Author: Chris

Teacher. Blogger. Podcaster. Asks way too many questions.
Posted on

A Place to Call Home

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, which got me thinking about why that might be.

I think the obvious answer is that it’s just too easy to contribute on other platforms. When I first started blogging I used to post almost every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. It was to share a video or a picture that I found, jot down an idea, or just share a thought.

These days, there are easier ways to do that than with a blog. For many, it’s Facebook. For me, for a long time, it was Twitter (and it still might be if I could sort out this stupid password issue!) More and more it’s becoming Google+, which really is emerging as THE social platform of the future. These services make it so easy to throw an idea out there quickly. And let’s face it, for most people the level of engagement you get back on these platforms is probably higher. It’s really no surprise that most of us are blogging less often.

But having said that, I’m incredibly glad that I started this blog back in 2006. Looking through the archives there have been only a few months where I didn’t write something here, and over time this blog has grown into a body of work that I look back at and feel proud of. It’s a collection of ideas and experiences that has become extremely defining for me, and in many ways have been a major contributor to where I am in life right now. I’ve found that blogging has been extremely powerful for me because it’s forced me to think in public.

Despite the fact that I write here less than I used to, and instead contribute to the conversation in other places with other tools, I understand the reasons for it. Given the rise of these other social platforms, it’s probably to be expected. But at the same time, I’m very glad that I own this WordPress space of mine. I’ve seen free tools come and go, I’ve seen Google discontinue “unpopular” products, and I’ve poured lots of time and energy into social spaces that I no longer have any permanent record of.

That’s the nice thing about a blog. You own it. It’s yours. You’re in control of it. The longer I live on the web, the more I appreciate that.

Posted on

Dear Twitter… Help!

Sad Twitter BirdI started on Twitter back in February 2007, joining the service as user number 779,452 using the name @betchaboy. At the time, I thought I was already late to the Twitter party but looking back at it now that the number of users has crossed into the billions, I guess that wasn’t the case.

In the time I’ve been part of Twitter, my use of it has grown considerably. As I write this, my Twitter account follows 3,931 people (mostly other educators with a nice mix of others thrown in just to keep in interesting), and there are 8,496 people following me. With over 11,000 tweets since I joined, Twitter has been a big part of my learning for the last 7 years.

Twitter has been an incredibly valuable tool of connection and learning, and has enabled me to be part of conversations and communities that I never would have discovered otherwise. Twitter has, quite literally, been life and career changing for me.  I’ve written quite a few blog posts about Twitter over the years, some of which have been quite widely read. You could say I’m a fan of Twitter.

So here’s the problem…

Twitter had a security breach earlier this year and numerous passwords were compromised, apparently including mine. Now, when I try to access my account on www.twitter.com, it tells me that I have to change my password.

Fair enough. Click the link and it sends me off to do a password reset using either my username, email address or mobile number. The trouble is, no matter which one I use, it doesn’t work. The username and email options are supposed to send me an email so I can reset the password, but no such email arrives (and yes, I’ve checked the spam folder).  Likewise, requesting a password reset using my mobile number is supposed to send me a text, but no text arrives.  After exhausting all these options, I get a note on the screen that says “If you still don’t receive a message in a few minutes, then unfortunately there is nothing else we can do to help you regain access to your account.”

Come onTwitter, you can’t be serious!

To make things even more bizarre, I can still tweet from that @betchaboy account from devices on which I’ve never logged out since the password problem arose, and which are set to remember my password. I can tweet from my iPad, from the Chrome web app of Tweetdeck and from Tweetbot on my Macbook, all of which I have never logged out of since the problem.  However, on new devices I can’t connect, and I can’t connect any app or service that needs to talk to the Twitter API.

I find it really odd that I can tweet from existing devices that remember my  password (presumably the old password) but that I can’t log in with any new devices. And the fact that I can’t retrieve or reset my password and that I’ve written to Twitter Support six times now, all with no response, is just beyond frustrating.

I suppose I could set up a new Twitter account and just start again, but with so much invested into my original Twitter account, I really don’t want to have to do that. My Twitter username, betchaboy, has been very much part of my online identity and digital footprint and I really don’t fancy losing it. And of course, it takes time to develop a large network on Twitter so I definitely don’t want to have to start that process over again if I can avoid it.

