I’m certain there are plenty who would disagree with me, but my personal social networking policy is to follow these two rules:

1. Accept any friend requests from students, but never initiate the request.

2. Never say or show anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t want said or shown in class.

I’ve been doing it this way for around a year now and it has worked out well. Before we get too far with this question, let me clarify that I teach college students. I’m not sure if I would have the same opinion if I were a K-12 teacher although I’m inclined to think it also works for teachers of high school students nearing college age. That’s a whole other topic that merits its own discussion another time, and there are many more factors in play for the public school teacher to consider. This is mainly about my opinions on Facebooking with college students, although I’m not sure that my opinion would vary too far from this even for teachers of High School students.

“Net Gen” students can benefit greatly from having responsible social networking modeled for them.

The only college aged kid I’ve ever spoken to about irresponsible drunken-party photo posting so far is someone who posted & tagged my niece at a party. I didn’t know this person, and they didn’t know I was able to see it either so it was a great teachable moment. Basically I told them it’s a bad idea to put compromising photos online, but a really bad idea to identify and index the people in them. I can’t remember if I let the niece in on that conversation now, but looking back I probably should have. I think that “Net Gen” students can benefit greatly from having responsible social networking modeled for them. Being Facebook friends with some of them helps me to confirm this notion. Anyway, I got no replies back from anyone involved in the incident I described and can only hope that I made the point perfectly clear that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy online, even in Facebook.

To me the benefits outweigh the risks because my students can see what is essentially an extension of me, outside of the classroom. It provides an alternate method of contacting and interacting with me. Not only is this good for retention of existing students, but also good for maintaining contact with graduates after they move on to their after-college careers. However, if you’re uncomfortable with what your students might learn about you in this setting, then I’d certainly advise against social networking with students. But right now I’m not overly concerned because of rule #2. I try to monitor my online persona pretty closely which is nothing less than what we ask our students to do.

Last week, I introduced my visual literacy students to the fascinating and entertaining documentary film “Helvetica“ in which world famous designers praise and berate the ubiquitous typeface. My students were amazed at the force and passion with which these designers spoke about simple sans-serif lettering.

This morning, I’m catching up on some twitter discussions only to find a New York Times article on a similar topic- Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists The author bemoans how knowing too much about type can cause an ongoing discomfort in a world awash with poor typography.

Some examples include a Gothic church with signage set in the same font as the front page of National Lampoon magazine or incorrect use of period type in movies:

I still find it bizarre to see type or lettering that is wrong by years in a period movie in which the architecture, furniture and costumes are impeccable, and where somebody would have been fired if they were not

Matthew Carter, typography designer, Cambridge, MA

While I don’t hope that my students find themselves continually annoyed at poor use of typography and other design principles, I do hope that their awareness will increase and that they begin to notice examples that could be made better through better application of these principles.

(in an interesting aside on the immediacy of Web 2.0, the Wikipedia article on Cooper type already cites the 2 day old NY Times article I previously mentioned.)

One of the cool new features of the WordPress Headway 1.5 theme is the Photo Gallery. I’m switching my wife’s business website to a WordPress format to simplify content management and to allow her to be a content contributor.

I’m writing up this tutorial because there are a number of steps involved in making the photo gallery work. It’s not difficult, just a lot to remember, so this is a record of what I’ve figured out. I’m assuming you already have Wordpress & Headway 1.5 installed. Feel free to add to this discussion if you know something I don’t, because I’m just learning HeadWay myself.

Step 1.

Login to your site.  You get to your WP admin dashboard by adding wp-admin after the URL to your site. (e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin)

Click on Appearance

Step 2.

Appearance options should appear. Click on Headway Advanced Leafs.

Step 3.

In the Add a new gallery input box, type the name of your new photo gallery. I called mine Really Cool Pictures.

Step 4.

In the Select a Gallery dropdown box, choose the gallery you just created. Click on Switch to Gallery.

Step 5.

Click the browse button and browse to the image you want to upload. If you like, you can also type in a Title and a Caption of your picture.

Step 6.

Repeat step 5 for your remaining photos. You should begin to see thumbnails of all of your images.

Step 7.

Once all of your images are uploaded into the gallery, we need to create a new page to view the gallery on. On the dashboard menu, click the Pages button, then click Add New to make a new page.

Step 8.

In the Add New Page window, the first input box is for the Title of your page. I called my new page, Cool Pictures. Under attributes, you can select the parent page if this is not to be a top level menu item, otherwise just leave everything as-is. Click on the Publish button to create the new page. We won’t add the photo gallery just yet, we’ll use the Headway Visual Editor to do that.

Step 9.

Open a new tab or new window in your browser and open your website homepage. Open the page you just created for your photo gallery. My Cool Pictures page is listed as a top level menu item, yours will be as well unless you chose a parent page for it. Since you are still logged in to your WordPress admin screen, you should see a Enter Visual Editor button at the top of your homepage. Click Enter Visual Editor to open up the visual editing interface.

