular readers, has helped me make an even bigger impact than I could have made in the confines of a classroom.

Books (and blogs!) are silent teachers.

6. I blog because blogging is easy. Even after all these years of blogging, I am still AMAZED at the way blogging software combines ease of use along with real power. I can use blogs for totally casual, ad hoc purposes (like this blog), but I can also use blogs for some serious content development, like at my UnTextbook blog site for example, or at the blogs I have created in support of my book projects, like Mille Fabulae et Una.

That was easy.

7. I blog because I can re-use old posts. Being able to re-use content is something that is very important to me, and blog posts naturally lend themselves to re-use. You can link to them (linking is one of the most powerful forms of re-use!), and you can also recycle them. For example, my Proverb Laboratory blog is powered by recycling. I add new content when I can (usually during the summer), but I keep the blog going strong by recycling one of my old posts each day: Waste not, want not.

8. I blog because it helps me become a better writer. True confession: I never even thought of myself as a writer before I started blogging. I didn't even like to write! But blogging has changed all that for me; because I am writing all the time now, I've grown to feel more confident as a writer and also to enjoy the writing process.

A zeal for writing grows by writing.

9. I blog because I work at a PUBLIC university. The motto of my university is: Civi et Rei Publicae, "For the citizen and for the republic" (i.e. for "the public thing," which is where we get the word "republic" in English). As someone who works at a public university, I feel it is my obligation to contribute to public knowledge, doing my work in the open. Blogging is the best way for me to do that. I feel exactly like the seed sower whom you can see here in the university's seal: to blog is to sow the seeds, hoping for a later harvest.

10. I blog because blogging is fun. In all honesty, I probably should have listed this as the #1 reason because I cannot imagine doing all this blogging if it were not fun. Now, that is largely because I find the things listed above fun: I think it is fun to learn new things, it is fun to share things with others, etc. Having fun is a big part of why blogging works so well for me, and if I had more time, I would blog even more — because I enjoy it! :-)

The wise man is full of joy.

Cast Your Bread Upon the Wars: A story of connections

In my Connected Courses "nugget" post this weekend, I sang the praises of Weinberger's "small pieces, loosely joined" model of web publishing, and just yesterday a WONDERFUL thing happened to me which illustrates how connections can and do happen online that would never happen in a traditional publishing model, for all kinds of reasons. So, here's the story:

I got an email from a Latin teacher, Justin Slocum Bailey, who has added a section to his beautiful website, Indwelling Language, which contains his audio recordings of Aesop's fables taken from a book I published online a few years ago, Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop's Fables in Latin. Justin is such a great performer and he offers the fables in both classical pronunciation AND ecclesiastical pronunciation! How cool is that? I would say that is very cool indeed! He doesn't just tell people that yes, there are in fact many ways to pronounce Latin (sadly, a subject much disputed amongst Latin teachers)... he shows them! Even if you don't know Latin, you can appreciate what a great reader Justin is by taking a listen: Indwelling Language Audio.

So, thanks to this great new audio event, I was able to add a new section to my Latin blog, Bestiaria Latina, where I can feature one of Justin's audio fables, with a link back to the text of the fable in the book that I published:

That blog is something I have had online for many years... my school may refuse to let me teach Latin online (that's another story), but they cannot stop me from sharing my love of Latin with the world via the Web. When I started the blog back in 2005, it had no readers at all, like any new blog, and I remember getting so excited when I reached 100 readers! Now there are over 2000 people subscribed to the email option alone, and I get a couple of hundred visitors per day to each post. In a Latin class at my school, I could have reached maybe 20-30 people each day... but I do better than that every single day with my blog.

It's through the blog that I got to connect with Justin and so many other wonderful Latin teachers and students, along with the hundreds of people I will never know directly... but with whom I am connected nevertheless through our love of Latin fables and proverbs, a love that intersects at the blog.

As for the book, oh, the book is a weird one, one that no traditional publisher would ever touch, but I am so proud of it: it is the single biggest collection of Aesop's fables in Latin (well, probably in any language!) — 1001 Latin fables, without duplicates, drawn from an enormous array of Latin sources (classical, medieval, and Renaissance along with even more modern sources like my beloved François-Joseph Desbillons), sources that I was able to discover thanks to Google Books and other digital libraries online.

