As a pretty dedicated Mac guy, I’m planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Still, I’ve been reading different bloggers’ takes on it and David Pogue identifies a couple of nifty features I hadn’t yet heard about:
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Snow Leopard, Apple, David Pogue
As with other professional groups, many educators have integrated Twitter into their digital lifestream and in some cases, their classrooms. But Paul Hudson’s article in techradar makes a good case (as part of a larger argument urging more thought and caution about ostensibly free
web apps) for considering Identi.ca as your microblogging platform. In addition to cloning your Twitter stream, he explains that it operates on the OpenMicroBlogging standard and supports OpenID. Essentially, this openness gives you access to your data whenever you need it.
Like Twitter, you can use Identi.ca through the web or a dedicated client. As a Mac user, I like Nambu.
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Identi.ca, Nambu, techradar, Paul Hudson
Campus Technology recently reported that UC-San Diego has released a free iPhone app for students that they can use to access information such as courses, professors, and various videos that UCSD distributes via its YouTube channel. They also include a rather compelling statistic: 2,100 downloads after only two days of making the app available.
Needless to say, there has been lots of interesting movement on the mobile-campus-computing front and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the research that comes out of this expanding circle of growth. Geri Gay, the head of Cornell’s HCI Group, appears to be one of the leading researchers in the area and gave a very interesting talk at this year’s Educause ELI. A quick look at her publications shows her work in mobile computing extending back to 1997. Impressive.
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Campus Technology, Geri Gay, Cornell HCI Group, UC San Diego
Flock has represented a real advancement in web browsers with its emphasis on the integration of popular social tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg.
This week it offered a pretty significant update. Two changes I like are how you can use the Media Bar to preview photos and videos and store Twitter searches for future reference.
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Flock
John Timmer of Ars Technica has a piece on California’s Governor Schwarzenegger move towards free, digital textbooks. He points to the economy as one key factor propelling the move, but the one I find particularly persuasive has to do with the very real limitations of a six-year textbook-review cycle, especially when it comes to math and science.
In announcing the decision, Governor Schwarzenegger also emphasized its pedagogical value. Printed textbooks, he noted, are on a six-year approval cycle, meaning that many recent historic and scientific events get left out of the classrooms.
Needless to say, the knowledge base of science and technology grows much faster than at six-year increments. Another interesting and related development will be the platform (e.g., Kindle’s .mobi?, ePub?)
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Ars Technica, John Timmer, California
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
Beginning this week and continuing for the next couple, I’ve been participating in a colleague’s class whose students are discussing one of those terms that has become so popular and widely used (or overused in the eyes of some) that it’s come to mean all different kinds of things for all different kinds of people. And what is this slippery term? New Media. In this class, we’re discussing it in the context of Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool.
Not surprisingly, it’s raised the question of what exactly do we mean by the term literacy. By coincidence, while catching up on a recent batch of RSS feeds, I happened to come across Doug Belshaw’s post in which, just a couple of weeks ago, he created a discussion forum dedicated to this very topic. One of the threads is labeled Hannon on literacy and after reading through the various posts, I noticed two dominant concerns: annotatability and findability.
In educational environments, teachers encourage students to annotate texts because it promotes better comprehension, which ideally leads to more informed, critical analysis. Similarly, when students write about these texts, it can be a real bear sometimes when they butt up against that all-too-common hurdle: finding that particularly poignant quote or passage that they remember reading, but just can’t seem to find. One of the posters in Belshaw’s forum connects it to a recent class session-
Last Thursday I had a Y11 English class finishing coursework on ‘Of Mice and Men.’ One of the students remembered the gist of a quotation he wanted to use. He’d been flicking through the book for ages looking for it before he asked me. I brought all my skills of memory recall, scanning and skimming to bear. And couldn’t find it. Suddenly the solution dawned on me: I found a copy of the text on Google books; a quick keyword search and a few seconds later we had the exact quotation he needed.
Learning doesn’t happen through a tedious cycle of flicking pages for ages. Digital texts ease the search burden. Just press CTRL-F.
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Jeff_Rice, Doug_Belshaw, Literacy
A couple of days ago, I was skimming the headlines in Fast Company, and read about a new search engine called Duck Duck Go. So I gave it a try and after a few successful preliminary searches was impressed enough to try it out as my default engine for a couple of days.
Here are just a few, initial impressions …
So after two solid days of Duck Duck Go as my default, I’m leaning towards Fast Company’s conclusion. Okay, maybe it’s got a bit of a silly name, but maybe that’s what people thought when they first heard the name Google way back in the 90s.
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Flock, Duck Duck Go, Fast Company
There’s been a fair amount of press coverage lately (CHE Wired Campus Blog Ars Technica) on the University of Virginia’s decision to begin phasing out its computer labs. Generally, the reason has been attributed to cost and the fact that most students already have their own laptops and use those more than the machines in the lab.
While this situation obviously doesn’t apply to all schools, (at mine for instance I see the labs enjoy regular use) but what I think will be a more interesting trend to follow will be the impact of students with mobile devices. As has been frequently reported, mobile devices have much wider adoption than laptops and so the interesting question for those in the educational technology arena is how that will shape the configuration of learning spaces that integrate a spectrum of computing devices. Also, aside from the gadgets, how will it impact the design of more mundane things like tables and chairs? With this in mind, I don’t see labs being replaced, but reconfigured to accommodate changing circumstances. Schools like the University of St. Louis-Missouri seem to be moving in this direction already.
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Chronicle of Higher Education, University Missouri-St. Louis, University of Virginia
Campus Technology has a story on a collaboration between Moodle and Google. Specifically, MoodleRooms will be integrated with Google Apps for Education. So practically this means that,
[t]hrough the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition
Although, it’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the Moodlesphere, I’ve done some informal piloting of Google Apps for Education in some of my classes and anecdotally, students have mentioned that they’ve found it to be fairly intuitive. Another benefit was familiarity: every student knows the Google name/brand; also, the university logo appears at the top of the login page.
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Moodle, Campus Technology