Paul's Web Space 2.1

Open Source Makes a Splash at NECC

(This is a longer, unedited version of a my blog post "Open Source on the Agenda," which appeared earlier this month on Education Week's Digital Education blog.)

Open source technology displayed a growing presence at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2009. The Open Source Lab held popular sessions throughout the conference, while the Open Source Playground showcased various technologies and organizations – serving as a mini exhibit floor for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. Nearby, NECC Unplugged held free-form sessions, and the Bloggers Café was a hub of spontaneous creativity. While still dwarfed by the exhibition floor downstairs, these features attracted sell-out audiences and an increasingly large and passionate fan base among NECC attendees.

Presentations and handouts touted numerous open source alternatives to traditional software, the best collected in a handout listing the Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education. Two speakers stood out among the many presenters who may be familiar to Digital Education readers:

• Steve Hargadon of Elluminate, CoSN, and Classroom 2.0, and organizer of open source and EduBloggerCon events at NECC 2009, presented tirelessly on educational applications for open source software, social networks, and Web 2.0.
  
• Award-winning Georgia educator and entrepreneur Vicki Davis gave presentations on educational use of wikis and social bookmarking groups, among other topics.

Ubuntu Linux was represented in both the Lab and the Playground, with a clustered distribution running 60 thin client workstations setup by Revolution Linux. Revolution’s Educational Services Director, Benoit St-Andre, led a session on avoiding common pitfalls of open source software deployments. He later told me of much larger thin client deployments they have carried out in school districts of up to 10,000 workstations and 40,000 students (which save both hardware and power costs). Local Ubuntu users group volunteers also highlighted for me custom distributions; such as the Netbook Remix (designed for small screens) and Edubuntu, which is targeted specifically at education users. The Wikipedia article on Ubuntu contains much more detail on the history and versions of this breakthrough version of Linux.

Curriki was well represented at NECC as well. Blogger and evangelist Anna Batchelder gave an NECC Unplugged talk on open education resources, covering Curriki and other offerings such as MIT OpenCourseWare, FreeReading, Connexions, and OER Commons — the latter can be searched directly from our Teacher Magazine home page. Executive Director Dr. Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan touted the value and cost savings Curriki makes possible at a breakfast meeting that also featured Chicago Public Schools technology administrators outlining how open source infrastructure helped them leverage E-Rate funds to enjoy $1 million per year in network operations cost savings.

The other major “exhibitor” at the Open Source Playground was One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its operating software, the affiliated Sugar Learning Platform. The OLPC project experienced a rocky start, featuring a slower-than-expected adoption and a very public split between the hardware and software projects, but has made strides recently in Latin America. I spoke with the exhibit’s organizer, Mike Lee, manager of the DC-based OLPC Learning Club and a director of the team that operates AARP.org. Mike told me about OLPCorps Africa, an effort to spread 100 teams of volunteers across the continent to deploy at least 100 laptops per team; blog aggregator Planet OLPC provides news updates on this and related efforts. While the OLPC project isn’t officially directed at the United States, there are volunteer projects in cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago featuring significant deployments, and local high school students are involved in Mike’s Sugar Labs DC project team as well. One Laptop Per Child really represents a disruptive technology in the truest sense — essentially inspiring from scratch the creation of an entirely new category of computers, known as netbooks, that is becoming increasingly popular and influential.

Labels: edtech, education, edweek, necc09, open source, technology

   Link: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2009/07/open_source_on_the_agenda.html

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Edweek.org Sponsors Teachers College Debate, Produces Election Multimedia

The web site I manage, edweek.org, cosponsored and facilitated the live Webcast of a debate Tuesday evening at Teachers College between the top education policy advisers to the Presidential campaigns — Linda Darling-Hammond, an adviser for Sen. Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, Sen. John McCain's top education adviser. Education Week also organized a post-debate panel discussion featuring an array of education policy experts and moderated by Education Week reporter David Hoff, which we videotaped for later viewing.