What's more, I did something no academic publisher would ever have allowed: I re-crafted the fables to make them useful to Latin students, turning the poetry into prose and shortening the fables so that none of them is longer than 120 words (see p. 426 of the book for a detailed discussion of my editorial process). You can find out more about the book here at this massive blog which contains all 1001 fables as linkable blog posts (very useful for Justin's purposes): Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop's Fables in Latin. There's also a free PDF download of the book itself.

So, I published this book in 2010. My hope was that it would, at last, convince my school to let me develop an online Latin course... but that hope failed. After ten years of asking permission to create an online Latin course, I have stopped asking and yes, I've given up all hope of ever teaching Latin at my school again. But that doesn't mean I have given up hoping for other good things; in fact, one of my personal mottoes is: Spes ultima dea (Hope is the last goddess). And as soon as Justin let me know about the audio yesterday, I immediately thought of the Biblical proverb that Howard Rheingold had quoted in one of the Connected Courses webinars early on: "Cast your bread upon the waters: for you shall find it after many days." (Mitte panem tuum super transeuntes aquas, quia post tempora multa invenies illum.) So, indeed, after four years, here I find the fables again... this time in lovely audio form!

Since the first fable in the book happens to express something of my own life philosophy, I'll close with the words of the fable itself, in both Latin and in English (bibliography and other notes at the blog):

1. Leo et Canis. Occurrit canis leoni et iocatur, “Quid tu, miser, exhaustus inedia, percurris silvas et devia? Me specta pinguem ac nitidum, atque haec non labore consequor, sed otio.” Tum leo, “Habes tu quidem tuas epulas, sed habes stolide etiam vincula. Tu servus esto, qui servire potes; equidem sum liber, nec servire volo.”

1. The Lion and the Dog. A dog runs into a lion and teases him, "Wretched creature, worn out with lack of food, why do you run through the woods and lonely places? Look at me, fat and shiny. What's more, I obtain these things not by work, but at my leisure." The lion replies, "You do indeed have your feasts, but you also stupidly wear a chain. Go ahead and be a slave, you who are able to do that; as for me, I am free, and I will not be a slave."

I think the moral of that fable speaks for itself. And, even better, it resonates with Simon's lion post from a week or so ago. Looking for more lions? Go visit Simon here: Zootopia.

And let us now sing the praises of all small things, loosely joined! :-)

Connecting with Inoreader: Blogger integration!

Whoa... this is pretty fascinating: there's a Blogger integration feature at Inoreader, and when I click it, it pulls the complete HTML of the item (in this case, a lovely Twitter post from Jackie Gerstein) into the post. So... that means I can send things over to my Digital Tools blog this way. It doesn't look like I can add labels (?), but it has the full editor here.

OHHHHHHH: I am foreseeing some pretty profound uses here if I repost work from my students for sharing and discussion via a kind of central blog hub that I maintain. Because really... this is a very cool bit of integration

I am a domain mapping master! :-)

No, not really, ha ha. I actually have no idea how it works... I just know: IT WORKS. Here's the story:

I was so curious to see how this mapping worked that I gave it a try already a few days ago, but I was impatient about waiting for the DNS to populate, so I had actually deleted the subdomain I had created and removed the 3rd party set-up from the blog. I was just too busy during the week to keep an eye on this to make sure the DNS did populate eventually. Since I did not wait for the DNS to populate, I was not 100% sure whether it worked or not, but I figured I would wait for the three-day weekend so that I could afford to be patient. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the multi-step verification process I went through did not have to be repeated and apparently the DNS procedure went through just fine, so that I did not have to do hardly anything when I went to map today. Supremely cool!

Adam, I don't think the tutorial says that people only have to do all that tedious stuff ONCE, and then they can apparently map all the Blogger blogs they want in no time at all. It might be good to indicate that! I would have been happy knowing that by doing the mapping once, I was getting ready to be able to instantly map all the Blogger blogs that I want.

So, here's what I did today - I thought I would be here for an hour, but it took just a few minutes!

I started by making a new blog that is going to be my pet project for this semester, where I will be writing up "The Anatomy of an Online Course," trying to document (finally!) the different components of my online course design. Here is the Blogger blog I made:
http://onlinecourseanatomy.blogspot.com

I published a single test post so that I could make sure the mapping worked for an existing post:
http://onlinecourseanatomy.blogspot.com/2014/08/test-post.html

Then, I logged on at create.ou.edu and made a subdomain. Since I don't have the same naming constraints as at blogspot.com, I was able to choose something shorter:
http://anatomy.lauragibbs.net

Then, I followed the steps in this tutorial for the actual mapping.

