Maybe it’s good to sell fish once in a while?

This post has nothing to do with selling fish, actually, but I figured that it will probably have a total readership of about 3-4 people. Enough of the idiosyncratic crap that I think I understand.
How to export a web-based SCLP for offline viewing in your browser (instead of printing everything to PDF for further painstaking annotation) - my way:

1. You must have Mozilla Firefox installed. (Switch if you are using IE.)


2. Find and install a lovely extension called Scrapbook. Restart FF to complete installation.


3. Go to the homepage of your web-based SCLP, then right-mouse-click, "Capture Page as..."


4. To capture not just the page you are on but also the pages that it links to, and the pages those pages link to, you need to select a Capture Depth of at least 1.


5. Wait for it to save, grab a Kit Kat, have a coffee, or go for a toilet break.


6. Check your Scrapbook folder for the saved package. If saved correctly, the links will be relative, so they should work offline as they do online.


7. Smile to yourself, use Scrapbook to annotate the saved pages if you like, then burn a copy for submission.

*NEW* Additional instructions to myself:

• Give the folder an English name.


• Locate the file named "index" to start browsing offline.

Kanji of the Year, Word of the Term, Streams of Consciousness

Just like the Japanese pick the Kanji of the Year every year since 1995, I wonder what would be our Chinese or English word of the term?

Looking up the etymology of "overkill..."

What would happen when, days/weeks/months/terms/semesters/academic years/years/decades from now, a student/colleague/peer/superior/anybody stumbles on/finds/is directed to this blog? Will this change anything or make anything or do anything or be anything? If I have the intention of retaining this learning/sharing blog as a teaching/sharing blog, how will it evolve?

I need to go to the toilet, and that is a sensitive topic in some schools, where you need to take a short/long journey to another washroom, which is as good as announcing that you have business to do. Better still than students, whose honest and deceptive requests for toilet breaks may all be ignored as excuses for wanting time out in the open, not time-out. Better that than body damaging restraint.

Better direct than convoluted maneuvers, or direction perceived as convolution. A blog is more bulimic than it is anorexic, for whatever goes in is regurgitated, perhaps not in their original glory but rather in a perverse re-rendering of its contents, toxic or otherwise. An edublog is medicated, sanitized, sanctioned. Foucault: the medical gaze is dehumanizing, separating body from soul in its regard. And we live in a panopticon.

Cathartic catharsis. The beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning.

Metacognition, and the beginning of the end

Just a week to go before QED522 concludes in all its splendor. Some thoughts, as honestly as I can represent them, before my own subjectivity subjects my consciousness to oblivion.

Copyright: I guess working in the Writing Centre only acquainted me with how not to plagiarize in a written paper, but Prof Tan's comments on possible copyright infringement in our SCLP were really a positive eye-opener. Functioning under the paper-citation logic, I had thought that it would be okay to create a montage of clips as long as the sources are cited somewhere. After all, the way the montage is put together is "original." However, this is only half right. We were alerted by Prof Tan to the fact that putting such a video up online will still make us liable of distributing copyrighted content.

I am sincerely grateful for his helpful firefighting suggestion that we show our painful Windows Movie Maker product in an offline class instead. For a while the thought of possibly having to kill my video horrified me.

Affordances: Yes, it makes sense to edit an image with software like GIMP or Photoshop. I was so thankful that I used many layers in the source file for our original header image, which contains copyrighted images. With the help of exactly two mouse clicks, the potential infringements are now out of sight, and I have added some new design elements adapted from free fonts and royalty-free images, without killing the healthy bits of my header. Cheers!

Polling: Private opinions made public beneath the guise of confidentiality. Democracy, the allusive ideal to attain to, almost always a test of how well publicity and imaging/image sway the vote. As it is with every other election. I always doubt the integrity of polls.

Appraisal: If peer appraisal for teachers is going to be launched at its full, we may just end up playing Survivor every other day. Like Tina from the Second Season, to survive we will have to lie low until one by one the rest are eliminated. Does school have to be Battle Royale?

