ePad – Rockin’ It Like It’s 1987

You know you have something going right when the spoofs are spectacular…

Then we have this dream sequence/history of Apple’s computer designs. Beautifully done, but I don’t see how they could have left out the evolution of the iMac or iPod, except maybe they couldn’t get the curves of their virtual rendition to look right…

Finally we have the latest iPad ad, that debuted during Sunday’s Oscar broadcast…

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Apple iPad Announced: Oh My God, It Doesn’t Have a Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper!

I love CNET. It’s one tech news source where I can find everything from straight tech journalism to flawed editorials on the latest things happening in the tech world. Take the overhyped announcement of the iPad a little bit ago, CNET provided the following excellent straight news reporting on the event:

Then there’s this excellent example of the tech news analysis by Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman in CNET’s “Real Deal” podcast. The two put the iPad announcement into the historical context, looking at many of the previous, mostly failed, attempts to popularize the tablet/handheld class of computer. Make sure to visit the podcast website, these guys have excellent show notes and links to all of the gadgets mentioned in the video/podcast.

Then there’s this speculative editorial that wants to pass itself off as news reporting. Molly Wood is a smart, funny journalist, but she’s definitely from the media personality school of thought where snarky strong opinions are pushed to the front, generating huge positive or negative responses. I can’t watch this video without getting pissed-off. Ack. Moving on.

Discounting the noise being made by those who flat out hate all things Apple, iPhone or Steve Jobs, I’ve noted at least two trends between the fanboys and the haters. The first trend seems to be that pretty much none of the haters have actually touched the device and are making their vitriolic pronouncements based on the videos and the device spec sheet. This leads to the second observation: all of the haters are freaking out about all of the things the device doesn’t have. Oh my god, it doesn’t have a walk-in closet! Perhaps you missed that opening slide in the keynote where Jobs placed the device between a smart phone and a laptop. The idea is that the device will have things missing in the smart phone and won’t have things found on the laptop, like a three-car garage (crap, now I’m sounding like Molly Wood). Moving on.

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Moving Media Around the House

By definition, this is a “first world” problem. In the news gap between CES and the Apple event next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might manage my media collections between all of my computers. The buzz around the Boxee box and anticipating the need to have most of my working data in the cloud so that I can access it regardless of what computer or platform I’m using has inspired me to find a better way to work with my media. Actually this is a “problem” that I didn’t have until I moved from my one-room studio to my one-bedroom apartment and then two-bedroom townhouse. I have four macs floating around the house (and anticipate a fifth Apple in the form of an iPad-netbook-media-thingy), each with their own full copies of my iTunes library, DVDs ripped to a couple macs, and daily podcasts downloaded to all four computers. In the past I manually erased podcasts I’d already listened to on one of the four computer and my iPhone, but given how many podcasts I listen to this method is just too much work. I’d also been hoping to store my DVDs on one computer and be able to view them on any of the other devices. The upcoming release of the Boxee box has me rethinking my media sharing scheme.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

One of the things that I’ve learned so far is that even though I’m using fast wireless “N” and or a fast “power” Ethernet connection between the first and second floors, ripped DVDs stored on hard drives in their original Mpeg2 format won’t play across the network without lots of buffering or dropped frames. Unacceptable. I was anticipating using my PS3 as the movie/media player downstairs (still working on that), so I had previous converted some movies to mp4 and those videos seemed to play nicely across the network. So, even though I’m a firm believer in having access to all of the “extra features” that I look for with my DVDs (and how convenient they are to access using the DVD menu system), I’ll need to rip and convert my media to a more network friendly format, like mp4 (which makes each extra feature into it’s own separate video file). Grrr.

