SETTING UP FILTERS

by Richard White

2010-05-14

Sounds like a pretty technical article here: “Setting up Filters.” That could refer to spam filters, or search result filters, or filtering content to restrict the types of webpages that are being delivered to students at your school’s network. All discussion worthy, but… today, I’m thinking about personal filters.

Let’s look at how you can set up filters in your personal/professional life, filters that allow you to focus on the good stuff coming through—the things that you want or need to focus on—without being distracted by the bad stuff:things that are only going to interfere with your job/life/effectiveness.

Because the reality—our reality—is that there are simply too many channels for input in our lives, and no one is able to manage that firehose unaided. No one. Not me, not you, not your multitasking, ADHD, twenty-something friend living on espressos and Monster drinks.

You’ve almost certainly already taken advantage of some of the coping strategies that have been made available to you: your email client (I use Apple’s Mail.app) or webmail provider (gmail) already has spam filters built in, lucky for us.

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed lately, here are some options to consider:

• Reduce your networks
  Social and professional networks allow us to be more connected than ever. Feature? Yup. Feature AND flaw. More connections are good up to a point, but you’ve got a limited amount of time and energy. If you can’t monitor what’s happening in Facebook, your Ning accounts, your LinkedIn account,… why belong to all of them?
• Reduce your peripherals
  This could run the gamut, from that extra printer that needs to be recycled to the bluetooth mouse you hardly ever use, from the old cellphone (recycle it!) to the extra car that you no longer use. Get rid of all that extra crap that you keep moving from one corner of your desk to another, and free up some CPU cycles.
• Reduce distractions
  There’s ample documentation on the web that getting any actual… you know, WORK… done while you’re AT work is a Herculean /Sisyphean/Greek hero-of-your-choice task. Phone calls (work & cell, emails, text messages, chat messages, colleagues stopping by to ask a question, friends stopping by to take a coffee together, all conspire to make it extraordinarily difficult to do what I love most, and what I’m actually paid to do: teaching. Don’t get me wrong. I love the people I work with and the fact that I can socialize with them. But when it’s time to work, you need to find a way to shut out the distractions.

  Turn off email. Close your browser. Silence the cellphone. I still had one colleague who kept coming in to chat at inopportune times, so I got the clever idea of buying a pair of Sennheiser HD 202 headphones that I could pop over my head when I really needed to get work done. I was wearing them when the guy came in earlier this week when the guy came in and and cleared his throat a few times. I pretended I couldn’t hear him. After a few more tries, he poked me on the shoulder to get my attention, forcing me to look up and take off the headphones.

  “Wow, those things really do a good job of keeping out distractions, eh?” he said.

  “Not good enough, apparently…” I said.

  Was that too mean?

• Reduce complexity
  Life’s a lot more complicated than it used to be, from the television shows we watch to the decisions we have to make as consumers. It makes sense to reduce complexity where possible, in order to save your processing power for the things that are truly important.

  Why carry 7 credit cards in your wallet? Why keep 37 files scattered over your computer’s desktop? Why pay for a landline? Why try to keep your complex schedule in your head, as opposed to on a decent calendar app in your smartphone?

  “You can have anything you want… but you can’t have everything you want.” Figure out what’s important to you, and ditch the rest.

• Organize your news consumption
  This may seem silly, but I’ve stopped reading newspapers, or at least buying them. It’s hard to justify buying magazines, too. I don’t know how the whole “who’s going to support journalism” thing is going to settle out, but while they’re discussing it, I’ve taken to bookmarking RSS feeds on my laptop, syncing those feeds to my cellphone, and reading the news on the computer/cellphone at convenient times. Less waste, and I have enough different news sources now that I can easily scan the RSS headlines, just like I used to scan articles in the newspaper. It’s the new thing.

  Give it a try!

What strategies have you found to simplify your life, things that allow you to filter the distractions in your life so that you can focus on things that are more important to you? Keyboard shortcuts? Cutting your cable service? Ditching your smartphone?

iPad: What’s It to You?

2010-04-09

by Richard White

I’ve had my iPad for just about 5 days now, which means I’ve started to figure out a little bit about what it means to me.

