101questions: crowd sourcing perplexity

I've followed Dan Meyer { @ddmeyer | dy/dan } for a while now. Here's his bio blurb from his blog:

About

December 24th, 2006 by Dan Meyer

I'm Dan Meyer. I taught high school math between 2004 and 2010 and I am currently studying at Stanford University on a doctoral fellowship. My hobbies include graphic design, filmmaking, motion graphics, and infographics, most of which have found their way into my practice in some way or another. My specific interests include curriculum design (answering the question, "how we design the ideal learning experience for students?") and teacher education (answering the questions, "how do teachers learn?" and "how do we retain more teachers?" and "how do we teach teachers to teach?"). I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

(http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?page_id=2)

Dan has an excellent blog, but is also involved in many web projects as well. One such project caught my eye because of his tweets. Every once in a while he'd tweet a link and ask something along the lines of, "What's the first question that pops into your head when you see this?". This intrigued me. I would click on the link and be taken to 101questions. It looks something like this:

I would type in the first question that came to mind and click submit. I then get to ask a question about the next photo or video. Also, if I no question comes to mind, or item just isn't that interesting, I have the option to skip it.
This is pretty fun on its own, well at least for me, but Dan is using this to collect/create engaging and perplexing activators.
Here's how the project is described on its webstie:

We don’t care how well you lecture. We don’t care how well you engage us. We aren’t impressed by your fancy slide transitions or your interactive whiteboard. We care how well you perplex us.

Can you perplex us? Can you show us something that’ll make us wonder a question so intensely we’ll do anything to figure out the answer, including listen to your lecture or watch your slides? Here’s one way to find out. Upload a photo or a video. Find out how many of us get bored and skip it. Find out how many of us get perplexed and ask a question.

Then figure out what you’re going to do to help us answer it.

Signed,

Your Students 
(http://101qs.com/blog/about/)

 I thought this was a great idea and can relate to the feeling of seeing something and just needing to know how it works, so I joined the site. I haven't put much on yet, but I've already learned some things.

• It's called 101 questions because each post is capped at 101 questions. You ask a question about your post when you upload it and the post is capped at 100 further questions, well more like interactions. Both asking a question and skipping a question count as an interaction. The number of questions out of 100 interactions is what determines the posts perplexity. If no question comes to mind for 100 people and you get 100 skips, chances are students aren't going to be intrigued if you use that photo or video in class.
• The question you have in mind for a particular post may not come to anyone else when they see it. This allows you to get a broader perspective and gauge what types of questions your students would be asking themselves.

This site is fun and a great way we can work together to improve our classrooms. Thanks, Dan!

And the winner is...

All the votes have been tallied and the keyboard is victorious! The spider web was the clear loser, with no votes, but perhaps it'll make a comeback as a Hallowe'en themed badge...

Here's the code to add it to your blog:

<a href="https://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F07086533109188873610%2Fbundle%2FInternet%20for%20Ed%202013"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8366/8483228233_0fde4f62c9_o.png" alt="#I4Ed" width="205" height="79" border="0"></a><br />

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_GB"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/80x15.png" /></a>

<font size="-2">thanks to <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/o_o/5743370/">o_o</a></font>

And here's how to add it to your blog. (If you use blogger, sorry Wordpress-ers.)

Updates

This blog is again going to be the home of course work. I started my Internet for Educators class at BU today and I am pumped. (To all those starting a blog for this course, "Hello and welcome! I hope you enjoy it.")

We had some introductory assignments, a.k.a. tech tasks, and I was happy that I'd already fulfilled most of them: I have a blog, twitter account and RSS reader. However, I have yet to give this blog a page sharing biographical information, so that's what I've been doing tonight.

Concerning Me is my bio, or about me, page and it is brand new. It doesn't go into great detail, but shares some information I find pertinent and gives a brief explanation of why this blog exists.

I made a photomosaic for the page. The over photo is one of my favourite pictures of me of all time and the mini-photos are all the pics of myself I could find on my laptop's hard drive. It was made on easymoza.com, but there will be more to come on that later.

