I’ve had enough of the work involved with dealing with spammers on Ning sites.

So decided to reduce the workload by getting rid of eTools and Tips for Educators.

It’s a cool name and URL – http://etools.ning.com/

If Ning is like blog sites once a URL has been deleted no-one including the original user can create the site again with that URL.

Let me know if you would like to take it over (and use how you want) otherwise I’m deleting in 48 hours.

PS  Unlike my husband who I’ve tried to give away (occasionally) it doesn’t come with an inbuilt snore

Image by Mubblegum licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

I created Animoto video below over 2 years ago!

It was unusual because as I said in the description:

Had to push the boundaries of using Animoto by adding words and voice. Not because it was a good idea, it probably wasn’t, but the challenge was there so had to try!

Today David N. left me the timely reminder in a comment:

Happy to say I continue to push those boundaries and are learning new things every day.

My motto–

• The only bad ideas are never trying or giving up too quickly

Since Animoto allows you to upload your own music I quickly recorded some audio (using Audacity) and uploaded it to put with my video.

And here’s the video for a chuckle

Oops and apologies in advance as I may have said bad words like ‘this might be crap’ when talking.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

Yes that was also me once too   Nowadays I’ve learnt very slow, steady saves time and my sanity.

So I’m incredibly proud of the fact that I’ve never watched ANY Google Wave videos, read ANY tutorials and avoided every invite until I stumbled across a reason for investigating.

My motivation was I discovered you can set up public waves that any one can join.

I decided this was a good way for me and other educators to learn how to use Wave, by working together with each other, while also seeing how Wave might be used for personal learning (and with student).

Joining a Public Wave

We’ve called our public wave eduwave.

Joining  it is as easy as:

1. Search for Eduwave by typing with:public Eduwave into search and then hit Enter.
2. Now all you need to do is click Follow once you’ve found Eduwave to start following it.
3. Feel free to add your own replies to the wave, test different features and send me a tweet (@suewaters) if you want me to log in and join you.

Off course I’m proud of the fact that my friends taught me quickly how to use Wave.

Creating a Public Wave

Big thanks to Rob Wall for quickly locating the information I needed to create the public wave.

All you need to do is:

1. Add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts lists by clicking on Add new Contact, enter the email address public@a.gwave.com and then click Enter
2. It should add Public to your Contact list
3. Now hover your mouse over Public’s avatar and select new wave

Now anyone in Google Wave can search and add themselves to your public wave.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Please share your thoughts on Google Wave.

Your like(s), Dislike(s), What’s cool? Your tips… and links to any tutorials that I should have read

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

The survey was used in a series of presentations and to build my PLN Yourself website.

Being a year later I’m wondering how much has changes?  Are we using different tools to connect?  Are the tools we would recommend to new people different?

Can you help in the following ways:

1. Can you please complete my new Personal Learning Networks Survey?
   • There are only 2 questions
2. Can you promote my Personal Learning Networks Survey to your network using a range of tools?
   • For example blog post, twitter, plurk, Facebook so responses aren’t biased by promotion by one tool or one individual

If you do promote this survey can you please link to this post by creating a pingback and/or leaving a comment?  So I have a record of all the different ways in which this latest survey has been promoted?

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

I’ve been asked to focus on educational blogging and building personal learning networks so I’m hoping you can help as I want to:

1. Demonstrate how conversations in blog comments provides greater knowledge gain for all involved, because each individual sees a different perspective of the task – giving everyone greater “food for thought!”
2. Model personal learning networks in action!

About The course

EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education course is an open access graduate course from the Faculty of Education, University of Regina for both registered and non-registered students.

Participants are all teachers, or principals, and most are new to using social media.

Can you share your thoughts on the following:

1. What are the benefits of blogging with students and/or yourself?
2. What are some of the challenge of student blogging and how do you avoid them?
3. Can you recommend any ‘must read’ articles on student blogging?
4. What questions would you most like me to answer if you attended a presentation by me on educational blogging and building personal learning networks?

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

As the conference targeted the VET sector I decided to take a different PLN approach and share how social networking tools can create communities of professionals, and students, that help each other.

Skills level of participants

Participants were surveyed near the start of the session to help guide how little/much information on each aspect need to be explained. The results are shown in the table below (Yes= has their own or uses with their students; No = doesn’t have own or use with students; No response = they didn’t respond to the question).

Value of Creating Communities

The message for creating professional learning communities using social networking tools was similar to PLNs. Our daily face-to-face interactions offer limited opportunities for:

• Asking our work colleagues/students questions
• Reflecting on ideas with each other
• Effectively sharing information

Social networking tools provide the ability to easily connect ourselves, our students, with educators in the same/similar fields, and people from industry to form a global community. This greatly increases opportunities to receive assistance and provide assistance.

The main difference to a PLN is technology skills of individuals you may want as part of your professional learning community are often (very) low. This means you need to use a range of tools including ones they are more likely to feel comfortable using.

To stay sane remember:

• Not everyone will share your excitement (and it is unrealistic to think they will)
• Let them choose whether or not they join
• Don’t be offended if you can’t encourage everyone to participate
• Be grateful for those that do participate
• It takes time!

