But having said all that, it is still getting harder and harder to get excited about new Google services.

Its not that they are boring or pointless. It really just has to do with not wanting to invest in a new tool to only have it canceled in less than a few years.  Many people point to the untimely death of Google Wave as the main cause for their lukewarm response to Google+, but those of us that have been following Google for a while know that there were many other disappointing closures before Wave.

But if it can make it, Google Plus has some great ideas that could be very useful in Education. Or at least I think. Very few of my friends are on it yet, despite me sending out invitations… so it is hard to get a good feel for truly how well it works. But here are some initial thoughts:

• As many have said, the ability to only share certain information with certain groups of friends is a great idea. It was a great idea when ELGG and Facebook first came up with it, of course – but Facebook kind of never really bought into the idea once they added it (and the average online user has never heard of ELGG). After all, they were trying to monetize your connections, so why make it easy to reduce the number of connections and interactions you can make?
• The killer app to many people seems to be the free group video chat. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet because of my limited circle of friends that are in Google Plus, but the early feedback sounds positive. But I know that this is a feature and price point that many educators have been looking for.
• Am I supposed to say G+, Google+, or Google Plus? What is the official spelling?
• Programmers are already writing browser plug-ins. Sure, Facebook has apps, but not until years after FB was created, and none of them seem to be able to change the core functionality of how Facebook looks and operates.  Maybe there are some out there and I don’t know it. The Facebook + Google Plus integration was pretty nice, even if it was a little basic (there were concerns over it being malware, so I uninstalled it). It added a button on your G+ page that let you open your Facebook stream right there in G+.
• The true measure of whether G+ will be successful or not depends on how well the people in charge understand networks. George Siemens wrote a recent post examining the importance of this.  Siemens also comes to the conclusion that Google just doesn’t get it. That may be so, but I would also say it may be too early to really tell. The user base for Facebook is so huge while the base for G+ is incredibly small. Facebook will probably seem to work better just due to its size, while G+ may appear to fall short due to how new it is.  I think it also depends on what you look at. Siemens looks at Facebook friends suggestions, something I usually ignore completely. Unlike Siemens, over half of the friend suggestions I get on Facebook are the “way out there” kind.  So I have to admit that I have been ignoring that feature in G+ because I also ignore it in Facebook. Besides – I don’t need and algorithm figuring out for me who I need to connect with. I prefer to do some research on my own and find my own connections. Maybe Siemens is right about Google recommending only “power users” to him, or maybe he doesn’t realize that he probably qualifies as a power user himself (much more than myself or most people I know) and the possibility is that since Google sees him in the same category as these people that it is also recommending them to him. So, ultimately, the success of G+ will probably be more in the eye of the user, based primarily on how well they do the specific things each user is interested in.
• It is probably a given that most Google services will integrate with G+ at some point, but how long will it take for the ones that haven’t already been connected? I can’t seem to find a way to share anything from Google Reader with my circles – other than the old school way of copying and pasting a link. But I could already do that in Facebook. In order for me to switch from Facebook, I am going to need to see integration with the things I already use.
• Google also says that Plus pages for companies (like Facebook fan pages) are coming. In reality, they are already there in the form of Google Sites, Google Groups, and even Blogspot. Once all of that is brought together into a page for companies or classes or whatever in Google Plus, that will be pretty cool. Cooler even than Facebook Fan Pages… if there are enough users on G+ to take advantage of it.
• I like the idea of Sparks, but I am wondering how to make them more useful. For instance, I like music. But not all music. But there are a large number of bands I follow. Do I have to start a hundred Sparks to follow them all? Sounds daunting. OR will it be possible to start a Spark on a broader topic and then go in and specify what parts of the broader topic you want to see?

Overall, an interesting new product that could go many different ways. Something for everyone to keep their eyes on.

Or maybe not.  Read this article on new features that Chegg.com has added.  Let me draw your attention to one of the last lines – a quote from Dan Rosensweig, the current chief executive:

“Education is one of the areas where technology has not had a chance to work its magic”

Really? Thank you for insulting everyone that has been working in the Ed Tech field for the past 50-100 years. Yes, there is much more that technology can do in education that has not been tapped yet. We have a long way to go. But we have also come a long way, too. There are thousands of examples where technology has had a chance to “work its magic” on education.

