I have a large folder of desktop wallpaper that I rotate through with some regularity (every five minutes or so). They all come from the web. And I project my desktop with some regularity. Which means that I get asked about where my desktop photo comes from pretty often (a few times a week). And I teach about media literacy, intellectual property and citation. Which means that I want to give credit where credit is due.

A few years ago, I started actually adding the URL of the page that I had downloaded an image from as its Finder Get Info comment. And then, in one of the Leopards, Apple started including this metadata in the Spotlight database for all downloaded files, too. Which means that, if I know the name of the image on the desktop right now, I can look up the URL that I got it from. That’s a big if.

I spent a little while last night tinkering, and came up with the following command that gets me the name of the currently displayed desktop wallpaper:

defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop | grep 'LastName' | tail -n 1 | grep '[^"]*\.[^"]*' -o

This extracts the final LastName entry out of the com.apple.desktop.plist file and pulls just the file name out of it. Then, because I knew that I actually want the URL that I stored in the Get Info comments field, I extended this to the following:

cd ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/Single\ Display/; defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop | grep 'LastName' | tail -n 1 | grep '[^"]*\.[^"]*' -o | xargs mdls -name kMDItemFinderComment | grep 'http[^"]*' -oi

You’ll note that I assumed that all my wallpaper comes from a specific folder (~/Pictures/Wallpapers/Single Display/) — but this information could also be extracted from com.apple.desktop.plist (run the defaults command without the grepping to see what I mean — look for ChangePath). The big breakthrough for me was realizing that I needed to use xargs to extract meaning from the result of my grepping, which was presented to mdls with a newline at the end — xargs then runs mdls on all of the one lines of resulting output.

In the end, I presented the output of each of those shell scripts as overlays on my desktop (using GeekTool) and I wrapped all of this into a little AppleScript that opens the web page from whence my desktop image comes:

do shell script "cd ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/Single\\ Display/; defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop | grep 'LastName' | tail -n 1 | grep '[^\"]*\\.[^\"]*' -o | xargs mdls -name kMDItemFinderComment | grep 'http[^\"]*' -oi | xargs open"

The real addition is that I use the xargs to pass the URL to open, which opens the URL in the default browser.

In all of this, it is worth noting that Bwana has been enormously useful. As was this article from O’Reilly on using Spotlight from the command line and this page on the defaults command.

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Even as the end-of-year to-do lists are approaching critical overload, I find that one of the joys of the spring is the contemplation of what I will be working on next year. Not so much in a “next year I’ll do this all differently” kind of snit, but with more of a “year in review” focus: spring and graduation makes me sentimental and reminiscent.

With that in mind, in the past week I have come across two interesting resources both for teaching in general and for thinking about our work as “knowledge workers” in the 21st century (to infinity and beyond!). First, Merlin Mann discusses how we do (or do not) allocate our time and attention to getting our projects done. Thoughtful, provocative and entertaining stuff. Second, Williams College’s Project for Effective Teaching has gone online with a truly exciting, provocative array of professorial reflections and questions around specific aspects of classrooms and teaching and learning. Enjoy!

How, you might ask, do videos like these fall into my hands? I follow-up on the sources of interesting articles that I see. And then on the sources of those sources: I like to find where the ideas are swimming around raw and unfettered. I do this by following a boat-load of interesting “edu-bloggers”, by following (and engaging with) other teachers on Twitter, and by doing a lot of skimming.

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As we head down the homestretch of May and June, more and more students (and teachers) are experiencing siyyum for their coursework, either as final papers or presentations or projects. Projects and papers are delightfully straight-forward and easy to facilitate and grade… at least, when compared to presentations, which have the added benefit of being a potential exercise in goodwill and patience to sit through.

The first hurdle our students have to get over is the technology itself — bringing together all the disparate elements of their presentation into one place and time. A few years ago, I wrote up a cheat sheet of tips that help to avoid the most common student pitfalls. I have not run into technical problems with student PowerPoints since I started giving them this handout (I kid you not).

In general, a good presentation has to nail not just the content and technology, but also visuals and public speaking. And this is the hardest thing to do right. For adults, even. Experts have started to decry PowerPoint as not just problematic, but actively destructive when it comes to communicating information and especially nuance clearly.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

New York Times, April 26, 2010

Shifting the focus from a PowerPoint document to the holistic presentation will further the student’s ability to communicate complex ideas — a key skill in today’s (or any day’s) world. Some further reading that is both informative and motivational on that front:

• Merlin Mann talks about “How [he] made his presentations a little better” (know this: he was pretty good to begin with)
• Business Week breaks down how to “Deliver a presentation like Steve Jobs” (the inimitable CEO of Apple)
• Edward Tufte (the master of information presentation — and notorious PowerPoint-hater) examines how to get the absolute most out of PowerPoint (or not)