I put in the CNAME ghs.google.com (Step 5), and then when I went to enter the 3rd part address at Blogger, I did not get the error message about verification! I was surprised, but sure enough — there was no error because I was already verified.

This address works and shows my Blogger blog contents:
http://anatomy.lauragibbs.net/

Next I tested the existing post address at blogspot:
http://onlinecourseanatomy.blogspot.com/2014/08/test-post.html

It now displays at:
http://anatomy.lauragibbs.net/2014/08/test-post.html

HOW COOL! Just to make sure I was not hallucinating, I mapped another blog to see what happened. Before I started, I copied a URL for a post so that I can check to make sure existing links will still work:
http://englishaesop.blogspot.com/2011/11/davies-apollo-and-jupiter.html

Here's my new subdomain:
http://englishaesop.lauragibbs.net/

After I map... presto! It works!!! And the old link redirects:
http://englishaesop.blogspot.com/2011/11/davies-apollo-and-jupiter.html

GLORY HALLELUJAH. I had no idea I would get to skip all those steps: what a nice surprise! I don't really feel a need one way or the other to map all my Blogger blogs, but this is a very cool opportunity for my future students. If they are already using Domains because of a previous class they were in, I feel confident that I can help them to map their Blogger domain, while also giving them good support on the use of Blogger itself. Of course, if they are WordPress users and want to carry on using WordPress, that's great: my only requirement is that their blogging platform support full RSS and also labels (tags, categories, whatever) for navigation.

I feel proud of myself, and it was good to go through a process like this and learn something new - that sense of nervousness but also the excitement when something succeeds! I ask my students to do new things with technology, so it's good to remind myself of just what that feels like. To me, it feels good!!!

THANK YOU, Adam, for the chance to do this! Much appreciated. 

Fall Diary, August 27: student storytelling!

I've just been so busy this week, so here are the relevant Google+ posts for today!

Storybook Stack: Email Reduction Strategy

Joys of Student Storytelling

Online Presence: Better than Video

I've been thinking a lot about online presence lately, both instructor presence in an online course and also student presence. And when I start thinking about something a lot, well, I end up with a lot to say. So this will probably be the first in a series of posts on this top. In this post, I'll focus on instructor presence and exactly how I create an online presence for the courses that I teach online.

I'll start with this contention: online presence — both instructor presence and student presence — is the single most important element in online course design. I know that is true for my courses... and I would be curious to know what other online instructors think about that!

And here's a thought I recently had: the current obsession with talking-head video is an attempt — a badly misguided attempt — to create online presence. Video, of course, is just content, and not even a particularly robust form of content for all kinds of reasons (more on that topic). A talking head video is NOT online presence.

So, while I've taken several MOOCs that included video, even abundant video, by the instructor, those videos did nothing to make the instructor seem really present. The latest Janux course I tried, for example, represents the most extreme case of that I have seen so far in the world of MOOCs: apparently the instructor listed for the course is not participating in any way at all, except insofar as they filmed her in some videos — last semester? last year? There's no telling. In any case, the videos are not new, which means they are not responsive to the class right now and not responsive to the students in that class.

Because that's what it's really about: online presence offers the responsiveness of a face-to-face encounter, while overcoming the F2F constraints of time and space. Online presence, unlike face-to-face, is asynchronous, persistent, re-usable, linkable, searchable, discoverable, all those Internet virtues... while also being directly responsive to a given class and the needs of the students in that class.

When I first started teaching online in 2002, there was only a very limited range of tools for developing online presence. Webpages (freestanding webpages, not blogs or wikis, etc.) were really about the only tool that I had available, but I published a lot of webpages... and my students did too! From the very semester that I taught online, student websites were the heart and soul of the class, and that continues to be true of my classes today.

Now, however, there is a whole wide range of tools available for creating an online presence ... more tools than I can even hope to take advantage of. So, for the remainder of this post, I will talk about some of the tools I am using this semester, all of which I am extremely happy with... some new, some old, ALL of them fun to use!

Daily Announcements Blog. This is probably the single most important focal point for my course-related web presence. There is a new announcement post every day (I queue them up a day or two in advance), with information about course assignments and activities, along with all kinds of other content just for fun and random discovery. I embed this blog page as the homepage for each of my courses in Desire2Learn, so there is something fresh there every day, no matter what day(s) of the week the students are logging in.