Threat: There are just a few more months to Practicum and several more months to school posting. I am happy to be perceived as a threat, and just sad that, as two friends and NIE seniors have already told me, that it is better to be less of a perfectionist in my work, in case I am seen as spoiling the market and get peer reviewed negatively. Since when did this culture of preferring imperfection over and above one's best effort become the mainstay in the nation's education training ground? I really do not think metacognition should be applied for the purpose of consciously downgrading one's work just to upgrade one's public standing. It is simply obscene.

Niche: I now (or, for now) think that the best way to protect myself, my sanity, my integrity, my quality, my output, my longevity, my hopes and my dreams in this line would be to find this impenetrable niche unique to me.

Teacher: As much as this statement may disgust, I am first a teacher, then a Chinese teacher. We do not want to be politically incorrect by being racist, Occidentalist or Orientalist. We do not have to be politically incorrect to the extent of finding Chinese teachers who use English like drinking tea, and who cannot let a day go by without playing with some ICT tool, an anomaly and a cyst.

Pleasure: At the risk of sounding like a boot-licker or even more incorrect and incongruous, I really, really, really enjoyed myself in QED522. Easily the best taught and most fun course I've taken in NIE. I blog and I play in my sandbox because I like it, and am motivated. I am at the center of everything, because I am not just a student, but the student at the center of student-centered learning, which respects the individuals we are.

I am who I am, because I am made by I AM and an image of that which is I am.
Yes, the above issues will still haunt me in the school(s) I will be posted to. But Rule#1 says, there are no ghosts. Amen to that.

SCLP development thus far - it’s almost the end of the module!

We are almost at the end of the road that leads to new ones. For the past week, Guilian and I have been discussing the peer evaluation, critiquing, and blogging mechanism for our SCLP.

For instance, she helped me sharpen my thoughts on the rubrics design by asking whether it would be better to just have a common set of rubrics for "Agents" and "Guides" since many criteria overlap. I thought however that having two sets of rubrics would be clearer, since the tool I advocate using (Forms on Google Docs) does not allow us to redirect students to different questions based on their answers (e.g. "If A, go to Q5").

We did have some cordial disagreements over the best ICT tool for peer evaluation rubrics. Aesthetically, I agree with Guilian that there are many free online survey tools that can do the job much better. She also managed to locate some sites which provide pie charts and other graphical representations of the survey results. My reasons for sticking to Google Docs' Form tool is that it actually links the survey to a Google Docs Spreadsheet which not only lists all collected responses so far, but also timestamps every response i.e. there is an automatically generated column that displays the time at which each set of responses was received. By adding fields for the names of the respondent and critiqued student, we can also match each set of responses to their owner, unlike other free online surveys where this is not possible. Furthermore, you can keep customizing your form without having to create a new one.


At present we are happy that we are developing an SCLP for e-learning (thank you, Prof Tan, for the idea) that can also be adapted for face-to-face classes. Having an SCLP that resides online also allows many other possibilities for future expansion, not the least through hyperlinking to other hypertexts.

GIMP layer effects test

Font: Bleeding Cowboys

Email etiquette…

Not that I am always correct and polite, but here are some common examples of bad email etiquette:

-Replying to queries with "Hi" without addressing the other party (it's too informal, impersonal, and impolite). I just got a reply like this to my query regarding the recent PBP. It does not help that the reply is vague and ignores what I said as well. This is what I hate about writing to a email address like ***_RU_*** - sometimes you get good and clear replies, sometimes you don't.

- CC-ing the entire school when a message only concerns PD tutors of level X/CCA or whatever ICs. Not recommended, but always advised and done. Why? For the purpose of cover, if you like, as Just Follow Law states it. Another example: why does one teacher's email about a spoilt school laptop have to be CC-ed to at least 2 HODs on top of the TAs?

I really think I am very cynical and critical of late. The most productive and destructive time to blog. Does this even fit edublogging? Perhaps not.

Do not upload your notes only the day before class at an unspecified time!

The affordances of Blackboard have been exploited, sometimes forcing us to be on standby more often than necessary.

