The second video takes up the story from the young girls point of view. As an educator this video is downright cringe-worthy when they portray the students in class sitting hands folded in rows and columns while the teacher lectures, albeit with very pretty visuals. This is where business shows that it knows nothing about education and especially education of the near future. They do get it somewhat right when they have the video table where the students grab color swaths and use it to select images based on the colors and combination of colors. It’s horrifying when outdate modes of teaching show up in “visions of the future” videos. The lesson here is that even if it’s in a virtual environment, we learn by doing not by sitting in lectures. My moto is if the information needs to be delivered as a monologue or lecture, do a video and post it for students to go over before getting together for class. If we’re “together” we’re doing, or reviewing, not lecturing. Ack! Future education vision FAIL!

Sources:

• image: Wall of Screens Lifestyle by Joe Bustillos
• Youtube video: A Day Made of Glass 1 Uploaded by CorningIncorporated on Feb 7, 2011. Watch “A Day Made of Glass” and take a look at Corning’s vision for the future with specialty glass at the heart of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=6Cf7IL_eZ38 retrieved 2/9/2012.
• Youtube video: A Day Made of Glass 2 Uploaded by CorningIncorporated on Feb 3, 2012. http://bit.ly/xITx1H – Watch and share “A Day Made of Glass 2,” Corning’s expanded vision for the future of glass technologies. This video continues the story of how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0&feature=youtu.be retrieved 2/9/2012.

The following video, from TED 2007, highlights some very important aspects of the One Laptop Per Child program that tends to get completely missed by competing programs and tech journalists. It used to drive me nuts when John C. Dvorak or Lance Ulanoff (formerly from PC Magazine) would go off on how it’s not a real computer or what the hell are third world kids going to do with a computer. Even some supporters speculated that this could be used by third world farmers to better market their crops, or some such foolishness. Argh!

The OLPC program was born out of findings of Seymour Papert at MIT and early experiments that Negroponte did taking laptops to Cambodia in the 2000s. From Papert the realization was that using computers in education was not about teaching applications to children. It makes no sense for me to teach Word to a six-year-old, justifying it by saying that I’m preparing that student for the future job market. God help us if they are still using the version of Word that that child learned twelve-years earlier. No. Papert laid out in The Children’s Machine that the real benefit of using computers in the classroom was teaching children thinking through teaching them how to computer program (using simple languages like LOGO). The thing that came from the Cambodian experiments, that sounds very Apple-esque, is that you have to have a vision for the whole process and not reduce things to just hitting a price target. What this means is that Negroponte understood that they had to design the thing to work in the intended environments where there was no infra-structure common to the developed countries. One cannot assume that there’s easily available connectivity or power, so the device has be designed to be extremely low powered (less than two Watts), work well in sunlight, use mesh-networking to get online and be rugged. And of course the software needs to be designed for learning. Alas, Microsoft and Intel tried to undercut the OLPC by going low-cost with their Classmate PCs. Negroponte said it best when describing how this isn’t about laptops, technology or emerging markets: “This is a mission or a market.”

So, what happened to my OLPC? It sits on a shelf in my office. I wanted to use it as a kind of netbook and take it with me to coffee shops and Taco Beach so that I could do my writing when I was out and about. Two things killed that dream. The first was that I couldn’t get the thing to connect to most wifi networks. Duh, it was designed for a kind of mesh-networking that I didn’t have in 2008 in Long Beach, California. The second thing was that, even when I did get a connection, it was difficult to run more than one task at once and switching between multiple browsers screens proved to be too tedious. So, I couldn’t do the writing that I wanted to do with additional windows opened to the resources I’m using, just like what I do on my other computers. Of course, the real failure, that I’m just now realizing, is that I should have used it to learn how to program, that’s what it was designed to do and I completely biffed that one. Doh!

The following videos are related to the coming of the newer version of the OLPC recently announced, the OX-3.

