Google Docs & Fare Thee Well

I have heard a great deal about Google Docs over the course of the last year and am eager to get in there and see what it can do. To give it a go, I am writing this post using Google Docs which, it seems, is capable of posting directly to my blog. I will admit that I am skeptical about this as even within Blogger I have had issues with formatting, particularly with pictures. So let's try that out with a picture I took while attending a conference in Washington DC last week. Not bad! I can change the resolution, change the image's alignment, etc. after inserting. Very nice compared to the editor on Blogger.


To thoroughly test out the functionality of Google Docs, I also tested the Spreadsheet application and it seems to have all of the functionality of Microsoft Excel. It has a a VERY FULL compliment of functions available for use in formulas and like the word processor and presentation application is capable of importing and exporting to Microsoft Office formats.

How will I use Google Docs you ask? Well, I can envision a number of applications related to both my teaching and non-teaching activities. Given the audience, I'll focus here on those related to teaching. The single biggest application that I see is in facilitating group work where students need to collaborate on an assignment. One of the biggest complaints that I get from students in my first year Design and Communications course (in which everything is group work) is that they struggle with combining documents, e-mail attachments, etc. I think that Google Docs may help alleviate their frustration and make them more productive. The formatting and other tools that are available are quite limited as compared to something like Microsoft Word. I believe that this will be difficult for Google Docs to compete with. I know that for some of the more complicated reports that I work on which use templates, styles, automatic tables of contents and figures, embedded spreadsheets and graphs Google Docs doesn't stand a chance. I don't think though that that will render it useless. I see the advantage being in the ability to collaborate on documents on-line as the real focus. Even for more complicated documents, Google Docs can provide for initial drafts where content is really the focus of the work. Formatting and final layout can be handled elsewhere once most of the collaborative work is done. It is in this way that I see my students using this tool. (Sidebar: It has been reported that the new version of Microsoft Office will have the ability to share much like Google Docs)

Final verdict: Big thumbs up for Google Docs

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So it looks like I have reached the last activity for Web 2.0: Your Web - Your Way. I have to admit, I am a little sad to be leaving the comfortable world of planned activities. Particularly the guided introduction to the good, popular and useful tools that exist on the WWW. Time to forge ahead on my own. Well, not quite. I think a community has developed around this project. A "Learning Network" that will enable me to continue to learn about technologies that I can use in my teaching. I am very grateful to our fearless leaders for developing this course and wish to congratulate you on a job very well done. Thank you.

If you have become a fan of Dark Matter (I think there are two of you), fear not! I believe that blogging has become a part of my life, not just my "on-line" life. I hope to continue posting things that I find interesting and useful.

As always, thanks for reading and please comment.

Word Map Me Will Ya?

A quick post today about something I find really neat: word maps.


Wordle is a neat little tool for constructing word maps, or clouds, from text, blogs or Delicious tags. From the main page click on "Create" and then feed it some text. Once you've got that in, you can play with the layout. The result of running Wordle on my blog is shown above and the result from my thesis is shown below.


Pulling results out for use is a bit problematic as you have to do a screen capture but, all in all, worth the hassle. Run it on some of your text and see what it can do for you!

Leave a comment to let me know if you like these posts and/or find them useful.

Thanks for reading!

What the tweet is going on?, My head is in the clouds & My online presence

So, what’s with the title you ask? Well, lots to talk about this week as I tackle a posting on Twitter and reflect on my trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Blackboard World 2009. (HUGE THANK YOU TO MARY!!!) Follow this link to see some pictures.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news at all lately, you’ll know that Twitter has revolutionized the way that the world learns about news 140 characters at a time. I was fortunate enough to listen to a keynote presentation this morning while attending Blackboard World 2009 in Washington, D.C. by Lester Holt of NBC News. (That's him in the picture.) It was interesting to hear him, a professional and very accomplished journalist talk about how Twitter and other web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing the way that news is reported. Along with the immediacy of the conveyance of information though comes the question of credibility. Anyone can now publish information to the whole world with just a few clicks of a mouse or keystrokes on a cell phone. Just recently, the new iPhone can publish video directly to YouTube and has increased the number of uploads tremendously. Incredible. What used to take a team of professional journalists and millions of dollars of equipment can now be accomplished with a cell phone.

