Google Friend Connect entered open beta today.  I’ve been waiting and watching for this tool to become more generally available.  As of this posting (12/4/08), Google Friend Connect is installed in this space to experiment with the features etc.  The members gadget is at the top of the right sidebar, if you’d like to try it out.  I may be adding other available gadgets as well.

When the closed beta for Friend Connect was originally announced, I was hoping it might be a tool that could be added to various existing educational tools - LMS’s etc - to extend their functionality.  Looking at it now, that doesn’t appear it to be possible.  Friend Connect appears to be driven at the top level of a domain; remains to be seen if it’s possible or will be possible to have multiple Friend Connect instances on a single domain.

Given that it’s not available in existing educational tools, my next thought is how it might further extend the capabilities of Google Sites - perhaps moving that platform toward being a more capable edupunk’ed learning system.  With many of the tools already available in Google Sites (file cabinet etc), adding the social element may make it more functional and connected to users as a learning space.  However, at first glance, Google Friend Connect can’t currnetly be installed into a Google Sites site; I hope that’s on a Googler’s “features to be added” list ;-)

I noticed via a post at Lifehacker today that Google is hosting the entire LIFE magazine photography archive. As Google’s announcement indicates, this doesn’t include just published images; it includes any and all images which can be digitized; currently, they have about 20% of the 10 million image library scanned and online:

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

Whether browsing from the LIFE Photo Archive Hosted by Google start page or doing a search from Google by adding “source:LIFE” to the search, it’s an amazing resource and collection with only 20% currently available.  I’m not sure where else we might find images like this one.

What baffles me about the announcement and the resource home page is that there’s absolutely zero mention of copyright or license or permissions to use the content.  Given that there’s nothing posted, the assumption is that the entire library is (C) All Rights Reserved, and of course, that doesn’t mean that the content can’t be used in the classroom.  But, I’m surprised that there’s not at least some explicit indication of the license of the images.  And, it’s discouraging that such a collectoin isn’t being made available via a more lenient and usable Creative Commons license: attribution-noncommercial-noderivative, perhaps?

Maybe that’s an educator’s perspective, and just maybe, I’m asking and expecting too much.  Oh well.

I’m teaching a section of Microcomputer Applications - an introductory level computer course.  An early topic in the semester, for me, is security and ethics.  Of course, I prefer discussion to lecture, and as I prepped this semester, I was wishing I had a classroom clicker - aka audience response system or aka polling - system to help engage the class - to solicit their input beyond a simple show of hands.  After having just used Google Forms to collect introductory information about students, I figured I could try using Google Forms as a makeshift classroom polling system.  All it requires to be functional is a teaching station with PC & projector and learners having individual access to the internet (a computer lab environment).  It worked perfectly, and I definitely got more feedback and learner participation than I’ve gotten in the past.  Here’s what I did.

First, I used Google Forms to create a survey for each question that I wanted to ask and use to facilitate the discussion.  One example is this question about virus protection software:

 

I actually created ten surveys since there were various questions that I wanted to poll learners about throughout the discussion.  It required more work and prep that way, but I think it helped break up the discussion a little as I stopped to ask a question and poll them.  The alternative would be to have all questions in a single survey and have learners respond to all learners in one fell swoop; that definitely would take less prep time.

Second, I added to the learning module within my LMS the list of questions with links to the surveys and the results.  There’s also additional links for learners related to the question or concept.

Third, during class, the process was relatively simple.  As the discussion progressed, I stopped and asked the class to click on the current survey link and complete the survey.

After students had 30-45 seconds to start responding, I accessed the results page and continued to refresh until I had a number of responses matching the number of students in the class.  The results, particularly given the chart and percentage summaries, provided a number of opportunities to personalize the issues and discuss the implications.  This example shows that 12 of 21 in the class were/are not sure what phishing is.

With the preparation in advance and the links readily available to learners, Google Forms provided an excellent, makeshift polling system.  Several side notes.  First, it is anonymous since there’s no way to pass learner ID from the LMS to Google Forms; of course, I could have had learners enter their identity, but I chose not to since they would have had to do that on each and every form/question/survey.  Second, it’s not good for impromptu polling; it takes relatively thorough preparation for the discussion.  The process of creating the form, making the link available and accessing the results via the Google Forms interface takes some time.  Finally, students couldn’t access the results on their own; Google Docs doesn’t currently have a way that I’m aware of to publish results.  Clicking on the results link required logging into Google with my identity, but having the link available with the course materials allowed me to quickly and easily access the results. 

Certainly, hardware solutions and proprietary software solutions provide more bells, whistles and features, but for the value/cost ratio I got from this, it was a great solution ;-)

The Official Google Blog commented “We Knew the Web was Big“:

we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

Of course, 1 trillion links will always sound like a lot, but to visualize it a little differently, exactly how many different hyperlinks is that?

So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

Is there any other argument for the importance of information literacy in our schools, colleges and universities?  If our learners now do not leave our institutions prepared to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information,” what impact will that have on them? our workplaces?