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Making Things Run Smoothly

• Make sure that you always insert pictures into your presentation using the Insert Picture command from the Insert menu. Do not copy and paste pictures into your presentation. For arcane reasons, copy and pasting pictures can make your PowerPoint fail to display your pictures on other computers.
• Keep a folder of all of the pictures and video that you add to your PowerPoint. Just in case you need to re-insert it (for example, if you messed up on following the tip above).
• Video is not embedded in PowerPoint, pictures are – share Zip files. That is, you can insert pictures into a PowerPoint presentation and send the presentation to someone else and they can see the pictures but you cannot insert video, send the presentation to someone else, and expect them to see the video. PowerPoint creates a link to the video instead. To get around this, if you are going to use video, put your presentation and your video files in a folder together, then insert the video. When you are ready to share your presentation, right-click on the folder and Send To > Compress or Zip Archive and send out the Zip file instead. Your recipient can unzip the archive and will have the presentation and the video.

Making Things Look Pretty

• Black text on a white background is not traditional by accident. It’s easy to read. Think carefully before trying a novel color combination.
• One picture per slide lets you show the picture big, in all its glory. Multiple pictures per slide lets you compare pictures. Think about which it is you want to be doing (and remember that postage stamps are hard to see!).
• Don’t stretch your pictures. You can scale your pictures proportionately by holding down the Shift key when you drag the grab boxes on the corners of the picture. This will make sure that the picture doesn’t get distorted.
• Use text judiciously. This one is complicated: you don’t want to have too much text on a slide because it will get small and hard to read. You don’t want to put your script on the slide, because then you’ll be reading from the slide, which is deathly dull (unless, maybe, you’re Morgan Freeman). But you do want to present text that will support your arguments and highlight important ideas. And you do want to present quotations that are illuminating. One rule of thumb is the “six by six” rule: no more than six words per bullet point, no more than six bullet points per slide. This is totally artificial and you should violate it as needed… but remember it and what it is really urging: don’t overwhelm your audience with text!
• Less is more. This is true of almost everything involved in PowerPoint, but particularly when it comes to animation and sound effects. They have a campy appeal, and can sometimes underscore a point you’re trying to make. But you ain’t Spielberg and PowerPoint ain’t ILM, so don’t go trying to put in gratuitous special effects just to make your PowerPoint more appealing. Your research and ideas should be the focus, not your ability to make car crash sound effects.

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One of the oft-touted features of social media, blogs, and news sites is RSS feeds. The phrase “subscribe to my feed for updates” probably connotes some twenty-something layabout in a coffee shop, but, in fact, RSS feeds are enormously useful to grown-ups (like thee and me) for managing large (vast, huge) amounts of information.

First, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In this case, we’re using syndication in the same sense as a newspaper syndicate (not a crime syndicate — there’s different software for that): suppose Dave Barry writes for the Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle carries the Bizarro cartoon. How is it that we open the LA Times and see both of these in our paper? The newspaper syndicates distribute all of the updates to Dave Barry’s column and Bizarro just prior to the newspaper going to press each night.

RSS, really simple syndication, is a newspaper syndicate for the rest of us: we can subscribe to the RSS feeds on web sites for updates from that web site, and use a feed reader (Google Reader, Newsgator, Bloglines, iGoogle, etc.) to present all of these updated feeds to us in one place. Common Craft has a short (brisk, even) video explaining this:

All of the blogs on our school blog server have RSS feeds. In fact, you can subscribe to updates from a particular category on a blog, or to updated comments on a particular post on a blog, if you want. Major newspapers provide lists of RSS feeds for their articles.

As a voracious newshound myself (I used to read two, three and sometimes four newspapers in a morning), I’m finding that — with RSS feeds — I no longer even open a physical paper. Instead, all of my information comes through Google Reader subscriptions to blog and newspaper feeds. About 5,000 updates a week.

For more plain English explanations of web technology, check out Common Craft’s YouTube channel.

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It’s no surprise what I found; a well-intentioned producer, hoping to help illustrate an interesting story but not sufficiently trained in the appropriate use of Flickr, used your image not licensed for commercial use on our clearly commercial Web site.

That’s partly my fault in not giving better direction to our staff on Creative Commons. We’ve used this as a “teaching moment” to improve our training to staffers, and I very much appreciate your pointing this out.

We’ve removed that photo from our site, but by way of remedy, I’d like to offer to pay you our standard one-use fee of [none of your dang business] per image. I’d like suggest that I post a followup message to your blog with my mea culpa on not giving sufficient direction to our producers on Flickr and Creative Commons, and that we’ve taken remedies to close the gap.

