Chris Betcher

Time magazine recently announced that the person of the year for 2006 is in fact... me! And you. And all those other bloggers, podcasters, and users of the ever expanding range of Web2.0 tools. Apparently, Time magazine thinks we are having such an impact on the world that we have been collectively recognised as "Person" of the Year. Thank you, thank you very much. When Time produced this issue , they wanted to have a mirror on the cover to reflect back the image of the person holding it. To this end they had a supplier in Minnesota provide them with nearly 7,000,000 pieces of reflective Mylar to stick on the cover. That's a lot of Mylar! (Ironically, the people about whom the article was written are probably more likely to read it online anyway.) Of course, if you happen to own an iSight-enabled Mac, not only do you have obviously better taste than your Windows-toting brethren, but you can take advantage of a very neat little trick that only iSight enabled Macs ca...

This cracked me up. And reminded me yet again of how lucky I am to be a Mac user... If you have eyes like mine, click to enlarge.

Well. It seems I've been tagged! A friend and fellow edublogger from Montreal, Sharon Peters , tagged me as part of a little game where she was tagged by another edublogger, Chris Harbeck who in turn was tagged by Karl Fisch , who in turn... well you get the idea. The game is to tag five people in the blogosphere, get them to share five little-known facts about themselves, and then pass it on to five other bloggers to do the same. Of course I wouldn't normally condone these online pyramid schemes, but this is different since it's obviously designed to spread only within the educational blogosphere and - importantly - to get people used to the idea of tagging their posts! In that sense, it's a great idea as so many people are completely clueless when it comes to using tags. So, here are five things that you may not have known about me... Number 1 - I am clueless when it comes to using tags. That's right. Clueless. Oh, I understand the concept of tagging, and I ...

I'm a Porsche 911! You have a classic style, but you're up-to-date with the latest technology. You're ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you're one of the elite,and you know it. Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz. Thanks Simon for putting me onto this.

I've been reading Thomas Friedman's book "The World Is Flat" and have been finding it a compelling and interesting read. I think he has really clearly identified and explained the trends and convergences that have brought us to what is arguably one of the most important inflexion points in world history. If you get a chance to read the book I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you might like to have a look at this video ( http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/ ) of Friedman giving a speech to a group of students and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this talk he gives an excellent overview of the book and explains some of its key ideas. The speech lasts about 75 minutes in total and its the sort of thing you need to really sit and watch in its entirety, but well worth it. Maybe watch it instead of TV one night...

There's a lot of talk in the music industry about how to protect music from copyright infringement and illegal use. Record companies as a whole were fairly slow to give in to the whole music download idea because they see it as a threat to their empires... for years the record companies had an exclusive stronghold on the production and distribution of music. As the world has gotten flatter and the gap between an idea in a musician's head and the release of that musical idea to a waiting public has gotten smaller, cheaper and easier, the role of the record company has shrunk in importance. So as we've witnessed the rise of digital music across the Internet, we've also seen the record companies fight tooth and nail to hang on their ivory towers. They've used their legal muscle to crush filesharing services like Napster and Morpheus, while others such as Limewire have so far somehow managed to avoid being taken down. The reasoning goes that if people are allowed to...

In the cult classic radio play, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams talked about a fictitious technology company called the Sirius Cybernetics Coorporation, a company who products were so bad that… "O ne is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all. In other words, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. " Does that sound familiar?  Ever tried to do battle with a substandard software application?  Or a fundamentally flawed Operating System? Or some new gadget that was designed by geeky engineers but is incomprehensibly difficult to operate for the average user?  And yet why do we just accept these devices and this software? …"One is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all".  Such a poignant statement! By the way, it's quite astoun...

In 1976, when I was a school student in Grade 8, we had a wonderful science teacher who had a part-time job at night running the mainframes at Macquarie University. He managed to obtain an old Fortran punchcard machine that he brought to school and taught us to program with, and every day he would take our punched cards to the university with him and run our simulations late at night (Remember how much money computer time used to cost back then?) As a science project, our whole class walked up the nearest busy traffic light near the school and we counted cars as they went through all the various possible turn options at the intersection. We took all this raw data back to school, punched it onto the Fortran cards to adjust the timing of the lights to make them more efficient. Each day our teacher would come back to class with reams and reams of dot-matrix computer printouts showing graphs of the traffic flow numbers. We would get our groups' printout, analyse it, work out ways to im...