Sources:

My previous OLPC-related articles:

• NECC Conference Observation: Negroponte Rocks! by Joe Bustillos, July 6, 2006, http://josephbustillos.com/2006/07/06/necc-conference-observation-negroponte-rocks/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• Why Tech Journalists Don’t Get Negroponte’s OLPC (AKA The $100 Laptop) by Joe Bustillos, Sept 2007: http://josephbustillos.com/2007/09/14/why-tech-journalists-dont-get-negrapontes-olpc-aka-the-100-laptop/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• David Pogue Gets The OLPC! by Joe Bustillos, Oct 2007, http://josephbustillos.com/2007/10/08/david-pogue-gets-the-olpc/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• The XO-1 Arrives, by Joe Bustillos, Jan 2008, http://josephbustillos.com/2008/01/04/the-xo-1-arrives/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• My Year with the OLPC – NT4PT by Joe Bustillos, Dec 25, 2008, http://josephbustillos.com/2008/12/25/my-year-with-the-olpc-nr4pt/ retrieved 2/9/2012.

Videos/Images:

• image: My OLPC by Joe Bustillos
• youtube video: Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TKjfgjiQs&feature=player_embedded retrieved 2/9/2012.
• youtube video: OLPC’s Negroponte says XO-3 prototype tablet coming in 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILMzuS2qZfc&feature=related retrieved 2/9/2012.
• youtube video: OLPC Unveils XO 3.0 Tablet at CES 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oc2Cte1oWE&feature=related retrieved 2/9/2012.
• images: OLPC XO 3.0 tablet: an 8-inch tablet for $100, with Android and Sugar options for the children (update: pictures!), http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/6/2688604/olpc-xo-3-0-tablet-a-8-inch-tablet-with-android-and-sugar-options-for retrieved 2/9/2012.

Uploaded by TEDxTalks on Aug 12, 2009
Finale: Creating Hemispheric Unity through the Arts. Benjamin Zander conducts the Youth Orchestra of the Americas. How bringing together young, energetic musicians in the pursuit of excellence and the celebration of cultural diversity can serve as a powerful model for creating unity and catalyzing social change.
Presented at the 1st TEDxBoston on July 28, 2009 (http://tedxboston.org).

About TEDx, x=independently organized event.In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self- organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

So I’m toying with the idea of not using iPhoto except to stream to my iPhone and start just doing files and folders on my Dropbox. Before I left for Macworld I bought an app called Graphic Converter because I have a ton of clip art that I would like to access but I don’t want to have to click through individual images to find the one I’m looking for. Having a virtual catalog would be great. Alas, finder wasn’t really cutting it. We’ll see. I just need something that works better than having all of my images on one computer (the one with the least space & smallest screen), and occasionally backing it up to the other computers. This is such a first-world issue, it’s silly. But I’m tired of not having my media where I want it so that I can work on it, not just to admire. Grhhh!

Sources:
All images by Joe Bustillos

One thought that lingers came from a heated conversation that I had with one brother-in-law about the anti-SOPA movement. If the conversation is any indication of what the masses feel about what happened with the anti-SOPA movement that the message is getting really mangled out there.

My brother-in-law, a former science-teacher, is a fellow affectionado for all things NPR and one of the few remaining humans that I personally know who still reads the local LA Times in paper form pretty much every single day. So we’re not talking about some Fox “News” unfortunate. Anyway, the gist of his argument was that stealing/piracy is wrong and that the anti-SOPA movement must be the outcry of those websites and individuals who are benefitting from the continuation of this unregulated, mostly lawless Internet. Hmmm. Did I mention that he’s a pretty smart guy? He admitted that he understood that SOPA was a poorly written law, but this was another example of those connected with the Internet trying to get away with what in “normal life” would be understood as theft. And the fact that there was such a huge backlash that reversed what looked like a governmental done-deal must have meant that these Internet players are pretty big. It’s a safe bet that he feels like these Internet people are all an anarchic selfish bunch who are completely self-absorbed with their Twitters and Facebook.

Trying to explain that SOPA/PIPA had the potential of breaking the Internet, downgrading our first amendment rights and throwing the copyright balance of power to the already powerful media companies, didn’t seem to break his resolve that the anti-SOPA people were just trying to get away with theft. I tried to explain that the infinite copyable nature of digital goods changes the business practices. Nope. Theft. I tried to explain that music and musicians can and are being supported because fans understand that if they want more music from their favorite artists, that the only way for that to continue is to support them by attending their performance and buying their music on amazon and iTunes, and that by keeping the prices low it makes piracy impractical. Nope. In his mind the vast majority of music on the Internet is stolen. Okay. I think this goes beyond distrust of the Internet, to feelings that Internet culture is undermining what is good in life, period.

