Betchablog

OK, I actually did it. If you read the previous post, you’ll know that I was thinking of moving this blog to a self-hosted server and doing a bit of a blog makeover in the process. I asked for some feedback via the survey… thank you very much to everyone who kindly responded. The results were interesting.

Some of you were ok with the site the way it is (and you’re right I think. It’s not *terrible*, though I thought it could be improved) Most of you didn’t reallt hate the current design, but a majority agreed that it could use an update, or at least thought that a change would be as good as a holiday. Quite a few of you didn’t really care one way or the other, since you only ever view the site in an RSS reader anyway.

There were a lot of positive comments about the quality of the content (Thank you!) but there was a general consensus that the sidebars were a little too cluttered and messy. I think I agree with you. The current blog just sort of evolved over time and had a lot going on in the sidebars that was not all that relevant to you. (although tracking visitors and the like is interesting to me, I can see that it’s not all that important to you)   I agree that the most important thing is (or at least should be) the content, and that the easier I can make it to get to it, find what you’re looking for, and read it, the better.

So I’ve moved to a new blog.  You can find it at www.chrisbetcher.com, although most of the old addresses, such as www.betchablog.com or www.betchaboy.com will redirect to it. (All except the actual Edublogs URL obviously) The export and import worked ok for the most part, although there are few oddities with fonts in places, and there may be missing images from some of the very old posts. Que Sera.  I’ve redone all the RSS feeds so things should work as usual in your feed readers without you needing to change anything.  Rather than start again, I managed to shift over the existing site stats, Google analytics and so on to the new site – something that I did for the technical geekery of finding out how to do it moreso than because I actually needed them carried over.

The new site is a bit plain at the moment, but I want to keep it fairly simple.  I gave a sneak peek to some of my Twitter folk to do a bit of usability testing and the response so far was positive.  Thanks to everyone who offered some feedback and to test it for me.  I still need to design a graphic header, maybe tweak the CSS to adjust some of the colours, etc, but I think it will be worth it for the additional stuff I can do with Wordpress plugins.  There are some amazing plugins out there, but not all of them work with WPMU and I can understand why the Edublogs team have to be a little conservative about which ones they allow… a rogue plugin can bring down a Wordpress server, and when you have the sorts of uptime pressures that Edublogs must have, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.  In my own sandpit, I don’t have to play it as safe so I can try using some neat Wordpress tools that I wouldn’t normally have access to.

Thanks again to everyone who reads and engages with Betchablog.  I hope you make the move with me over to the new site, and I look forward to lots more blogging in the future.

And a special thank you to the team at Edublogs for everything you’ve provide to not just me, but to the entire edublogging community over the years.  It’s a great service and I would never have gotten to this point without you.

See you all on the other side…

Image: ‘We’re Not Gone‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035597898@N01/405395160

For a few years now, this blog has been an important place for me to do my “thinking out loud”, and in the process it’s been extremely rewarding to have been able to share some of that public pondering with others.  I’ve learned a great deal from the whole blogging experience and although the frequency of posting has sometimes varied with life’s little circumstances, on the whole it’s been wonderful to evolve this blog as my own little place in cyberspace.

I have absolutely no intention of changing the role of this blog as a place to think about, share and discuss ideas that interest me.  Despite the rise of Twitter and other microblogging services, there’s a lot I can’t say in 140 characters so I plan to be writing here for quite a while yet.

The theme for this blog has been pretty much the same since I started it here on Edublogs.  Almost from day one, I chose the Andreas theme, a Wordpress theme designed by the incredible Andreas Viklund because it has a number of design features that are important to me – two sidebars and an “elastic” resizing that stretches the main column to fit any size browser window. It has the usual ability to embed various widgets and feeds, but most blog themes can manage that.  And while it has a few customisation options for changing colours and so on, visually it’s a pretty basic sort of theme.  Some might even say it’s a bit boring. I’ve often thought about changing it, but I’m wary of just swapping themes at random and besides, although Edublogs may offer 100 different themes there’s only handful that I actually like.

Although I’ve said many times that I blog mainly for myself, it’s still nice to think that there are readers out there who actually spend time reading this stuff. While it might be fun to just swap themes whenever the mood strikes me, I’m sure it would be a little off-putting for visitors if the site looked different every time they dropped by. For me, providing some visual consistency with the aim of building readership has been more important than simply swapping blog themes for my own amusement when I’m bored, even though I am often tempted to.