One of the things that I really like about Twitter is that I can follow people who post things that I am interested in like technology, teaching, etc. I can also get help quickly too by posting what I want help with and getting responses from people. BTW - Thanks Sue. I also really like the ability to see what people are ‘tweeting’ about. In fact, I have even added a gadget to my webpage that displays a cloud of the most popular hashtags (the subjects) being used on Twitter. I personally find this fascinating. It allows me to see what people on Twitter are talking about. The recent election in Iran is a prime example of how this can be used and would be really useful in a lot of areas in education.

A powerful tool that anyone interested in using Twitter should investigate is a free piece of software called Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck allows you to organize the plethora of information that is available to you. It also allows you to perform searches on hashtags, manage multiple accounts, organize the people you are following, etc.

So, what do I think of Twitter? Well, for me, I think that I may use Twitter for having a work-related online presence and for following topics that I am interested in related to professional development. My personal web 2.0 tool of choice is Facebook. It does everything that I look for with regards to online social networking with family and friends. My policy regarding students, and I tell them during my first class, is that I use Facebook for my personal life and that I am sure they don’t want to look at pictures of my kids nor do they want to know if I won my chess game against my friend from Halifax. The flipside of that is that I don’t want to know about their personal lives either. I am not interested in which vegetable they are most like, what country they are most suited to living in or how hard they are finding school (yet they publish photos from their weekend escapades). To satisfy students’ desire to have a more personal digital connection with me, I point them to my website by placing a link right in the navigation of my Blackboard course. On my website I have a brief CV, links to my publications, my schedule (updated and sync’d with Outlook and my iPod real-time by Google Calendar…very cool), articles that I share from Google Reader as well as this blog. All things that, though they pertain specifically to me, constitute my professional online presence.

Picasso...I mean Picasa!!!

Another Google favourite has emerged for me: Picasa. Picasa is a FREE tool from Google for managing your photos and doing simple edits like the one shown on the leftt. (see the origial below) In this particular case I was able to tune the light to make it a bit warmer, add a soft focus to blur the edges a bit and crop out the unwanted portions of the picture. All in only a few easy clicks. Picasa also has a few neat little tools for doing automatic fixes, suggesting crops, etc. It can also make simple movies, posters and collages, can do geo-tagging and makes it easy to share your pictures via e-mail, Blogger and offers a photo sharing site similar to Flickr.

Here's an example of the automatic cropping. The first image is the original while the other was a suggestion from Picasa.

All in all, for simple edits, I give this one a huge thumbs up!!!

I Think I've Become a Slacker...Oh Well

Holy smokes...it's Monday afternoon and I'm not done my homework for last week. I think I have become a slacker! Oh well, I'll deal with that next week. Oh wait, that's this week!

Social bookmarking is an entirely new venture for me. I've been noticing this funny little name...del.ici.ous...around on websites for some time but never really new what it was for. Now I understand, or at least am starting to.

Activity #1: Searching

To conduct a search to compare Delicious and Google I had to come up with a topic. Wow...all of the internet at my fingertips and what did I come up with? Nothin'. OK, so what might stump either of these two systems? Ahhh, epipheny! Ask about one of my research topics! They're obscure and unpopular. Perfect! I chose the keyword "turbulence". Results? Delicious returned a handful of interesting stuff, but nothing fantastic. And what about Google you may ask? 12.1 million hits. First thing that comes to my mind is that if I narrow the search any more on Delicious I will be out of hits in no time. In Google, if I don't narrow the search, my time on the planet will run out. Interesting dichotomy.

Now to let you in on the secret. In the context of the research community, this is a actually a very broad and generic term. I searched this word on purpose to see what these systems would return. I know that searching "turbulence" on Google is going to turn up a bunch of hits, lots of them useless to me. The main reason for this is that the term is commonly used in explaining political fallout, etc. Delicious, however, returned mostly, though only a few, things that were somewhat relevant to what I was looking for. In defense of Delicious, the community that would be using it and ALSO doing research in turbulence is probably quite small. Hence, the number of tagged pages would be small as well. End result? I think Delicious will be useful for topics that have a sufficiently large audience. OK, enough already. I'm late and a slacker remember? No need to embellish any further.