On the way to the restaurant one night I showed him the little blue dot representing where we were on the map on my iPhone. On the way back from the restaurant he asked if I’d ever unplugged for a week before. I’ve had crappy Internet for a week but I’ve never just unplugged. He asked if I would consider unplugging (for a week). Nah, not really. I tried to explain that this is what I do, being plugged in is part of my fun. I tried the pager analogy, that when I worked for the phone company driving all over Orange County I looked at my pager as a means to have some freedom, that I was always about 15-minutes away from being where I needed to be. So the pager freed me from having to be tied to a desk in an office. My brother, however, thought of his pager as the means for others to keep tabs on him, so he was always leaving the little thing at home. Same device, but I saw it as a means of freedom while my brother saw it as a device of control. Yeah, my brother-in-law wasn’t buying it and I felt the distinct impression that he felt sorry for me because I was deluded enough to believe that my life online was real. Wow.

I know that I live and have lived ahead of the technological curve for some time now. The world has changed and continues to change and it’s not just about pretty toys but the real connections that these pretty toys can enable. Friendships, politics, the classroom, entertainment, they’ve all changed because of these pretty little toys, in ways that even their creators could never imagine. I understand that some of us don’t like change and only see the destructive potential of these things. But just like the pager, this change can something that brings out the best in us and doesn’t have to destroy all the things that we love. I have to wonder what the distrust says about the worrier. So, whether this is the end of what we love or an opportunity for something good will depend on the user of the tool(s).

So, being the kill-joy that I am, when she pulled up the video I said, oh yeah, I’ve seen that before, way back in the Tech-TV days. And then went on to explain that the whole video is computer generated. [fail trombone]. She was so disappointed that she couldn’t be bothered to finish watching the whole three-minute 26-second video. In her mind, finding out that it was all CGI meant that it was all fake. I tried to explain that the original creators didn’t just create a pretty bouncing ball virtual machine and then just dropped in the soundtrack, but designed the virtual machine to “play” the notes, so they had to program the timing to literally play the tune one hears on the video. She wasn’t having any of it. The fun was destroyed.

So I went on Snopes.com to confirm that the video was in fact CGI and alas I was correct, all CGI. The detail of the hoax was amazing (seriously, this was all built using re-purposed John Deere farming gear?!). One cool thing, I did find that Intel had actually built a machine inspired by the CGI machine in the Pipe-Dream video. So, when I was watching the video of the Intel machine, I couldn’t help but wonder if the soundtrack on the video was being created by the machine or a remixed thing overlaid onto the video. What do you think, real music or pre-recorded fakery???

Sources:

• Pipe Dream, Snopes.com, http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/musicmachine.asp retrieved on 2/3/2012.
• YouTube Video: 3d Ball Music Machine [Completed Version] [HQ], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmREjs6NYVY&feature=related retrieved on 2/3/2012.
• YouTube Video: The Robotic Musicians known as: Intel’s Industrial Control in Concert, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JLdB0WEixjM retrieved on 2/3/2012.

Uploaded by Honda on Jan 26, 2012
To celebrate the launch of the all-new 2012 CR-V, Honda brought Ferris Bueller’s Day Off back in a big game commercial. We cast Matthew Broderick as himself, skipping out on a day of acting work and living it up in his all-new CR-V. Relive movie history with Honda’s fresh twist and wonderful homage to this ’80s classic.

Think you’re a true fan of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? We hid over two dozen references to the movie throughout the commercial. Some are obvious, some are VERY subtle. See how many you can find. #dayoff

In the meantime, one of the more interesting presentation that I attended was by Rachel Smith, called: Visual Note-Taking with the iPad. At first I was thinking that this was a giant step backward in terms of using the iPad to create notes that weren’t really searchable. Ack. But this also reminded me of the recent whiteboard videos where an artist takes a talk and creates a real-time info-graphic of the talk (a la Dan Pink’s video on Drive). This also reminded me of a friend who used poster-board graphics to improve student literacy (something called Project Glad, back in the day). Check out Smith’s video:

