DIIA Blog

Many people thought that the iPhone and iPod Touch would not be good e-readers - too small many said. Well, I thought this too. But, I bit the bullet and downloaded both the free iPhone Kindle app and the free Barnes and Noble Reader bought some relatively inexpensive titles and found myself actually reading more than I have in a good while (books at least). Entire books. I find the screen actually perfectly adequate for reading, but the killer feature is that device is usually with me all the time, so I can read whenever the time or notion hits me. This convenience outweighs many of the drawbacks including screen size. I don’t want to drag an e-reader around with me all the time, but a smartphone is a necessity. My wife sometimes leaves hers at home and I always look at her with a look of incomprehension. “Are you SURE you don’t want to bring that with you?” I ask.

The same can be said for educational apps for the iPhone. Ahhh… what good will are they? Kids just use the thing for Wikipedia, social networking and IM’ing… all distractions and inaccurate. And who needs another rote memorization app that many of the iPhone “education” apps offer? Well, it appears that one company has thought a little deeper about what an educational app should be and have released an app for essay writing. Yes, essay writing. On an iPhone no less. How or why would one want to do this you might ask? Well, it turns out that plenty of college age kids think its a pretty good idea. The application is called the Essay Writing Wizard (I know, sort of a mouthful). What this app does that no other one does right now is help students to THINK about how to put together their thoughts into a carefully constructed essay. The app offers a number of features and tips for writing good essays and then guides the student through the process without dumbing things down or hand holding. Its really a tool for collecting ideas and the formalizing these into an essay. Similar in spirit to the e-readers on the iPhone, but for writing, EWW allows one to capture ideas and notes on the go, wherever they are. This little feature turns out to be quite powerful as we all have discovered with our iPhones and 100,000 plus available apps. So finally, in this large mix of iPhone Apps, a tool emerges that can truly help college kids get going on one tried and true part of academic life in higher education, the essay, and do it write away.

For an in depth review of this app, check out the Edu-In-Review review. It is comprehensive gives you the details on the app which is $3.99. You can buy add ons for particular writing areas as well which prices varying.   

The App is made by Niles Technology Group which you can read more about here.

Keene Haywood

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched the National Broadband Plan in a forum at Thompson Conference Center on Monday. In a Daily Texan article today, Commissioner Meredith Baker said, “The Internet is a critical educational tool. We came to Austin first. It is a model for educational benefits over the Internet.”

Featured at the forum were high school students who have benefited from three UT-Austin Continuing Education programs–the UT Online High School, the Migrant Student Graduation Enhancement program, and the Language Learners at the University Center for Hispanic Achievement (LUCHA) program.

As the social networking scene continues to explode, developers are increasingly finding novel ways to use services such as Facebook and Twitter. Through the Facebook Connect technology, the developers of a web app called Aardvark seem to be onto something. Their service basically crowd sources your contacts and contacts of contacts in Facebook to help answer any question you may have. Any question. So how good would this be for students? Probably pretty good unless you are taking a test, in which case asking the Vark might not be a good idea.

For getting answers to questions stumping you, you can submit your question to Aardvark which is then interpreted by the system’s artificial intelligence system. It then sends the message out to people in your extended social network who might be able to answer your question. The question is sent out anonymously and the replies back are as well (as far as I can tell), so no question is too ridiculous. Your identity should not be revealed. A average response time is about 5 minutes. And of course an iPhone app was just released. This is an intriguing application that will be interesting to see how it matures, especially in higher education circles.

Keene

Well, maybe not studious in the true sense of the word, but the ReadWriteWeb has a nice collection of applications that can help you with a little studying, buying textbooks, RENT-ing textbooks, keeping organized, designing a dorm room (I know how much design can one do in 100 sq. ft) and more. Its a nice little overview and worth a look over if you are a student about to start classes again, know a student who is heading back to school or you just pine for your former student days and want to use all the apps the cool kids are using this year. Of particular note is StudyBlue, a web app that utilizes Facebook Connect to hook into your Facebook account for collaboration studying (a good term to throw out to the parents).

Check them out here.

