Archive for February, 2007

It just happened again. One of my students, working on a video project tried to email me the final version. Fortunately, the TWO GIGABYTE file was too big to be accepted by the UF email server. I did receive the follow-up email asking if I knew if there was something wrong with the email server because this email wasn’t going through.

Just for context, you should know a few things.

1. I teach most of my classes online.
2. The Learning Management System (Blackboard in my case) is where all assignments are turned in (no exceptions).
3. My syllabi specifically state the only time an attachment should be emailed to me is if I ask for it to be mailed to me ahead of time.

I have had instances where the LMS scrambles certain files. Our Bb server still can’t handle Flash files sent from certain Macintosh computers. If I have a student using a Macintosh in a multimedia class, I will have that student file attach a Flash file to me. I only do this AFTER we establish the fact that the LMS won’t handle the file without breaking it.

Having a student email me a file out of the blue is distressing. Everyone knows that email attachments are the primary source of modern viruses. On top of that, UF limits each user to 100 MB of total email. A couple of large email attached videos and I am out of commission.

When someone tries to email something that is twenty times larger than the limit I can receive, there is a bigger problem. The problem is that many users have no idea how to tell if one file is any different in size than any other file. The GUI has contributed to this problem. Even Windows Explorer doesn’t show file sizes or file extensions (don’t get me started on that) by default. If you mouse-over a file, you can get this information, but many users don’t know this or don’t use the information. Even knowing that a file is 2 GB doesn’t help. With high speed Internet, it should matter… right?

Email should be words. I don’t even format my email. It is plain ASCII. I would never choose to use HTML in my email. If I want to send someone an agenda, I don’t attach a Word document. An agenda is made of words just like email. I can copy and paste words from a word processor into my email and save someone the trouble of opening an attachment… that contains only words.

Do you realize the process involved in sending someone a file attachment. Since email is based on ASCII text, the email attachment must be converted to ASCII using Unix to Unix Encoding. This makes the file roughly twice as big as the binary version. This doesn’t include the extra overhead that is created by all the formatting code that goes into most binary files. An ASCII page of text is 2k. Copy the same text into Word and it becomes 4k. UUE the 4k and becomes 7k. So attaching a one page text document is like sending three and half pages of email.

Last year I received over 300 MB of file attachments. Most were only a few megabytes. The largest was 12 megabytes. If I consider only the attachments (not the accompanying email), this was more than three times the capacity of my inbox. Most of these attachments could have been avoided if senders would send links to files instead of attachments. With all the content management systems that we use to hold our information, emailing a link to something instead of an attachment saves everyone time. If I need the information, I can follow the link and I don’t have to clean it out of my attachment folder.

Here’s an interesting video I ran across. It talks about Net Neutrality. You’ll see Lawerence Lessig in there as well as some other biggies: Cerf, Kahn, Berners-Lee. All these people are speaking out for network neutrality on the Internet. If you don’t know about Net Neutrality, this five minute video will tell you everything you need to know.

In this video, there was some historical information about print publishing and radio broadcasting that I didn’t know. Each of these technologies started as a way for individuals to distribute information to each other. Now both (print and broadcasting) are controlled by large corporations and have effectively become one way communication tools. It is interesting to see how these things can be directly related to the direction of Internet information if Net Neutrality is blocked.

If the blizzard kept you away from the state technology conference this year, here is one of my presentations. This one deals with developing effective online content to be used when teaching online. The video isn’t perfect. Some of the movie was goofed up (a couple of slides look blank) by Google during the encoding process. I really can’t complain. They are now hosting and streaming a 45 minute video for me.

I did two presentations at eTech Ohio this year. The other presentation is called Teaching Online. I’ll get that one online soon.

I finally did it.  I recorded my first Podcast.  Thanks to John Rappold from SCOCA for tagging along and supplying the content. 

I named my podcast Ed Tech Chatter (sticking with the ETC acronym).  The topic for the first podcast is GeoTagging.  It took me a while to figure out how to create the RSS feed information and get that setup with Feedburner.

If you are interested in subscribing, here is the link to the feed

http://www.trustyetc.com/chatter

After watching the Free Culture video again, and reading a little more about Lawence Lessig, I have determined that he has his own established “style” of presentation.  He uses a minimalist approach where only one word, or at most a short phrase is used on each slide.  Lessig uses few graphics.  The font always looks like something created by an old typewriter.  He also uses white letters on a black background.  With this approach, he is forced to create many more slides than most people use in PowerPoint.  The above presentation is 243 slides and he presents them in about half an hour.

I have adopted several of Lessig’s stype ideas into my own presentations.  I like the rapid-fire, more-than-three-slides-a-minute pacing.  One mistake many people make with PowerPoint is putting too much information on one slide.  By typing fewer words on the screen, the presenter must avoid the “read it off the screen” presentation style.  Nothing is worse than a presentation of paragraphs of text unless the text is read word-for-word to the audience.  This leads to Death By PowerPoint.

Having a lot of slide does something else, especially if you are a first-time presenter.  When you are nervous, you tend to speed up your talking and move through the slides quicker.  With a presentation with a lot of slides, you will need to move through them faster and your “nervous pace” won’t be as noticeable.

I do use many graphics in my presentations.  The topics I cover (educational technology) tend to require more pictures.  I don’t use clipart-for-the-sake-of-clipart to fill in white space on slides that are all text.  Most of my pictures are screen captures that show specific software or uses of that software.

If you are looking for an excellent source on presentation styles and mechanics, check out Presentation Zen.