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CLMOOC Central: My Personal Dashboard

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Curation is a tall ask when engaging engaging in any large scale, online community/course like CLMOOC. With so much activity being generated by so many individuals, it is easy to feel both overwhelmed and overwrought with remarkable rapidity. One of the ways I like to bind multiple streams into a manageable means of content control is through the power of RSS and a digital dashboard.

There are still a few digital dashboard services, despite the loss of some heavyweights, like iGoogle and Pageflakes, both of which were really good products actually. I settled on Netvibes some time ago and continue to use it.

The advantage of using a dashboard like Netvibes is that you can easily run a number of data streams onto a single page in the for of widgets, allowing for quick scanning of multiple information sources in a single page view with minimal scrolling. Widget sizes can be altered to fit, as well as page layouts to reduce the need to scroll or accommodate more widgets. While I am making this page public and available to anyone with the address, it is a fairly easy set-up.

  1. Begin by registering for a Netvibes account.
  2. Once logged in click New… in the Dashboards drop-down menu in upper right corner. Enter the keyword(s) that you wish to track (I entered CLMOOC 2014).
  3. A number of pre-defined widgets will appear on the page (alter as desired).
    • Click the arrow-head to the right of the tab title for a drop-down menu that includes the page layout, how the widgets will be displayed.
    • Clicking the Green +Add button in the upper-left corner will reveal a all kinds of widget possibilities, many leveraging RSS.

I added the webpage widget along the top of the tab, partly because it looked cool with the logo, but also because I can scroll within the widget frame and see announcements quickly and easily.

I ran the Twitter and Google+ feeds off to the right, along the top to instantly scan the the most current information. What is really nice is that Netvibes has already done the work for collecting a Google+ stream, despite it not generating an RSS feed. So no extra work required there.

Below the fold, requiring some scrolling, I added the image feeds from Flickr, Picasa, and Instagram to browse the various memes and visuals created as part of the CLMOOC experience. Additionally, I paired the images with a widget gathering all the videos tagged in YouTube and Vimeo.

I can add other RSS feeds later, say like Diigo or Delicious if that proves to be a highly used tool for collecting sites and resources. I can even add a blogroll like widget if I like to track posts from select participants once things get rolling.

The one drawback is that the widgets are stuck streaming in reverse chronological order, so there is no real filter other than the most current content rising to the top. Still, a dashboard like this is great when you want to take the temperature of a highly active effort. A quick scan can help you get up-to-date in a hurry. This example will no doubt evolve as CLMOOC unfolds.

Lastly, I can’t say that I completely came up with this idea on my own. It is actually a bit of a hack based on something I learned from Steve Hargadon in the earliest days of the Classroom 2.0 Ning (way back in the olden times of 2008). Still, this seemed a pretty easy early How to Guide for creating something that can be a useful tool in the sometimes chaotic MOOC experience.

Reactions to “Third World America” and the Whole Broadband is the Future Ruse

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So I was scrolling through my RSS reader and came across a blog post, “Third World America,” by edtech maven David Warlick, his keynote was the subject of my previous post. In it he discusses how he was in rural Wisconsin, speaking to educators as part of a professional development event, and he had no access to the Internet in his hotel. As he spoke to the teachers he also states:

“But what was hovering just beyond these conversations was the fact that a
large percentage of the population that these educators serve are without
Internet and a larger percentage who do have it, are still dialing in. Part of
the problem is that the area is fairly economically depressed.”

Ironically, I had just been discussing the same issue in a class I am taking to prepare to teach an online course next semester, through a virtual high school. The reality is that there are all kinds of students that will miss the opportunity of online learning simply because they do not have necessary access, which is quickly meaning broadband, let alone the other kinds of artificial governors that schools place on which students get to take online courses. And to think, I will be teaching this course through consortium in which my public school employer is a member!

Even more ironic, I was just speaking with my good friend Joanne, who recently moved to rural Washington. She too was experiencing all kinds of obstacles to obtaining Internet access. The best suggestion to her, at this point, was to build a 100 foot tower on her property, to get above the tree line, so that she could install a satellite dish at the top. Mind you, none of the service providers were even willing to guarantee that the dish would even work!

So, I found myself practically having the same conversation for three days in a row.

All of this got me piping hot about this Internet access issue, and completely agreeing with Warlick’s conclusion:

“Today, geography should not be a factor in who has access to the world of information, who the world of information has access to, nor who has the opportunities to tap into the info-verse and harness opportunities to serve and participate in the emerging global economy.”

He is right on the mark with this post. Moreover, this is a whistle that has not been blown loud enough.

We are already at a point where over half of the packet traffic on the Internet is rich content, demanding broadband connections. To not have a broadband connection in the not too distant future will be to slowly slide deeper and deeper into a “dark age,” which is unconscionable in our country. One of the promises of technology and innovation is that it is a democratizing force in our society, allowing people increased opportunity and information; but we are quickly approaching the moment where that simply is not the case. The price of broadband entry is already high for many and not likely to get any better quickly. So the democratization of technology is really for the haves, while the have nots look to be just plain out of luck.

Robert X. Cringely also wrote some columns about the promised state of broadband access in this country (“When Elephants Dance,” “Game Over,” and “The $200 Billion Rip-Off”), and they chart a history that is downright criminal. Worse yet the real problem is that it doesn’t seem as if many people are even concerned about such a looming crisis. The articles are alarming to say the least.

Much of the Bill Moyers reporting Warlick even mentions is available at the PBS website “Moyers on America – The Net at Risk.” The transcripts, audio, and video are all unavailable.

Not addressing this issue seems to me, not only shameful, but positively un-American.