The biggest question most people have, before they’ve used it anyway, is: “What is this? Is it just a big iPod Touch?” I think one of the really cool things about this new device—and I think it’s fair to call it “new”; like most Apple products, it’s not technically a new device, but Apple has gone and made this thing so well that it IS new, for all intents and purposes—is that it can be different things for different people.

• It’s a big iPod Touch
  It plays games and movies like nobody’s business. Two days ago, I made the mistake of leaving it out on my desk at school. When I returned an hour later and started it up, the game “Plants and Zombies” started up, with a “Welcome back, Matthew” opening screen. “Uh, I hope you don’t mind, Mr. White—I didn’t want to mess up your game, so I made my own game account on their,” explained Matthew, a little embarrassed.
• It’s a small computer / netbook killer
  Netbooks, for some people, have been the ideal device for light-duty computing: answering email, surfing the web, working on cloud-based documents, or doing some light word processing. The iPad does at least the first three really, really well. And it’s a super-sexy chick magnet, so… that’s worth the price of admission right there.

  

• It’s a book reading Kindle Killer
  It’s true, the plastic, gray-scale Kindle is doomed. The iPad’s ability to display epub-format books beats the competition all up and down the block. Colors are crisp, the page turn motion is realistic (if that kind of thing is important to you), and their bookshelf metaphor (ripped off from Delicious Monster’s amazing Delicious Library) is stunning. It beats the heck out of sitting in bed reading the dishwater-gray Kindle with a freaking reading light clipped to the screen.
• It’s a Media Consumption Device
  Music, books, and especially movies are SO good on this. How good? Last night I sat on the couch with my girlfriend and her son watching “WarGames” on this machine, streaming over the wireless via Netflix. The giant wall-mounted flat screen hooked up to DirectTV? Yeah, it didn’t even get turned on…
• It’s the Next Big Thing
  Awesome 10-hour battery life, a cool running processor, blazing fast graphics, bright screen, razor-sharp touch interface… It all screams “I am the future!” At least if you’re into consuming media.

I’m not that guy, though—I’m not the media consumption guy. I don’t typically play games on my computer, except for the World of Warcraft years… but there’s no app for that on the iPad. I don’t usually watch movies on my computer. I do record movies on my camera and edit them on my laptop… but you can’t do that on the iPad. I surf a little on the web, but I also create content for the web… and you can’t easily do that on the iPad. I edit Word documents, and you can’t do that in any serious way on the iPad. I do computer-based presentations (PowerPoint/Keynote) for my students… and the iPad has only limited functionality in that area.

I talk a lot about workflow, so what I’m saying is this: I like the iPad in a lot of ways, but it’s not as useful to me for my own workflow.

Not yet. I’m willing to wait a bit.

In the meantime, I’m not the only guy who’s trying to figure out if this is “my thing.”

iPad

2010-04-08

by Richard White

So… yeah. I bought an iPad.

I pre-ordered, and got in line at 6am to hang out with some other really nice people, including Carlos, the youth minister to gang-bangers, and Abraham Peters, who graciously took a picture of all of us standing in line, and the German guy from London, who happened to find himself in the States at the right time and managed to buy a reservation from some guy on Craigslist.

I bought two iPads, actually: one for myself, because I’m an Ed Tech guy, and I have a feeling this is going to be a Very Big Deal. And one for my Dad, because this thing is so made for him.

Picture my Dad, hunched over in the cold, drafty office, reading the online New York Times every morning on an ancient computer screen. Eventually he gets up, rubs his lower back, and heads off into the kitchen where he’ll make some breakfast, sit down at the table, and settle in to read the local newsrag, a pitiful thing that barely qualifies as journalism.

The iPad was made for my Dad. Now, he’s eating his eggs and reading the New York Times online on the blazing bright LED screen, flipping through articles, and emailing me the ones that he especially likes. It’s business as usual… only infinitely better.

We sat on the couch and watched an episode of “Glee” together—he’d never seen it before, and absolutely loved it. We set up Netflix streaming for him. We looked at the books in the online bookstore. At the rate we were going, I’ll be surprised if he ever gets on the computer again, unless it’s to sync his most recent photos to the iPad. Then he’ll unplug, them pack up the little tablet, and take it to my Mom to give her a slide show on the thing.