Lately though, I am really getting itchy feet to do a site overhaul.  There are some really interesting Wordpress themes and plugins around at the moment, and I’m feeling the need to take advantage of them.  Of course, this may necessitate a move from the legendary Edublogs service to a self hosted Wordpress server.  That makes it quite an emotional decision, because both James and Sue have been awesome in what they’ve offered to the global blogging community over the last few years.  They have both been personally very helpful to me when I’ve had requests, needed assistance or I’ve just been able to hang out with them.  The thought of not having my blog running on the Edublogs servers is hard to imagine.

But in the last few months I’ve had to get a bit of Wordpress backend experience.  We installed our own WPMU server at school after Edublogs placed restrictions on non-supporter blogs, and to be honest, managing the server has been really quite straightforward.  It took a bit of fiddling to get some of the RSS running just the way I wanted, but once it’s done it works just fine.  I also helped my partner Linda set up her new self hosted blog and was quite stunned at the additional power and options she got from it.

The other thing I did which helped me understand how this stuff works was to install Wordpress locally on my MacBook Pro.  It’s quite straightforward and takes advantage of the super-useful MAMP stack, a neat little bundle of tools that, with one easy click, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP on the machine, effectively turning it from a regular old laptop into a powerful web server capable of delivering server-side applications like Wordpress and Moodle.  By running MAMP and installing the Wordpress code, I now have a fully functioning Wordpress server on my laptop that lets me experiment and play with all sorts of themes and plugins from Wordpress.org.  If you’re even only slightly technical, you should find it very easy to do, and extremely worthwhile.

If I do make the move to a self-hosted Wordpress installation, the other thing I haven’t really worked out is how to handle the subscribers feeds.  The blogs currently has nearly 1200 subscribers and I’d rather not just lose them and start again.  I do redirect my subscription feeds through Feedburner, so it may be as simple as just telling Feedburner what the new site URL is.  Then again, it might not be that simple either.  I need to take a closer look at how that stuff works.

Either way, moving from Edublogs to a new server, moving from the current blog design to a new one, are all decisions that I’m still wrangling with. It’s easier to just leave things as they are, but perhaps it’s time for a change.

So I’d really appreciate your thoughts… assuming I can look after all the technical backend stuff to get the same or more functionality from the blog, but with a nice fresh clean theme, what do you think? Should I make the change?  Do you even care?  If you could take a moment to do this quick survey I’d really appreciate it.

And thanks for being a reader!

Image: ‘Do you Tango? [snag]‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36613169@N00/378823

Hope 2010 is a great year for you all!

This photo is made of three separate images stitched together with Photoshop.  It’s the calm before the fireworks storm!  I thought it turned out quite well considering I didn’t have a tripod and was just leaning up against the wall to hold the camera steady on a 4 second/f3.5 setting.

CC photo by betchaboy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/4233820172/

I’m a big fan of Leo Laporte.  Leo is best known these days for running the TWiT network (This Week in Tech), a podcasting empire that publishes more than a dozen excellent tech podcasts like MacBreak Weekly, This Week in Tech, This Week in Google, FLOSS Weekly, Windows Weekly, Net@Night and quite a few others, but he comes from a background in traditional radio and TV media. Leo has a wonderful, easy-to-listen-to manner, has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry better than anyone I know, and is always covering the latest, most interesting stories in tech.  It’s easy to stay current with the latest tech goings-on just by listening to one (or more) of his podcasts. I listen to at least three of them reguarly, and others when I have more time… my drive to work just wouldn’t be the same without Leo!

This clip is a recording of a live stream from a talk given by Leo to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.  It goes for about 40 minutes, but if you’re looking for some excellent explanations of how and why the media landscape is changing, you really should take a listen to what he has to say.

Some of my favourite quotes from this talk:

On the economics of online advertising:  If you think the newspapers and the television stations are in trouble now, just wait a few years, because Facebook and Google offer advertisers the holy grail. When you buy an ad on those platforms, you’re buying an ad from somebody who is interested in buying your product. They’re pre-qualified. Yeah, I can get 18 million on Seinfeld, but I have to pay for 18 million – I only want to talk to 100,000.  On Facebook and Google I get that 100,000 and no more.  It’s hugely valuable, and they’re not going to pay these princely sums for these audiences anymore.  That model is dead.”

