iterativelearning

From Wired’s Gadgets Lab column, Priya Ganapati has an interesting piece on Why E-Books Look So Ugly. Despite the advances in screen reader technology that make text resolution nearly as good as what appears in regular hard-copy, various industry reps believe that ebook sales would increase if they ramped up their efforts on aesthetic details such as typography.

But it’s not just a matter of design. Apparently, a big part of the problem stems from competing standards; Amazon uses a proprietary format (.mobi) whereas Apple uses ePub. This sounds a lot like the battles over web (browser) standards. Considering the possible connection, I checked to see if the W3C had weighed in on this yet, but after a quick search, I didn’t find any sort of definitive statement. However, TeleRead, which covers ebook developments, wrote a post last month on a Barnes & Noble subsidiary, Fictionwise, going with the ePub format. I don’t know if the ebook industry is looking to the W3C for guidance, but it would be nice to see it, or a similar sort of organization step in soon so we can see ebooks achieve aesthetic elegance.

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Amazon, Apple, Wired, Priya Ganapati, iPhone, e-Book
Fictionwise

Continuing yesterday’s theme, here’s another little nugget from Wolfram Alpha; this one is primarily aimed towards web writers, designers, and coders. If you’re coding colors, you can quickly find hexadecimal values just by entering names of colors in the search box with a + interspersed between each. So for example, if you enter the color combo

• purple+yellow
• you’ll see, #BF8040

It also outputs a color swatch, the nearest html color values, and complimentary colors among other things. As I see it, this allows for quick experimentation, and probably gives more information, than going to one of your favorite hex-index sites stored inside your bookmarks. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, you can see this and other features in Wolfram’s introductory screencast.

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Wolfram Alpha, hexadecimal

I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that numbers geeks, engineers, and scientists have been flocking to Wolfram Alpha ever since its release on May 18. But after watching their introductory screencast, I found that it’s got offerings for word and language enthusiasts as well.

For example, let’s say you need to write a paper in the range of 15000 words. If you enter that figure into Wolfram Alpha it computes the number into both single-spaced and double-spaced page equivalents;

… or … if you were writing a paper on the history of the English language (a standard course offering in English Dept graduate programs) and needed to know the background on prepositions; if you entered prepositions into Wolfram Alpha, one of the results you’d see would be its first recorded use: 1388 or 621 years ago. To check the credibility of this data, you could also click the Source Information link and see that Princeton University’s WordNet, among others, was one of the references.

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Wolfram Alpha, WordNet

In a recent issue of First Monday, Scott Reid shares results of a study he conducted of faculty shifting traditional, face-to-face classes to an online context (Online courses and how they change the nature of class). Part of this discussion centers on faculty experiences in using the discussion board feature and the challenges of building successful online learning communities. This vexing question, of course, represents a big component of distance education research. Nevertheless, in one of the more interesting excerpts, one of his respondents speculates that part of the problem may relate to cueing:

One professor … thought some students were holding back on participating because they didn’t have cues such as body language to help determine the receptiveness of other people in the course.

What I find interesting in this relationship between cueing and the level of receptiveness is its implications for spontaneity. Spontaneity can lead to promising insights and creative ideas, but if a student is overly concerned with the degree of receptiveness, then it seems likely that the potential for that kind of stimulating environment is reduced. One way faculty lay the groundwork for better receptiveness or -cueing participation- is through a variety of orientation activities that focus on building interpersonal connections rather than immediately launching into the business-side of the course. Learning communities can’t be built without recognizing the time it takes to build the trust and understanding of different students’ communication styles.

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First Monday, Scott Reid

The user-friendliness of Ubuntu has certainly helped widened the popularity of open source options. Dell, for example, now offers computers bundled with Ubuntu. Sun’s Open Office is the office suite that comes with Ubuntu and they’ve recently released the latest version (3.1). One particularly nice addition to their word processing app, Writer, is the ability to quickly add a reply to a comment. You can check out more details here.

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Open Office, Dell, Ubuntu

Earlier I blogged about the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s modular learning space – the Learning Studio. At a recent Educause conference, some faculty from the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences described a similar setup. (They’ve also produced a short video to give you an idea of what it looks like.) A similar feature to both of these learning space designs is IT being freed up from having to provide the computers; instead, the focus is on creating dynamic, modular spaces that can be adapted to course-specific learning needs and encourage small-group collaboration. Essentially, the space becomes a kind of plug-in-play architecture where the students’ computing devices are plugged into the network and corresponding display screens.

This perhaps plays into what the University of Virginia found, where many students already had their own laptops and presumably preferred to use their own machines rather than the university’s. Now, with the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks and expanding power of mobile handhelds, we could see more universities transitioning traditional computer labs to modular learning spaces.

GoogleDocs is one of the tools I like to use in my online classes. Students know the name (i.e., Google), the interface is easy for them to intuit, they can share documents via simple URLs, and it’s integrated with the Google Apps for Education.

Today, the Google Docs blog announced an improvement to the collaboration feature, so it’s easier to create groups. Previously, you had to manually add email addresses each time you wanted to share a document; now you can simplify the process by using the contact manager to create groups.

With the massive adoption of microblogging platforms like Twitter, there’s been talk about whether or not RSS readers are dead (1, 2, 3) . One of the recent threads in this discussion happened over at Mashable in which one of the commenters (Eric McGinnis) mentioned feedmil — something that isn’t an RSS reader or a microblogging platform. Essentially, with feedmil, you can search blogs, microblogs, and news sites. But that simplicity belies its power (at least as far as I’m concerned). It’s got numerous features, but here’s just a little smattering of what I found beneath the surface.

• Interface:
  It sports an interface that foregrounds simplicity and clear visual cueing. Both of these make it very intuitive.
• Sorting:
  You can sort feeds by blogs, microblogs, podcasts, and others. You can also sort by feedmil rank, relevance, or quality. It also has multi-lingual capabilities.
• The Slider: customizing search results —
  One of its more distinctive options is a set of sliders that allow you to customize related keywords (what they call Topic Significance). For, for example, if I enter the term instructional technology, one of the related keywords that will appear in the Topic Significance slider column is university. If I then move the slider to the right to increase its significance, then my search results are automatically tailored towards higher education. (UI gift = No need to click a confirmation [OK] button.)

• The Slider: skipping through history —
  When you click on a specific search hit or result, not only does it display a brief synopsis and relevant urls, but it gives you another slider tool to quickly explore the chronology of a blog without even going to the site itself. So, for example, when you move the slider to the left, it moves back through the previous entries and displays the entries for those dates. Pretty slick for doing quick historical searches.

So in my initial fooling around with it, the Slider seems to be where its real potential power lies; it pushes beyond basic keyword searches.

Am I going to toss my RSS reader? Not likely. For me, my reader (currently NetNewsWire) is still an optimum way to keep up with my favorite observers and analysts. But I definitely plan to use this as a research tool and would suggest it to students.