I already had the PDF on my dropbox so I thought I’d try to use something like GoodReader. Lord help me, they’ve updated it to use iCloud but I have no idea how to use my dropbox with it. FAIL. So I went directly to the Dropbox app, found the file and hoped that there’d be an option for me to select which app to view it with. Ha! No luck. I got another generic PDF reader with no annotation enabled. Then I remembered that Circus Ponies’ Notebook app (for both the mac and iPad) imports the PDF either as a file to be clicked and viewed, or as a annotated pages. So I dropped the 184 page dissertation into Notebook on my mac, imported as annotated pages, saved it onto my dropbox folder and then opened it up all ready for reading and marking up on my iPad. I had four other articles that i wanted to review so I created a separate Notebook file, and dropped four other PDFs into their own separate tabbed sections of the Notebook. Talk about having a powerful tool and not knowing about it.

I just watched the Apple Education event keynote and I’m very excited about what I saw. If you haven’t seen today’s keynote yet, run, do not walk to your local device (I got a better connection via my iPad projecting the keynote to my TV) and sit a spell. Nope, Schiller will never have Steve’s dynamic style, but the content is definitely something that we need to be keenly aware of. In a word they are taking book publishing and specifically textbook publishing, and taking it to the next level. The textbook will not be a static collection of words and images frozen at printing but have the portability of a book, the videos and interactivity of a networked computer and the freshness of blog pages, while retaining formatting, typography and layout that tends to be lacking in web-based textbooks.

I was going to try my hand at getting Udutu to work for my stand-alone copyright unit but I’m now going to investigate the possibility of using iBook Author to make the unit. Now we know where all the iWeb brain-power went over the last couple years. And I’m curious to see Full Sail will continue to experiment with iTunes U, in that iTunes U seems determined to become it’s own LMS and not just a lecture delivery vehicle.

I’ve been getting emails from QuarkXpress begging me to check out their new iPad/ePub friendly $299 app (if you have a previous version of QuarkXpress). They’ve got to be peeing their pant. I wonder how Schoology feels about Apple putting more effort/muscle behind iTunes U with added assignment and communication features. Yikes.

Enjoy. jbb

Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos

So when we last left our hero, I was looking for the best way to consume my daily news via my iPad… I had discovered that the Amazon kindle edition of the Los Angeles Times was much improved from earlier versions. My guess is that earlier versions, because of limitations of the kindle itself, were black and white images only and attempted to mimic the look of the print edition in a single column fashion, which led to some navigation difficulties. I really don’t know because by the time I decided to subscribe to the LA Times they had switched to an Onswipe-like layout with side-scrolling and section navigation on the left. See A) Los Angeles Times – Amazon Kindle edition on the right.

Imagine my surprise when I checked out the free LA Times iPad app and it looked pretty like the Amazon Kindle version that I was paying $9.99 each for. In fact, the free version was a little more advanced in it’s usage of screen real-estate, giving the reader a bit more information and options on each single screen. See B) Los Angeles Times – iPad App Edition (free) to the right.

The free version had the better screen usage because the section menu was drop-down, so it was out of the way when not needed. See C) Los Angeles Times – iPad Edition – Sections Menu to the right. And the free version was not lite on content by any stretch of the imagination. Granted, the last time I saw the paper version of the daily I was shocked at how small the newspaper was. It was hardly a shadow of it’s former self. So my guess is that the free iPad version has all of the same content as the paper version.

Finally, one thing that was very frustrating with the Kindle version of the Los Angeles Times was that if I found an article that I wanted to share or clip there was no way to do that in the Kindle version. I couldn’t select the article to copy it or even select any text that I might want to share. Now that might have been a limitation of the iOS interface but it really made the Kindle version feel like it was just for reading and not for sharing or research. The free version had social-networking built-in. Yeah. I cancelled my Kindle-edition. See D) Los Angeles Times iPad Edition Social Networking Menu to the right.

As I continued to explore the free Los Angeles Times iPad app I couldn’t find anyway to “subscribe” or become a subscriber in the traditional sense. I’m guessing that the free iPad version is being supported by the few ads along the bottom of some of the screens. As much as I love getting the whole LA Times for free, I’m concerned about the sustainability of the free model. That said, I’m not happy at the confusing subscription model being promoted by the New York Times that favors paper-subscribers over iPad/online subscribers when there’s so much less waste in the iPad/online model. Note that when you look at the iPad version of the New York Times all of the sections are locked for non-subscribers – see E) New York Times – iPad Edition – PAID Sections.