On the future of traditional media: “Newspapers were invented to distribute display ads, and they just stuck some stuff in between the display ads. As soon as display ads don’t work, which they’re not, it’s going to go away… (newspapers) will be the realm of the rich person.  We’ve see revolutions like this before. When Gutenberg invented movable type in the 15th century, before that, only the very rich could afford a book because it had to be hand-written by a monk. The printing press made all this accessible. Did it kill books?  No, but it changed fundamentally what a book is.  So if you look really short term, yeah TV didn’t kill radio or the movies, we still have all that… but I think we are in a much more fundamental transition… Will blockbuster movies go away? Probably not, but I think you’re going to start to see far more small films created by kids with digital cameras.  This YouTube generation is going to change everything.  I think way we understand movies, the way we understand newspapers is going to go away.”

On the role of Twitter: “Twitter is brilliant, but I think it’s just the first iteration of what will eventually be an internet nervous system that you’ll be plugged into, and the zeitgeist will flow around you at all times. I think there’s better ways to do it than Twitter.  I think we participate in it as journalists… we’re actually the input, we’re the ones who are putting content into it, and then people stir it and churn it around.  Twitter is at it’s best, not when you say ‘I had toast for breakfast’, but when you say ‘Did you read this great article?’  If you really use Twitter properly, if you check it regularly, you don’t have any fear any more that you’re going to miss something, do you? Because you just know. If you follow the right people, the stuff you care about, you just know.”

On getting attention online: “The science fiction author Howard Sturgeon said ‘80% of everything is crap’, and I think there’s some of you right now that might say it’s more like 99% of everything is crap. There’s all this stuff now, and how does stuff surface. I believe that the 1% of the great stuff will just surface.  As this internet nervous system gets more developed, word of mouth becomes more efficient and great stuff rises. Soon, you will no longer be able to use mainstream media as a launching pad. The answer, I think now, is the same as it should always have been – the best content. The way to get good is by doing great stuff. Do the best stuff you can, do the stuff you care the most about so that your passion shines through, because people love it when you’re passionate.  And if your passion shines through and you’re doing great stuff, I believe that this new internet nervous system will surface you. So yeah, there’s a lot of crappy YouTube videos, there’s a lot of stupid Twitterers – there’s a lot of crap, there’s more crap than ever before – but at the same time, there’s more great stuff than ever before.  Just do good stuff.”

As an educator, I think that last quote contains the real truth that we need to be encouraging out of our students, ourselves and our colleagues. “Do the best stuff you can, do the stuff you care the most about so that your passion shines through, because people love it when you’re passionate.”

Thanks Leo.

I hope you’ve all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year’s event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com

I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task.

As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you see above. It’s not exactly what I’d planned, but I’m still pretty happy with it… it still looks at most of the things I wanted to include, but just not in the way I’d originally envisioned.

It was an interested experience to hang all this stuff off a single focus point, in this case, the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition that takes place in Sydney each October/November. I particularly liked the idea of using SxS as the core for the presentation because I know of quite a few schools that do actually use it as the basis for a thematic unit of work for their students so I know that it really does have a “real world” use in education. I was also quite fascinated with the way that social media and web technologies have infiltrated and expanded the event over the last few years, and I think it offers a great example of how the web and the real world can collide in a good way. I also liked the notion that the use of technology in schools can (and should!) be used to support real live physical events, and that technology really can be used to enrich a real world experience. And finally, because K12 Online is such an international event, I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase a little bit of Sydney, this beautiful city in which I feel so lucky to live.

Hope you enjoy the presentation, and that you take the time to check out the other 79 or so presentations that have been part of the conference this year.

In the past six days I’ve received six emails from various companies asking me if I’d please be so kind as to promote their services, talk about their products or otherwise just mention their wares in a blog post.  This is not a new thing – I’ve been getting more and more of these requests over the past 12 months – but the frequency of them has been increasing to the point where it now sometimes averages one a day.  In a weird sort of way, I guess this is an indication of some level of “success” in the blogosphere.

But to anyone considering asking me to be a schill for your wares, can I save you all some time?  The answer is no. This is a blog, not a brothel.