Since whatever they are uploading has been prepared long ago with much dedication and care, it does not do them any justice either to surprise us with late uploads (or, uploads they preloaded, but timed for late appearance on our student page).

Personally, I also hate it when an upload I have just downloaded is overwritten
later by a newer version but without any announcement. What kind of
signals are they sending? That it is better late than never, and always
better to be just in time than early?

Even if we can learn anytime, anywhere, we should not be coerced into non-learning, time draining tasks like this all the time, everywhere. Please do not make self-serving assumptions about students' computing habits.

Grade Curve vs Grade Inflation

I have been wondering for some time whether NIE awards grades by criterion-referencing or norm-referencing. While in a certain class the other day we were told that the former is used, so that different tutorial groups in the same module are assessed with a consistent set of guidelines, I have also heard otherwise that NIE practices the grade curve.

NUS has been known to use a combination of absolute results and relative standing to derive a student's final grade. There is a moderation process that goes on behind the scene. It has been said far and wide that there is also a curve of some sort for EPMS, which means the bulk of grades given will have to be average, even though the grade descriptors for different bands are meant to correspond to how far the education officer exceeds or falls short of expectations. In other words, we can't have an entire school exceeding expectations on all counts? Of course, correct me, an untrained teacher, if I am wrong. It seems as though we cannot do well unless we also do better than everyone else, not just ourselves.

The kind of compensatory measures (read: norm-referencing on a parabola) practiced in our education/education employment system fly in the face of grade inflation in the United States, which some say are a result of professors guarding their tenured positions against negative student feedback.

To be on either the extreme of loyalty to a grade curve or to feel-good grade inflation would not conducive to learning, however. While using grades as extrinsic motivation/pressure is not ideal, it does seem to be the case with extreme practices. Nonetheless, grades need to be worked out properly so that assessment of learning/work can be executed for learning (QED520's A/P Chang distinguishes between assessment of & for learning).

All the more do we as educators and those being educated need to rethink the issue of grades.

Long Gruelling Episode with Video Editing

Just had a long grueling episode with video conversion and editing software, plus a bad encounter with (surprise, surprise!) Adobe Download Manager (which is used for downloading trials from Adobe) that crashed my computer several times without my initial suspicion.

What happened was that it took me some time to realize that I would lose control over my desktop every time I tried to launch a file or resume a download from Adobe Download Manager. It was bad, I lost all my Mozilla Firefox bookmarks and extension settings. At first I even thought FF was corrupted and reinstalled it. IE also has a problem now... it does not really run.

After a little more research I think it's Akamai Download Manager that screwed up big time... 

Fingerpointing is easy in cyberspace 

Mindmapping tools online (free!)

Some free online mindmapping tools that you may wish to try out.

• Mindmeister: Can be used with its accompanying widget/browser extension Geistesblitz, so that you can submit ideas to Mindmeister immediately for mapping.
  
• Mindomo
  
• Bubbl.us:Cute, adorable, intuitive. Controls for changing bubble colours and adding nodes are located on each bubble - just mouse over.

However, as far as I can tell, they are not entirely suitable for non-linear storyboarding as you typically cannot connect two nodes to a new node, nor can be insert a new node in the middle of an existing chain. I could be wrong though.

 

GIMP and Paint.NET: the brief 3-point review

GIMP

• Good enough as a Photoshop replacement, although it does not have a magnetic lasso and RYGB mode. It only has RGB, so it's more suited for non-print designs.
  
• Many free add-ons, scripts, brushes, gradients available. A lot of GIMP users regularly convert Photoshop brushes, gradients and other effects for GIMP.
• Palettes are all over the place (compared to Adobe CS), may require some interface customization.
  

Paint.NET

• Not as feature-rich as GIMP: no healing brush and brush selection. May have to use the clone stamp tool instead to work around this.
  
• Has Black and White and Sepia adjustments option, good for converting color photographs without going through too much trouble
• Good enough for really basic image editing. After all, it was originally designed to replace Paint which comes with Windows.
  