During the session I discussed the main tools I use for aquaculture industry to highlight their benefits and how it can be done.

Facebook

In terms of aquaculture Facebook is used mainly with my students (but I do have some work colleagues in my account). My students are given the option to add me to their Facebook account knowing that they can email me, use the chat or leave comments on my wall.

Years ago I used to give students my email address and never get got any emails. With Facebook student regularly contact me to help with both my work and other courses. Many continue to remain in contact when they leave.

Ning

Our AquaEd Ning community to connect educators, industry and my students together (consists of members from within Australia and oversees).

Benefits of Ning are ability to have forums, upload photos, upload/share videos and easily email all members etc.

For me this Ning community meant I was about to source training material and images to use for an aquaculture elearning unit. I couldn’t have sourced this material as well (or as quickly) using traditional methods.

My students, and other community members, are using this Ning to share what they are doing and ask others questions.

Ning challenges are you need to be prepared to facilitate and encourage conversation. The more people you can encourage to help you facilitate the more likely it will grow. As a Ning owner you need to closely monitor all new members (using RSS) due to spammers.

Twitter

Never thought it would happen but have people from aquaculture joining my twitter account. Which has been excellent because they also then join AquaEd Ning.

As these people are already into social networking they add value to your community because they aren’t reluctant users.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This session was recorded and you can watch it here!

My advice for building a community remains the same as for a PLN — your first step is to start using these tools for your own learning then start thinking how you can connect with members from your industry. Check out my PLN Yourself website to get started!

Meanwhile for those that have created professional learning communities — please share your stories. What has worked well? What aspects have caused problems?

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

People often look at the number while failing to consider how the statistic was calculated or what it truly means.

About Misinterpreting Statistics

Here’s an example:

Statistics show that 45% of the population can’t read the newspaper.

Shocking literacy rates! Or is it? How many included in that statistic were too young to read, didn’t speak English, had some form of disability etc? What percentage of the entire population was sampled, what method was used, did the method bias the result etc?

Using Statistics in Blogging

So where am I going with this? Well bloggers love statistics and they love to know how they rank against other bloggers. Since Technorati authority is no longer reliable bloggers have looked at other options.

So some bloggers are using PostRank. For example, here are the top blogs on education based on their ranking by PostRank. Trouble is bloggers are looking at the statistics and the number 1-10; not considering how it was calculated, how blogs are ranked against each other using PostRank or what these numbers mean.

Effective use of PostRank

Let me be clear! I love PostRank. It is an incredibly valuable tool for quickly analyzing and comparing all of your blog posts in terms of number of:

1. Comments
2. Bookmarked (Delicious, diigo etc)
3. Twittered
4. Linked to

All of which helps you reflect how the different post types impact how readers engage with the posts. For example, if your aim is a long informative post you would expect few comments but hopefully lots of bookmarking and/or linking. PostRank helps you work out if you achieved this goal.

Misinterpreting PostRank

But if you are using PostRank to compared your blog’s performance against another blog, or identify the best blogs for a topic than you need to look more closely at their statistics.

In particular look at those eye icons that represent views. What do they mean? Well they are the number of your readers that click the post title in the PostRank widget in your sidebar.

Should high clicking on the PostRank widget in a sidebar make a post (and blog) high ranking?

Below is a screenshot from PostRank. The example on the left is a perfect 10 from another blogger (educational) whose rank on that post is entirely based on click on the PostRank widget. While The Edublogger post had high bookmarking, linking and comments.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

But before I do it is important to point out, to ensure full disclosure, that I work for both Edublogs and Incsub (who own Blogs.mu).

WordPress blog vs WordPress MU blogs

When you sign up for a blog on Edublogs or WordPress.com what happens is these companies host your blog and you can get on with the job of writing your posts and blog design. The highest level of access you have is as an administrator and because it is a hosted solution features like adding extra plugins or uploading themes aren’t possible.

The other option for single blog users, who want to use WordPress but have more control over their blog features such as extra plugins or custom themes, is they will install WordPress from WordPress.org and host their own blog on either their own servers or pay a hosting company.

Once you want to hosts lots of blogs on the same domain then you need to use WordPress MU (WordPress Multiuser and also known as WPMU). Both Edublogs or WordPress.com use WordPress MU but Edublogs has been highly customised by our specialist team WPMU coders to include features that specifically assist educators with using the blogs with students.

WordPress MU blogs vs Edublogs Campus Site

Often schools and universities want higher level of control and access than achievable with Edublogs so they will look at solutions like hosting their own WordPress MU site or Edublogs Campus.

While installing and managing your own WordPress blog is relatively easy, but can cause problems, WordPress MU is considerably more specialized and requires a certain level of expertise.

This is why educational organisations choose Edublogs Campus because it provides all the powerful features of a WordPress MU site without having to worry about the stress of hosting, maintenance and upgrading the software.

The main feature which provides the higher level of control that educational organisations want is access to site admin. On a WordPress MU the next level of access of access above an Administrator is the site admin user.

