Keep in mind that by providing these instructions I am not agreeing to provide you with technical support for the rest of your life. The instructions are for the G1 ONLY, so if you have a MyTouch or something else you will need to look elsewhere. Use at your own risk, blah, blah, blah…

Adapted From CyanogenMod Wiki:

1. Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html
2. VLC Video Player (this baby will play anything) http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
3. Uninstall Norton Antivirus – even if it’s free. Same with McAffee Antivirus. Stay away from these bloated apps! If you want virus protection, I suggest AVG Anti-virus Free Edition: http://free.avg.com/us-en/download
4. Flash Player: http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player.exe
5. Open Office: http://download.openoffice.org/ (you’ll need this unless you have MS Office)
6. iTunes (includes Quicktime): http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
7. Primo PDF lets you print/save to a PDF: http://www.primopdf.com
8. Skype: http://download.skype.com/SkypeSetup.exe)
9. Pidgin multiple IM client: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/
10. I usually install the following 10 Firefox add-ons. Not all will be useful to you, but the first 5-6 might be:

1. Ad Block Plus (ABP) – a must for blocking ads while browsing
2. Google Toolbar for Firefox
3. Shareaholic – delicious and other social bookmarks and sharing
4. Tab Mix Plus
5. Extended Copy Menu – lets you copy as plain text without all the formatting
6. Personas – lets you put skins on Firefox (I like the carbon fiber designs)
7. Echofon (formerly TwitterFox)
8. TinyURL Generator – I use this to shorten links for Twitter
9. Web Developer
10. Firebug

Optional:

1. HFS explorer – Reads mac file systems from a PC, if you need that sort of thing. Great for those who run Bootcamp or are switching between mac and PC: http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/
2. Silverlight – This might come preinstalled on some PCs, but just in case: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/
3. Adobe Reader http://get.adobe.com/reader/- Preinstalled on most PCs (PrimoPDF can also view PDFs and takes up much less space)

3G Modem Easter Egg? Interestingly, while it’s not listed in the official specs, the dm3-1035 appears to have a 3G modem built in — or at least support for a 3G modem. There’s a SIM card slot hidden under the battery, and some are claiming that it works with a broadband AT&T SIM. Others claim that an additional module is needed to make it work, so this could be a manufacturing error that varies from model to model. HP hasn’t enabled the modem, but others have posted the utility that apparently makes it work. An interesting hardware Easter egg, to say the least!

Model dm3-1035us ($499 after $50 rebate at Office Depot):

Here are the specs:

• AMD Athlon Neo X2 1.6 GHz dual-core processor L335
• 13.3″ LED widescreen display with BrightView and 1366 x 768 resolution
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM (expandable up to 8GB)
• 320GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200 rpm); Optical drive not included
• ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics; up to 1470MB graphics memory and 128MB display cache memory; AMD M780G with 64MB GDDR2 sideport memory.
• Built-in webcam with microphone
• Altec Lansing audio
• 4 high-speed USB 2.0 ports
• 5-in-1 media reader with support for Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO and xD-Picture Card formats
• HDMI output
• Wireless LAN (802.11a/b/g/n)
• 10/100Base-T Ethernet LAN with RJ-45 connector
• Weight: 4.2 lbs. and measures 1.2″ thin
• 6-cell lithium-ion battery
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit OS preinstalled
• Software included: Microsoft Works; HP MediaSmart; Adobe Acrobat Reader; Cyberlink DVD Suite; 60-day trial version of Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition.
• Rated battery life: 6 hours
• Bluetooth

So while I understand there are limitations with the refresh rate of the E-Ink display, it’s hard not to get carried away thinking about the possibilities. I’ll be honest, I was not really interested in the Nook until I heard it will run Android. That changed everything. So while some complain that Nook would be great if it only had text-to-speech or a web browser, I don’t really care about the current features anymore. (Yes, their e-books are overpriced.) Someone is going to hack this thing, and that will be the point at which it becomes amazing and irresistible. Let me put it this way: 10-inch screen+wifi+micro-sd slot+color touchscreen+Android+root=Awesomeness!

The TwHistory project began in early 2009 with the first Twitter reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg over a period of several weeks. While history is considered a boring subject by some, others find a great deal of satisfaction in reenacting important moments in history, dressing in old uniforms and marching on preserved battlefields. TwHistory is based on the idea that historical reenactments can take place online and have the same positive effects for volunteer participants and virtual onlookers.

Twitter provides all the necessary elements for a recreating a historical event: actors, communication, and relationships. Followers of Twitter reenactments get updates in real-time as the characters of a particular historical event communicate, or “tweet” about what is happening. Each historical character has a Twitter account with a username that conveys who the character is. The content is researched beforehand and entered into a shared spreadsheet to be reviewed by the project leader. This ensures that volunteers have written appropriate tweets that work well together with the other Twitter characters. Tweets must be 140 characters or less, so abbreviations are often used. Once the length has been checked, the tweets are scheduled with a timer program so they are sent at a specific time. The idea is to match the date and time of the events as closely as possible so that the tweets are an authentic reenactment. All this is organized in an online group and carried out by volunteers.