I guess at least they are not as bad as the Borg, thinking that they invented all of the magic that is happening.  They just want to ignore all the magic that has already happened.

Subject: Dimdim aquired by salesforce.com

Dear Customer:

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!

This affects free accounts as well as paid accounts. All recordings you have on their site must be downloaded before your account expires, which depends on whether you were a monthly or annual subscriber. [official announcement]

What the hell?! First Facebook and now Yahoo! have screwed me (us) over. Two really simple, very functional, extremely valuable web2.0 tools that I’ve been preaching and pushing all year b/c they are/were incredibly useful — delicious and drop.io — and the parent companies pulled/are about to pull the plug.

• October brought us the announcement that Facebook bought drop.io and that free accounts were to quickly disappear and paid accounts discontinued Dec.15.
• Yesterday brought us even more shocking news that Yahoo has decided to sunset their very popular social tagging tool delicious.

Damn them.

Now what do I tell faculty? What are you going to tell your faculty? How are you going to sell them on some really amazing online tool that does something incredibly useful for their class and yet runs the serious risk of being acquired by [huge company name here] and very quickly wiped out?

Yes! I’ve found this great tool that helps you meet that learning objective, keeps your students engaged, encourages active learning … but just an fyi — don’t get too dependent on it, b/c it’s very possible someday you’ll suddenly have to export everything, find a new tool, and figure out how to migrate from one to another.

[Update: Now Yahoo! Says Delicious Will Live On ... Somewhere Else]

First up is this small company called Google you might have heard of. Last week they announced that you can edit videos online with YouTube Video Editor.  A few basic features are present – you can crop the beginning and/or end of a video, combine multiple videos together, and even add music from a free music library.  Well, not totally free – if you use the music there, the editor says ads will be displayed. I’m not seeing anything about the ability to download what you created.  Although, there are always ways of doing that with YouTube.

But that is about it for this service – still probably in Beta at best, and you can’t edit or mix audio.  That would be the next nice step. But the big deal is that it is also connected to the largest online video sharing site ever.

But what if you are wanting to create music of your own?  Not just mix a soundtrack, but create music like you would on a synthesizer… but online?  Aviary recently released Roc:

“Use Aviary’s music creator to simulate dozens of musical instruments including piano, guitars and drums. Create music loops and patterns for use in Aviary’s audio editor (Myna) or as ring tones.”

And you can add your own voice or music to the mix. I gave it a shot – it is surprisingly easy to use. you can listen here:

(oh, and all of the embed and share stuff you see above was part of the package deal with Aviary. Nice.)

For hardcore video mixers or musicians, this is probably not that great of a deal. For teachers and amateur creative types – this is huge.  Many different projects could be created online and easily shared with students around the world.

For most of us, a blog has been the extent of how we keep the content flowing while avoiding the creation of online textbook monuments.  Blogs are great for that, but they do have a few short-comings.  For one, they tend to be text heavy – which can grow stale after a while. You can insert images, videos, and audio clips in posts – but that takes a lot more time and effort to accomplish even after you have produced the media.  And even if you own a iPhone, blogging is much easier if you are sitting at a desk. Blogging on the go sounds great, but it is still pretty time-consuming.  If only there were a way to make this all easier…

Enter in to this equation Posterous.  Their tag line says it all: “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”  That is the basic idea – but here is low-down. You create an account, based on your email. Then you create an email and send it in.Posterous takes your email and turns it in to a blog post. The subject becomes your title and the body becomes your post. But that is not all. You can add tags with ease.  But you can also attach images, audio files, and videos – andPosterous will crunch it all for you and add it to your post. You can even designate where you want the pictures to go in the post.

But that is not where it stops. Posterous will then push that content out to any site you want it to:  Twitter, Picassa, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, and even a WordPress blog (there are even a few sites they publish to that I had never heard of).  They only give you about a Gigabyte or so of storage (you can buy more) – but you can always use other sites to hold your larger media – like videos (on YouTube). Posterous does all of the heavy lifting for all of that.