So, do I enjoy a free-copy of the LA Times every morning on my iPad with my Wheaties? Not so much. It’s tough to settle into the sit-and-read-the-paper-with-breakfast model that I’ve aspired to. Also, I’ve gotten used to skimming dozens of news sources at a time via my iPad RSS reader of choice, NewsRack. There are dozens of more visual newsreaders that mimic the slider model, but my purpose is to skim and select what to read and if I have to wade through tons of images it’ll slow down the process. I guess I’ve chosen a method of going through dozens and dozens of news sources instead of trusting a couple, or as in my dad’s case, one source.

Actually, now that I think about it, part of my problem is that I’m used to skimming and get a lot of my research links via my Twitter-stream. I tend to skim my Twitter resources before skimming my RSS articles. So, there’s a definite disconnect from the traditional news/magazine publication cycle and how I consume my information. As beautiful as some of these news apps are (like the ABC News and BBC apps) I don’t want to go to dozens of iPad apps or virtual magazines. It’s the web2 model: I don’t want to have to go to the apps, I want the news to seamlessly come to me. Man, this is much more difficult than I expected. This is going to require more thought… to be continued…

Sources:
image: Man Reading Newspaper at Beach – Microsoft Office Clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=newspapers&ctt=1#ai:MP900401660|mt:2| retrieved 1/14/2012.
image: Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos, http://josephbustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/newspapers-on-ipad.jpg retrieved 1/14/2012.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici

What does one expect when about to tour a public school described as innovative and tech-savvy? Classrooms filled with rows and rows of white gleaming tables populated by endless computer monitors under antiseptic white fluorescent lights? Giant wall monitors in the office and all common areas with the day’s activities scrolling below a looping-video of a professionally produced virtual tour of the school given by an smiling young woman? White-headphone wearing students silently gliding from class to class on hover-boards? Up until the last one, I probably had you thinking, “Yeah.” I had the opportunity to visit a very innovative school the other day and you know what I noticed? The place looked pretty much like any school I’d visited where teachers were interacting with students and students were engaged in their learning. In other words, the place wasn’t a shrine to shiny technology, but educators were busy working with their students using technology. Period.

I’d heard about Audubon Park Elementary in Baldwin Park from coworker, Dr. Bedard, who said that it was as an innovative place where, unlike many schools, students were encouraged to bring their tech from home in the form of e-readers and iPads to the classroom. That piqued my interest. Oh yeah, she also confirmed what we’d heard from other coworkers, that many classrooms have students sit at tables in groups of four on yoga-balls bouncing up and down as they do their work. Interesting. So, while there is tech in the classrooms, the place is not a shrine to technology. Educators, beginning with the principal, Trevor Honohan, have chosen to find effective ways to do their job using technology.

Assistant principal Bryan Dolfi told me that the change began over a year ago when Principal Honohan saw how much impact the installation of interactive promethean boards had and began to look for ways to encourage the classroom interaction. Dolfi said that they were fortunate to be located in an somewhat affluent neighborhood and worked with the community and parents of the 1,150 K-5 students to raise funds to add netbooks to the classrooms. I asked Dolfi how the staff of a bit over one-hundred took to the change. I’ve been on school sites that were awarded huge grants with the accompanying radical influx of technology only to have a third of the staff leave because they were asked to use the technology in their teaching and they felt like it was too much to ask. Dolfi took me to look in on a classroom where the teacher was using the Promethean board, standing at the back of the room asking her students items from their science unit. I’ve been on enough school tours to known when I’m watching the technology-dog-and-pony-show for the visitor and when I’m watching something that’s part of the day to day routine and this was the real thing. Then Dolfi added after we left the room that the instructor had been one of the less tech-savvy one’s who had been scared to use the tech only a year ago and now she was one most called upon to help others get comfortable using the tech. Interesting.

