The video I made in 1988

In 1988, I was a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. We had a month-long class in TV production as part of a "Principles of Technology" course. This is the music video we made. Okay, our lipsynching skills are not great, and we are obvioulsy obsessed with special effects (and have no budget) but ... this was before the age of serious digital video editing! There was no Camtasia, no SnagIt, and we had no digital video cameras - this is all old-fashioned splicing.

P.S. I am the blond one.

Summer Reading Bargains

After the workshop ended yesterday, I went to Barnes & Noble to get a cup of coffee and stroll through the old-fashioned "stacks" of information (bookshelves).

I picked up three math-oriented books out of the bargain-priced shelves, and thought I would share them with you, in case your B&N might also have them at bargain prices:

1) A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram (from Mathematica) $6.98

2) The Sacred Geometry of Washington DC, by Nicholas Mann (AMATYC will be in DC this fall) $7.98

3) Divine Proportion (Phi) in Art, Nature, and Science, by Priya Hemenway $9.98

Sometimes, being a math instructor has it's advantages - surplus unpurchased books in your field! I was really interested in reading the Wolfram book earlier this year, but lacked time and it was pretty expensive (over $40 if I recall correctly). If there are a few of us that would like to read it, we can set up a discussion group on my new TCM Moodle site, which I hope to get all figured out this weekend. Send me an email (wyandersen at gmail dot com) if you'd like to be part of that group.

P.S. I will post more about the workshop, but right now I am exhausted and need to do something non-workshop related for a day or two. Lucky for me I have that 3rd combination book to build the files for this weekend.

Join us at the Math & Technology Workshop Today!

We're meeting in three different WizIQ rooms at 2pm EDT. (we wanted everyone to have a chance to play without being completely overwhelmed)

If you live on the east side of the country, join us in Group 1: Click here at 2pm EDT


If you live on the west side of the country, join us in Group 2: Click here at 2pm EDT


If you live in Hawaii, Alaska, or another country, join us in Group 3: Click here at 2pm EDT

Virtual MCC Math & Tech Workshop Attendance

Wow! This has been such a fun week so far!

We have 24 folks on campus for the MCC Math & Technology Workshop this week, which runs Monday through Friday.

It's non-stop math and technology! So non-stop that there's no time to post!

We will have several simultaneous WizIQ sessions on Wednesday at 2pm EDT. As soon as I get the links from my session "leaders" (in the morning) I will post them here if you'd like to join us!

Managing a mountain of email

Most likely, if you're involved in higher education, you get a lot of email. During the week, I get between 50 and 100 emails a day, which seems like a lot, but I recently read that some people receive (and deal with) over 1000 a day!

My goal has always been to try to "zero" my inbox frequently, but lately I have not been so successful - lots of reading material comes in, and between newsletters in my inbox and my Google Reader, I'm buried in information.

I just came across this Google Tech Talk, called "Inbox Zero" (by Merlin Mann) that I thought was a very appropriate thing to share with my readers - especially since almost everyone is either done, or almost done, with the semester. The Google Talks run 60 minutes, but you can get by watching the first 30 minutes of this one - and in the end, watching this video will save you well over 30 minutes of time, so I would consider it good value for your attention & time budget.

One of the most valuable ideas that Mann discusses is the idea of an "email DMZ folder" (I think this came in the Q&A period after the talk). If you've been letting your email inbox build up forever, create a folder (or label) called DMZ. Take everything currently in your inbox (and I do mean EVERYTHING) and move it to the DMZ. There. Now you have zero messages in your inbox and can begin to use a sane system for processing your email.

Another important distinction that Mann makes in his talk is that we have to stop thinking of email as requiring a response, and start thinking of it as simply requiring processing. Using gmail certainly makes this easy, as you are already forced to abandon silly folders (he points out ... how often do you actually manage to locate emails in those folders correctly? how often do you even look in those folders?). I sorted through the 200 or so emails still sitting in my inbox (while I watched the Inbox Zero talk) and whittled down my labels to the following:

MCC: email that comes to my college address - it's automatically labeled MCC

Respond: email that does need a response, but not necessarily immediately

Reading: email that is informational ... like newsletters, I also set up several filters to have newsletters automatically sent to this label and archived

Blogs-to-be: email that I send myself or I get from readers that should eventually be blogged about - if you have sent me something, but haven't yet seen it on the blog, this is where it is located until being dealt with

Copier: email sent from the copier at school ... I have to remember to delet these after I save them or they take up a lot of storage space

Respond (Starred): these are emails that I need to respond to, and I need to do it relatively quickly. I removed the stars from all my emails this morning, and then only applied them to the truly high-priority items.

The general idea:

1) Junk? Or you don't it after reading it? Delete it.

2) If it's simple to do respond to (and requires a response), deal with it.

3) Otherwise, archive it (to the appropriate folder or with the appropriate label).

I've been good about these first two, but not the third. So, now that I'm back at zero ... I'm going to try to be better about maintaining my Zero Inbox.



P.S. Stay tuned for our updates from the first (annual?) MCC Math & Technology Workshop, happening on the Muskegon Community College campus from Monday-Friday next week.

I will be inviting participation from the Internet audience on Wednesday afternoon for our session on Synchronous Online Communication, so if you can't come, but want to join in the technology fun, watch for a link to participate in that.

Professors Make Videos: This is news?

From the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education, comes this article "Film School: To Spice Up Course Work, Professors Make Their Own Videos"


When I saw the headline last week I read a paragraph, rolled my eyes and and went on with my readings. But today it popped back up in my reader from someone else's blog and I thought, okay, I'll play along. Let's see what, about professors making their own videos, is news. Here's a quote from the article:

Mr. Berger, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been experimenting with several new Web technologies as part of a project called HigherEd 2.0, which is supported by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Half a million dollars to do what some of us have been doing as a responsible part of our job? This is clearly a fluff piece. They interview three individuals for the article. There's no broad survey of who else (ahem ... community colleges) might be making videos for their classes. There's no mention of how video lessons are a NECESSARY component for online classes.



I thought I would try to engage with some of the details in the article. So I looked up HigherEd 2.0. You can visit the site yourself and make your own determination. There are five training modules (basics of podcasting, basics of blogging, student-generated content). I saw that the site had a blog and I wondered how I'd never come across the HigherEd 2.0 Blog ... the blog has one post. Enough said.


I've been in the "video-making biz" for a year now, but I know other community college folks that have been doing it for YEARS for their online classes. The only news in this story is how much money the NSF is shelling out to encourage these profs to engage with technology. Clearly, we need to find open-source methods of providing the same encouragement. Or maybe I'm just jealous ...

South Park Professors?

Sometimes I stumble upon something on the Internet that I just can't resist sharing. There's this great German site, SP-Studio, where you can build your own South Park character! I can see you asking, how the heck is this possibly going to be useful to me?

If you've ever had the need for a cartoon representation of yourself (thumbnail photos in IM software, gmail, etc.), this is a VERY easy way to build one.

I'm afraid I got a little carried away and built characters for most of my department (if you're familiar with my campus, I'll let you guess who is who).

Why is it so tempting to procrastinate when there's only one chapter left to write?

Never fear, although the site (http://www.sp-studio.de/) is from a German Flash developer, you can build characters in English too.