Class Twitter Feed. In addition to the daily announcements, throughout the day I am updating the Class Twitter Feed, so not only are there new things every day in the class announcements, there are new things throughout the day in the class Twitter feed. I am able to embed that feed in the Announcements blog, and the Twitter widget is highly responsive: you can tweet me from right there inside the widget.

Tagboard. For course-specific content, there are the #OU3043 and #OU4993 hashtags, and this allows students to contribute to the class feed also. Tagboard will be a really handy way to develop that shared hashtag presence: #OU3043 Tagboard and #OU4993 Tagboard. In Week 2 of the class, I am going to see if I can get students interested in trying this!

Pinterest Boards. This is my newest experiment. I got hooked on Pinterest last year for my own personal projects, and then I started seeing all kinds of ways in which I could use Pinterest for my classes too. So, the Pinterest Boards are another way that I am creating online presence and, as with Twitter, I am hoping this is something the students will join me in: Myth-Folklore Pinterest Portfolio and Indian Epics Pinterest Portfolio.

Now, those are the ways I create online presence related to my classes, which is in addition to the main ways in which I maintain an online presence, which is mostly at Google+ and in my non-class-related blogs, like the long-running Bestiaria. I also have a separate Twitter account, different from the class Twitter: I'm OnlineCrsLady.

Of these tools, Pinterest is the one that is the most new to me, so I still getting my "rhythm" with that one, but for the other tools - Announcements and Twitter - they are an automatic part of my daily routine, even more fundamental than email. My guess is that if faculty try to teach online with email and a learning management system as their only tools, they are probably not going to be able to create a highly dynamic and responsive online presence. Limited to email and an LMS, I would not be able to achieve my goals as a teacher online... but with tools like Blogger and Twitter, I believe I can create an online presence that is of greater and deeper value for my students than the ephemeral face-to-face conversation we would have for 150 minutes each week in a classroom.

So, those are my thoughts for today about online instructor presence. Next time, I will try to say something about student online presence, and hopefully I will have more to say about my Pinterest adventure too. Meanwhile, I've pasted in below screenshots of the Announcements, Twitter, Tagboard, and Pinterest just to give a quick visual impression of what they are like. They are pretty cool, very attention-getting!

Better than video...? I would say so.

Twitter

Tagboard

Pinterest

Announcements

Fall Diary, August 21: Day 4... commenting about to begin

Today was another day that was especially bureaucratic... I need to remind myself that the Wednesday and Thursday of add/drop week are just crazy-making, and not just for me, but no doubt for the students too! Chasing down students who haven't done Orientation Week assignments, replying to all the students who want to enroll... very distracting. It was hard to find any real time to focus today!

Still, the blog groups are set up, and commenting can begin. I hope that will go well! One student ran into a strange snag with his Google account in Chrome (weird!) which interfered with commenting, but things turned out fine when he used Firefox. So, we'll see: I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the email this weekend in case people do run into problems.

I'll confess that this is the one place where the Blogger solution falls short of Ning: in Ning, the "Comment Wall" and the "reply back" features really made it easy to sustain conversations. I realized too late that I should have had people create a Comment Wall post immediately at their blog, so I will be sure to fix that next semester. It's a logical thing to ask them to do when the Week 4 Internet assignment rolls around, though, so I'll be sure to include it then. Better late than never!

And since bureaucracy wears me out like nothing else, that's all I have to say tonight for my course diary... but hoping for good adventures on Friday without all the add/drop distractions that really tugged at me both today and yesterday. Fingers crossed!

A bright spot today thanks to this marvelous article at Hybrid Pedagogy... I'll try to find some real time this weekend to comment on it in more detail! :-)

Day 1 of the semester... Blogger+Inoreader success

Given that so many students had created their blogs already during the "soft start" week of the class last week, I wasn't too worried... but still, what a great relief that the new Blogger blog approach seems to be working just great! There are now 60 blogs up and running (out of appx. 90), and no problems at all along the way. A couple of people were not clear on the difference between blogs and blog posts (so they tried to create a new blog for each new post), but we got that straightened out pretty easily, and I revised the instructions accordingly. Best of all: people seem really excited about blogging with a real blogging tool like this. Most of them are completely new to blogging (a few tumblr users, a few WordPress, but overall: blogging is new!), and I am really glad about how the first post about "Favorite Places" was something fun and easy to write, while also introducing them to one of the most powerful things about blogging: combining text and images.

