Save Your Students $850 Million!

AOL announced today that it was buying social network Bebo for $850 million in cash. A staggering price considering that Bebo has quite a few less users than MySpace or Facebook. However, they do have a lot more users in other countries such as the UK and New Zealand. Given AOLs other woes, it does seem like a bit of an odd direction to take.

Even though your students probably don't have a spare $850 million lying around, that doesn't mean they can't get in on the social networking action. Just send them over to Ning which is a site where they can create their very own personal social network...for free!

A five minute sign up process is all it takes to be off and running with your own network. You can invite members, post content and control the look and feel of your social network's home page. You can choose to have the network viewable by anyone or keep it restricted to members only. You choose the URL for your network which will end in ning.com and therefore would look something like this: mycoolnetwork.ning.com. You can host blogs, threaded message forums and several other features. The learning curve is very low as it has a similar look and feel to established social networks.

So how does Ning make money? The network you set up has rather unobtrusive Google Adsense ads on the side of the page which generate revenue for Ning. But if you want to control the ad content on your site and keep the revenue for yourself, all you need to do is pay Ning $10 per month and you can remove all of their ads and put up your own.

I think that setting up a social network would make a great group project for a computer literacy or business class. Groups could compete to sign up the most members, have the largest number of relevant blog postings, generate the most useful message threads, etc. So send your students out there to play around and see what happens.

Sources of Videos Other Than YouTube

Can't find what you are looking for on YouTube? There are certainly plenty of other sources of free video on the Internet. Here are a few of my favorite sites:

Google Video - You would think since Google bought YouTube they would have combined the two sites by now (or at least made the functionality the same). But you would be wrong! Google Video, still technically in beta, hosts videos in a similar fashion to YouTube. But the real strength of this site is the search feature. As you can see from the image below, the search box default option is to search the entire web for videos, not just ones hosted on the Google Video site. Therefore, this is a superior search feature to the one offered on YouTube which only searches videos hosted on the YouTube site.



Lab Rats - Two technology journalists, Andy Walker and Sean Carruthers, started making video podcasts in October 2005. Fortunately for us, people loved them and now the Lab Rats website contains over 100 video podcasts on technology. These videos are well written, produced professionally and contain useful information on topics ranging from Web browser security to iPod hacking. There is something here for every level of student.

5 min - 5min is a site that offers short video solutions (all 5 minutes or less) to practical questions. Their idea, as explained on their site, is simple: "...any solution can be visually explained in no more than 5 minutes. Our goal is to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides in areas such as arts, business, fashion, sports, health, tech, food, and much more." They have a technology section which contains some very informative videos such as Wikis in Plain English and How to Retrieve a Lost Windows Password. While not as extensive a collection as YouTube, the videos at 5min are very high quality and well produced videos.

If you know of any other sites that provide useful technology videos (for free, of course), mention them in a comment to this post and I'll add them to this list.

A Vision of Students Today

This video gem is from the Cultural Anthropology Faculty at Kansas State University who have brought us so many other clever videos over the past couple of years. They asked their students to work on a shared document (sort of a wiki) and to comment on what was going on in with each of them when they were in the classroom. They filmed the results and displayed them in a thought provoking way (students holding up signs). The students' comments probably reflect many of the issues your students are facing.

Even though this video is designed more for faculty than for students, I still find it beneficial to show to my students. It gets them thinking and often sparks a good discussion about what they want to get out of my class. Often showing this video will spark student interest in using Wikis. Two free sites where students can set up Wikis are wikispaces and pbwiki.



Discussion Questions for Students:
1) Which issues from the video are you facing in your classes? What solutions would you propose to the students in the video to address their concerns?
2) Have you ever used a Wiki or Google documents to share information with a group or plan a project? Have you ever used these tools in classes at this institution?
3) Do you think you would find Wikis useful in your classwork? What about in your personal life?

How Not to Use PowerPoint

This is a humorous look at things you shouldn't do when you are creating PowerPoint slides to support a presentation. Even though it is funny, the video makes a lot of valid points that are worth pointing out to students.

The Mom Song (William Tell Overture)

This is a good video to play for 8am classes while you are waiting for class to start. The William Tell Overture is very difficult to sleep through, IM through, etc. And Generation Y students can usually relate to this video as the comedienne does remind them of their mom!

Fun With Hard Drives

Hard drives need to remain hermetically sealed otherwise they tend to stop functioning. But have you ever wondered what a hard drive looks like on the inside while it is running? Thanks to someone sacrificing a hard drive (they won't be able to use it again), now you can see what really happens.



And if you've never defragmented a hard drive, this is what it looks like in time lapse mode.

Would You Like a Little Cholesterol Medication with That Pizza?

Many people are concerned that technology and the Internet are eroding our personal privacy. The video below is the ACLU's slant on what it might be like to order a pizza in the near future. Fasten your seat belts...its going to be a bumpy ride!



Now we all hope that this level of scrutiny doesn't happen but my local pizza parlor already tracks orders by phone number. So when I call they usually have a pretty good guess about what I'm going to order. At least they don't have access to my medical records, library records and magazine subscription information...yet. But with all this information in databases, it is theoretically possible to consolidate it all at the pizza parlor.

Fortunately, the privacy of medical records is protected by law. But say the local pizza parlor did run a coupon in Men's Health magazine. They could buy the list of local subscribers from the magazine and integrate it into their database that is keyed off of caller ID. Then they would be able to mention the coupon to callers who subscribed to Men's Health. It presents interesting possibilities.

Discussion Questions for Students:
1) What types of personal information would you feel comfortable with a merchant (like a pizza parlor) having about you? What types of information would you never want revealed to retailers?
2) What is your position on a national ID card (or the REAL ID)? Is preventing terrorism worth giving up some personal privacy rights?
3) Should personal medical information be more readily available if it could be used to protect your health? Would you feel comfortable with a server at a restaurant recommending healthy food choices based on your medical history?