I have a huge DVD and music collection and get most of my more daily news and entertainment via video and audio podcasts, so I need some kind of box attached to my TVs so that I can get my Internet/network media. I was hoping to use my PS3 as the player in my living room, but it has a crappy web-browser and doesn’t do RSS, so it can’t natively do podcasts. More work needed here. At the moment my mac mini is doing living room media duties. I love the Front Row interface, but it seems a bit confused that my episodes of StarTrek (classic and Next Gen) are not movies and won’t let me organize things. So maybe the updated Boxee interface will do the job.

I’ve played with Boxee previously, but couldn’t break away from my iTunes addiction. With the software upgrade and set-top box, I’m thinking that this might be the solution to my Internet TV/podcast thing, either the software or the set-top box. Depending on my success using the PS3 as a media player, I still might need another set-top box for the bedroom TV. I’m also thinking that I need to plug into the NetFlix thing (streaming and disc) so that I don’t find myself buying every movie I want to see. So whatever box I get needs to do Netflix, access my music and DVDs across the network and either grab podcasts off the net or the ones stored on my other computers. Having invested in the PS3, I’m aware of the problems of getting a box that isn’t as expandable to handle all of the twists and turns that tends to happen in the media market.

Sources:
* Boxee Demo. http://www.boxee.tv/box retrieved on 1/23/2010
* FrontRow image by Joe Bustillos
* Tekzilla » Episode 124: “Should I buy a Boxee Box or a Roku or Stick With My xbox?” http://revision3.com/tekzilla/veronicapc/should-i-buy-a-boxee-box-or-a-roku-or-stick-with-my-xbox-360- retrieved on 1/23/2010
* Tekzilla » Episode 121: Boxee Box. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/2010newyear/boxee-box retrieved on 1/23/2010

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Form Factor: 8×11

Nope, this isn’t about grading assignments while drinking beer, though that practice clearly deserves a blog entry/study of it’s own. This one is about a unexpected discovery I made last Sunday when I needed to get away from my domicile and plant myself at a local pub to watch a day of NFL goodness. Of course having 10-page student papers to grade wasn’t going to stop me. Now, because access to a power-outlet was in doubt and previously the wifi was iffy at best, I took the unusual precaution of actually printing out all of the assignments and choose to read through and make notes on these pages before uploading the comments onto my laptop. I’m pretty fanatical about NOT printing out things, so I can’t remember the last I graded something in the dead-tree version. But I have to tell you that it was remarkably convenient to quickly flip through the pages, mark them up and then move on. And from the perspective of my small table in the bar, it was a lot less conspicuous and I wasn’t looking over a screen to see the TV(s). Weird. It was just amazingly natural to work in an 8×11 form factor.

How much more efficient would it have been if I had some device, roughly 8×11, where I could have marked up the documents (in their native electronic form), that could run all day on a single charge and had access to the Internet even when there’s no nearby wifi. Hmm. No, I guess I could make the notes on the text with my finger, but a stylus works too. I doubt it’ll have a stylus, but I have to wonder if Apple’s upcoming announcement next Wednesday will include the announcement of a device that fulfills this content creation need. The announcement better not be just a rev of the iLife suite. Ack.

Sources:
image by Joe Bustillos

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TWiT Reflection into the New Decade

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

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Interactive IKEA Catalog – Apple iPad?

Apple reserved presentation space for the end of January and the rumor mills is cranking up around the Apple netbook-thingy… At CES2010 everyone and their brother is announcing all sorts of tablet/slate/netbook/e-book readers devices, all trying to fight against the buzz of a device that hasn’t been announced yet. Amazing.

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Time Inc. Media Pad… Hints on Apple Tablet

In case you haven’t noticed, this is the year of the media pad/e-reader. And no, Mr. Ballmer, we don’t want to read/interact with our media on a big fat (hot!) laptop or, God forbid, desktop computer. We want something small (w/ a big screen), sexy and fast! Is this Time Inc. Pad the unicorn/Apple Tablet? Since I posted this video in my blog, rumors about the Apple unicorn/tablet have really taken off again. End of January announcement? Stay tuned.