Free Advanced Image Editing Tools

In an earlier article, I listed a few free Digital Art options that have very basic options only. Here are some free advanced image editing tools that you can use in the absence of Adobe Creative Suite.

GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program
I first came across this probably a year or two ago, but I never got down to trying it because the installation package was not as user-friendly as it is now. As far as I can remember, you used to have to install something else apart from GIMP and do several other things before you can setting up GIMP proper.

This is a fairly full-featured image editing software, but I have not got down to testing it though. Reviews however are rather positive. (Download.com editors and users respectively rated it 5/5 and 4/5).

Paint.NET
"Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools."

The unlimited undo feature looks like its greatest affordance. Adobe Photoshop has a History palette that by default stores 20 states (i.e. you can go up to 20 steps backwards by clicking on any state or snapshot in the palette). Although technically speaking you could increase the number of History states to 1000, the maximum, it will take a serious toll on your system resources. I have yet to test this as well.

Photobucket
If you only need quick fixes for blemishes and wrinkles, just use the image editor on this free online image hosting tool. Works like the "Healing Brush" in Photoshop.

Reference:
Top 8 Free Photo Editors for Windows

Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp: 3D modelling the free and (hopefully easy) way. Yeah!

Uses:

• Art class designs


• 3D Classroom floor plans


• Reconstruction of spaces described in texts e.g. History, Chinese...

Kaltura

This is my latest loot: Kaltura, a free online video editor that is licensed under Creative Commons. I'm blogging on Kaltura from ScribeFire before I forget how to locate it.

I think it would be amazing if we could use Kaltura as part of our SCLP for students to record and edit their conversation practice, especially since you can add content immediately to a Kaltura using a webcam! Kalturas can also be embedded on websites with maximum ease.

According to the site, "Kaltura partners with the Wikimedia Foundation to add collaborative rich-media to Wiki projects." Yes, this is definitely suitable for Student-Centered Learning where collaboration is key.

Flock, the social web browser

Flock is touted as THE social web browser, which integrates social networking tools to help you connect with friends.

Although I am intrigued by the concept, I am put off by the disclaimer that not all Firefox (FF) extensions will work with Flock, even though Flock is FF-based.

A SWiK.net article points out some differences between Flock and FF, as well as some flaws and product biases of Flock (e.g. Yahoo is the default search engine).

Mozilla Firefox Add-ons (Part 2)

I haven't been "shopping" for Mozilla Firefox add-ons for quite a while, but here are some great finds, recommended on the official Firefox Add-Ons site, that I found today and like.

• Interclue: "Interclue tooltip windows display content previews, useful extra information and relevant next actions for almost any link on the web. A truly user-centric design, "Clueview" tooltips show you only the most relevant content from linked pages, and can provide embedded viewing for images, mp3s and YouTube videos."


• ScribeFire: "ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog."


• PicLens: "PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for viewing images across the web. Our new interactive "3D Wall" lets you effortlessly drag, click, and zoom your way around a wall of pictures for an extraordinary viewing experience. The new search box lets you search the Web in full-screen using Google, Yahoo, SmugMug, Flickr, Photobucket, and DeviantArt. Just type a query and view all the results in the PicLens wall."


• Greasemonkey: "Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript...."


• BlogRovr: "You don't have time to read ALL those Blogs! Let RovR do it for you. Rovr fetches posts from your favorite blogs about anything you're browsing, and shows you summaries you can open read posts without leaving the web page you were on. Blogrovr also suggests popular items AND lets you Twitter about any site you're on too."

For my earlier post on Mozilla Firefox, click here.

Printing to PDF

How to export anything printable to PDF for free

1. Download a PS2PDF converter and install it.
2. Download CutePDF and install it.

3. Once you have done that, CutePDF will be added as an available "printer." To export just about anything printable to PDF, simply access the Print menu as you normally would, but select CutePDF as your printer instead.

4. Once CutePDF is selected as the printer, you can customize the number of pages per "sheet" and choose to print in black/white or colour in the "Properties" menu in your print dialog.