Activities #2 and 3

So next, like a good student following his directions, I signed up for an account on Delicious. To spare you some reading (and honestly some writing), here's a summary of my feelings:

• I'm an Engineer and talking about my feelings is not my strong point. Just kidding...I couldn't resist, true or not!
• Tags make searching better because of the tags are added by the public, not the author
• Because real people bookmark them, the sites are probably good/useful
• Because there are so many users on the internet, you can get a "large sample" of what people think about a site with regards to its relevance (provided the topic is not too narrow)
• I like how tags are automatically added when I add a site and the ability to add my own as well as a note
• I REALLY like the portability of my bookmarks. I am relatively mobile between my laptop and iPod but this is a huge advantage for students who must move between school and personal computers

What's Next?

So far, and I have only been thinking about this for a few days, I have come up with one really useful way to use Delicious for teaching. Because I can tag sites and then publicize that group of tags (I haven't sorted out the details but apparently I can) I can make a group of "Useful links for ENGG1013", or any other course(s), that I can add to any webpage. Then, and here's the really cool part, as I add links to that group in Delicious, they will automatically update where I've put the links in my course! No running back and forth...Delicious does all of the work. I'll blog the how-to when I get it figured out.

Well, I'm sure you're all tired of reading this post by now. I would be remiss, however, if I did not send out a big thanks to my two biggest fans: Sue Davis and Newfie Girl who read and comment on this blog everytime I post. I'll be sure to drop a couple of autographed headshots in the mail for you both.

Bye for now and thanks for reading.

Engaging Digital Natives: Media is the Key

Time for another installment of Dark Matter. This week's exercise: Online Video. Finally...something I feel really at home with!!!

One of the things that has influenced my thinking about teaching, and even my place on this planet and in society, is a video I saw on YouTube two years ago. It's called Shift Happens. Since then, the video has been updated a couple of times (here for ver. 2.0 or down below for ver. 3.0) and there is even a wiki for the next one and the creator has a blog!!! (Note: Some of the content is the same between each version but all have a little something different. If you're only going to watch one, then watch 3.0.)

I show this video to my first year Engineering Design students as these issues will be their issues once they are practicing and it accentuates that what they really need to learn in university are fundamental principles and, perhaps more importantly, HOW to learn and THINK critically. We usually end up watching the video three times in a row at their request. How's that for getting a bunch of lazy, unengaged teenagers' attention! I am speaking (writing?) tongue in cheek of course. I believe that sometimes students today need to be engaged in a new way. The way in which they have been acclimatized to being engaged: through media. That's not to say that this is the only way they can be engaged but it certainly does help get them there. As with many things, balance is crucial.

In another of my courses I use videos from YouTube to illustrate complex phenomena like the shoch wave shown below. I have found that the students' level of engagement has increased 5-fold and their understanding and "gut-feel" for the subject matter has also dramatically improved. In addition, the fact that I present stuff from YouTube alters their perception of me as an instructor and ultimately benefits the classroom dynamics.

Now for a technology related teaching tip:

When inserting video into your presentations, be sure to download the video to your own computer first. Don't assume that you can just link to the video on YouTube or some other site. Sometimes classrooms don't have Internet access or hardware is down, or there's not enough bandwidth, etc., etc. If you're using a YouTube video, do the following:

1. Find the video you want to embed in your presentation and click on it to bring up its page
2. Open a new browser or tab and go to the KeepVid website
3. Switch back to YouTube and ook for the box on the right side of the screen that has URL in it
4. Select the text and copy it to your clipboard
5. Paste the URL you copied into the URL box on the KeepVid page
6. Right click on either the Flash Video (flv) or mp4 video download buttons and specify the location and desired filename
7. The file will download to your computer and can be inserted into your presentation, sent to Blackboard, etc.

Hope you find this useful and thanks for reading.

iPods and Podcasts: You Can't Touch This!!!

For me this was a timely exercise as I just purchased a 16 Gigabyte iPod Touch and, I gotta say, I absolutely love it! Why is this relevant you ask? Because students have iPods and/or phones to listen to audio or watch video with. Though these aren't necessary for podcasting, it is a likely avenue for students and one of the reasons I bought my iPod...or at least that's what I tell my Dean.