Construction has finally finished on Links! I wanted something visual and fancy for this page, so I've embedded a symbaloo webmix I made of sites I think are useful to educators and that I also like. I'm not the biggest fan of having to scroll the embedded webmix, but that seems to be the best symbaloo is offering at the moment. 

Sites I post about will be added to this page, so, if I talk about something cool that you end up forgetting, this page will hopefully be an easy way to find it again. 

Meta-blogging

I currently write four blogs.

• ICTyler (this one) about explorations in the world of ICT and education.
• The KT Adventures - Personal things like travel pictures, stories, thoughts and such.
• Tried It! - a chronicle of my attempt to overcome pickiness and food in general.
• Poetic Times - a multi-author blog where we create found poetry from current events to use a resource in the classroom.

I started blogging in high school on Teen Open Diary. As for purpose I'd say a lot of it was that other people were and that I wanted to articulate my thoughts for an audience, plus I love being silly.

There are as many reasons to blog as there are people. As an individual, I use blogging as a creative outlet, a way to connect with family and friends while travelling, a way to organize and sort through my thoughts. As an educator, I use blogging for building connections, sharing resources and seeing new ideas and perspectives.

Blogging is an amazing reflective tool. To sit and think what you want to say on a topic/experience makes you sort through it. You re-engage with things.

Going back to Teen Open Diary. The concept of an open diary is a great way to think of a blog. It is your personal opinions, thoughts, experiences, but left open for any interested passerby to read through AND comment on. Comments can be inane, advertisements, vitriolic, or instructive, insightful and helpful.

More than its Summative parts

This blog was started as a summative project for my ICT in education course at Brandon University. I came into the course a technophile and it has been great for sharpening my skills and showing me new programs, sites, and technologies.
For me, however, the most important aspect of the course lies elsewhere. Professor (soon to be doctor) Nantais has encouraged me to think critically and reflectively on the role of ICT in education, both in a broad sense and what it means for our future, individual classrooms. He introduced me to the Literacy with ICT continuum and its importance in all areas of education.
Leaving this course I am committed to using technology in a new way: to foster creativity, critical thinking and the development of responsibility in my future students.


While this has been a project, I love blogging, technology and feel that sharing and collaboration make for great educators. So, I'm going to continue chronicling my educational experience with ICT (and probably regular experiences too). So follow along as ICTyler is going to be so much more that its summative parts.

Blogger

I have been a blogger user since 2009. I set it up when I moved to New Brunswick as a way to share and stay in touch with family. I am comfortable with it and thus chose to do my summative project as a blog.

Mosaic view on my personal blog.

There was only one wrench thrown in the process. Blogger has recently released dynamic views, which are a series of new templates that layout and display your blog in dynamic new ways. Originally I set up ICTyler with the mosaic dynamic view. It makes thumbnails of your posts. If you have a picture it uses it, otherwise it highlights the initial text, and arranges them in mosaic form. The size and position vary slightly each time you come to the blog. I really enjoy it. However, with dynamic view templates there is a header bar that enables users to switch between all seven views at their leisure. If I were to stick with dynamic views I would lose control of how my blog would be presented to the world. I found a way to potentially overcome this though. In the advanced template setting I can change the dynamic view bar background and font colour. I set them to be the same and when people visit the blog they are none the wiser.

So, I'm feeling confident. I have a hip, new layout and it's going to stay that way. Then I remember gadgets. I remember labels, blogrolls, rss feeds and all the great sidebar content possible in blogger. Dynamic views does not have this. Why have I been labelling posts? How can I share useful resources with everyone who comes to the blog, without them having to somehow find the right post?

It was for this reason I switched back to one of the original templates. I modified it to my liking and have been able to add twitter feeds I feel are valuable resources. Posts can be organized via the archives or the label cloud. I hope to add a useful link bar, blogroll and slideshow of my pictures among other things. I think the many uses of gadgets outweighs a flashy layout for what I want to accomplish here.