In any historical reenactment it is often the actors who get the most benefit, and this is no different with Twitter. And just like traditional reenactments, TwHistory projects have the potential to draw a large audience. Part of the fun is the contrast brought by the medium. It is hard to think of General Custer texting a tweet at the Battle of Little Bighorn without smiling. Spectating Twitter followers often retweet favorite messages, drawing additional followers to the reenactment. Interest has grown steadily, attracting historians and hobbyists alike. The project also attracted the attention of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, interested in its value for outreach efforts. The TwHistory model is also being used to teach part of a Cold War History class at a high school in Missouri.

Research is needed to understand what effects historical reenactments using Twitter could have on student engagement and learning, but anecdotal evidence point to positive outcomes. Open social learning may be a challenge to harness or control in a formal learning environment, but it is an area that is highly relevant today and should be explored.

The structure of the CE course was fairly straightforward. Activities were spread out over six weeks, with readings and a case study for each week. Groups were responsible for self-organizing and responding to the case study each week, as well as grading and commenting on the work of the other groups. The final week consisted of creating a case study of our own, along with an answer to that case study. I subsequently found out that these will be adapted and used in future sections of the CE course. A very clever, sustainable course design, I must say!

Work was meant to be done in groups, and each group was given a wiki page to work out the case study and a blog to post their final answers. A course chat was also provided, but organizing a weekly chat didn’t work well for my group so we abandoned it after the first week. Instead we used long email threads to push ideas back and forth. (I think the course administrators expected to harvest some ideas and feedback from the chat logs, so I got permission from my group and sent them our email threads.) The number of emails seemed to annoy one of our group members, who quickly dropped out. Perhaps an asynchronous discussion board would be more useful in future courses, given the busy schedules most people keep and some people’s apparent aversion to receiving lots of email. (I get about a hundred a day… I helps me feel loved

While there wasn’t much interaction with the admins, I don’t really think that was the point. After all, I assume it was called Peer2Peer for a reason. The admins did a nice job of setting things in motion, clarifying topics, adjusting groups and deadlines, etc. Their response times varied, but generally I think they were on top of things. I assume they have just as many outside activities going on as the course participants — if not more.

One thing that took everyone by surprise was the attrition within groups. By the third week our 6-person group was down to three, and soon that became two. But two is enough to provide for interaction, and I worked with an excellent partner. I suppose 50% or higher attrition shouldn’t come as a surprise when you are dealing with busy professionals who are learning for the sake of learning. Reality tends to interfere with such pure motives. Well, almost pure. I was able to arrange independent study credit as part of my PhD program of study, so I had some additional motivation to keep going. Had I ended up alone in my group the experience would have been totally different, but with at least one person to consult the experience was quite satisfying.

I also like seeing the different ways my amateur photography gets reused by others. For example, one of my photos of the Crab Cooker restaurant in Newport Beach, CA was reused on Wikipedia. Two other images were used on a travel site called Schmap.com. But my favorite reuse photo is one showing a row of three identical houses for sale in my old neighborhood in California. It really captures the essence of housing crisis, and it has been reused in five different places so far.

Reuse & Reputation: Can they be tracked?

They say the more you give the more you get. (They also say that all you need is love, but that’s another topic.) While my photo sharing isn’t likely to generate anything more than a simple satisfaction of being appreciated, it has implications for reuse in other areas as well. Openness can pave the way for increased reputation in your profession just as easily as in your hobbies. But how do you know if you are making progress? Tracking reuse can be fairly simple if you have a fairly unique username. I have set up a Google Alert to crawl the web and notify me anytime my Flickr username (caswell_tom) pops up somewhere. Of course, this won’t track reuse in print or on password protected web pages, but it’s a start. As my collection grows I keep track by adding a “reused” tag to each of the photos. I also add a comment on my image with the URL where the photo was reused. Flickr makes adding tags and comments to your photos very easy. Here is what I have so far.

Does > openness = > reuse?

I have learned that unique of obscure photos get reused far more than common ones. And while greater openness does not necessarily translate to greater reuse, I have noticed that people started reusing my photos around the same time I assigned an Attribution-only Creative Commons license to all my photos. It’s just anecdotal, but I didn’t not have any cases of reuse until I made the change from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY. It seems logical that a less restricted license would be more appealing to an online journal, magazine, or other site. Of course, adding metadata also helps. I usually add a few descriptive tags to my best photos. But just as important is my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is, I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. And the odds of them being used for something really offensive approaches zero.