Step 10.

In the Visual Editor, you will see a number of menus. Locate the Leafs menu and click Add next to the Photo Gallery leaf option found all the way at the bottom. (You may have to re-arrange some of these menus, and can easily do so by clicking and dragging the gray menu header at the top of each menu.)

Step 11.

You should now see a Photo Gallery leaf on your page. You will need to set the properties of the leaf so it knows which Photo Gallery to display. Move your mouse over the upper right corner of you Photo Gallery leaf to reveal some menu icons. Click the pencil icon to edit the Photo Gallery.

Step 12.

Select the correct photo gallery in the  gallery selection box.

You can experiment with the settings and preferences in this window to customize how your gallery will work, but the main thing to get right is choosing the correct gallery. This will become more important as you create additional galleries.

Step 13.

If you don’t like the size of your photo gallery leaf, you can resize it. On the Leafs menu, click Utilities. Next to Resize Leafs, click Enable.

Step 14.

With resizing enabled, you can resize the leafs on your page by clicking on the borders and dragging to a new size, or you can also click on precise resize and type in the pixel size numbers you would like. I prefer the visual click & drag method.

That’s it! Be sure to click on the Save Changes button found at the bottom right corner. Once your changes are saved you can view the page in another window or tab and see if it looks like you wanted. If not, come back to the visual editor window to keep adjusting & tweaking your layout.

I hope this short guide is useful to someone. I’m sure I will refer back to it from time to time.

I recently heard on NPR that the school library at Cushing Academy, Ashburnham, MA has completely done away with books in favor of digital texts. From the NPR story:

Dean of Academics Suzie Carlisle says school officials had noticed the trend. She says surveys they conducted showed students weren’t turning to printed materials for research. Instead, they were immediately going online.

The kids of Lunchtime Leader Podcast recently asked me a question about this trend. If I would have known about the Cushing Academy story I could have looked like I was really on top of this, but I just sort of hemmed & hawed my way through it. What I had completely forgotten about was that I have previously taken a stand on this issue.

Too often, students rush headlong into cyberspace without considering what wealth of information they might be missing in printed form. The truth of the matter is the vast majority of the world’s knowledge is still not publicly available in digital form. This notion was driven home to me last spring as I slogged my way through the papers of the Eisenhower Library for a History of American Education research assignment on the National Defense Education Act. There’s simply no way the information I found could be discovered anywhere online. Maybe I’m not tech-savvy enough, but I challenge you to find the full text of the NDEA law online somewhere… I couldn’t. I found it easily in a book.

A couple of years ago, I taught a Humanities through the Arts course, and a major research project I assigned was called the “Dead Artist’s Project”. Students were to study up and prepare a research presentation on an artist of any artform (literature, drama, music, art, etc.) but the catch was it had to be an artist who died before the researcher was born. (Originally the only requirement was the artist be dead, but I kept getting Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger and Anna Nichole type stories.) It was fascinating, and forced them to consider the creative genius of a generation who came before they were alive. In addition, I required that at least two print sources be cited as references.

We spent time in the library, browsing the stacks, and seeing what we could discover. I can’t tell you how many times I serendipitously discovered related reading materials using this method and you simply can’t have a similar experience in a database-the search methodology is so different.

I think it’s a mistake that libraries are keen to yank all of their printed materials. Am I just getting old?

It seems that a young teacher in Georgia was pressured into resigning her job because of her online activities on Facebook. A parent complained to school administrators about Ashley Payne’s Facebook profile, which included vacation photos of her consuming alcoholic beverages and also contained profanity in some of her status updates.

Here’s the local news coverage:

One of the reasons cited for the pressure to resign was that she worked in a small town. Those of us from small towns know exactly what that is all about, with everyone knowing everyone else’s business– precisely the reason this story is ridiculous to me. If the young lady drinks and cusses, everyone in town probably knew before she publicized it on Facebook. She kept her updates private and had no friend connections with students, so I’m wondering how the information became public in the first place?

I’m keenly interested in the training and professional development of teachers. Would love to hear your thoughts on this case. What mistakes were made by the teacher? The school administration? Facebook? What do you think?

In no particular order here are some of my thoughts:

• Putting anything online that you wouldn’t want to see on the evening news is stupid (And being young and being stupid often go hand in hand).
• The opinion of one parent should never be cause enough for dismissal.
• You ought to know your rights and seek legal counsel before signing anything like a forced resignation.
• You really don’t want to work in an environment where you are not wanted.
• Since when did adults of legal age drinking beer and wine on vacation become a problem in the classroom?

Is there anything else I’m missing here? I would especially love to hear from teachers & school administrators on this.

Thanks to @Holtsman on Twitter for the lead on this story.

