only dead fish

Here is my `Iolani Physics Ning site, which is obviously still in its infancy. I’ve got one week to tool with it and decide if it’s what I want for my classes.

Click for a larger screenshot

There are two enticing aspects that I can think of so far.

One, Ning is collaborative, like a wiki. If I challenge students to find an example of a 38kV transformer around town, students will be able to post their video or photo for everyone to see. This can then be turned into a photo hunt game.

The collaboration goes further, as NING really encourages peer reviewing and student-generated teaching through its forum.

Second, Ning allows for RSS feeds, which provide current news.

I think Ning is closer to what I want than Pageflakes because it is a social network, which is how I view my physics classes, all of us (myself included) contributing and learning from each other’s company and input.

Last summer I played with Moodle, but the tech guys at school decided not to support it fully, so I dropped it.

After having played with Pageflakes, I’m tempted to use a start page for my course web site. I do like the abundance of widgets, but the ability to incorporate rss feeds into the page is the primary temptation. As it stands now, I spend a lot of my non-teaching time updating my web site, which involves writing a lot of code and linking. By using a start page, I’d be freed (to some extent) from being a web admin. I do need to play with Pageflakes more though, before I make the conversion.

I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to learning css and designing my web page. The result is a site with the functionality and look I desire. By subscribing to Pageflakes, I lose a lot of design flexibility and am forced to use the company branding. Yuck.

There are other alternatives to Pageflakes, such as iGoogle and Netvibes. An article at Cnet.com looks at four of the leading start pages. Looks like I have a busy afternoon ahead of me.

I’ve found Google Docs to be a handy tool for my Physics classes. Frequently, students need to share data with their lab partners to write a common report or I want students to analyze a large quantity of data gathered from across three classes and Google Docs enables them to do these things.

Click for a larger screenshot

Click for a larger screenshot

At the beginning of the year, I also use Google Docs spreadsheets to compile a student information sheet which includes everyone’s email address, etc.

Our science department has a wiki and also uses Google Docs to schedule meetings, confirm potluck assignments, share summer vacation photos and stories, and much more.

Google Docs is a definite must-use.

I use YouTube frequently in class to show clips which illustrate concepts we’re studying. For example, students are fascinated by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, because some topics, like time dilation in particular, are so bizarre and non-intuitive that it’s difficult to believe, much less understand. I’ve found this clip to be valuable in aiding student comprehension.

My students made a music video as a final project and they loved having have their work posted on YouTube. This video by Erin is titled “The Physics of Going Green.”

Students really love the idea of having their work displayed on YouTube. However, YouTube will disable the audio track of videos which use music recognized as copyrighted.

And just for fun, here’s La Camisa Negra by Juanes. ¡Baila!

I’m not finished yet… check back later! or not.

Search for podcasts with iTunes

I have been using podcasts in my personal life for two years, I think. At first, I subscribed to everything that sounded even remotely interesting, but the backlog of unplayed podcasts became overwhelming and though only sized at a few MB each, they quickly began to eat my hard drive space and ipod space. Also, there were a lot of really bad podcasts out there (sort of the internet equivalent of Wayne’s World). Understandably, my subscription list experienced natural selection as only the fittest podcasts have survived.

For this task, I started by randomly looking at Raybook, which produces study guides and SparkNotes for a cost and NPR: Science Friday, a weekly discussion of various topics.

I then targeted “physics podcast” with a Google search. At LearnOutLoud.com, I found Introductory Physics by Joel Fajans. This looked like a review of various topics in broad strokes. More promising, UC Berkeley has a Physics course, titled “Physics for Future Presidents,” which make their lectures available on podcast.

Logistically, I’m not ready to videotape each day’s lesson, but a colleague and I have been toying with the idea of videotaping our demonstrations as a study tool and for absent students. It wouldn’t be difficult to make this available as a video podcast and I will definitely do it this year.

I can also see students getting excited by producing their own video podcasts for their documentary projects, video projects, and self-produced study guides, but then again, I’m unsure of the value of students making podcasts. Who would use them? And if podcasts differ from ordinary audio and video files because they can be published to an RSS feed, why is that of value?

LibraryThing

Immediately, LibraryThing paid dividends as I did a keyword search for “Everest,” and found recommendations for several interesting titles that I hadn’t known of before. I am endlessly fascinated by this breed of people who are so focused in their discipline and truly willing to sacrifice all for the thrill and challenge, by the sherpas, for whom Everest is not just another notch in their belt, but intertwined in their being, and mostly by the mountain itself, so beautiful and majestic, with so many moods, which gives and takes without prejudice.

I lost myself in the discussions…

Though I’m a reader myself, I don’t assign much reading outside of the physics textbook that we use and I really intend to change that this year with a few ideas.

Could I use LibraryThing in my classes? I think the Science Fiction Fans group has potential for use; we refer to Ender’s Game when we study artificial gravity and time travel. Author Chat would be great, if I were an English teacher. There was also a Physics group, but that didn’t look very active.

Here are my trial delicious bookmarks.

Professionally, I’m going to suggest to my fellow physics phriends that we try Delicious. I do see the possibility of being overwhelmed by our list of physics links, but hey, chance ‘um!

Peronally, I only use my laptop, so I don’t really need my bookmarks to be online. And I’m not so enticed when Delicious hypes “social bookmarking,” though it does seem more useful than the “Look at me” services of Facebook and Twitter. For this exercise I will check out what my fellow 2.0′ers are bookmarking.

However, when traveling abroad, Delicious would be very tasty indeed to have in an internet cafe.

Wish I had Delicious when I was here!