That particular assignment — create a blog, and then create a Favorite Place(s) blog post — has a due date of Tuesday, so I should get the rest of those in tomorrow. I'm very pleased at how many people took care of all that already on Monday (or earlier).

I was also super-pleased with how Inoreader is helping my workflow (a couple of specific posts about that at Google+ here and here), and the guys at Inoreader even tweaked the HTML clippings so that the width is now a variable that I can control. That let me create a nice page at the class website with the Favorite Places posts embedded via an iframe right there inside the class site. Here's that page, and here's a screenshot:

So, tomorrow they will be adding more of these Favorite Places posts, and then on Wednesday will come the storytelling posts! There are already about a couple dozen of those storytelling posts also, using all three of the options - fable, nursery rhyme, map. So far it looks like the nursery rhyme is the popular choice, which is just great: that was something new this semester too!

I'm sure there are going to be snags and problems along the way, but at least so far, I didn't really have anything to worry about with these new features of the class. I guess that by focusing on the classes over the summer (something I've never done before!), I really got "in the groove," so that the changes fit together nicely and all make sense. Or so it seems from how things are going thus far... and one student is already done with Week 2 (pretty amazing!). That's very reassuring: if he got through all of Week 1 and all of Week 2, the instructions must make at least some sense. :-)

Anyway, long day — we'll see what tomorrow brings, and I am excited that it will start off with me commenting on as many of these wonderful blog posts as I can find time for! Whoo-hoo!

Blogger, Inoreader, Feedly: what a great way to start the semester!!!

As people who know me over at G+ or Twitter saw this week, INOREADER was the big event! I am in love with this tool!

So, in this post, I'll explain in detail (yes, it's another tl;dr post from yours truly) just how I am using Inoreader and why it is unexpectedly an essential new tool for my online classes. But first, some context:

Blogging in my classes: Bloglines and Ning. I've been teaching fully online classes since 2002, and I abandoned discussion boards for blogs in my classes so long ago that I cannot even remember when that happened. Maybe in 2004? There are lots of reasons why I far prefer blogs to discussion boards, and I guess I should write up those thoughts sometime. Meanwhile, though, suffice to say that blogs are essential for my classes. Students write several posts every week, and they also read and comment on each other's posts, just as they read and comment on each other's class projects. This reading and commenting is the heart of the class! So, way back when, I recommended that the students use Bloglines, which was primarily an RSS reader but it had a very simple blogging tool too... and people probably remember the hilarious Bloglines Plumber for when the system was down.

That service then pooped out, but I gladly switched to Ning; that must have been in 2008. I enjoyed free Ning for a couple of years (wasn't free Ning amazing?), and then I switched to the mini-Ning (primarily for educators), which was just $20/year. Ning worked very nicely as a group blogging platform, and it really ran itself. Since the students were all blogging in the same place, with a nice homepage display of recent activity, it was very easy for them to find one another, connect, comment. I really pretty much just let the Ning run itself, and it worked just fine. Not perfect (the group space meant students could not customize their blogs, and it had only limited RSS), but since the students were able to find each other, read, share, and enjoy, I was perfectly happy with how Ning was working.

End of Ning. Thanks to a remark by Michelle Pacansky-Brock (I am pretty sure it was Michelle; I learn about so much stuff from her), I found out that mini-Nings were going to be phased out sometime during the 2014-2015 school year. I was sad to hear that, but not surprised. It was clear that other services, like Edmodo, had come to occupy the education niche that Ning had at one time aspired to. I had no interest in paying for the very expensive (I think it's $25/month?) standard Ning since none of the standard Ning features really pertain to my class (they are very much about video, monetization, etc.); I just needed a good way for students to blog and interact via their blogs. But what blogging tool should I recommend? Argh! Crisis! But a productive one, since I knew there were lots of options out there, and I had plenty of time to ponder as I had learned about the coming demise of Ning back in December 2013.