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Moodle is NOT a Verb, or is it?

This was my last week teaching Full Sail/emdtms’ LMO (Learning Management Systems) course and I couldn’t end our time together without a little conversation about Moodle. Enjoy.

Moodle is not a verb, or is it?

I’ve been hearing about Moodle at ed/tech conferences for longer than I can remember. In the early years it seemed to be an “under the radar” project bringing together the open source tech community and educators. More recently, with district administrators making decisions to roll-out Moodle, the concept seems to have shifted from a roll-your-own thing to something imposed upon teachers with little training, assistance or attempts to generate buy-in. In either case the platform has appeared to be largely text-driven and visually challenging. Wikipedia has an excellent overview of Moodle at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle.

The following video is intended to help those unfamiliar with Moodle’s module-mentality (and also for big fans of Legos!):

This next video is a good overview of the Moodle interface that includes a few commons tasks teachers might do:

For those curious for more in-depth training I located a course available through Lynda.com at
http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourseN.aspx?lpk2=47547

Other tutorials are available at: http://moodle-tutorials.blogspot.com/search/label/Moodle%20Video%20Tutorials and
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teacher_documentation.

One of the most important thing to remember about learning platforms, whether we have a say in their roll-out or not, is that it’s an opportunity to enlarge your reach with your students and that it’s your input that changes these things from being just tools to becoming learning opportunities.

Please review these videos and info and come to our Wimba session ready to talk about Moodle.

Sources:

* moodle logo. http://docs.moodle.org/en/License retrieved on 12/13/2009

* youtube video/image: Moodle explained with LEGO short version posted by moodlefan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPZl6LLvik retrieved on 12/13/2009

* Youtube video: What’s Moodle? posted by jenericjarvis. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jY9KcHwIWI&feature=related retrieved on 12/13/2009

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Digication Revisited

As I continued to explore online teaching/learning platforms for my LMS course (Learning Management Systems), I revisited Digication, a platform that I used my last year teaching middle school technology and media classes. The following are my notes that I passed along to my students to study before our weekly online session. The last portion are three examples of the Udutu teaching module that we’ve been studying.

Digication Revisited

In between large-scale enterprise level learning management systems imposed upon educators and roll-your-own systems like moodle are many smaller online options such as Digication (http://digication.com/). I heard about Digication from an interview of one of the founders, Jeffrey Yan, on Leo Laporte’s "Inside the Net" podcast. Digication’s founders recognized the need for something more than just another place to post content, something that would cater to educators’ special needs that aren’t being addressed by overly-generalized web-portals, and at the same time be as simple to manage as an email account. Following is a Behind-the-Scenes tour of Digication and the "Inside the Net" interview of Digication founder, Jeffrey Yan (NOTE: the interview is a bit long…). Please review these items before our wimba session.

Inside the Net 35: Digication (http://www.twit.tv/itn35)

One of the things that attracted me to Digication was that it had all of the features of a full CMS but didn’t require that I code it myself or try to get the assistance/permission from my district IT. Only limitation for the free account was that there couldn’t be more than 1,000 users at my school. I’ve written about my experiences with Digication a few times on my blog:
* Digication Gets My Vote
* Classroom Website on Digication

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RollTop Laptop – Answering Yesterday’s Laptop Design Shortcomings

What could we do if we had flexible display materials? As advanced as the tech seems, it still might not fly because the rolled up size still seem too big when one thinks about how small and thin and light-weight the Apple Macbook Air, the Sony Vaio X- and P-series and the various netbooks already are. Flexible display materials are just beginning to show up, but there’s something in this design that’s answering problems from when the smallest usable laptops were the 15-inch/6-pound devices. Rolling up said 15-inch devices is still going to be at least 13-inches long and a rolled up girth of four-inches diameter. That’s awfully big when one considers that a lot of people are happy using an iPhone-sized device to do a lot of their communication/computer tasks.

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