Hear ye, hear ye….

Our millennial generation is speaking up. Please take a minute to listen to a representative of them.

How many generations can your old media survive?

About a week or two ago, I picked up a cable to convert my old VHS tapes to digital format on my laptizzle. Most of my tapes that I’m converting are pretty old. I guess when I have time, I will also convert my cassette tapes via audacity and share them on sound cloud; and my videos on either vimeo or youtube. I’ve scanned as many old pictures that I’ve run across from cleaning out my old house I grew up in. Now I just need to burn them to DVD or continue my quest to move my digital memories online.

My actions of converting ALL of my dusty artifacts to digital format are due to the need of safely archiving (and sharing my treasures with family and friends) and the fear of magnetic media degradation which I’ve experienced with an old 8mm reel-to-reel that I paid Wolf camera to do for me.  (Also, I am not getting any younger). As we get deeper in the new millennium, the urgency to duplicate magnetic tape media becomes more critical due to limitations of magnetic media shelf life. I guess it really depends on how you store the contents of your stuff whether or not if the need to convert is necessary. So, how many generations can your media survive?

Sand or Cement?

Nowadays, everyone is on the Internet. So, should one stop to reflect their personal online behavior and evaluate their online digital foot prints. Yes, because everything you do, say, act, click on leaves either a foot print that is either cemented permanently or temporarily impressed in virtual sand. What do I mean?

Google yourself, and you will see your cemented tracks. Or anything that you participated or contributed online that is permanent to certain extent that can be recovered by someone other than yourself that you cannot remove. Server logs of your whereabouts online that you cannot access is also virtually cemented and only viewable to a select group of people as if you was a star! Ask anyone that is being sued to downloading movies or music lately.

However, if one can remove your digital tracks, that could be considered a foot print in the sand, which is somewhat temporary unless you or someone else can remove  it such as the cookies of your web browser (cache) and browser history.

Do footprints serve a purpose? Yes… You can discover many things about someone that have or do not have digital footprints. Current and potential employers, significant others, and just ordinary nosy people find joy and sorrow in what people knowingly leave behind.

What if I do not leave any digital footprints? That would be impossible, only if you do consider yourself a non-participant of the web 2.0 revolution or a user that is very restricted with your online activities.

Hashtag Fail

I went to church today and ran into this flyer.

I was delighted to see my church reaching out to the youth using social media. However, what can be (or go) wrong with this hash tag #LookAtMeNow?  Well, click on the link to see for yourself. You will see tweets that may NOT be Christian focused?

Apparently, very little thought went into the decision to use this tag. My point is when using hash tags, you want to make them unique especially if you are going to use it for a youth revival…

What do I use to keep ahead of the game?

I am sharing three resources that I use daily to stay on top of my game. What game? Keeping on top of the latest tech trends and other info with minimal effort. Two of these resource are great for building your own PLN (personal learning network). I’ll let you figure which one’s I’m referring to.

1. Twitter.com - If you are on Facebook, but not on Twitter, IMHO you are really missing on some really great information. Twitter is really what you make out of it. If you are new to twitter, or never tried it before, I challenge you to try it for a month. But you have to figure out how to get the most out if it. If you need coaching, please follow me and hit me with a DM (direct message) for some guidance!

 2. Delicious.com - People usally bookmark website that are important, right. Having that said, there are many social bookmarking sites, but this one IMHO is the most resourceful (and not blocked at my school) The power of this resource is when you build your NETWORK and see what your friends, colleagues, or anyone is bookmarking. Also, it is very important in how you tag your links. Especially if you need to retrieve a website that you need but don’t remember the specific web address. If you are curious in seeing my bookmarks or even my network, just click here.

3. Popurls.com - I use this aggregator to keep up with the latest and greatest info whether it is national or tech related news.  There are other aggregators just as good as this one, but I guess I’ve used this the longest and it serves my needs.

Please comment and share any of your resources that you use to keep your head above the sea of information…

Mobile Tagging…. Revenge of the Cue Cat’s Spirit!

Hmmm…. I am sure that you have seen either of these two new codes (QR & Microsoft tags/codes explained on Joseph Kim’s blog)especially if you read any current magazines. 

UPC codes has been around for awhile and for years, people in marketing has been trying to make it useful for the consumer. In the late 90′s Radio Shack pushed the cuecat to help consumers to scan products to go to the vendor’s website. Unfortunately, this concept did not materialize to anything the average person would really want to do.

However, in the past few years, vendors have been experimenting with the usage of QR codes on smart phones as demonstrated in the image below. I am sure that the usage mobile tags will continue to grow in this smartphone age.

Twitter, #edchat and U!

As I got in from my extended weekend, I picked up my THE Journal out of the mailbox this evening and briefly read through the Tweets for Teachers article. Decent read, but could not help to notice the advertisement of the hash tag ‘edchat’. I was delighted to see that this place got some noteworthy recognition on Twitter.

Further along the the article, it pointed out that many educators do not see the value of Twitter, but via #edchat allows intelligent dialogue around a designated educational topic which is usually voted on. Cannot forget to mention that in the article also mentioned #teachertuesday.

Twitter is just another vehicle of collaboration via web 2.0. Remember my fellow educators, let’s use it to our benefit, not our demise.

Our Digitally Obsessed Nation

Dependency…

if is not with oil, it seems that our world would not be the same without it being plugged in.

I will watch this show tomorrow to see how obsessed we have become with technology. Don’t get me wrong, I am a hawk when it comes to technology. However as I get older, I am starting to see both side of how we respect and abuse the things in our digitally connected world.

16% have been approached by a stranger

Sixteen percent of who? Our children that have access to the Internet. This can be quite disturbing especially for parents who are aware of cyber criminal activities.

Parents, educators, and concerned citizens should be proactive in learning how to protect children from the dangers that the web present.

We cannot continue ignore such issues.

If you have the opportunity, please read what the FBI has to share about children and cyber crime.

Monstrous Uniform Resource Locators

Can you believe that a teacher (not calling out any names) or teachers still have students enter monstrously long URLs as displayed above? Don’t you know that by the time the students enter all of the letters CORRECTLY and actually get to the assigned website, that have the class period is gone?

Redirectors or URL shorteners are here to save us (especially students) from the headache from receiving repeated 404 errors/page cannot be displayed errors due to one incorrect character. My personal favorite are tr.im & bit.ly… There are many, many more; in addition, these sites are NOT blocked (for now) by school’s web filters.

So…If you are still posting URLs from hades, shame on you!