Keene

Even after posting approximately 60 entries, clearing 2,364 spam comments, and live-blogging SXSWi and AccessU, I still can hardly believe it has been a whole year since the DIIA Blog came online.  The experts say that a blog is only as good as its content, and I sincerely hope that readers found the DIIA Blog to be a rich source of up-to-date information, insight, amusement, resources, and perspective.

It was personally gratifying to see page hits approaching the 100,000 mark while live-blogging at SXSWi, knowing that we were spreading the word about DIIA among the industry movers and shakers.

AccessU, although smaller in scale, brought attention to the vital importance of accessibility to everyone who uses the World Wide Web. It was there that I coined my mantra, “Curb cuts for computers!” as an analogy for how accessible design benefits all of us. Glenda Sims (UT), Sharron Rush (Knowbility), and all the caring geniuses who developed the standards have made me a life-long advocate of designing for usability. We will all most likely face obstacles in communicating via the Internet as we age, so why not plan ahead?

Most of all, I have enjoyed learning more about the world we live in–from my blogging colleagues, and from the research I’ve engaged in to find something worth blogging about. I hope to hear from more DIIA voices in the years ahead, bringing wider-ranging, thought-provoking information to our attention, and engaging in dialogue through comments–although not the spammy ones, please!

If you use a Mac platform, Amy Miller has developed some nifty widgets to ping you when a new post goes up. Dana DeLoca, DIIA’s creative videographer and photographer has added a rich visual dimension through the “Photo of the Day” to complement our wordy posts, along with her fantastic sidekick AJ Landeros (Mr. iPhone). Truly, it takes a village…

My birthday wish for the DIIA Blog is to see it expand and grow, touching more lives, enhancing the University of Texas at Austin experience for faculty, staff, and students, and drawing in a wider circle of commenters to challenge and engage us in fruitful dialogue.

Blog on!

In the past few days there has been a flurry of news about e-books and e-textbooks in particular. The NYTimes ran a story on Saturday about the looming demise of the physical textbook. It does say that the physical paper textbook we know and love is not going to disappear overnight, but that now, more than ever, e-textbooks are poised to make a permanent push into the classroom. The article notes that higher education will be leading the way into this area but that K-12 schools won’t be far behind. There are issues of the digital divide with the costs of e-reader devices, but if digital textbook prices fall significantly, the price issue may not be an insurmountable obstacle in my opinion. There is the cost of the device up front, but once in hand, these devices could potentially be used for years reducing the cost of ownership. And as the market matures, the devices can potentially become low cost appliances. Since they are less complex than a full computer, they can also potentially be re-sold fairly easily or even rented to those who truly cannot afford the up-front price.   

In addition, the NYTimes article quotes CTO Sheryl Abshire from the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, LA who points out just how different students of today are from the “read the textbook” linear students that education has traditionally embraced.

Kids are wired differently these days. They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite. They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote… Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.

This fact coupled with a technology that is now maturing enough that it can be used in a widespread fashion in the classroom might just be enough to usher in a new digital age of learning. Who would have imagined that the venerable paper textbook might one day be just be a memory, but in a few more short generations of higher ed students and the legions of K-12 students behind them, this may just be the case.

To add some more fuel to the fire, today, CourseSmart has just released an iPhone/iPod Touch app that allows access to its large textbook library. The iPhone app is free but it only works if you are a paying customer using CourseSmart’s desktop application. CourseSmart is one of the largest e-textbook publishers out there right now so adding an iPhone app to the mix will only help get their content more mobile. It should be noted that CourseSmart knows that trying to learn and write on an iPhone or Touch is tricky so they tell you the iPhone app is really meant to compliment the desktop software as CourseWare EVP Frank Lyman notes…

Instead, it’ll provide a quick, searchable reference for use on the go when using your computer is impossible or awkward. CourseSmart EVP Frank Lyman suggested one possible scenario for how students might go about using the new program to enhance and extend their learning. “If you’re in a study group and you have a question, you can immediately access your text. (quoted from this entry at The Apple Blog)

I think this is a good point and perhaps the sweet spot for truly mobile devices like smartphones and e-readers. No one really wants to try and read a full text book on a smartphone. Your vision will get blurry long before you graduate. But as noted by Mr. Lyman, they are great tools for looking up information, sharing information and enabling in situ research and collaborative, contextual learning. Used in conjunction with a larger e-reader device or a full blown laptop or desktop system, students can use both together to enhance their learning in new ways.