As site admin user you can:

1. Manage the access and level of responsibility of all users
2. Manage blog features including access to plugins, themes and blog privacy settings
3. Create new users and new blogs
4. Edit posts, pages, comments on any blog
5. Reset passwords
6. Edit and delete any blog

In really simple terms, if you have problems with a student, as site admin user, you can immediately log into the dashboard of their blog, without being attached as a user to that blog, then edit/delete a post/comment plus change whether that student can access their blog.

WordPress MU blogs vs Blogs.mu Community

Blogs.mu is quite a bit different from the hosted Edublogs and WordPress.com. When you sign up with either of these services you are provided with a blog.

On Blogs.mu you can sign up for WordPress MU site of your own and then set up your own blogs, or blog community under it. For example you might like to set up a community on writing called writerspot.blogs.mu and then if the writer John Smith signs up in your community his blog is writerspot.blogs.mu/johnsmith.

Similar to Edublogs with Blogs.mu you can choose to be a free user or a supporter.

With Blogs.mu just like Edublogs Campus you are getting your own WordPress MU site with the high level of control minus the stress of hosting the site and specialist expertise required to maintain or upgrade WordPress MU.

The features of these two sites are quite different because Blogs.mu is designed for anyone who wants to set up a community using their WordPress MU while Edublogs Campus has been customised specifically to meets the needs of the educational community.

For a comparison check out:

1. Blogs.mu Site Admin Guide
2. Edublogs Campus Site Admin Guide and log into the University of Blogs Sandpit site

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of how blogs.mu was created check out Barry’s On Muing MU – A technical introduction post.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

CURRENT STATUS: A new twitter worm attack occurred on April 17.

Early Easter Sunday 12 April (Western Australia 9 AM GMT + 8hrs) I noticed that several of my twitter followers sent out tweets that appeared like their account had been hacked. To be honest, I thought I was safe because I had seen similar before.

Boy how wrong was I….

This guy learnt a new method of hacking into our accounts. All it takes is checking on the profile when you receive notification of a new follower. Assume they have probably set up quite a few accounts to do this….

It immediately accesses your account and starts sending out a range of different tweets about the company.

Here is what you need to do if it happens to you:

1. Immediately change your twitter password – that appears to stop it
2. Check your bio and make sure it hasn’t added a link into it for their web site – remove any links that have been added

This was caused by a worm named the Stalkdaily worm created by Mikeyy Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of StalkDaily.com from Brooklyn (read more about it here).

When StalkDaily hit I recommended that twitter users don’t:

1. Check out the profiles of any new followers until it is addressed (unless you first engage in a meaningful conversation with them)
2. Don’t visit web profiles of infected users or click on the link to StalkDaily

Within about an hour Twitter deployed a security patch that they thought fixed the problem. It was also necessary for Twitter to suspend some users accounts for awhile. Some of twitterers found when their account was reactivated that it had removed them from their followers lists as a result. This meant they had to contact people and ask them to refollow.

I recommended people remain cautious for the rest of the day — just in case. Fortunately this was good advice.

Approximately 8 hours later the next worm hit twitter. This time Mikeyy Mooney created the Mikeyy worm that took over accounts including changing their user and sending out continuous tweets like:

Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy
Man, Twitter can’t fix sh*t. Mikeyy owns.
Twitter should really fix this…

During the Easter weekend Twitter fought off four waves of worm attacks created by Mikeyy Mooney.  Damon Cortesi wrote an excellent postmortem post that explains exactly how the worm worked and what code was used.

Unfortunately security continues to be an issue for twitter.  After Mikeyy Mooney was hired by ExqSoft to do security analysis work Mikeyy launched a fifth worm attack on Friday April 17.  You can read more about this latest version here.

Options for protecting your twitter account:

1. Don’t visit web profiles of any twitter users if you are logged into your twitter account unless you have ensured your web browser is fully secured and have scripting turned off using plugins like NoScript for Firefox.
2. If you haven’t secured your web browser only visit web profiles of twitters users once you have logged out of your twitter account.
3. Stick with using a twitter application like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.  You can use either of these applications to check out new followers using their search facility and add by clicking on the + alongside their profile.

IF you want me to add you to my twitter account — please send me @suewaters and engage in conversation. If you are new to using twitter you might like to check out my twitter advice for new people.

Please note: I don’t normally update posts but because of the nature of these worm attacks this has been necessary.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!

Like with all my other presentations, I like to model the process so I’m hoping you will help demonstrate the power of collaboration by providing your input and as always I will share my research!

Please note: My use of the term global projects ranges from smaller sized projects such as student blogging to a global audience or skype conversations with other classrooms through to the larger scale projects that involve lots of students working together and collobarating on tasks with students in different timezones.

So can you please leave a comment or write your own blog post to let me know:

1. What are some of the global collaboration projects you have been involved with? Can you include the approximate grade/year level of your students?
2. Why did you become involved in these projects and what were some of the benefits to your students?
3. What were the main web tools used to manage the projects?
4. What tips/advice would you give others to ensure that these projects run smoothly?
5. Also can you recommend projects that you haven’t been involved with but are good examples of collaboration done well?  I would really love some examples from higher education.
6. Can you also ask your network to answer these questions?

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider Subscribing for free!