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Update: Great minds think alike! (and fools never differ…) @jonbecker quickly pointed out after I pressed ‘Publish’ that @doug_holton has already blogged about, made notes upon, and tested out this idea!
Before Google Teacher Academy last week I was revisiting Google tools I don’t use every day. One of these is Google Knol. Like Google Wave, it had changed a lot since I last used it, so I experimented further on the train down to London. Below is a link to the New Literacies ‘knol’ I produced along with a video overview of some of Knol’s features. I really do think the current peer-reviewed academic journal system is broken and needs a replacement. Something like Knol could do the job!
So yes, I bought it, took it back and bought it again. But I’m keeping my Dell Streak now. It’s great. And this is my last post on mobile phones – well, this month anyway…
Usually new mobile phones are known about well in advance of their launch. Everything from specs to early reviews are made available in order to create a buzz around the product. For example, a couple of years ago I was sent an LG Shine and encouraged (although not instructed) to take photos of it and blog about it. With the Dell Streak, however, apart from a great video at jkkmobile I stumbled across on the night before it was released in the UK, I’d heard nothing about it!
Full specs of the device can be found here, but the highlights are that it’s an Android tablet/smartphone hybrid with a 5″ screen. Yes, five inch!
Let’s just get past the two (related) questions I’ve been asked most frequently over the last couple of weeks:
Is it too big?
Don’t you feel a bit stupid putting it to your ear to, you know, make phone calls?
My responses:
It’s certainly on the upper limit of what counts as a phone size wise. Some, undoubtedly, will find it too big. But given that I tended to use my iPhone more for Twitter and other internet based activities than for phone calls, I don’t!
It’s not Dom Joly size and I don’t really suffer from self esteem issues anyway. As for people who think that phones should only be able to make phone calls, get back in your cave please…
Things I really like:
The whole experience and speed of the device makes it über-slick
Spotify, Dropbox and other official apps are better (to my mind) than their iPhone counterparts
The size of the screen makes everything… just better
It’s really quite thin
Several virtual desktops means you can organize your stuff
I don’t have to jail break it to set it up the way I want it
Widgets provide real-time updates
The camera is legendary and the in-phone editing functions are actually useful
I’ve been very impressed with my Sony Reader PRS-600 since I got it last week. It’s a great device for reading, highlighting and taking notes on academic articles. Since before I couldn’t find much useful video on how the highlighting and note-taking functionality works, I’ve quickly put together the above two minutes by way of demonstration.
Hope it helps.
Note: those reading via RSS/email may need to click through to see the video – or view it on YouTube!
I’ve reflected before on my difficulty in answering the question, “So… what do you do?”. From that post, however, the answer I’m increasingly keen on giving is:
I tell stories about how learning can be.
Invariably, given my predilections, this involves the use of technology. No matter where I go in Europe, in Turkey or the Middle East, there are three barriers that educators see as almost insurmountable:
I don’t have the time – I’m working flat-out as it is!
The curriculum doesn’t allow it.
We haven’t got the hardware/software/internet connection speed.
My responses to these?
Whilst there may a learning curve involved, you will invariably save time by making learning more available to students.
I ask them what the curriculum prescribes. More often than not it’s based on a false assumption – or, more dangerously, a textbook.
There has to be a reason for the school/local authority to upgrade the hardware/software/internet connection speed. Are you providing them with that reason?
And this is where the storytelling comes in. Because I’m not actually that interested in the technology itself. I’m interested in students reaching their potential, social justice and transforming education so it has some semblance of relevance by the time my son ends up in secondary school (2018 if you’re wondering).
So I came across the same issues when I visited the two schools my Dad works in near Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. But what I came across there was the willingness of teachers to learn. They really wanted to improve and get better – so much so that they availed themselves of every opportunity to ask me questions, quiz me about practicalities, and pick my brains.
I didn’t present anything groundbreaking or revolutionary whilst I was in the UAE. In fact, it was pretty tame stuff. What I did do, however, was tell a story. And that’s a whole lot more powerful than pointing educators toward a rag-tag bunch of loosely-related technologies we refer to as ‘Web 2.0′…
I heard about BumpTop a few months back when it was Windows-only. It’s makes your desktop 3D in an aesthetically-pleasing way. This week they launched the Mac version which I found out about via Mashable. It turns out that Mashable had 100 free ‘Pro’ upgrades to give away and I was lucky enough to be quick enough to apply to get one. This gives BumpTop extra functionality and features.
My thoughts can be found in the following quick overview:
(higher quality version at the Internet Archive – do they not do transcoding any more?)
Just to mix things up a bit, I thought I’d do this as a series of videos – it seemed appropriate to the subject matter. Learning Score is a visual planning tool for educators. And. It. Rocks.
Official promotional video
My quick overview
Planning a lesson from scratch in 10 mins
1. Official promotional video
2. My quick overview
3. Planning a lesson from scratch in 10 mins
You can get a 14-day free trial at http://www.learningscore.org/trial, but if you’re quick you can get a longer trial at http://www.learningscore.org/bett!
The most significant things I’ve learned this week have been snow-related. Have a quick look at the above YouTube video of me building an igloo. That took me 7 hours! Instead of getting all philosophical and talking about how good it felt to create something out of nothing and how I started to feel ‘at one’ with the snow, I’ll reflect on some practical considerations:
I should estimate how long things are likely to take before they start
The size of an igloo depends on the angle of the walls – easy to forget!
There are lots of different types of snow.
Igloos are actually quite warm!
I considered sleeping in it, but having worked on it for 7 hours straight every single muscle in my body hurt. I went in the bath, read my book and went to bed…
Here’s a brief overview of other stuff I’ve learned this week, broken down by category.