Another story on the jkOnTheRun blog about the heating up of the e-book space also aired today. I like their point about its not the device, but the content. Indeed, we need to make sure that educational content remains as open as is reasonable. Publishers should be able to make money, but not hold students hostage with excessively high rates for books. As this whole market matures, I can imagine scenarios where students rent e-textbooks or have subscriptions with publishers while also using more freely available content from blogs, websites, etc. which the NYTimes article points out. Learning truly becomes a fluid exercise in a digital world where nothing is set in stone so to speak.

As Amazon preps release of their large format Kindle DX into the higher education space this Fall and Apple prepares a new tablet like device along with Barnes and Noble teaming up with Plastic Logic to offer another compelling device to the market, the e-book wars look like they are just beginning. Like the digital rights management issues that the music and movie industries have long wrestled with, content for educational textbooks and e-books in general is about to get thrown into this in a big way. It may be a bumpy ride, but like it or not, e-books and e-textbooks are coming to a school and student near you perhaps sooner than you think.

In July, Thomas Freedman of the The New Democratic Leadership Council published a short call to arms paper about outfitting every school child with a eTextbook reader. He heavily refers to Amazon’s Kindle, including it even in the title of the paper A Kindle in Every Backpack: a proposal for eTextbooks in American Schools. The paper outlines plenty of good reasons why our education systems should embrace eTextbooks and their associated e-readers. These are very clear. However, I think to get the impact Mr. Freedman is advocating, two things need to be addressed which are not mentioned in the paper. One is that instead of a particular device such as an Amazon Kindle, the focus should be on a universal, open source format. This format can deliver the textbook content to many different e-reader devices instead of just one or two that work with a proprietary format. And second, the technology Freedman mentions that kids want is not exactly ready for the e-readers of today. Let’s take a look at these two critical areas as they are important to this discussion.

Amazon’s Kindle format is fairly closed and the tight control Amazon exerts over it was evident recently when George Orwell’s 1984 was yanked digitally off the devices without the owners knowing it until after the fact. It caused quite a stir and had Jeff Bezos candidly apologizing for this. In this day and age, closed formats need to tread very lightly and e-books are no exception. Yes, I understand that we need to deal with copyright and rights management. Hopefully the lessons of the music industry can be applied to this nascent area of technology. The Kindle does support other formats which are more open as well in all fairness, but they are clear that they want you to buy your content from them.

As it stands now, there are plenty of proprietary formats already floating around from Amazon, Sony and soon, Barnes and Noble when they work with Plastic Logic to deliver e-books. Now, I can understand that distributors would want to seal off competiors by making their devices only read their proprietary format, but for educational purposes, this is not a good thing and so I think it should be clearly stressed that for such a national inititiative, an open e-reader format should be embraced and supported, perhaps with government support. Don’t let one tech company lock everyone into one format. Keep the eTextbook format by demanding, by law, that eTextbooks should be as openly accessible as possible. Just as paper textbooks can be loaned, shared and exchanged easily in the traditional book format, so too should an eTextbook. Learning cannot be proprietary.

Enter the Portable Document Format (PDF) that has become our ubiquitous digital document format. While it was created and is controlled by Adobe Systems, they have given the PDF format a long enough leash that it is supported on all major platforms and is quite portable in the digital domain. And while PDFs can have some embedded multi-media, this is far from the norm. Its mostly text and images that you get with a PDF. Many of the current e-readers do support the PDF format and can display their contents on the E-Ink screens. The viewing mileage you get out of looking at PDF on something like a Kindle or Kindle DX will vary. Its not great but it works on the E-Ink screens. E-Ink is developed by a private company and licensed out to the manufacuterers who want to use the E-Ink screens on their devices. The big problem with PDFs on e-readers, especially the smaller ones, is that the documents are static. The images and words do not flow to fit neatly on the small screen for reading. You have to zoom in on a page, then scroll around to read it, or you are stuck looking at the PDF at one size such as the case with the Kindle DX, which has a large screen, but you can’t resize a PDF to suit your viewing needs. One e-reader manufacturer does make a device that is specifically for looking at PDFs. It uses its own software to take a PDF and make it fit on the page nicely with text flowing around images and fitting on the smaller screen better. Its not perfect, but its a step in the right direction. But again, we are really talking about text and images, not other types of multimedia.