Indulge me for a moment on a bit of a sidebar. I was looking for a replacement for my PDA. One of my colleagues, let's call her "Mary", had just got one and showed me the interface. WOW!!! Flipping through screens with the flick of a finger, calendar, mail, browser, music, video, games, looks REALLY COOL, and, drum roll...wireless. A poor man's Blackberry! I was still, however, unconvinced as I had always thought iPods were just for music and had really good TV commercials. Wrong!!! My next encounter with the new iPod Touch was at a meeting. I sat between two colleagues who, in the middle of the meeting, pull out their Touch's and start reading e-mail, browsing the web and doing engineering calculations. That's it...GOTTA HAVE IT!!! The geek in me was salivating and I was no longer paying attention to the meeting. Oh well.

Flash a month ahead to today. I now have one of these shiny little trinkets and, thanks to this week's activity, have discovered yet another way to use up every spare minute of my life. Yes, that's right, I now watch podcasts of some of my favourite shows. The really cool part is that iTunes looks after everything for me. Once I watch an episode, it fetches another one for me. Thusfar (since yesterday) I have only explored TV shows that I am familiar with like Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs". I did notice tons of other free stuff. Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention that a lot of this stuff is FREE!!! Good thing as I am too cheap to pay for it!

I have had a bit of experience with recording the audio portion of my lectures (using Audacity - much easier than it sounds) and posting them to Blackboard. I have also recorded screen capture movies (as I discussed on the wiki for this program). Technically speaking, this is not podcasting as there is no RSS component to push the new podcasts to the students. And therein lies the beauty of podcasting: having a piece of software retrieve the files for you.

So, what are my plans with regards to using podcasting in my teaching? I am undecided. I have always been a BIG proponent of making students come to class. Because of my discipline (Engineering), I feel it necessary to have them treat their education like a job. (We are mandated to teach them professional skills.) You show up on time, submit work on time, etc., etc. Making podcasts available makes it easy for them to not attend. In the past my solution has been to have mandatory attendance but made the lectures available for review. Students didn't use it much...they had already heard the lecture. This past year, however, I found a new use for podcasts, or Vodcasts as they are sometimes called when they involve video. I experimented with posting the videos I mentionned earlier to create some more learning opportunities for students and effectiely increase the amount of classtime that I had with them. This afforded me more time to push my content in class while providing them with more example problems. In addition to getting them off my back about doing more examples, they can watch the video as many times as they like. Win-win!

Final verdict: I will definitely be using more of this technology in the coming school year to supplement my lectures. I read the article from this week's activity about how to create the RSS for the podcast and it's a bit dicey but it looks like there are tools to do the work for me. Full steam ahead!

Thanks for reading.

I Wonder If I Have OCD?

I discovered a very useful way to follow the comments on my blog and, at the request of Sue Davis, am sharing it with anyone who is interested.

Being somewhat neurotic about feedback, I found myself incessantly checking my blog to see if anyone had made any comments about what I had written. I wonder if I have OCD? Hmmm...once again I digress. This required a lot of clicks to navigate the sign-in, etc. and was rather inconvenient. While playing with some of the options for layout, etc. I discovered a very cool little "gadget" that solved all of my problems. It allows me, or anyone else for that matter, to subscribe to an RSS feed of the posts and/or the comments on my blog. (By the way there are lots of really cool gadgets there that do all kinds of neat stuff.)

Problem solved!!! Because RSS pushes the data to me when there are updates to my blog's posts and comments I don't have to keep checking (and worrying about how neurotic I am being).

To add the "gadget" to you Blooger blog, login to Blogger. When you get to the "Dashboard" click on the "Layout" link for your blog and click on the "add gadget' link in the box where you want the link to appear. I put mine up near the top so people would see it even if they didn't scroll down.

Now, you need to find the right gadget. There are a lot of them and unfortunately no way for me to give you a direct link. When the new window opens, scroll down until you see a gadget called "Subscription Link" (it's made by Blogger). Change the title if you want and then click "Save".

The final step is to subscribe to your own comments in your RSS reader. I use Google Reader so it was automatic once I selected it.