I had been not anticipated much in the way of a response at all from the Chronicle, so this was all a pleasant surprise:

I’m a little guy and they’re pretty big. I can get up on my hind legs and complain. But I doubt they’ll pay attention to me. And besides, this particular violation of my rights is relevant to the world (and, really, me) for only the next few hours, until this cycles off their front page. And then it’s just something that happened that’s easy for them (and me) to ignore.

In the end, it took a bunch of follow-ups with Dean (Gmail counds 18 emails in that thread, back-and-forth), several versions of an invoice, and just plain a lot of patience, but I got a (token) payment for the use of my image, a vague promise that some education had happened in the newsroom, and no deeper explanation than what I posted from Dean above. I appreciate the payment. I appreciate the promise that education was happening… but the work to get all that was, in the end, much more than it was really worth.

I think that all of this goes to highlight the difficulty of working with intellectual property law in general: there’s a huge imbalance in terms of the amount of effort required for small fry like me and a major publisher to track down and combat the theft of their work. Nothing that the Chronicle asked of me in return for payment was excessive (it was all normal stuff that outside contractors have to do if they want to get paid by a corporation — but I feel like a sucker now that they have my social security number), but every additional effort that I had to make to obtain redress was increasingly less worthwhile for me. If I had to do this regularly, I would be the world’s grumpiest human being. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and, it turns out (and I had already known this intellectually), there’s no such thing as redress without real effort (and now I really get it). Nobody’s gonna make it right to you unless you hold their feet to the fire. And I was dealing with nice people who meant well at a decently reputable company; it was still a hassle.

Would I raise my tiny fists and shout into the whirlwind in vain again in a similar situation? Probably. And I’ve got some new thoughts on how to do it — next time I can shortcut some of the email back and forth by just leading off with an attached invoice. And an invoice for an amount that I think is fair (now that I have something resembling a ballpark figure: more than the Chronicle paid me). But I hate how whiny and bitchy it makes me feel. Having the fact that I’m the little guy rammed home makes me feel even littler than before.

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When I was a summer camp assistant director, back in the day, my least favorite task was to field “dead or alive” phone calls — those phone calls where parents were inquiring whether Junior, who had not written home in the past month, was still alive or not… with, perhaps, some suggestion that “not” would be more acceptable than “not writing home.”

Knowing that we’re all headed off campus for Pesach, now is a good time to set up a vacation auto-response on our email, hopefully staving off any potential “alive or dead” inquiries about us.

Also, I want to share the coolest trick that I’ve learned in FirstClass in the last week: Calendar Punch-Through — layering multiple calendars on top of each other, so that you can see all the events at the same time. Watch the video to see what I mean. It’s rad. Or, at least, gnarly.

The bonus: I maintain a feed of recent internet posts on teaching and technology. This is the filtered version of what I read: I slave so that you can benefit. These are articles that I think are in some way interesting or informative about teaching, or teaching with technology, or generally existing as a teacher in the early 21st century. It’s a fascinating mish-mash.

http://battis.net/link/AcademicComputingFeed

And thank you all for your feedback on last week’s blog “explanation” — a more polished, finished version will be ready after Tiyulim Week!

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As teachers, we instinctually know how to use a lot of the tools that come our way: pen, paper, whiteboard, textbook. These all have self-evident uses. Not only do we understand how to use these tools, but we can think creatively about their purpose, and how they might be used to teach, challenge and push our students.

Where this gets a bit sticky is when we’re presented with a tool that we aren’t quite sure how to use, or what it’s purpose might be. To this end, I’ve been thinking about ways to explaining some of the technology that we’ve been talking about this year at its conceptual level: not what it’s for, but simply how does it work? (Perhaps this is residue of reading too much David Macaulay in my mispent youth.) Once we grok the working of a tool, then we can start to think about the purpose to which we might put it.

This week, what I share with you is not a finished thought, but a rough cut of the first half of a video explaining how blogs work. This is the work of an afternoon — not a polished product in any way shape or form. And I would be delighted (nay, indebted) to you for feedback on this proto-explanation. Does it makes sense? Does it help you to think about a blog as a device? What would make it better?

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We won’t rehearse all of the problems with email attachments here (Can I open that file? What happened to my disk quota!? Which version was it?) Instead, let us focus on things that improve the experience. In fact, here’s a short video Top Ten list:

Links from the video

• Convenience: YouSendIt.com (and Scrivener, a fun writing application)
• Collaboration: Wikis (specifically the Laptop Leaders)
• Focus: Blogs (specifically the Digital Portfolios PLN — Seth, [and his colleagues] can help you set up your own)
• Reach Out: Google Docs (and Spreadsheets, Presentations, and more…)
• Brevity: The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

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