This brings up the other point related to Mr. Freedman’s article. He mentions the ability for students to take quizzes and have multimedia, etc on such devices. Well, that may take some time and if that is truly desired in the near future, then one needs to look at other devices such as laptops, netbooks or tablets that have operating systems (and batteries) capable of handling video, animation, web connectivity and interactivity (i.e. Flash). He points out that about half of students questioned about what they wanted in their classrooms responded with wanting access to real time data visualized like what you get with Google Earth. As a huge fan of the GeoWeb, I could not agree more, but you are not going to get a Google Earth experience on a Kindle or other e-reader (btw, Google Earth requires some high bandwidth connectivity and a decent graphics card to really shine). E-Ink is rumored to have color screens out perhaps in the the next year or so and is playing with them in their labs now. However, for this technology to support all the multimedia goodness we are used to on our full computers, this may still be out a few years. For now, the e-reader devices promise heaps of books in your pocket (see no backpacks needed) and the ability to have instant access to your personal library. But they are mostly still a passive reading experience. And that is fine, but don’t expect them to sing iTunes and do the Flash app dance. The Kindle does have a rudimentary web browser and its Verizon Whisper sync wireless technology is nifty for delivering books, blogs and newspapers, something the other devices are lacking to a large degree, but e-readers are not multimedia machines (yet). A possible exception to the multimedia dilemma is found on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch which are quite capable multimedia devices and decent, if not perfect e-readers too. I have found the iPhone Kindle app to be surprisingly good at reading Amazon’s Kindle books. The device is always there so I read at times I normally would not, such as waiting in line to get on a plane, see a movie, etc. Its there when the moment strikes to read a few pages. In addition several iPhone apps offer decent PDF viewing experiences too such as Readdle’s ReaddleDocs app or their new PDF Expert app. AirSharing and AirSharing Pro also offer some good PDF reading capabilities. And it is highly likely that Apple will release some form of a tablet like device in the next six months that will handle multimedia along with e-books so this could perhaps bring the future to us a little faster than E-Ink screens will.

So these are my words of caution for embracing eTextbooks for all school kids. I think this needs to happen and it will happen, I just hope it happens smoothly and those that make it happen keep formats open and embrace new technology that will merge the written word with the moving image and beyond. This perhaps will get people reading in an entirely new way while transforming the learning process and moving the venerable textbook into the age of bits and bytes.

Keene

You can read the PDF (perhaps with your e-reader!) of Mr. Freedman’s paper here.

Cell phones have been around in the United States since 1983. The big brick microwave strength phones of that era have thankfully long passed, but small, sleek cell phones have also been around a good while now too. Motorola and Nokia in particular pushed the envelope. Remember the Razr? And there was Palm whose Treo was all the rage for a time. But everything changed when Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007 and the rest they say is history. Its been nothing short of a phenomenon with its elegant touch interface, bright, high resolution screen, stellar web browsing experience (aside from lack of Flash) and of course its OS, SDK and the App Store. All of this turned the idea of smartphone on its head and the industry has not been the same since. But despite Apple’s innovation, there is something else going on here and its worth thinking about for a moment. The iphone is really a metaphor for a mass move into cloud computing. Two technology writers make this point and are worth noting. In particular, I think this metaphor and their ideas will have quite an impact on education as students move their digital worlds higher and higher into the clouds, circumventing in many ways traditional IT infrastructure associated with institutions of higher learning. Writer Chris Hoff at Cisco put his finger on the pulse in his commentary on the iPhone and the Cloud with his nice post. And Fellow Cisco blogger James Urquhart succinctly summed up Hoff and added his two cents with another post on CNet.  Both are worth reading and pondering for a moment. Here are a couple of quotes pulled from these: Hoff says:

The iPhone is a fantastic platform that transforms using technology that has been around for quite a while into a more useful experience. The iPhone converges many technologies and capabilities under a single umbrella and changes the way in which people interact with their data and other people…

The thing I love about my iPhone is that it’s not a piece of technology I think about but rather, it’s the way interact with it to get what I want done. It has its quirks, but it works…for millions of people.