As for me and my iPad? I’m not as much of a convert. You can read the excellent comments of David Pogue, or John Gruber, or Andy Ihnatko, or this excellent article at Ars Technica, and they say more or less what I say: it’s fast. It’s beautiful. It represents, for many people, the future of computing, where our devices are powerful, and simple, and seamlessly integrated into our lives to the point that we have a hard time remembering what life was like without them. I don’t doubt that that’s going to happen. In fact, I hope it happens—I have a little money invested in Apple, and my son is starting college next year.

But as of this writing, it doesn’t seem to be my thing. It’s a great machine for consuming content, there’s no denying; YouTube never looked so good. But for content creators like myself, or anyone who needs a little more control over their computer—anyone who wants to drive a stickshift—the iPad’s automatic transmission is probably going to be a frustrating experience.

• Want to read a PDF document? You’ll have to email it to yourself, or use a third-party app to get it onto the iPhone’s hermetically-sealed file system.
• Want to edit a Word document? You’ll have to buy the $9.99 neutered version of iWork’s Pages, open up the document in that, edit it, then “Save As…” a Word document, plug in your iPad to your main computer, use iTunes to Export a copy of the document, and then fix any fonts, formatting, or layout that got changed in the process.
• Want to backup your files? Well, you sort of back them up every time you sync, although you can’t actually restore an individual file. You can make a copy of a file from the iPad (for a limited number of applications) by exporting, but you’ll have to go through and do that on a file by file basis. There’s no facility for backing up the entire machine and restoring individual files.

I don’t want to complain too loudly; any device manufacturer on the planet would KILL to have a product like this in their stable. And I totally get that this is going to be a hit.

Facebook’s a hit, too, though. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something that fits my lifestyle, or my workflow.

The typing I do, the websites that I design, the video editing I do, the podcasts I record, the DVDs I rip, the music I record and mix, the presentations I deliver, the programming I do… none of those exist in the world of the iPad in any meaningful way.

And yet…

It’s a very import development, technologically, and I’m looking forward to seeing where we go from here.

It’s an exciting time to be a technologist.

Analog Development

2009-01-15

by Richard White

I’m a minimalist.

Seems like I’ve been “going light” for most of my life, or at least since I got turned on to backpacking, and started eating everything from cereal to steak out of one of those little Sierra cups that were all the rage back in the 70s. I don’t carry any consumer debt, I don’t check a bag (even flying transcontinental)… and you can still occasionally catch me eating Lucky Charms out of that little cup.

The ultralight ethos only got reinforced when I began preparing live in France for an extended period of time. Books, music, photos, lesson plans… everything got moved onto a 15-inch Titanium PowerBook, and it seems like I’ve been living out of a laptop ever since.

I’ve had lots of reasons for expending the time and energy it takes to transfer old-school paper-based lessons and lesson-plans into digital form. Part of it has to do with the ease of transferring information from one year to the next. I look at some of those “Course Planners” that I used to plan the year with, and remember how I’d painstakingly transfer one year’s schedule into another planner for the following school year (writing in pencil, in anticipation of the inevitable changes that would necessitate last-minute adjustments). I had two large 3-inch binders, one for each semester, in which I’d keep detailed lesson plans, copies of handouts, lab activities, tests, test keys.

It’s all a bit overwhelming when I think back on it now.

I’m reminded, though, of how important those pen-and-paper, “analog” lessons were, now that I’m in the process of developing a new course. You can get all sorts of “planning in analog” advice, from everyone from Nancy Duarte to Garr Reynolds, and they’re right.

There are lots of reasons why it’s good to plan with a pencil and pen. Making diagrams and sketches is almost always easier on paper. Collaborators can easily add to your work (as long as they’re in the same room). Paper is easily transported, and multiple pieces of paper can be easily spread out for examination.

For me, it’s mostly a simple question of real estate. I’ve got a two different calendars that I’m working with, a lesson plan for the day, a textbook propped open—and yes, the laptop opened up—and that allows me to organize the disparate elements of the course and assemble them into something more-or-less cohesive, in a way that clicking back-and-forth among eleven open windows on the tiny screen simply doesn’t allow for.

Imagine me and the Sierra cup, a 10-oz steak flopping over the sides, and sauteed mushrooms dropping onto the ground while friend, fellow backpacker, and chef for the evening Brian laughs hysterically.