In addition to the complete debate and panel discussion, we created several clips of discussions on policy issues of interest to our readers, and posted them to related blog. Our Teacher Beat blog discussed teacher preparation and motivation in At Ed Debate, Sparks Fly Over Merit Pay, TFA, and the Campaign K-12 blog posted their impressions of Keegan's and Darling-Hammond's answers to the question Who's Going to Be Education Secretary?. Finally, our producers performed a word cloud analysis of the debate text – In a Word, 'Teachers' Are Center of Debate – described in the blog NCLB Act II.

Elsewhere, our web team created a cool online trivia game – How Well Do you Know the Presidential Candidates? – where you try to guess which candidate uttered various statements about education policy. Also included is a Voter's Guide comparing and contrasting McCain and Obama's positions on various education policy issues. We've collected these features and more on our new Campaign 2008 Multimedia and Interactive Coverage page, along with running Twitter streams displaying "Tweets" about the campaign in general (we're Twittering as @edweek2008elect), and specifically about the Teachers College debate — we created the hashtag #tcdebate for the purpose, which actually spent much of Tuesday evening atop Twitter's Hot Election Topics. These presentations have enhanced our coverage of the election campaign, and exposed our work to new audiences.

Labels: education, edweek, politics, tcdebate, Teachers College, twitter

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/campaign08/mm_coverage.html

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DNC Convention 2008 Excitement

The DNC Convention has certainly been an interesting event, made even more so by the role I've played in exposing edweek.org's expanded coverage, and by my friend who spoke there.

First, I was Twittering about Edweek's coverage and Campaign K-12 blog using the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags. Leslie Bradshaw sent me a Tweet in response describing the coverage that she was setting up for C-SPAN. Her social media agencies New Media Strategies and JESS3 created this site, picked the blogs, and made C-SPAN video embeddable by bloggers for the first time.

On the bottom of this page, there are local and national blogs, including ours; there is also a page compiling all #RNC08 and #DNC08 tweets, including many from Education Week. Not only are we using blogs and tweets more actively than ever before, but we managed to have our coverage picked up by C-SPAN and Frank Rich in the New York Times.


Then on opening night, my friend Margie Perez spoke at the convention. Margie was great — she talked about the impact of Katrina on her and on New Orleans, the lame response by the Bush Administration, and the help she got from Habitat for Humanity, and her smile was a mile across. She then introduced a video narrated by Jimmy Carter with more about the project. Her blog posts describing the experience are priceless (part 1) (part 2). Another friend, Armand Lione, posted the YouTube video you see above.

An electrifying week, and it's not over yet!

Labels: DNC08, edweek, politics, socialmedia, twitter

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Job: Online Community Intern at edweek.org

Do you use multiple social networking services, write for a blog, or lead discussions on web forums? How would you like to apply those skills as an intern for an online journalism operation, and gain valuable job experience at the same time?

Edweek.org, a national non-profit news Web site covering K-12 education, seeks an online community intern to help manage our online community and contribute to viral marketing and social networking campaigns on behalf of the organization.

Responsibilities include:

• monitoring comments and forum posts for inappropriate content;
• managing one or more social network profiles or channels;
• performing outreach to bloggers and social bookmarking sites;
• promoting a sense of community through participation and feedback;
• occasional web design or production tasks in support of these activities.

Qualifications: The position requires experience engaging with several social media applications and web communities, good writing and editing ability, basic HTML skill, a strong work ethic, and a highly developed sense of humor. Must be able to meet deadlines and work under pressure. Experience with CSS, graphic or multimedia editing, or blogging or content management system software a plus.

We welcome interns with an interest in social media, journalism/communications, education news and policy, and/or multimedia production. We are metro-accessible, a short walk from the red line in downtown Bethesda.

Please send resume, cover letter and samples/links via e-mail to: WebIntern@epe.org, and tell us where you saw the ad.

Labels: community, edweek, socialmedia, socialnetworks

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/

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SEO Resources, Events, Consultants, Blogs, Etc.