The point here is that Cloud is very much like the iPhone. As Sir James (Urquhart) says “Cloud isn’t a technology, it’s an operational model.” Just like the iPhone.

I think beyond just the success of the iphone, we have to look at the success of cloud computing and how the iPhone is a metaphor for cementing this way of computing into our lives and society. Its a device that has showed us the possibilities and clearly, we all want more. And clearly today’s students will increasingly use this technology more and more on devices that fit into the pockets of their jeans. A commenter on Urquhart’s post mentions that the “cloud” part of computing is soon destined for the tech talk closet since a good deal of computing is done now in the cloud and its just called computing. So perhaps we can just think of the cloud now as just part of the larger sky to use an obvious metaphor. So sky computing anyone? Whatever you want to call it, its here to stay and Apple found a compelling way to deliver this experience in a consumer device that just works.

Keene

In the first of a three-part series, the Chronicle of Higher Education Research Services reports on what to expect in course delivery in the year 2020. According to the executive summary, students will expect institutes of higher learning to adapt to accommodate students’ financial and temporal needs.

Online classes, part-time study, courses from multiple universities, and expanding the four-year convention for earning a baccalaureate are some of the options students will expect.

This will call for more flexibility on the part of colleges and universities to meet changing conditions, particularly in the area of mobile delivery of services.

The College of 2020 Executive Summary 1 (pdf)

The annual NMC Conference winds down on this third day. Its been a full two previous days and this final day is an abbreviated half day that has a morning session followed by the Excellence Award and the closing keynote.

In the final session block of the conference I attended what was my favorite presentation. Titled Connecting Mass Audiences to Ecosystems using 3D Visualizations, it was given by Dr. Fred Watson of California State University- Monterey Bay (co-sponsor of the conference this year). Watson has a team at the university that produce short animations and videos with very detailed and realistic visualizations for use in visitor centers, documentaries and online interactive projects. They target resource managers, students, researchers and the general public. The group producing this work is called EcoViz and they provide their services well beyond the walls of the university. Fred showed examples of their work in Yellowstone National Park for its main visitor center. He also showed work done in the Monterey Bay ecosystem including the Cordell Bank and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries. It was great stuff and all done with custom software he and his team have created. EcoViz hopes to release the software to the public in the next year or so. You can see more of these excellent projects at: http://ecoviz.csumb.edu/home/

Following this final session of presentations, was the giving of the annual NMC Center of Excellence Awards. These went to three institutions who have done ground breaking, innovative, creative work in the area of New Media. The recipients were:

Abliene Christian University, Abliene, Texas: For their ground breaking work in integrating mobile technology into the campus, particularly centered around Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Center for Digital Storytelling Berkeley, CA: For their long ongoing efforts to train and evangelize the process of digital storytelling with new media tools. For over a decade and a half they have been pioneers in the new forms of digital storytelling that is now so prevalent with Web 2.0 tools.

Universitat Oberta de Cataluna, Barcelona, Spain: Their award was given for their work in creating an open, accessible, rich online higher education experience for Spainards and others around the world.

All three of these institutions were deserving, gracious and inspirational in their work and acceptance of the awards.

Finally, the ending keynote was a tribute to pioneering technologist, Douglas Engelbart who was honored by the NMC for his achievements in interactive computing, particularly the invention of the mouse, an indispensable tool to all who use computers today. Unfortunately, my flight schedule did not permit me to see this presentation.
That wraps up a snapshot of this year’s conference. Next year it will be held again in California, but this time it will be in the LA area at Disneyland and University of California - Southern California (UCSC).
For photos of the conference, head over to Flickr where over a thousand pictures have been tagged with NMC2009 by conference attendees. This link takes you directly to the search for this tag.

Keene