So here is a little unsolicited feedback about Utah State University's Instructional Technology department. I keep hearing about how this department is "top ranked" and "one of the best" departments out there. But I am concerned about the future of a department that can't seem to attract anyone suitable to fill the department chair position. To me, this speaks louder than any US News & World Report ranking or any self-congratulatory statements. But even more troublesome than the self-delusion of USU INST students is the department's apparent lack of focus on students.

So far the USU Instructional Technology department has done a poor job convincing me that I matter as a PhD student within the department. (No, this has nothing to do with COSL or my choice of program chair.) I've been at it for a couple years, and I'm not even in the student directory on the INST web page. Other departments I have seen have walls with photos of their students, including their names, where they are from, and when they started the program. We have an online version, and it is completely outdated and boring. But I have a suggestion.

When I visit other departments I see photos of their grad students on their walls. It's cool to look at, and it sends a message. "Our students matter." Something like would help us put names with faces. I see the need for both an offline and an online version. And with our online version we could do much better. Why not add rich student profiles to the department's web page? Like personal blogs, LinkedIn profiles, flickr or Google image accounts, and other things we want to share as part of our online identity? Do you think this would be hard to build? It's already done. It's called Ozmozr, and it was built right here in the USU Instructional Technology department. But I bet not many people in the department even know about it.

Don't get me wrong, I will succeed at my goals regardless of my "headless" department. This is not about students wanting to see their own photos in the hall in front of the Instructional Technology office. It's about interacting with faculty and grad students and sharing ideas. So an important question for any new department chair should be, "How do we convince students that they are a major focus of this department?" Start with a major overhaul of the INST website. Make the new site compelling and interactive for current students as well as alumni, with rich member profiles that leverage existing (free) online services and encourage sharing and interacting. And, just for old time's sake, put some student pictures up in the hall as well.

I wish I had a screenshot to prove it, but not long after I copied a recent geofacts article I wrote over to this blog my Google pagerank dropped from 6 to 2!

Lesson from Wise and All Powerful Google Bot: Never self-plagiarize!

For those of you who have been faithfully following my blog (both of you), I am now also posting stuff to techconsumer.com and geofacts.org. Here is a recent post on geofacts that I am also posting here, just to see what the Google bot does to my pagerank when I self-plagiarize...

This week I started using a site called MyFamily2.0 beta after a recently family get together. The site is free, and describes itself as “a place where you can share photos and narrated photo stories with your family and friends.” I am quite impressed with it so far, particularly the “stories” section of the site. It allows users to add audio stories to their part of the site. This is done using a regular telephone to record the story (they provide you with a unique PIN number when you call). You can also tie photos to the recorded story. All that is missing is a geocoding feature to allow users to tie these stories to specific locations.

I see great potential with this site, so I used their feedback link to make this plug for geocoding:

One suggestion I would make that could really bring the photos, videos, and audio stories to the next level would be to “geocode” or “geotag” these memories. By this I mean allowing users who add media to browse to a specific map location using a Google map or something similar and link them to a physical location. You could tie all this wonderful media to specific locations, such as a cemetery site or a childhood home. Panoramio.com is doing this with photos, but I don’t know of anyone else who allows users to geotag audio and video media. It won’t be long until we all carry GPS-enabled mobile devices that can search by location. The sooner we can tie media files to physical locations, the more likely MyFamily.com will lead the way in “on-site” family history.

I watched SiCKO online tonight, and I am ready to move back to France. There's a part in the middle of the movie where Michael Moore has a hard time understanding why the media hates the French so much. They have better health care (along with the rest of the planet), more vacation time, and a shorter work week. But it's more than that. It's just a better quality of life. And people actually care about other people -- not just their family and friends. It's hard to explain. Most Americans wouldn't understand.

Sign up for an account now. Ask questions later. (Questions like "what does this do, and what is it good for?) Like my friend Marion, I can't really answer the second question when it comes to Twitter. But I joined anyway, so I may as well announce it here. I now twitter.

Here's an interesting quote from artist Nathaniel Stern recently interviewed on iCommons: "I think we need to recognize that it’s not necessarily at odds to both give away the content and sell the object. Art that is in the public interest can be distributed widely, and the same art can be a luxury item for sale."

This applies equally well to books, movies, etc, etc. You can give it away and sell it too. The one is the content and the other is the object. Of course, someone else can come along and sell your content as an object too. But if I am given the choice as a consumer, I will buy the object from the original author, even if it costs a little more. Wouldn't you?