The final product for the course I’m working on (a computer science course) will include a website, the lessons (in PowerPoint form), a series of assessments, and a whole lot of code examples and programming assignments, and all of it will eventually live on the laptop.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the paper. The notes. The ballpoint pen. The mess.

It’s all part of the process.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Geeks

2009-12-22

by Richard White

I’ll admit right from the start that I have no idea if these techniques align with anything Stephen Covey mentioned in his book (which I haven’t read), but here they are: seven things that will improve the way you work on the computer.

These aren’t sexy, high-gloss, applications that you need to download. No, these are mostly relatively simple, under-the-radar habits that you can incorporate into your Mac, Windows, or Linux workflow immediately, just in time for the New Year (if you’re in need of any easy-to-fill resolutions).

Let’s get started!

1. Organize your directories

If your Documents folder is full of a bunch of random files, or—worse yet—your Desktop is filled with a bunch of random files, you need to clean up your act. Get those files organized into a series of logically organized and nested folders that will give your brain a strong sense of place location.

I don’t care how powerful your operating systems search function is, there’s a benefit to keeping all your receipts in one folder, all of your emails in another folder, all of your materials for Project X located in the Project X folder.

And while you’re at it, switch your file system view from Icon to List view, so you can see that nested file structure.

Here’s a partial glimpse of what mine looks like. Here, a series of PowerPoint lectures are contained in the folder lec, which is contained along with some other folders in a folder for my ap_physics course, which is contained in a directory for this school year called poly09-10, which is grouped with all of my educational materials in a folder called edu, which is in turn contained in my Documents folder. Easy!

2. Print to PDF

Bookmarking websites is a great way of keeping track of those websites that you like to return to, but content on some websites has a unsettling way of disappearing. If you’re interested in keeping an archive copy of something—and article you read, or something you want to read later on when you are offline—you should make a PDF copy of it.

Apple, Windows, and Linux machines all have the capability of “printing” to a PDF formatted file on your local computer. This capability comes standard on Macs and on some Linux machines. Most Windows and Linux machines will need to have an additional bit of free software installed to make this happen. (Google “windows print pdf” to find out where you can get this software for windows, or “linux print pdf” for Linux.)

Not that many webpages include a “single page” option or a “print” button that will show you a page that removes much of the distracting navigation or ads that might otherwise clutter your PDF copy. Then select “Print” in your browser, and choose the PDF option in the Print dialog box. You’ll need to indicate a file name and location on your machine that the file will be saved. Then click “Print” (a bit misleading, because you’re really saving a file), and then you’ll have a local copy of the content, ready to read at your off-line leisure.

3. Take notes with a text editor

Whether it’s the Apple’s TextEdit, Windows’ Notepad, Linux’s gedit, or something a little more powerful—BBEdit (Mac), vim or emacs, etc.—everyone needs a lightning fast text editor that they can use to create little text files. Grocery lists, to-do items, a note on the desktop with the title of that book you need to order… using Microsoft Word or Excel to keep track of a few kilobytes of text is overkill.

4. Organize your bookmarks

All web browsers—Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.—provide you with the opportunity to bookmark frequently visited pages. If you have a LOT of bookmarks, you should definitely consider organizing them into folders, and then perhaps keeping those folders in a “Bookmarks Bar” at the top of your browsing window.

Even better, don’t bookmark the website itself; bookmark the RSS feed for the site, which will inform you when new content is posted by placing a small number indicating the number of unread articles next to the name of the bookmark.

Here, for example, I have 19 blog postings that I haven’t yet read, and 6 educational technology articles that I need to look at at some point.

If you don’t mind others having access to your bookmarks, you might also consider taking advantage of http://del.icio.us, which allows you to subscribe to and sync browser bookmarks across multiple machines.

5. Make a daily backup

The new mantra, courtesy of Leo Laporte and the fine folks at T.W.I.T., nicely summarizes the minimum requirements for keeping your data safe: “3 Copies, 2 Media, 1 Offsite.” In other words, you should have at least three separate copies of your data, stored on at least two different types of media, with at least one of those copies stored offsite (where a local catastrophe can’t harm it).