Twitter, please, can you help me sort this out? I don’t know why the normal reset processes are not working for me. I don’t understand why I can’t get anyone to respond to a support request made through the proper channels. I’m super frustrated by this whole thing, but I really want to get it sorted out.

If you know someone at Twitter, could you pass this post on to them?  If you have any suggestions, could you let me know. I just want to get it resolved and move on.

Posted on

My Other Computer is a Data Centre

YouTube CubeOne of the most common questions I get asked by teachers is how to include video in their online resources. Whether it’s including video clips in Moodle or embedding a video into a wiki or blog, the use of video can be a powerful tool for helping students learn. As someone once said to me “Give me 3 minutes and the right piece of video, and I can teach you almost anything”.

Working with video has a reputation for being complicated. I remember doing an online video project about 13 years ago with a school in Japan and we were literally air-mailing VHS cassettes to each other each because it was the “simplest” way to get the job done. Indeed, it’s true that even just a few years ago, working with video was still relatively difficult… the file sizes are huge, the editing process can be complex, and storing video files for playback on the web has traditionally involved a bewildering array of codecs and other technical-sounding choices. It’s all too much for many people.

Tools like Moodle can handle the inclusion of video in a course. If you can edit your video and get it in the right format, Moodle will usually handle the storage playback for you. Or not. It can be a bit of a lucky dip, and it often requires a disproportionate amount of work that many teachers simply don’t have the time or skills to do.

Enter YouTube.  YouTube celebrates its 10th birthday this week, and it would be an understatement to say that it has totally changed the way that regular non-techie people publish video. Thanks to YouTube’s massive backend infrastructure, much of the hard work of uploading, hosting and sharing video online is no longer difficult. I heard recently that there is currently over 100 HOURS of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, so the amount of content you have access to is truly mind boggling.The fact that so much content is being added to YouTube every minute of every day is testament to just how straightforward it is for “normal” people to manage.

Most people have used YouTube to watch videos. Whether it’s to learn something new by watching a TED Talk, or just to have a giggle at a cute cat video, YouTube has become a repository of just about any piece of video content you can imagine. The thing you should know is that YouTube lets you take just about any piece of video, in just about any format, and when you upload it, the YouTube servers do all the hard work of converting, transcoding, storing and publishing that clip.  That’s all the really hard stuff that for so long was the part that made working with video way too hard for many people. Now, if you can click the Upload button, you can publish a video to the world.

But did you know that there are a whole lot of other things that you can do on YouTube?

If you go to www.youtube.com/editor you will find a reasonably capable online video editor at your disposal. Sure, it’s not Premiere Pro or Final Cut, it’s not even iMovie, but for a completely free video editing tool that runs in nothing but your web browser, it’s surprisingly functional. Best of all, you have direct access to ANY video on YouTube marked with a Creative Commons license. And that means millions of videos, on just about any subject. While it’s a great thing for students to be able to capture their own footage, there is an awful lot of useful production you can do with access to the enormous library of YouTube videos without any need for a camera at all. Just search for what you want and drag it to the timeline, then use the trim bars to isolate just the part you want. Or click on the clip to get the scissors tool to split the clip at any point. Or click the magic wand tool to add all sorts of video effects, including image stabilization. Creating a video from the work of others is as simple as dragging the desired clips into place, trimming them down, getting them in the right order and even adding transitions, titles and music. It’s all right there on the webpage. Oh, and of course if you’ve uploaded clips to YouTube previously, you can edit your own videos as well.

For anyone who has been editing video for a while, this is jaw dropping stuff. While it’s a relatively simple editor right now, there’s little doubt that it will get better and better over time. Worth noting is that, because it’s using the massive resources of YouTube’s server farm, the computer you’re editing on does not have to be especially powerful. The servers are doing all the heavy lifting at the other end.

Once you finish editing, you can then publish your work back to YouTube and share it with the world. It’s just ridiculously easy.  Once your completed video is back on YouTube you can share it in all the usual ways, including embed code. This brings us back to where we began with this article, with the ability to easily grab the embed code and drop it into Moodle, a wiki or blog, or any website that accepts embed code (and really, these days, that’s just about all of them)

So now you have a video that sits nicely on your blog, wiki or learning management system, powered by the resources of YouTube

What’s the bottom line?

If you want to use video in your teaching resources (and you should be!) then make sure you check out the creative options that YouTube offers. It’s more than just cute cats.