I met Daniel Stanford at NMC last week, during Shelley's presentation on MOCSL tools. He mentioned that he had taken some time to create some criteria for evaluating social bookmarking tools. Daniel has started a new blog which could be a great place to discuss this further. Here it is for those who might be interested in his list....
Criteria for Evaluating Social Bookmarking Tools

They hate me. But that's OK. I don't take it personally. You see, I work for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, or COSL. I have been told that people who work at COSL are arrogant and don't feel they need to follow the rules. So get to be extra nice and the USU Instructional Technology faculty get to hate me. It's legal because I'm not a minority. Tall, white, COSL, male. I have no chance at claiming discrimination. It's not a fair game.

So that arrogant COSL image was projected on me when I turned in a couple of less than stellar papers to a couple of professors in a class called ProSem. Rather than concluding that my paper was simply too short or just plain lousy, they apparently blamed it on my "COSL arrogance." I believe this is referred to as the halo effect, "a cognitive bias whereby the perception of a particular trait is influenced by the perception of the former traits in a sequence of interpretations" -- Thanks Wikipedia!

I got a C+ in the course and I earned every bit of it. I'm sure I'm not the first person who had a work commitment and ended up having to turn in a crappy final paper. But since I work for COSL it's somehow different. Somehow it's worse. Anyway, after checking with several department people I finally figured out that the minimum grade for coursework within the school of Graduate Studies is a C. So I'm OK. But it sounds like some of the professors in my department feel I need a stiffer sentence, and they are pushing for me to have to retake the last ProSem course. Hey, I am willing to take my C+ and move on, but unfortunately I seem to have become the acting COSL scapegoat. So this is a plea to the folks who have halo effect issues or COSL-envy issues. Please leave me alone. You could spend the same time writing a few more grant proposals if it's really that important to be the one with the most funding. (Is that what this is all about? It's a plausible guess among type-A academics...) I'm just a guy who is trying to earn a degree and who happens to work at a place called COSL. Honestly, it feels like kindergarten here sometimes...

Trip pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/sets/72157600150840734/
The first days here in Europe have been mostly meetings and travel, but today we rented rode bikes and rode 55 km in Holland. Part of the time we could see Germany and Belgium, but we didn't cross over.

I have been offered more beer, wine, and liqueur than ever in the last couple days, so I have added a special "nobeer" tag for photos from places where I have disappointed the locals by ordering nothing more than a soda. This all reminds me of my dad's diplomatic drinking story. And the time when he was younger and some other kids held him down and chipped his tooth trying to force him to drink. So cheers to all you drinkers. I have no problem with your behavior -- as long as you drink responsibly and don't run over my kids. But can we please get over this fixation with trying to get others to drink? Why is not drinking less respectable than drinking? It really shouldn't be a big deal, but for some reason it is.

If a church asked its congregation not to eat snails and clams and I wanted to be part of that church, I would stop eating snails and clams. You don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out which ingredients in these two foods cause them to be on the "do not eat" list. You just follow it or you don't. Actually, when it comes to snails and clams I don't have much of a desire to eat those slimy things anyway, so it really isn't much of a loss to me. That's about how I feel about drinking alcohol. So if I offend someone by not drinking with them, perhaps I should be equally offended by their lack of res.

So just the other day a friend of mine called me a serial hobbyist, and even though he doesn't know me that well, he's right. To counter this accusation I am surrendering several hobbies -- at least for now...

1. Guitar playing - I haven't learned a new song for over 10 years. It's just fun to play the same stuff I already know. I'm not selling my guitar or anything; but I just won't claim it as an official hobby.
2. Photography - Yeah, I'm one of those guys who actually had his own darkroom for doing black and white photography. Those were cool times. I still have all the equipment, and I've been packing it around for 10 years now. I still like taking pictures, but I just do the point-and-shoot thing with a little Canon Elph. You tend to take less artsy stuff when you have 3 kids. So I'll enjoy all the great kiddie shots, but photography is no longer a true hobby.
3. Baseball card collecting - So I have 13,000 cards and I really don't know what to do with them at this point. This is an easy hobby to give up, because I haven't really done much with it for the last 15 years. Anyone want a ton of cool cards? You can have them as long as you promise to enjoy them.

There's plenty more where that came from, but I want to shed my hobbies a few at a time. And don't feel bad for me. There's plenty more where that came from. This year I plan to add paintballing to my hobby collection. Remember, I am a serial hobbyist.

This is the best explanation I have ever seen that deals with the balance testers must strike between scripted and exploratory testing:

"To the extent that the next test we do is influenced by the result of the last test we did, we are doing exploratory testing. We become more exploratory when we can't tell what tests should be run, in advance of the test cycle, or when we haven't yet had the opportunity to create those tests. If we are running scripted tests, and new information comes to light that suggests a better test strategy, we may switch to an exploratory mode (as in the case of discovering a new failure that requires investigation). Conversely, we take a more scripted approach when there is little uncertainty about how we want to test, new tests are relatively unimportant, the need for efficiency and reliability in executing those tests is worth the effort of scripting, and when we are prepared to pay the cost of documenting and maintaining tests. The results of exploratory testing aren't necessarily radically different than those of scripted testing, and the two approaches to testing are fully compatible."