Look, I’m sure you’re products and services are fabulous, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere may be interested in them.  I even kind of admire the fact that you “get” the power of new/social media enough to take the initiative of asking regular people like me to spruik the benefits of your products.  It’s nice that some of you couched it in terms of “take a look at what we do and if you think it’s a good thing, perhaps you can tell people about it”… that’s at least a respectful way of asking for promotional assistance.  But the answer is still no.  If I thought that a blogger was writing about something for any reasons other than their own, I would lose all faith in whatever they had to say, never being sure exactly where the line was between opinion and advertising. I’m used to being lied to in the traditional media, but I expect better from new media.

To that online university offering a 3 year degree program… it sounds like an ok idea, but no, I don’t want to include a link to your site on my site.  Actually, what is it with online universities? – I have had a ton of requests from quite a few of them, all asking me to include a “simple text-based link” to them, many even offering me reasonable cash payments to do so.  The answer is still no.

To that multimedia organisation that is “creating a portal into the soul of humanity by championing the selfless acts of others”… thanks for asking, but no.

To the flashcard company that wanted me to review their product on my blog, no, sorry.  Actually, after looking at what your product and educational philosophy is all about, it’s probably better I don’t write a review for you. Any tool that focuses on creating better ways to do rote learning is not something you want me to review, trust me.

To the other flashcard company who also wanted me to write about their “unique free services” in one of my upcoming posts, thanks but no thanks. Again, I’m less than impressed with services that help me learn better at the lowest end of Blooms taxonomy.

To the childrens’ book online website that was keen for me to write a review of their product in exchange for a 6 month premium subscription… nope.  Thanks for thinking of me, but asking me to blog about your product, and then telling me how much my readers would benefit from it is a less than subtle way of disguising how much you think you might benefit from it. Thanks, but again, no.

And to the commercial blog run by an online school that was interested in me reposting one of their recent posts, because it would “appeal to my readers”, thanks for thinking of us all, but no.  If the content is compelling enough, people will find it without my help.

Like I said, I appreciate being asked (although you can all stop asking! The answer is still no!) and I suppose it’s nice to think that other people might consider this blog to be worthy or influential enough to ask for a bit of free publicity.  If this happens to me, I can only imagine how many of these requests are made to other bloggers with some real influence!

The bottom line is that Betchablog is, and will remain, independent.  I’m not interested in writing about anything other than what I’m interested in writing about. I don’t take money in exchange for opinion. I won’t write about anyone’s product or service unless I want to do it for my own reasons.  I certainly won’t put links into my posts that I’ve been paid to put there.  I’m flattered to be asked, but even thinking about doing it makes me feel dirty.

Image: ‘Soho Street‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/86821409@N00/3479744130

Crossposted on the Adobe Education Leaders blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/)

I remember the first time I saw Photoshop.

I think it must have been about 1993 or so, when I got a free copy that came with a scanner purchased by my school. It must have been a “lite” version of Photoshop because I seem to recall that it didn’t support layers. Even so, I really enjoyed playing with it, and I ended up installing it on all the computers in the school computer lab (license? what license?) and I started teaching the kids how to create stuff with it. They just blew me away with what they could do with it, even without layers!

It was around the same time that I stumbled across an unused copy of Aldus Pagemaker in an out-of-the-way cupboard, and I convinced the school principal that we should use it to do the school yearbook; his agreement to my suggestion saw me suddenly escalated to head of the yearbook committee, a job that rolled on for many years and many issues beyond that. Of course, once you start working in Pagemaker (and now InDesign) there is a fairly fundamental expectation that Photoshop is a key part of that workflow.

From these accidental beginnings, I developed a long standing relationship with Photoshop. In the late 90s I was working with students to build collaborative websites, and of course all the graphics were done with Photoshop. We discovered all sorts of interesting features like batch processing, we learned to do decent colour corrections, to crop and manipulate images so that they fitted our needs. We discovered, often the hard way, about important concepts like pixel depth, image resolution, colour gamut, and of course the one that catches every self-taught Photoshop user out at some stage, RGB vs CMYK. We made images for the web and for print, we built graphics from scratch and we did weird things to existing photos. I’m just a teacher, not a graphic designer, but I’ve lost track of the hours and hours and hours I’ve spent inside Photoshop over the last 15+ years.