So how can this help the educator/coach/what-we-are-supposed-to-call-ourselves-now? Well, for one – it makes mobile blogging much easier.  There is even an app that lets you take advantage of the built-in camera on your smart phone to shake things up a bit each week. After a couple of weeks of text blogs – why not record yourself and post a video blog? Or why not go somewhere in the city and film something that connects with your content? A civic event, an art exhibit, building architecture, etc?  Maybe even go talk to a colleague or content expert and record the conversation (with permission, of course), and then upload that audio one week as a blog post. I know these will not be the best produced videos in the world, but the spontaneous nature of them will give the students a sense that they are “following you around” as you practically apply what is being taught in class.

Why not even make it seem more like a tour of your subject? You serve as the lead journalist of the group. Take them on a tour of the city from the perspective of your subject. Mix up the media (text, audio, video, images, etc) each week. Don’t get so formal with everything you say. Start off some of your posts with statements like “You know, I was pondering the engineering concepts in this week’s reading while at Starbucks – and I had this revelation about the relationship between this coffee cup and this week’s subject.”  But really film yourself at Starbucks having the revelation.

The less you script it out for yourself, the more fun you will have and the more students will enjoy it.

Remember what I posted a few weeks ago about Delicious as content? Posterous can push your content to Delicious. So add your class tags every week and your content will be inserted in to your class stream on Delicious seamlessly.

Oh – and don’t forget those web cams on your desktop computer. You don’t necessarily have to have a smart phone to do any of this. I know this might be hard to believe, but good revelations can also hit us while we are sitting at our desks.  So do some media productions there if you like.

(this post was cross-posted at Soundings)

In other words: BORING!

The classes that most students end up liking are taught by instructors that are talking to them about current events and new information related to their subject. The course that you get this semester is slightly different than the one last semester. In other words – there is a a greater value in showing up to this course, because it will be interesting and relevant (and slightly different from what your roommate learned last semester). The instructor is reading and researching the subject and keeping you up to date on the course subject.

But… can this be done online… where classes are usually canned and solidified months before the first day of course?

Through the modern miracle of technology, the answer is yes – if you plan ahead.

You are probably teaching a course in a subject that you like. That means you are also probably reading blogs, articles, journals, and other websites related to that subject.  What if your students could follow you as you do all of this reading? What if they could research with you – and this research became the course content? What if they discussed what you read that week, instead of some canned, stale question you stuck in a “discussion board” months ago?

Technically, this is possible with a blog. But do you really want to log in and create an entire blog post for every article, blog post, etc, etc. that you find… several times a week? Sound too tiring to you? Well then I have two words for you:

Social Bookmarking

You have probably heard of sites like Delicious and Digg.  Did you know that you can use these sites as the content for your course? Ditch the pre-processed cheese html zip file, pdf, or (shudder) audio lecture recording and go flexible, relevant, and easy.

Here is one idea: create an account in Delicious. Then come up with a tag just for each class – edtc3320, for example.  Then install a Delicious bookmark plug-in for FireFox or Chrome (if you are using Internet Explorer, well… I am sorry).  You can then send your students to the page for your specific class tag, and they can use whatever RSS reader they want to follow you. You can even create multiple tags for different classes.

As you come across different articles and links that would apply to your class – bookmark them in delicious and tag them for the class you want to read them. Maybe even add a second link of ‘edtc3320week1′ or whatever to help students organize them better. Delicious lets you write short comments on each link – so let students know why you bookmarked the link. Then add a discussion question for each link. For your class discussion, tell students that they have to answer at least one question raised during each week’s readings.

But don’t ditch the blog just yet – you are the content expert, so you have great insights to add to everything you read, and delicious has a short limit on comments.  So blog about what you want, and then bookmark your blog post in Delicious. It gets added to the flow that students have to read each week.

Dynamic content, active learning, reflection, and rapid course design all in one neat package! Want to be really fancy? Get a RSS feed widget, and then insert that in to your LMS course for the students that don’t get RSS. They can just click on the content page and it will be there for them in the walled garden…errr… Learning Management System.

Want to see what this could look like? Well, as I find resources I like online, I have created a Delicious tag just for EduGeek Journal readers to follow:

http://delicious.com/grandeped/edugeekjournal

Follow me in your favorite RSS reader to see what this could be like.

{this post is being cross-posted at Soundings: Best Practices in Teaching and Technology]

I’ve seen a few online options for the creative types that want to go the cloud-computing route, but most weren’t that special (yet).  Recently, I’ve been seeing a site called Aviary get some attention, so I decided to check it out.  The short version: not too hard to figure out, with a large number of features, all for free.

