iterativelearning

TechCrunch reports on improvements to Scribd — the collaborative, document-sharing site. In a quick skim of the features, there are a couple that seem pretty appealing such as embedding documents in any website and creating secure work groups for sharing documents. Scribd uses what they call iPaper, which runs on Flash, and so users can upload docs or presentations created in nearly any type of format (e.g., Mac, OpenOffice, Windows). While we all know Flash has its detractors, it can be nice for online learning contexts in which there are students coming from Windows, Mac, and increasingly Linux-based platforms.

Here’s an example:

Emerging Technologies for Learning
Report

A while back, I blogged about a company (Inigral) that was looking to position Facebook as a complement to traditional LMSs rather than as a replacement.

Now, Jeffrey Young over at the CHE Tech blog is reporting on projects that look to integrate platforms like FB with emergency response notification systems for college campuses. One project underway is over at the University of Maryland and is being headed up by HCI visionaries, Ben Shneiderman (Designing the User Interface) and Jenny Preece (Interaction Design; Beyond HCI). Young does a nice job of including those with concerns about how such a system might be abused (e.g., false alarms) as well as those touting its advantages, but the detail that stood out most to me was the description of a former New Orleans resident (now a student at UCLA), who explained that when Katrina hit, she was going to social networking arenas like Facebook for information because the cellphone networks were useless.

A relatively new journal, International Journal of Mobile Technologies, looks quite interesting. From the current issue, there’s one article on podcasting that really catches my eye (The Role of Podcasts in Students’ Learning).

credit: eLearning Watch.

Ars Technica has an interesting piece on the potential for Amazon to use it’s next version of the Kindle to coordinate with digital textbooks. There’s talk that the new model will mimic a traditional hard-copy spec of 8.5 x 11. Price, as Cheng notes in her article, will play a significant factor if this rumor proves to be true.

Guest e-Literate blogger Michael Statton describes a project in which Facebook is designed to complement rather than compete with the traditional LMS. Developed by Inigral, it offers a “private, secure application on Facebook.” The attention to privacy could nicely address the lingering dilemma of mixing purely social groups with purely academic — domains that perhaps a significant group of students and faculty would prefer to keep separate. He also explains that schools can integrate whatever branding strategy they have by doing things like designing unique skins. It seems to me that this might have some good potential to expand since it moves adoption of instructional software beyond confining binaries.

Despite its popularity, there is definitely a UI constituency out there who don’t find the aesthetics of MySpace very appealing. For those perhaps seeking a better aesthetic experience, Virb is worth a look. Essentially, you can do all the usual social networking stuff but with greater beauty.

On the road at a conference and in the conference hotel is a Starbucks. Because this is a large conference (thousands of attendees), the queue for coffee can be pretty long.

After a long wait, I finally arrive at the cash register and as I hand the cashier my Starbucks card, she informs me that they don’t take them. When I ask her why, she explains that this particular hotel owns Starbucks and so presumably, they’ve opted out of this system. From a User Experience standpoint, it would be nice if they had a sign of some sort that alerted the customer. What if the customer is out of cash and would rather not charge just one coffee drink? Not a big deal, but one that could enhance the user experience a bit.

For those of us who like to do lots of web clips, Evernote is definitely a tool worth checking out. It can clip text, visuals, or audio. It’s very intuitive and shows off a cleaner UI I think than Google Notebook. It also offers the option of emailing web clippings to your account. One of the best features I like is being able to sync your account across devices. And even better, a basic account is free — the right price for cash-strapped educators.

Matthew Ingram has a good, thought-provoking post on the relevance of social bookmarking. Because these tools make bookmarking so easy, it’s equally easy to accumulate a pile of urls that make it difficult to locate that site you’re looking for when you’re scrambling to meet a deadline. Yet, as an academic, I still find social bookmarking tools pretty useful. I like being able to locate a resource that I’ve bookmarked regardless of where I’m at or which computer I’m on.

Although, I think technically speaking it’s not a social bookmarking tool, Zotero, seems to be moving in that kind of direction with its upcoming sync tool.

I also like the potential for social bookmarking tools as a teaching tool; especially when I teach in online environments, the option of creating resource-sharing networks or groups can help build community. One relatively new player in the social bookmarking scene, at least to me, is Diigo. Among many of the standard features, it allows you to create private groups, which some faculty and/or students prefer when it comes to resource-sharing.

Zotero is a great tool for academics (and anyone else) who want an easy way to store, annotate, and enter notes on various web-based resources. Since I’ve been using it for about six months now, one feature that I’ve been hoping for (as well as a lot of other folks) is the ability to sync across computers. Thanks to the hard work of many dedicated programmers, this is becoming a reality. They now have a beta preview of this sync feature.