Voila! Now you get a feed of the comments made to your blog. No more logging in!!!

I am not sure if adding the gadget is necessary to get the RSS feed going from the Blogger end of things. The address for the posts feed for my blog is simply http://daleroach.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and for the comments is http://daleroach.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default. You may be able to simply modify this for your own blog by replacing "daleroach" with whatever address you chose for your blog and manually enter the subscription into your reader. Adding the gadget does add some good functionality to your blog though.

I hope this is useful. Please comment...I should be able to reply quickly as I am addicted to Google Reader and feedback.

Thanks for reading.

Wikis Wikis Everywhere

It would seem that mankind has embarked upon a most ambitious endeavour...writing our own encyclopedia. Now, you may say wait a minute, we already have encyclopedias, to which I would answer, yes, we do already have encyclopedias. But this is a different kind of encyclopedia. Mankind as a whole (or at least those that have Internet access) is writing it, in a grand group effort, rather than the "old" way where select researchers and editors get to determine what makes it in and what doesn't.

Of course, I am talking about Wikipedia. As a very liberal minded academic I find the concept of wikis simply amazing. On the practical side, however, there are some issues that arise. While doing some in depth research (Wikipedia of course, what else?) I came across some interesting information on Trustworthiness and Security. Given that our topic is wikis this week, I'd actually recommend the whole article! Here's an excerpt:

"... It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well."  - Ebersbach, 2008

I would like to suggest to you that searching on Wikipedia, or any other wiki for that matter, is no different than looking up information from any other resource, digital or not. Yes, we have some that are unequivocally trusted...the undisputed repositories of knowledge in a particular 

field. That is, until someone else comes along with a new technique or way of thinking and disproves all that we held true. What now? Well, a wiki simply evolves. Now when someone uses it they get the new information! The trick though is to ensure that the information there is updated and accurate and that only happens when users contribute and entries are somehow validated. This usually involves verifying, in some way or another, the credentials of the contributor. So we no longer have "open access" but "open access to those we trust to know something about this subject". I can live with that I guess.

I thought that would mention that I debated tying this post to Wikipedia because it brings a lot of conceptual baggage along with it. So, why did I? I think that Wikipedia exemplifies all of the good and bad points of wikis (they even summarize them on their own site!). As a teacher and researcher, I can stretch the list of pros a little longer: I can use a wiki to EXEMPLIFY why students need to question resources they use. Wow! How about that!? By getting students to follow the references and dig a level or two deeper, they learn how to critique information; a very important skill in the world we live in today. In addition, they become of other, hopefully, more reliable resources.

In closing, I should say that I have been using wikis for about a year now (Wikipedia longer but never contributing) and love them. The ability to collaborate with colleagues is astounding and the tools are simple to use. What else could someone ask for?

Thanks for reading.

The Artist Within

The advent of digital photography has drastically changed my life and, I would venture, the lives of many of you who are reading this post.

To give you some background, prior to owning a digital camera I had shot only a few rolls of film in my life.  Even though I have always been inspired by beautiful photography, I didn't have ready access to a camera nor the funds to take up photography.  You know, the typical life of a grad student kind of stuff.  Life changed when my wife and I bought our first digital camera in the summer of 2002.  I discovered that my repressed "artsy" side was longing to be free.

Digital photography allowed me to snap pictures without the worry of wasting film and money for processing.  This was so liberating!!!  The immediate feedback provided by the ability to review/preview one's pictures allowed me to learn how to take better pictures and offered even the untalented,  like myself, the chance of getting lucky and capturing a decent picture.  Add to this the ability to edit one's own pictures and send them over the internet, post them on Facebook, etc. and...well...you have a revolution.

For this exercise, I have chosen to use Flickr.  I do feel obligated though to mention that my fascination with everything Google made me first choose Picasa.  The sway came when I thought of what "most people" are using.  So, to learn as much as possible about the service that most of my students would use, I decided to give Flickr a try.  So with my new Yahoo account created (sigh...yet another account) I logged into Flickr and typed in my first search "korea dragon color" and was rewarded with a number of hits; my favourite is shown above, or click here to see it in Flickr. (I'm an academic so I feel the need to reference)  I also really liked a lot of the other images from Korea that this photographer had posted.  Wow, this is really cool!  One of my new favourite things to do is to type in some words that come into my head and then click on stuff that I find interesting.  It's really neat to see where it takes you.