Blogger. After thinking about how I use Blogger (and I am a long-time user of Blogger.com, largely because it is so javascript-friendly, unlike WordPress.com, as opposed to WordPress you host yourself), I decided I would recommend Blogger to my students, while also being glad for students to use any blogging platform of their choice, provided that it had full RSS with separate RSS for comments along with a good system for post labels and label pages. This is the same strategy I follow with the class websites too; I recommend Google Sites and provide extensive technical support and FAQs, but I am delighted if a student wants to use some other tool of their choice to create their website (the only requirement there is that the site should be ad-free). Since my school does not provide any support for student blogging or web publishing (but see below... this may change), it is very rare for a student to have done any blogging before, and almost all the students go with the tools I recommend, with just one or two exceptions each semester. In fact, this is why I have come to see these web publishing experiences as an incredibly important part of my class: I believe that all college students should be gaining a wide range of digital literacy skills, and I am glad that an online course provides a natural opportunity for that to happen (provided, that is, we go beyond the stifling environment of the LMS and its faux tools; about the so-called blogging tool in D2L, I have nothing good to say, and I did not even consider using it).

Feedly Dilemma. So, I spent time this summer thinking about how I would make this huge transition from Ning to Blogger. Luckily, I had for years been recommending that students create their own Blogger blogs as an extra-credit "Tech Tip," so I had lots of good support materials already written up. I was a little nervous just because I am always nervous about doing something new for the classes, but with all my Blogger experience, I figured it would work out. And it did — I opened the classes early, students instantly started created their blogs and posting, and I subscribed with Feedly since that is the feed reader I've been using since the sad demise of Google Reader. I had been a real power user of Google Reader back in the day, and Feedly seemed like a pretty poor replacement, but it had been good enough for my purposes ... until now. Since Ning had provided a group blogging platform with a shared activity stream for all the blogs together, I really wanted something like that again. But Feedly has no bundles, no public pages, no aggregated RSS... it had nothing to offer me here. Bummer!!! So I posted a plea for help at Google+ and ... THANK GOODNESS ... Stefan Heßbrüggen commented that Inoreader would do just what I wanted in terms of RSS and HTML clippings. I was so busy last week that I didn't think I would have time to check it out until the weekend, but at the same time I was so curious that I decided to check it out that same evening.

I AM SO GLAD I DID.

Inoreader. I was able to log on to Inoreader with my G+ account. And there it was: so blank, so empty... and so configurable!!! This was definitely the right tool for someone who didn't just want an "out of the box" solution but who instead wanted to configure their own RSS world. I quickly subscribed to the student blogs (I'll have about 90 total each semester, but right now it's just about 20 blogs, divided between two classes; these are the students who got an early start), and it took me just a few minutes to see that I could activate an RSS feed for the folders I create for each class. Fabulous!!! And then I saw I could have HTML clippings, just like in Google Reader, for those grouped feeds. Perfect! So, I was already sold at that very moment: this was going to be as good as Google Reader. But then I noticed something that really caught my attention: from the URL of the HTML clippings, I could see that the folder labels were really just tags... so did that mean I could make RSS feeds and have HTML clippings for ANY tags that I created? Oh my gosh: how amazing would that be? So I tagged some posts and, sure enough, it worked: I could activate an RSS feed and have HTML clippings for tags. And then I discovered the rule-maker! Now, with free Inoreader, they only let you make one rule (more than one rule is premium)... I made my rule, gasped at how perfect this was, and instantly upgraded to the premium service ($30/year).

Inoreader Rules. I mean that in every sense of the word! With the rules, I can basically make Inoreader work as efficiently as Gmail. Because I have always asked students to include a specific keyword in their different blog post titles (that is for their own convenience in scanning and searching the blog posts of other students' blogs), it was effortlessly easy to make rules for all incoming posts. So, I am using the rules to label the incoming posts for content and, even better, I am labeling the incoming posts for workflow: for example, nocomment means a blog post has not gotten a comment from me, needcomment means it really should get a comment if I have time (not all types of posts really need a comment), tweeted means I've tweeted the post in our class Twitter stream, pinned means I've pinned the post to one of the class Pinterest Boards. It is working wonderfully! Since I am using Inoreader as a dedicated reader for my student blogs only, the rules are very simple to create because I don't have to worry about filtering out non-class-related activity; it's all for class. With the option to build a custom Dashboard (seriously, there are so many great features in Inoreader!), I can create different workflow spaces to optimize the admittedly limited time I have to spend on student blogs. Rules, tags, multiple dashboards, multiple views: I simply cannot believe how fabulous Inoreader is for my purposes. I've put a few screenshots below:

("card view" is great for scanning image-focused posts)

(column view is what I use for reading/commenting)

(access to tags/folders for display, filtering)

(list view for super-quick scanning)

(a gazillion keyboard shortcuts!!!)

