Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published an article on the Middlebury College’s banning of Wikipedia for student research.

It’s a balanced piece that might be useful reading for both students and teachers. Author Noam Cohen quotes Jimmy Wales:

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, “I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.”

He continued: “Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.

“If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.”

Something is happening in the vernacular of presentations.  I remember the great vowel shift from my long-ago study of linguistics and I wonder if this shift is akin to that one.  Or, it could be merely a matter of style. And those of you who know me well, know that I am a slave to that stuff. Right now I am sure of something. My PowerPoints are growing stale. 

So, yesterday I took a break from my big paper to try to relearn presenting for the 21st century and to examine what folks are calling “presentation zen.”  My understanding of this is that I need to work toward a more feng shui approach. Critical words and phrases and powerful images should stand alone and make their impact on stark backgrounds.  Garr Reynolds’ blog has lots of examples.

Anyway, my exploration led me back to Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture presentation.  Folks tend to point to this white-typewriter-text-on-black-background approach as early presentation zen.

I don’t think I can adopt this approach entirely.  I like pretty too much and those words come flying awful fast. 

But now a thought shift:

My visit back to Lessig’s presentation resonated.  It resonated especially in light of my recent post and current feelings of confusion and abiguity surrounding information ethics, the regulation of creativity, technology, the expansion of copyright, intellectual freedom, the owning of culture, and intellectual property.  If you haven’t already viewed this presentation, go back, take a look, and think.  Lessig’s story about the Disney’s approach to intellectual property, as well as his timeline relating to culture and copyright, may give you fresh context and cause you think twice about where all this is going. 

Charlie, an 11th grader, came in with a problem we’re likely to all face in the next several weeks.

He saved his documents–due last period today–as Word 07 docs. And he couldn’t upload his file into our older versions of Word. (Of course, he should have saved as an older version or RTF. We’ll work on that for next time.)

I thought I could fix this one easily by importing the file into NeoOffice or OpenOffice. Nope.

I thought I could bring the file into Google Docs, AjaxWriter, or ZohoWrite. Nope.

With my colleague Tammy, one of our tech teachers, we searched for converters–on the Microsoft site and at Source Forge.

Finally we found it. You need to download and install fileformatconverters.exe

Then try to open the document choosing Word 07 from the dialog menu.

The Microsoft description:

“Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.”

Hope this helps some others.