So where am I today with digital photography?  Well, since purchasing our first digital camera seven years ago, we have taken about 5,200 photos.  Most of those are of our kids but I try to make time to get out and take pictures and release the "artist within" once in a while.  Here is a link to some of my pictures on Flickr . (Clicking the "Slideshow" is probably the best way to view them.)  I must say that I'm not terribly comfortable with sending photos out to the world so have only published a few of my favourites.  I have, however, discovered a wonderful new way to explore.

Thanks for reading.

Titles and Followers

Wow, I have followers!!!

It blows my mind when I think about the whole notion of "Followers". There are people out there who have declared themselves as interested in reading what I write. I know, I know, you may not be interested but just being supportive or following Mary's instructions. None the less, you are my "Followers" and now I feel the pressure to be interesteing so that I don't lose you. I wonder if this is how comedians feel when they have to be funny? Hmmm...I digress.

A few people made comments about the title of my 

blog - Dark Matter - so I thought I would provide a brief explanation. The first thing I did to convey my thinking was ask Wikipedia (because it's always right, right?) to give me an explanation. It came back with the following:

"In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is hypothetical matter that is undetectable by its emitted radiation, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter." Mark J. Hadley (2007) "Classical Dark Matter"

I've always found that my best ideas are usually my first ideas and this was what popped into my head. Surprising even to me because I didn't follow any of the thinking outlined below! For me, writing about my thoughts, opinions and my interpretation of my experiences (both big and small) is a bit like bearing one's soul.

Do you see the link now?...No?...OK, I'll go on.

It's a bit of a play on words. Usaually we walk around with ideas, or matters, in our head, a lot of them firmly understood. Others, however, are much more fluid, malformed, confused, or what we could call dark, as in hard to see or detect, not sinister or evil. If you read the definition of dark matter you see that the effects of it are felt even though it can't be seen, much like those crazy little ideas bouncing around in our heads.

So, fianlly, to my point! (And if you've stuck with me this long you are to be commended as a true "Follower") A lot of my ideas, opinons and practices that pertain to teaching fall into the "dark" category and, hence, the tile of my blog...Dark Matter...or equally but MUCH less interesting, My Ideas, Thoughts and Feelings About Teaching".

Thanks for reading.

Reflections on RSS and Google Convergence

Well, I believe I have now unlocked the power of RSS feeds. This may replace Facebook as my consumer of spare minutes. OK, I guess I should be honest...I definitely spend more than a few minutes a day on Facebook (as anyone out there who is my Facebook Friend knows) and would never give that up. So now I have a new way of consuming more of my day! WOW!!! Add blogging onto that I just don't know when I'll find time for "work"!!!

Seriously, I have discovered that I love Google. Plainly and simply love 'em. Starting out with their search engine, Google Earth (ground, sky, Mars & underwater), Google Sketch-Up, Google Calendar and now Google Reader. I created a Google account so that I can sync my i-pod touch (on order...WOOHOO!!!!) with Outlook and be all mobile/accessible and stuff.  Then I created my reader account and all of the blogs I follow on Blogger magically show up in Google Reader! It seems that my on-line life these days is converging on Google.

HOLD ON...WAIT A MINUTE!!!!! I think I'm supposed to be talking about RSS!

I love the idea of having the information that I'm interested in "pushed" right to my desktop. I find that I don't spend much time "Surfing" anymore because the web has become so populated with information that I just get frustrated. I will definitely be on the lookout for the RSS symbol now on pages with dynamic content. 

Thanks for reading.

New Frontiers

Wow, my first blog ... this is an entirely new experience for me!

I find the ease with which we can publish our thoughts to the world, well,  simply amazing.  I am very excited to be blogging and to have a conduit to the world.  As a first time blogger, however, I can't help but wonder if the world is ready for, or willing to accept, my thoughts and opinions.

Hmmm. Interesting reflections and hence the title for my blog. It kind of feels as though the world is peering into my soul at the thoughts running around in my head. That is if anyone is looking.

Bye for now.