I collect reuse like some people collect coins. I think it’s fun to see what happens with them. You never know where they might end up. If you have your own story of tracking reuse, please share!

UPDATE: I just found out that my friend, Julià Minguillón from Barcelona does the same thing! He posts all the places his photos have been reused to delicious, and he has over 160 cases of reuse. Um, I’ll take my humble reused photo collection and leave now…

1. Setting up your Twitter “character” accounts:
Think of your project as a play, and make a list of all the characters you will need. Each of these will need a separate Twitter account, and each account requires a different email address. So you will need several different email addresses to register multiple Twitter accounts. (If you use Gmail, there is a trick to get around this problem. You can fool Twitter into thinking you are using a different email address by adding “+1″ or “+something” to your Gmail address. An example would be yourname+something@gmail.com. So if you have 10 Twitter characters you need to set up, you can register one as yourname+1@gmail.com and then register another one with yourname+2@gmail.com, and so on. Gmail will ignore the + and everything after it and promptly deliver a confirmation email for each of your character accounts to yourname@gmail.com.) Before you get started you will also want to set up a main Twitter account and then use it to follow the “Twitter characters” in your project. I called mine “HistoricTweets.” Don’t follow anyone else with this account (other than your characters) and don’t tweet from the project Twitter account or those tweets will show up as well. (Frankly it’s a little tricky to erase an accidental tweet, since it involves digging into the mySQL database to find and delete the problem entry.)

2. Archiving Tweets on a single web page:
This is not really a necessity, but it’s nice to be able to show all the tweets in one place, especially to people who don’t use Twitter. Before you can do this part you will need a web hosting provider that can support PHP and mySQL (most can). Something inexpensive like BlueHost.com is fine. I used a free program called Twitster to capture all the tweets. Setting up Twitster is easier than setting up a WordPress blog, so if terms like PHP and mySQL are somewhat familiar to you, then you can probably do it. Download Twitster (http://plasticmind.com/twitster) and set it up using the project Twitter account and following the instructions in the README.txt file (included below). Be sure to leave the hash tag field blank in the setup wizard so that all tweets from anyone your follow with the project account will appear on your Twitster page. The tweets show up with the newest ones first, and there’s not much you can do about that unless you are a programmer. Here are a couple examples:
http://twhistory.com/gettysburg/
http://tomcaswell.com/historictweets/

From the Twitster Installation Guide:
1. Upload the Twitster files into the directory you want to use. (e.g. http://mysite.com/twitster/)
2. Bring up that location in your browser. Twitster will bring up a setup wizard the first time you access it.
NOTE: You may need to make your make your Twitster directory writable (777) so the wizard can create your configuration file. For security’s sake, once you run the wizard, you should delete setup.php and set the main directory permissions back to something safer, like 755.
3. Fill in the setup form. Leave the hash tag field empty if you want to display all the tweets for those you are following. Click “Set Up Twitster”. You’re done!

3. Scheduling Tweets:
Being able to schedule tweets ahead of time is very useful, especially if you are reenacting an even with many characters tweeting around the same time. The best free tweet scheduler program I have found is called TweetMaster (http://www.twtmstr.com) It was developed by a fellow contributor to the TwHistory.com project, and now it seems to have a few extra bells and whistles. This app lets you schedule tweets down to the minute, so recreating an even like the Cuban Missile Crisis could be really exciting (especially when events happen in rapid succession). The other thing I like about this app is that you can set up multiple twitter accounts into groups for easy tweet scheduling. I highly recommend testing whatever timed tweet app you decide to use with a couple fake accounts. That way you know what it can and can’t do for you.

I hope this helps others get started with Twitter History or other reenactment projects. Please leave me a comment and let me know if you are doing a Twitter project so I can link to it from TwHistory.com.

Why am I taking this course?
I have worked for the OpenCourseWare Consortium for the past two years, and the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for two years before that. I have been involved in many aspects of the OCW movement, from managing the development, testing, and localization of eduCommons (a popular OCW software platform) to creating the actual OCW courses with professors at Utah State University. As part of the process of creating OCW courses, content must be licensed in such a way that allows it to be freely available via the World Wide Web. This requires the best possible understanding of global copyright as if applies to education. I am not new to the issues of copyright in education (and have taught units on copyright in my own high school and university courses), but I feel there is still much for me to learn in this area.

While I am still working out the details of getting credit for this course in my Instructional Technology PhD program at Utah State University, I don’t think that will be a problem. I see names like Jane Park and Ahrash Bissell from ccLearn among those listed on the team and advisory group. If the folks at Creative Commons can’t facilitate an excellent course on copyright, who can? The course outline appears well-structured. I think I’m in for a treat. If any faculty from my department read this and think it sounds interesting, I would love to hear from you. BTW, I need 1 credit of independent study