This makes sense to me. The messing around I do as I am figuring out how new things work and how I should test them is really a form of exploratory testing. And this may be the only testing that is necessary for very small applications. But with a bigger app like eduCommons it is clearly impossible to keep everything organized without scripted (preferably automated) tests.

Grig Gheorghiu presented at PyCon and then blogged about what makes software more testable? Here it is, shamelessly borrowed from his blog:

I mentioned a list put together by Michael Bolton, and summarized/enhanced by Adam Goucher in this blog post. Recommended reading, both for developers who want to add testing hooks into their software, and for testers who want to know what to ask for from developers so that their life gets easier (and if you're one of the unfortunate souls who have to deal with Java or .NET, this blog post by Roy Osherove talks about testability and pure OOP.)

Although our tutorial was focused on tools and techniques for implementing test automation, we also mentioned that you will never be able to get rid of manual testing. Even though the Google testing team says that 'Life is too short for manual testing' (and I couldn't agree more with them), they hasten to qualify this slogan by adding that automated testing frees you up to do more meaningful exploratory testing.

My experience as a tester shows that the nastiest bugs are often discovered by manual testing. But when you do discover them manually, the best strategy is to write automated tests for them, so that you'll check your application in that particular area from that moment on, via an automated test suite which runs in your continuous integration system.

You do have an automated test suite, right? And it does run periodically (daily or upon on every check-in) in a continuous integration system, right? And you have everything set up so that you're notified by email or RSS feeds when something fails, right? And you fix failures quickly so that everything turns back to green, because you know that too much red, too often, leads to broken windows and bit rot, right?

If you answered No to any of these questions, then you are not testing your application, period (but you already knew this if you took our tutorial -- it was on the last slide :-)

I put together a little eBusiness with my wife back in 2002. AskADate.com was supposed to be a place to order themed gift packages for a loved one. If I remember right, the only person who ever ordered from the site was my mom. (Thanks, mom!) Anyway, it was a great excuse to buy a digital camera. In business terms it was a total loss, but I actually learned quite a bit about eCommerce, and I passed that on to my Computer Science students. If you count the advertising we bought through Google AdWords, I think the whole thing cost me about $250 ($200 of that was the digital camera). Even though the site is gone, it's great to be able to see it through Archive.org at http://web.archive.org/web/20030210140323/ask-a-date.com/.

Thanks for the memories, WayBack Machine!

“I don’t know what it will be like to have books from our libraries injected into our culture again, but I’d like to see it.” --Brewster Kahle

http://www.openlibrary.org/details/openlibrary

I realize this isn't new news, but it's new to me. Here are the parts of the 2005 Open Library/Open Content Alliance announcement from Archive.org that really hit home:

3 to 4 billion of the 12 billion libraries spend every year goes to publishing.

Other projects: International Childres's Digital Library, Internet Archive Bookmobile (dollar a book!). BookShare will use this content for access for the blind. $100 laptop will include books from this project onto their laptops. Open Content Alliance will create protocols and formats.

The Microlibraries Project at Utah State University is off to a great start. One of the things we are learning to do is get electronic texts back into printed book format. We are figuring out how to format, print, cut and bind Gutenberg books in an attractive and cost-effective way. This has implications beyond our current goal of sharing 5000 books with elementary school students in rural northern Utah schools. But this is a good place to begin.

The trick is sharing it all. Brewster Kahle points out in this podcast that at it's peak, the Library of Alexandria in Egypt was able to collect and store most of the books of the world. An amazing achievement, but not very useful to folks who couldn't go there. So how do we get more people to the library? Many people seem to think that the answer involves putting books online. Bring the library to the people, so to speak. I'm all for that, and it's an exciting to see it happening.

But what then? Do you really want to read those books on your laptop? Me neither. There is something about printed books. So while thousands of people work on digitizing books, some of us should think about sensible ways to get books back into their original format. If this is all about making knowledge more accessible to people everywhere, then let's not limit it to folks with a computer and an Internet connection. Let's share books.

I have had this in Word format for a while -- someone sent it to me via email a few years ago. So *poof* now it's online. If I have stolen your idea, email me and I will either attribute it to you or remove it. Your choice.

EDIT: The same thing is available here: http://participation.blogspot.com/2005/05/if-no-child-gets-ahead-then-no-child.html

1. All teams must advance to the Sweet 16, and all will win
the championship. If a team does not win the championship,
they will be on probation until they are the champions, and
coaches will be held accountable.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same basketball
skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No
exceptions will be made for interest in basketball, a
desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or
disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY BASKETBALL AT A PROFICIENT
LEVEL.