At edweek.org, we're fixin' to crank up our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, a roughly biennial effort, but always worthwhile, because best practices are always improving, and the search engines we're targeting also continually tweak their algorithms to prevent gaming and other distortions.

There are many blogs and other information resources available, often totally free (sometimes with a pay "premium" level of service as well). Anybody who understands the basics behind search engines, as well as concepts such as information architecture, taxonomy, and maybe a little semantic web, can get a good head start simply by consulting free resources and applying a handful of best practices to their site. One principle to keep in mind, though, is that applying SEO to a web site should not distort the presentation of information to make it less understandable by humans in the service of search engines — rather, you should only make changes that enable readers to understand and find information more easily as well.

A. Information Resources — the best news, tools, and information services, some free, some paid, and sometimes with consulting services also offered:

1. In 1996, Danny Sullivan founded the granddaddy of information services that track search engines, SearchEngineWatch.com. He sold it in 1997, but remained associated with it and the related conference series Search Engine Strategies, until 2006, through a couple more mergers and sales that left him with less of a stake in its success. It is still a major resource in the space, along with the affiliated interactive marketing service ClickZ.

2. Danny Sullivan has since started a new company, Third Door Media, which I believe has quickly become the premier resource, and certainly contains the most vibrant communities, in this space.

• First there is the blog and information service Search Engine Land.
• Then there is the growing series of SMX — Search Marketing Expo conferences.
• It offers Search Marketing Now, a series of free webcasts and webinars.
• And finally it operates Sphinn.com, a social news/discussion site for search engine marketers.

3. SEOmoz.org, founded by Rand Fishkin in 1994, provides many free and paid services. They have a daily blog and member blog; and publish more detailed articles (both free and paid/PRO), and provide an extensive set tools for free. Their PRO Membership includes more tools and more features in free tools, a dashboard, premium guides and paid articles. They also provide high-end consulting services.

4. Search Engine Roundtable is a group blog featuring forum leaders from many leading SEM forums around the web, a search engine that searches these selected forums in the aggregate, as well as its own Search Engine Roundtable Forums where anyone can contribute. The primary editors are Barry Schwartz and Tamar Weinberg of RustyBrick, a web design and SEO consultancy based in NYC. Their blog posts are very informative, but the forums covered seem slightly dated (Danny Sullivan is still listed with SearchEngineWatch, and his newer Sphinn forums are nowhere to be found.)

5. Check out this list of seven SEO News Aggregators from TopRank Online Marketing, who also maintain the much larger BIGLIST of SEM and SEO blogs

6. Then there's the mostly-paid SearchEngineNews.com service from Planet Ocean. The few select articles available for free are presented mostly to pitch the paid subscription service; I don't know what's behind the paid curtain, but other people at edweek.org have obtained useful information from this service.

B. Consulting Firms — firms that provide consulting, perhaps conferences, and some free information mostly to support their services business:

1. BusinessOnLine specializes in SEO, usability, and web strategy. Managing Partner Aaron Kahlow also chairs the Online Marketing Summit — I've seen him speak several times, and worked with him on social networks devoted to online marketing. I also attended a class on SEO taught by Ray "Catfish" Comstock, their Search Engine Optimization Manager — his fascinating lecture at a VisualSciences conference drove many of the changes we have made over the past couple years, giving us a great start that we're now looking to build upon.

2. Enquiro, founded by Gord Hotchikiss, specializes in B2B SEM/SEO, as well as testing/usability. They are located in British Columbia, and are said to be remarkably smart, easy to work with, passionate, and reasonably priced; they also publish articles, blogs, and case studies.

3. I've also seen Gary Angel, President and CTO of SEMPhonic, speak at a VisualSciences conference, and was suitably impressed. SEMPhonic offers various services related to Web analytics and SEM, and publish articles and blogs demonstrating their expertise, and describing their methodology known as Functionalism. They also sell a product to automate SEM tracking, and host conferences on analytics.

As with lists like this that attempt to be comprehensive, I will likely update this post from time to time; I will either repost it, or post an update notice with a link. I hope you find this helpful.

Labels: edweek, marketing, seo

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