Inoreader as Shared Space. And don't forget, all that workflow stuff is just a bonus — my original goal was to find a feed reader to help promote a sense of shared space for my students, and Inoreader is doing exactly what I had hoped. For example, thanks to the RSS feed for the posts labeled "storytelling" (the most important posts!), I was able to add an RSS widget to the class announcements blog that lists the latest stories as they are published. More importantly, I am able to provide a link to the dynamic HTML clippings in assignment instructions so that students can see work by other students (some folks are always working ahead!), which can be a great source of inspiration; for many students, seeing actual examples of assignments is way more valuable than step by step instructions. So, take a look at the Favorite Places blog post instructions here; originally, I had only my post to look at as a sample, but now there is a link that allows students to see all the latest posts at that time. So cool!

Feedly Redux. So, as I was commenting on the Blogger blogs, I was thinking about how much I hate email... and wondering if there was a way I could switch from getting all these (annoying, clunky, excessive) email notifications from Blogger about comments and comments on comments (and Ning was just as bad with the email notifications). And that's when I had this fabulous idea: I could take the OPML file of the student blogs in Inoreader, and then do a find and replace to change it into an OPML file of COMMENTS, and import that file into Feedly so that I could keep an eye on comments that way. And... it worked! This is because in Blogger the Atom feeds are named so nicely:

• blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
• blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

I just change "posts" to "comments" in the OPML file from Inoreader, and it's good to go. I don't want all the commenting stuff in Inoreader because, honestly, it will just mess up my rules and my searches, but at the same time I do want to keep track of comments, esp. for any real conversation that takes shape in a blog post where I have commented. Feedly will do that for me! The quick scan layout and bookmark options in Feedly are all I need to manage the comment feeds (which are mostly just students commenting to students; their commenting activity outpaces mine by far!)... so, with Feedly I can keep an eye on the commenting traffic way more efficiently than I ever could with the (damn) email notifications from Ning or Blogger. Here's a screenshot of the comments folder for one of my classes in Feedly:

They came automatically into Feedly in separate folders because of the way the OPML file in Inoreader is structured, but I think I will probably just put them in one gigantic folder in Feedly since there is really no point in having separate class-by-class folders for the comment traffic, although I am still pondering that.

Very VERY happy. So, as I sit here just 72 hours or so after discovering Inoreader, I cannot believe how lucky I am. If I had been given the chance to design a blog management system for my classes, I could not imagine something better than this! I am now going to be a much more active and aware participant in my class "blogosphere" than I ever was before. Plus, students are really loving Blogger so far exactly because of all the customization and personalization options. They have a much stronger sense than they ever did in Ning that the blog is THEIR blog... and that is indeed how they should feel because it is their blog! That sense of pride and ownership is exactly why I abandoned discussion boards long ago: a discussion board belongs to everybody/nobody, but a blog belongs to SOMEBODY, and it thus becomes a way for that person to build their online presence, sharing with others and getting to really be themselves online.

Now, if my school really embraces Domain of One's Own and finally starts providing blogging support for classes (wouldn't that be great???), this system should continue to work just fine. My experience with WordPress is limited, but exactly as I told the students to begin with: ANY blog they want to use will work, provided it has RSS for posts and RSS for comments, which would surely be true for any WordPress set-up which my school is offering (I am hoping they will allow me to join the pilot so that I can investigate questions like these early on).

Saturday morning, start of the semester, and I am simply amazed at my good luck ... but chance really DOES favor the connected mind, doesn't it?

Thanks to Inoreader (which means thanks to Stefan!), I am completely caught up on commenting on student blog posts after the soft-start week, and, even better, I have customized HTML clippings to share with the students, plus there are surely more RSS possibilities that I have not even imagined yet ... because really, this is all just within 72 hours of finding Inoreader: I know there are other amazing features I probably have not even discovered. It was always a hope of mine that I could extend/improve my own participation in the class blogosphere, and now I should be able to do that, even with the very limited time I have available.

And the blogs just look SO GREAT. I love the way that they create a real space for every student and a real presence for them online. I cannot imagine teaching without student blogs, and now with my new trio of Blogger-Inoreader-Feedly, I think I am going to do an excellent job of helping students as their blog coach and cheerleader!

What a great way to start the semester!!! Thank you, Inoreader!!!