And here’s the thing about Photoshop. Heck, here’s the thing about pretty much all of Adobe’s products… the more I know, the more I realise I don’t know. Every time I learn some new technique or skill, the self-satisfied smug feeling of cleverness lasts about five seconds before I realise that there is just so much more I could know about it, that I could do with it. Whenever I taught kids a unit of work on Photoshop I used to conclude it with an in-class practical test, where I’d give them some images and a problem to solve – it might be to produce some CD cover artwork or a magazine cover, usually with a few constraints or requirements to make them have to think about it a little – and they’d just astound me at what they’d come up with. “Creative Suite” is a good name for these products, because they really do force you into creativity mode. Most of the time after one of these class tests, I’d spend the next few lessons getting the kids to deconstruct what they’d done, to teach me how they got certain effects. In my Photoshop classes I may have been the teacher, but we were all learners.

When I was offered a place in the Adobe Education Leaders program, I was thrilled to be part of it, and felt relatively well qualified to be part of it given that I’d spent over 15 years teaching Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver and Flash to students. Of course, mixing with other AELs and seeing the fantastic things they do is a great way to reinforce just how little I do actually know, but it’s still been an incredibly valuable association for me.

I got thinking about this lately because I’ve been checking out the tutorials on the newly redesigned Adobe TV. It’s an awesome resource, with every application now having a Learn series, a set of basic tutorials that teach the essential skills required to get up to speed quickly… I wish this had been around when i started playing with Photoshop! As well as the Learn tutorials, there are a bunch of more advanced tutorials that delve into some of the trickier and more esoteric concepts.

And Adobe TV is not the only resource I turn to when I want to know more. There seems to be plenty of other places to learn the how-to stuff for Adobe’s products. Some of my favourites are the Layers TV podcast with Corey Barker and RC, the Creative Suite Podcast with Terry White, Creative Sweet TV with Mike McHugh, Instant Indesign with Gabriel Powell, The Russell Brown Show… the list goes on. I subscribe to all of these through iTunes and they just drop onto my iPhone for later watching. It’s a great way to learn. I’m sure there are many other fantastic resources for learning this stuff… perhaps you could leave a note in the comments about some of the resources you have found useful for learning.

Finally, I just wanted to mention a book I bought recently about Photoshop that is quite simply one of the most amazing Photoshop guides I’ve ever seen. It’s simply called Creative Photoshop CS4 by Derek Lea, and I’m just stunned at how incredible this guy is when it comes to Photoshop. I’ve been working my way through some of his exercises and have been discovering something new on almost every page. When you can use a product for over 15 years, and still constantly discover new things, it says a lot about the depth of the product and the open-ended nature of what it lets you do with it.

I realise more than ever that there is so much I don’t know about Photoshop (and most of the other Adobe products!) But I love that feeling of learning, of discovering, of digging deeper and just discovering that there really is no “bottom” to hit.

Yes, it’s that time of year again! The annual Edublog Awards are in full swing, and after a few weeks of people making nominations for various blogs, tweets, wikis and social networks across a really broad range of categories, I’m extremely honoured to have had not one, but two of my online projects – Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom – mentioned for an “Eddie” this year.

These awards (which are great to be considered for, but hopefully not to be taken too seriously!) aim to highlight and recognise some of the great work taking place in the online educational sphere.  Education is certainly one sector that seems to have really embraced the use of blogging as a tool for reflection, sharing, helping others and generally assisting teachers and students to “find their voice”.  I know that I’ve personally found the act of blogging to be critical in helping me “think out loud”, processing ideas in a public space where they can be exposed to the scrutiny, support and suggestions of others.  Having a blog has certainly helped me find my own voice and given me a platform from which I can share easily and freely with the world, whether it’s some resource I’ve found, a tutorial I’ve made, or just some vague idea that’s been floating around in my head looking for a place to be expressed.  I blog for myself first and foremost, and the idea that someone else might also find some value in any of it is just the icing on the cake, although it is certainly very tasty icing! I really do value the sense of community that my blog has created for me and although I say that I write just for myself, I must admit that it would be quite a hollow experience without the wonderful support of those who read, comment and engage with me.

To those that nominated Betchablog or The Virtual Staffroom this year, thank you!  To those that might consider casting a vote for either of them, thank you to you too.  But mostly thank you to everyone who reads (and subscribes) to some of these things I’ve been doing online over the last few years… you are the ones who make it all worthwhile for me.