You can look here for a list of tools they have available so far.  Most of these tools are related to some kind of visual art (including what they claim is the world’s first online vector editor), but there is also an online audio editor in the list.

What interests me about Aviary is that there is a community feeling to it – profiles, favorites, messages, groups, etc.  Kind of like online productivity for creativity mixed with social networking.

There are some drawbacks for the free account.  For example, you can only download a flattened version of your layered artwork or images (with a watermark).  But layered export is coming in the Pro Version.

Ah HA! You say… A Pro version?  That’s where they are going to stick it to us, with a big charge for the really good stuff.  Well, so far… not really.  The tools work the same in both version it seems.  The Pro version gives you features surrounding the tools that pros will need – like private groups to keep your work from being stolen.  And, the Pro version is $24 a year.  Click here for a comparison of the two levels.

I haven’t messed with the Audio mixer – but it looks like you can record entire songs or podcasts online (directly through input, or by uploading pre-recorded audio parts).

Interesting tools for educators – something to keep an eye on.

Check out some of the work created on Aviary.

Posterous is a service that allows you to update all of your social sites through an email.  It is designed to be intuitive – so if you attach pictures, they will get posted in your Flickr account.  Videos can go into YouTube.  But, a text post won’t end up in some weird corner of either one.  You can also update blogs like WordPress and your attached images and video go into the post, too.

The two features I am digging the most are site-specific emails and groups.  Usually, one email will go to all the sites that you set-up for autopost.  Don’t want your short Twitter update to post to your Drupal blog?  Just send an email to twitter@posterous.com.  Your little tweet only posts to twitter.  You can also combine emails, like twitter+jaiku@posterous.com.

The group feature is really nice.  Just invite other contributors and have them send emails to a bit more specific email address that identifies your group.   Any one’s email can then go out to a whole slew of social sites (great for organizations, school news, or conferences) in a matter of seconds.  Or, make your group private and host a class that way (you don’t have to autopost anywhere if you don’t want).  Every post goes out to all contributors by email, and you can comment by just replying to the email.  Any pictures or videos added are intuitively inserted into the post.

It will even update your FaceBook status, or load pics/videos into FaceBook.

As you can guess, this is a great all-in-one tool for mobile blogging.  Posterous itself can act as your blog, or it can push your posts out to most major blogging platforms.

Now I wish we could see Posterous pluck SocialThing away from AOL before it is totally killed and become a one stop place to post and follow all of your networks.  They would need some kind of comment tracking system for that, because I would hate to have to keep up with comments on all the sites the support.  Or maybe that can be an idea for future features – a way to sync comments from all the sites they support.

Which leads me to the big problem with hyping a tool before you release it – your competitors will beat you to the punch. Maybe Google is banking that Wave will be cooler than anything else anyone else can rush to the market. But if your competitor comes out with a tool that works for everyone that wants to use it – people will stick with theirs no matter how cool your idea is.

That brings me to Zoho Projects 2.0. Many of the features sound similar to Google Wave – like integrating chat with online documents and project flow and all that. Zoho’s take on social project collaboration is a bit more business minded – you can create milestones and post progress updates and such. Zoho doesn’t hype the synchronous/asynchronous integration like Wave does, but it is there. Which I think is okay – I really don’t think people are going to care that much about switching between synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous communication is a huge drain on productivity, so I predict that many people will be turning off some of Google Wave’s synchronous innovations. Really – who needs synchronous online document editing? Too many editors in the room will cause some big arguments. There is a reason that face-to-face meetings only have one person at the white board taking notes, even thought many whiteboards are monstrous in size these days and there are usually enough pens for everyone to go around.

But the biggest missing feature of Zoho Project 2.0 is the open-source attitude that Google Wave embraces. The ability to install Google Wave on your server and then customize it the way you want will be killer. Zoho Projects will only be good for educational projects that can fit into it’s design and flow. Which will be several, no doubt – but Google Wave will potentially have the ability to adapt to whatever anyone wants. If you want to dig into the codes and/or APIs, that is.

Still, I can see Zoho Projects appealing to a certain mindset. For more information and a demo video, see this post:

Announcing The Social Way To Get Things Done: Zoho Projects 2.0