3. Talented players will be asked to practice on their own,
without instruction. This is because the coaches will be
using all their instructional time with the athletes who
aren't interested in basketball, have limited athletic
ability or whose parents don't like basketball.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will
only be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.

5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school
is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams
will reach the same minimal goals. If no child gets ahead,
then no child will be left behind.

Have you ever noticed that some people are much more emotionally needy than others? They need to share everything with you. All the stuff you really can't do anything about. But it's more than a need to share. The way I think of it is that these folks take up more emotional space.

The way I see it, there is only so much space out there. Eventually people start to bump into each other. That is when there are problems.

I want to teach at a university. So I have to go to school. Lots of school. I am around PhD people and wannabe PhD people. Some of these folks take up a lot of emotional space. Egos, stress, jealousy, and more egos. I get claustrophobic sometimes. (It's even worse when finals week rolls around.)

You kind of have to stakeout your turf, or someone will come along and fill the emotional space right in front of you. It's not like personal space. Most folks will leave you with at least a few inches of that. But I've been in classrooms with zero emotional space. Zip. Nada. It's like the place is vacuum sealed.

If you are someone who takes up a lot of unnecessary emotional space, there is one cure for this problem. But I'll warn you, it's rather extreme. Have kids. It's like emotional space liposuction. I can guarantee that you will no longer feel like the center of the emotional universe once you have children to occupy that space for you. But then you'll be where I am. Suffocating in everyone else's emotions.

So here's my plea: If you are taking up more emotional space than you really need, try to voluntarily cut back. There are those of us out there who don't need much of this type of space, and we try not to impose on others. But we still need to breathe.

This is the all-time best question to ask people (especially children) who don't speak English very well. It's great for when you are in a foreign country and someone is trying to practice their 3 sentences of English on you... especially if you are in a hurry to get somewhere. This question produces some of the best puzzled looks I have ever seen.

I've been following some of my classmates blogs, and it looks like most INST 7150 folks are starting to get serious about final project ideas. Here is some background on my project and the quickie version of what I want to do: I used to enjoy helping friends and family with various computer questions and issues. This included everything from saving a file to starting a new website. It didn't take long before I started getting the same questions over and over again, kind of like Groudhog Day. So I want to put together a collection of resources to answer some common computer questions that I keep getting. I am not sure anyone will ever look at them, but it will make me feel better to have something to refer people to when I am too busy to help. Here are some examples of the questions I want to include in my collection (I realize that many are specific to the PC):

• What is System Restore and how do I use it?
  
• What is spyware and how do I get rid of it and then prevent it from coming back?
  
• What is the difference between XP Home and XP Professional?
  
• What are cookies?
• What are Windows updates?

Would you consider answers to these types of questions reuseable learning objects (RLOs)? Is this too generic an idea? I know sites similar to what I am describing already exist (www.pchell.com, www.computerhope.com), so is there something I can do to improve on what has already been done? OK, enough for now; it's bedtime.

I am about to print some business cards (you know, the do-it-yourself kind), and I am trying to figure out what titles to give myself. “Student” just doesn’t sound worthy of a business card. Maybe “PhD student,” but I am not officially in the PhD program, so it that lying? And if I’m going to stretch the truth a bit then I’m on that slippery slope that leads to falsified Microsoft certifications and the like. If I’m going to do that then I may as well photoshop my name on someone else’s diploma and be done with it!

So I’m back to nothing for a title. But I taught French and Computer Science in the public schools for seven years! Doesn’t that count for anything? Still, if I just wanted “Teacher” under my name I would have stayed at Redlands High School. So what else can I put on my Office Depot brand, premium matte, ivory business cards? I got a master’s in instructional technology while I was a school teacher. Does that make me an instructional designer? I don’t think so. I need job experience. Maybe I can get a $6/hour job at USU doing instructional design work to feel worthy of the title. Nah, I’d rather have extra time to go fly fishing. Besides, the one job I’ve had at USU only lasted a day…

<sidenote>
I got one of those $6/hr computer jobs at the start of Fall semester because I felt guilty about not working. (In the past I have almost always worked at least part-time as a student.) That night I was at the used CD store and couldn’t bring myself to buy anything because I knew buying a $6 used CD represented an hour’s worth of work. So I quit my job the next day. I haven’t felt guilty about spending money ever since.
</sidenote>

OK, time to make a decision. Here are my top three idea for my business card:

Tom Caswell
Instruction Designer Wannabe

Tom Caswell
Nearly-matriculated PhD Student

Tom Caswell
Unemployed by choice

Forget it. I’ll make business cards later.

My two-year-old just ate his 5th cheese stick in about 15 minutes. He seems fine, but is there a legal limit? Last week it was the same thing with apples. So much for moderation in all things...

"Pork Chop" in Logan, UT and again at Laguna Beach, CA