This is easier than ever to do. Optical disks (CDs and DVDs) are on the way out, and flash drives are still too expensive for their limited capacity. Here’s how you get started:
a. Get an external hard drive and configure your computer to keep a copy of your computer’s files once a day on there. Use Apple’s Time Machine, or Windows’ archive feature, or create a nice little shell script featuring rsync if you use a Linux machine (more on this another time).
b. Subscribe to Mozy, or Backblaze, or one of the other offsite services that, for a pathetically reasonable fee, will backup your entire machine (and, in the case of Backblaze, any external hard drives you have attached to it) for pennies a day. Or maybe it’s nickels a day. Yeah. It’s about 3 nickels a day. For bulletproof, offsite, backup!)
Then you can stop worrying about losing your data. Because you will lose data from your main machine. It’s a fact. You just want to be sure that you have another copy of it so you can easily get it back.

6. Stay in touch (email processing, blog, Twitter, social networking)

We don’t work in isolation. “The more you share, the better,” and computers excel at allowing you to keep in touch with friends, family, colleagues, etc., to an extent that can sometimes feel overwhelming.

The web is full of advice on how to be an effective blogger, or Twitterer, and if you find that at all interesting, by all means explore it. I would suggest that, as technologists, each of of should have at least a passing familiarity with the technology. I’m not on Facebook every day, but I have an account, and update my status every once in awhile, just so people know I’m not dead. I don’t have a long list of tweets, but I follow a few people, and am followed by others, and I occasionally observe as the wave of some recent hot topic builds, crests, and collapses onto itself (it’s fascinating to watch!).

And I have a blog or three (this, one of them) that I use to keep in touch with people in my life, both friends and colleagues. Blogs aren’t for everyone, of course, but as always, it’s great to play with the technology a little bit to see how it all works.

And everyone can deal with Facebook. Double-check your privacy settings and guard your personal information, by all means, but check it out and see what’s going on there. Again, as technologists, we need to be familiar with this stuff.

7. Manage your schedule (calendar, project software, task lists)

Computers have been used for managing calendars and to-do lists from the very earliest days, and the software has only gotten better with time. Everyone can benefit from using Google’s free, online Google Calendar, or Apple’s iCal, or any of the calendar options available on Windows machines. If you’re busy—and you know you are!—you should be using calendar software to help keep your life organized. You get bonus points if that calendar is kept up-to-date and synced regularly with your smartphone (iPhone, Droid, etc.)

Best of all, your brain, once cluttered with “Don’t forget to do X,” will tend to experience less cognitive overload, and be free to do what it was really meant to do: think creatively.

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Chances are, I’m preaching to the choir on this one, but on the off-chance that you’ve ignored some of these up to now, consider this a gentle reminder. None of these items are terribly sophisticated, or beyond the scope of any of us. They’re just good, solid tips that will make your life a better place to be.

Any items you’d like to add to the list? Leave a comment!

WORKFLOW – Emailing Groups

by Richard White

2009-11-18

Okay, we’ve been going on for a few weeks now… I’ve been waving my hands about, talking about “technology this” and “productivity that,” and so far, all I’ve really done is waste your time reading this silly blog.

Perhaps it’s about time that we get serious and start looking at some specific Hybrid Classroom techniques that you can use. Let’s start with an easy one.

Email is the backbone of electronic communication, and is the single most important way that I communicate with students (when I’m not in the classroom) and parents. One of the best uses for email that I’ve found is simply using it to keep in touch with my students (and occasionally their parents) on a semi-regular basis.

For most teachers, it’s not practical to email an individual message to every single student. But you CAN easily email a single message to everyone, if you have their email addresses in a group. The brief video demonstration showing how to do this was created using a Gmail account, but the same principle applies to any other email program that allows you to create groups of contacts.

Briefly:

1. Get a list of student email addresses.
   The easiest way is to have them send you an email with a Subject Line like “Conceptual Physics”.
2. Include those email addresses into a custom group…
   perhaps called “Conceptual Physics”.
3. When you want to send out an email to those students…
   enter the group name into the To: field of your email program. You should see the addresses of all the students on that list appear.
4. Compose email…
   being sure to include a good subject line.

It’s up to you what you’ll actually do with your new email prowess. Teachers who see their students more-or-less everyday might choose to reserve the group email for special occasions: giving them a hint on a hard homework problem, last-minute cancellation of a test, etc. Other teachers like to make it a more regular thing, with course schedules for the week, information that didn’t get mentioned in class, etc.

Next time:
The easy way to Email Parents