PowerPoint cops a lot of flak sometimes. People often use it in a way that is overdone, hackneyed, clichéd, uncreative and just plain boring. You'll often hear the phrase "death by PowerPoint", as presenters try to wear you down with slide after boring slide of bulleted points and flying text effects. Although PowerPoint is still seen by some teachers as a useful tool for education, it's relevance in a Web 2.0 world seems to be on the decline and I've heard a number of disparaging comments about poor old PowerPoint recently suggesting that it's time in the educational sun is well and truly over. I can understand why any teacher who has been teaching with with technology for a while might be sick of PowerPoint. They've no doubt sat through dozens, even hundreds, of PowerPoint presentations over the years. Many of these have been peppered with flying text that swoops across the page letter by letter while making swooshing sounds, or seeing slides that r...

Back in the day, when data projectors were still somewhat of a novelty, it was probably acceptable to be a little unsure of how to set one up.  But these days we are finding them in great demand and although our school techs are still willing to come set it up for teachers if they ask, I think there ought to come a point when we learn to do these things for ourselves.  I mean, you don't ask a tech to come set up an regular overheap projector for you, or a TV and DVD player, so why would a data projector be any different?  As our classrooms start to depend more and more on a range of "devices", surely we need to know how to use them for ourselves? Anyway, In an attempt to ease the way (and more-or-less gently drop the hint that it's about time some of you figured out how to do this stuff for yourselves) I made this little video that explains the step-by-step process of using a data projector the right way.  After adding it to our intranet, I had a copy just sitting on...

Dear Mr Gates, Is it OK if I call you Bill? I feel like I know you so well, I've been using your company's products for so many years now. I can't say that I was there from the beginning, but I did start using Windows way back at version 3.0. (I'm told that's probably a good thing, since Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were a bit of a joke apparently.) But since Windows 3.0 I've been right there with you man! I went through Windows 3.1, then WfW (remember that one? OMG, what were you thinking?) Windows 95 came along at about the same time as my daughter was born, in fact the hospital where she was born gave away a free copy of Windows 95 to every child born that special August day when you went on stage to the sound of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up"! My daughter was born a few days too early and I missed out (I've not forgiven her for that yet Bill) but hey, what a brilliant piece of marketing! And not at all tacky, like some people said it w...

Ah, I love this stuff... Edublogs just keeps getting better and better, thanks to the efforts of James Farmer. First we had a server upgrade a few weeks back and we got all sorts of extra goodies included for adding media files to posts - stuff like Youtube, Flash, Flickr and even video players. We also got a bunch of cool extras like the synthetic voice podcasting plugin from Talkr, and a new backend interface with many more options. The static pages can now be nested to form a hierarchical site structure as well as the regular blog structure, which could be very useful. Then 2 weeks ago James added a bunch of new CSS templates to the list of possible look'n'feel options, all with much tighter integration for the new plugins. Now, I log on to find yet more new goodies in here... a poll option! I've been having a play with the poll tool - appropriately called Democracy - and as you can see on the left, it works just fine. It's a pretty naff question right now, but ...

I'm sitting at the official Toronto launch of Windows Vista, the theme of which is "A Brand New Day". If ever I saw someone totally miss the point of what technology means for education, it's the guy speaking right now from the Toronto District School Board, Jey Jamarararmasomething. When asked what he thought was the best things about Window Vista, and what he thought were the most important new features of Vista, he said that it will help manage the students who bring USB keys between home and school, and it will engage them in learning better because they seem to like the "wow factor" of the new interface. Now there's a couple of great educationally sound reasons for implementing new technology... not! Where was the conversation about enabling a more connected learning environment? Where was the talk about enabling deeper, better quality learning through the use of technology? We then had a guy from Microsoft showing a demo of Vista, and we got ...

I've just spent the last little while playing with some of the new themes that Edublogs has just installed, and there are some very interesting ones in there.  Some are very minimal and others are just way over the top, but it's good to have a few extra choices.  I especially like the way that most of the new ones seem to have a range of options for customisation of fonts, colours and page width.  I'm a big fan of simplicity - hence the previous theme I'd been using - but there were times when even I thought it looked just a bit too spartan in its design. One of the blog template design trends that I don't like is narrow text columns.  I've always preferred text width to be specified in terms of percentage not pixels, allowing the window size to scale gracefully.  Many templates still use pixel-based width definitions, so narrowing the options down to those that scale nicely was pretty easy.  Then I looked at the options for each template, played with the variou...

This is pretty cool. Go visit www.geogreeting.com and type in a phrase or word... it then spells out the phrase using letters made of satellite-imaged buildings that are shaped like the letters. Spell with Flickr does a similar thing, but made up of letters found in Flickr photographs. Nice. Thanks to Judy 'Connell for putting me onto this.