This video was sent to me by a colleague at work.

I was immediately reminded of Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind” and frequent writer about emotionally intelligent design. Let’s face it, no amount of cajoling, criticizing or high pressuring can compete with sensitivity to the feelings of the intended audience. As a teacher, I prefer trying to find fun ways to communicate ideas, rather than badgering, lecturing and otherwise intimidating my students into learning what I think is important. To me, it just makes sense.

In 2007 Vinton Cerf, a founding father of the Internet wrote that what this country needs is another Sputnik to reinvigorate science education. After reading Cerf’s article, last spring I did a research project on the National Defense Education Act. The NDEA was the US response to the launch of Sputnik, hoping to improve schools and better compete with the perceived Soviet threat.

Today, on Daniel Pink’s blog, I find another interesting reference to this landmark event. This time it was a video of James Paul Gee discussing education reform. A few of the highlights I picked up on in the video include:

• Global competition will be the new Sputnik, and American education has a 50% chance it will experience the first real reform in 100 years as a result.
• Teachers have become de-professionalized, letting textbooks, testing and politicians make curriculum decisions rather than teachers making professional decisions about what and how best to teach. (Not an indictment of teachers, just a statement of current reality.)
• Innovation and creativity are not emphasized enough because many schools are simply test-prep academies.
• Social media helps to create “passion groups” through which people with similar passions can come together
• Teachers learning to use new digital tools are model learners for students

If you have 11 minutes or so, why not enjoy the entire video?

It is difficult to live where I do and not be reminded from time to time of the 1918 Willa Cather classic, “My Ántonia”. Today was one such day. As I drove to work through the gently rolling prairie hills of north central Kansas, I saw mile after mile of this:

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

-Willa Cather, “My Ántonia” 1918

Ninety-one years after this was written, you can still see the copper-red grass in the fall, although the prairie has long since been carved up into little plots. This year, my awareness of the land in which I live has been heightened greatly thanks in no small part to the book “PrairieErth: A Deep Map” by William Least Heat-Moon. Published a decade ago, I only first heard of it this year, thanks to an online friend Ira Socol who is fascinated with its unique approach to research.

I highly recommend both of these books, especially if you love the prairie. My Ántonia can be downloaded for free on Project Gutenberg. PrairieErth is still available on Amazon.com.

I’ve been noticing over the past several years some really rad pumpkin designs around Halloween. My suspicion is with the onset of digital photography coupled with manipulation software, it is becoming easier for the average person to put a fairly complex design on a pumpkin.

In my Visual Literacy class, we’ve spent a fair amount of time studying all of the basic design elements such as value, shape, space, line, composition, etc. We have done a number of value studies, vector drawings and image manipulations. I began to wonder after looking at the cool pumpkin designs floating around the Internet if 1) I could create my own design from an image, and 2) if it would make a good assignment for my students to try.

I found an image from Sendak’s “Where The Wild Things Are” book. I manipulated it in Photoshop, increasing the contrast so I basically had two values, black & white. I experimented with a number of ways of achieving this, the Threshold adjustment seemed to work fairly well. But my pattern was ultimately developed in Illustrator using the pen tool.

It looked something like this:

In the process of creating this pattern, I realized that I had experienced this type of design before when I worked in a screenprinting shop. Whenever we would print a light color on a dark fabric, I found that I had to think in reverse by creating a negative of what I wanted the final result to be. Since the light of the candle in the pumpkin would shine through the cut areas, I needed my highlight areas to be the shapes I drew, and leave the dark areas as whitespace. It was a great exercise in negative/positive space.

After completing my design on the computer, I printed it, and taped it on my pumpkin. I use a sharp pointy thing to poke holes through the pattern into the pumpkin so I could see where my cut lines would be. Then I carved out the cut areas according to the pattern. One thing I didn’t do so well was consider the complexity of carving in the pumpkin. I put too many fine details in, and often didn’t leave enough pumpkin flesh between my cut areas in my design to make a solid structure, so I had to improvise when doing the actual carving.

One thing we discussed in class was the possibility for a middle value as well as a black and a high key value in this design. In pumpkin carving, some have discovered that removing the skin, but not cutting all of the way through the flesh, you can achieve a middle value as well. (Some examples are shown here.)

Now I’m not the best pumpkin carver in the world. In fact, I’ve never done anything much more complex that the traditional triangle eyes, and toothless grin of a regular old jack-o-lantern, but I really wanted to test my design skills. After transferring my design to the pumpkin, I carefully carved it out and here is my result:

And here is what my pumpkin looks like all lit up:

What do you think?

I’d say this is a keeper assignment. I can’t wait to see what my students come up with for their designs, and if they will have the patience to actually carve it out.

Now that I have sort of figured this out, next year I suppose I will have to try a design with a middle value as well.

Happy Halloween!