Tech
Flocking.me allows you to search through your friends’ tweets only (via TechXAV)
Pretty much everything you need to know in terms of how Google’s new Nexus One phone stacks up against the Motorola Droid and Apple iPhone can be found in this post at Mashable.
Encoding.com looks like a rather useful way to transcode video so it’s in a suitable format for various mobile devices (via Mashable)
Confused by what the ‘Semantic Web’ and ‘Web 3.0′ are? Try this video!
Jay Cross posted links to Handy free online tools this week – including the rather useful-looking Rypple (for getting anonymous feedback)
This Google page is very handy for showing people the various types of searches you can do and information you can find quickly and easily.
I really, really want this iPhone stand that makes it look like an iMac!
Chris Messina, only a few days younger than me, has celebrated his 29th birthday by announcing he’s going to work for Google. I suddenly feel a lot more confident about Google’s ‘openness’.
Google Chrome extensions are now available for Mac (if you install the Developer build). I’m running several without slowdown! (via Mashable)
Seth Godin on why you should stop blaming other people and external circumstances from holding you back.
Academic
I read about Tetrads on Harold Jarche’s blog and incorporated it into my Ed.D. thesis. He’s also got a useful post entitled Sharing tacit knowledge on how hierarchies aren’t great for emergent practices.
Wirearchy is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology” that is replacing hierarchies in forward-thinking organizations.
This resonated with me – via Jennifer Hagy @ indexed
The ever-relevant and insightful Harold Jarche looks back at Seth Godin’s predictions for 2009 from 5 years ago (startlingly accurate) and his own from 2007, as well as looking forward to new and emerging business models.
Mashable reflects on ways social media has changed us. This post makes a lot of sense and I’m going to start to use the term ‘ambient intimacy’ to explain a lot of what goes on, online. It makes sense.
BBC News posted a great satellite photo of what Britain looked like without the Gulf Stream last week.
There are some places in the world you’re just not allowed to go. This post on listverse (via @dougpete) highlights the ‘Top 10′ of these.
Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) in a reflective and revealing post entitled Sojourner Truth outlines her recent struggles with blogging and celebrity.
Quotations
You’re only given a little spark of madness. You musn’t lose it. (Robin Williams)
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. (Bob Hope)
It’s rare in this fast-paced world of Twitter and synchronous communications to come across high-quality reflections on how we connect online both professionally and personally. The video below, put together by D’Arcy Norman with contributions from the likes of Dean Shareski, Jim Groom and Barbara Ganley, is 15 minutes long. It’s absolutely worth your time – watch it now:
Connecting with people online is, in a sense, a very strange experience. I can know a lot more about someone that I’ve never (and probably will never) meet in person who lives on the other side of the world than I ever will about a work colleague. In fact, as I’ve often commented to people when doing this, I think meeting people online actually leads to better relationships than if the situation is reversed.
For instance, this might sound silly but I’m always very careful never to wear my glasses when meeting people for the first time. Why? I don’t want them to pigeon-hole me. The next time they see me and I’ve got my contact lenses in I’m the guy ‘not wearing his glasses’. It’s a perception thing.
Meet people online, however, and it’s almost a window into their soul. One thing I find fascinating is people’s choice of avatar on Twitter. Some people choose to have an image of themselves to aid recognition when people meet them in person. Others change their avatar often. The people I’m interested in, though, are people like me: people who stick to one avatar and use it everywhere they go online. Presumably that’s because their avatar says something about them. Here’s a few by way of example from people in my Twitter network – what do you think their avatar and bio says about them?
@lisibo
Primary MFL teacher, ADE, eTwinning Ambassador, speaker and blogger, improving techie and generally enthusiastic gal who loves her iPhone
@durff
[no bio]
@gsiemens
Changing the node set…
In the video embedded above, Dave Cormier talks about the ‘light’ connections we make with people and how these build up over time. I think this is what D’Arcy Norman (author of the video and, as of last month, no longer on Twitter) and Stephen Downes (a one-way user of Twitter) don’t get about social networking. Yes, 140 characters may be all too brief. But if I connect with you 50 times over the course of a few days, having had to craft each message to fit within the 140-character constraint, I bet we know each other a whole lot more than we did previously. And then you can go and look at my Flickr stream, my blog, etc. for more background. It’s not a replacement, it’s complementary.
Knowing an individual’s personal background and beliefs helps you judge when making decisions on whether to follow their advice and/or lead. But that’s not always best done only on the strength of meeting them face-to-face. I, for example, am much better (in terms of being coherent, understandable) when expressing myself using the written, rather than the spoken, word. Most connections online these days inhabit a world that is partly synchronous, partly asynchronous.* People may respond straight away to something you put online, or they may respond hours, days, weeks, months, or even years later. Because online content is an implicit open-ended invitation to give your opinion and make comment, you can do so at your leisure. This promotes thinking and drafting when blogging, and iterating towards your actual opinion when using tools such as Twitter.
People who haven’t seen videos or listened to podcasts in which I feature are often surprised when they meet me in person. For a start, I’m often younger than they thought (one person commented that they assumed, because of my avatar, that I was ‘a fat, balding, forty-something’ – thanks!) People also don’t tend to realise I have an, admittedly diminishing, Northumbrian accent – replete with the rolling R’s. I’m all for personality and individuality, but sometimes these two factors – my age and my accent – have proved to be barriers in the physical world. Not so online.
So an ode to the internet and the connections it makes. No, scratch that. An ode to the people who give up their time to connect to people. To those who make my life better by contributing, questioning and criticising my work and my thinking. It’s great to have and to be part of an active audience!
* There’s probably a word for this, but I don’t know what it is!