Teacher with students in class - Microsoft Office clipart

Teachers set up to succeed, learning how to use technology in the context of their day-to-day job in a way that helps them reach and work with their students, which make the students more engaged, which makes the parents happy, which make the principal and district happy. This isn’t a story about technology but about smart dedicated people taking advantage of the tools within reach (or making it so that the tools are within reach) and then getting to the job of learning and serving their students. No giant screens with intrusive booming messages or hover boards or student/drones wearing white-earphones, just teachers, students, administrators and communities working together (and taking advantage of tech).

Sources:
Audubon Park Elementary School
Trevor Honohan — Principal
Bryan Dolfi — Assistant Principal
1750 Common Way Road
Orlando, Florida 32814

• image: Computer Classroom by sixninepixels, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2680 retrieved 1/14/2012
• image: 3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=3062 retrieved 2/14/2012
• image: Teacher with students in class – Microsoft Office clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?ex=2&qu=reading%20classroom#ai:MP900439545|mt:0| retrieved 1/14/2012

The Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey

I love that Stephen Covey put mail and phone calls in the “Not Important” quadrant of his “Time Management Matrix.” There you go, straight from Covey himself, “Not Important!”Makes me laugh, when I left public education in 2008, my principal chided me for trying to get help from support staff through email instead of using the mailboxes in the front office. Email was something that the district used (once they realized that it was a hell of a lot cheaper to do then sending out paper newsletters that no one reads). I love how education is almost always a good ten-years behind the technology curve. And here I am, even though I’m on the computer all day (unlike classroom teacher who told me, “I don’t have time to check the email!”), thinking that there’s got to be a better way to get this done.

What started this quest was the somewhat inefficient practice of saving my emails in folders in my email client based on general purposes. I have folders for my coworkers, folders for my students with subfolders for various repeated tasks (like their capstone projects), then I have folders for social networks and entertainment and blogging, etc., ad infinitum. But sometimes the message doesn’t fit any single folder. Sometimes it’s a message from Dr. Bedard about a student’s capstone project. Do I store it in Dr. Bedard’s folder or the Capstone subfolder for my students? Alas, the search function requires that I know which folder the message is stored in before it can find it. I use iCloud (formerly MobileMe [sound of taps playing off in the distance]) because it’s IMAP and I can access my account(s) and stored messages on all of my devices and am not limited to which messages are stored on which computer, but there is that “which folder” problem. I much prefer the Gmail way of dumping everything into one single Archive folder and using tags to ID messages. Thus, if I were using Gmail I could put Dr. Bedard’s message into the archive with her name as a tag, the student’s name as a tag and “capstone project” as a third tag. Wonderful. But Apple’s Mail app on the computer or iOS devices don’t use the label/tag structure.

So, I decided to check out an email client called Sparrow. It’s very visual and has a “conversation” style. But guess what, it allows for tags and the like and has a unified INBOX but I can’t pull messages received via my iCloud accounts and save them in my Gmail label-drive archive folder. It might look like it’s more conversational and has a reduced footprint on my desktop, but it’s actually even more segregated than how I did email using the default Mail app. I really should have tried out the free demo version before buying the thing. Doh! FAIL. And… and this doesn’t really address the problem of measuring one’s efficiency by the tool instead of perhaps changing the tool to better serve the real purpose of working with students and colleagues.

It’s too bad that Google Wave died. Some have experimented with Google hangouts, but that looks like glorified video-chat. We’ve been experimenting with Manymoon (now called Do.com – scared), but it’s basically just a single-level task-manager where we check off when we’ve done an assigned task with no collaboration and no project building. And, of course, we get all of our notifications through our emails, so it doesn’t diminish that flood. Truthfully, we’re probably just not very good at using this tool. So, here you have a group of highly intelligent tech-savvy online educators, who actually really like to work together and we can’t seem to find a collaborative tool that is worth the effort of getting up to speed on.

Just to take this discussion up to a mind-blowing level, I’m reminded of a Net@Nite interview of Luis Suarez from IBM, who works in the Canary Islands with bosses in the United States and coworkers spread across the world and has virtually eliminated email as part of his workflow. Right. He’s using social media, blogging and collaborative tools to get the job done. Email has been reduced from the conduit to another form of texting, sending short messages. It’s taken all of this time, more than ten-years, for many educational institutions to get everyone on email and now we realize that it was never meant to be the main conduit/repository of our communication needs. It’s just a goddam useful tool meant to be a reminder of some task, not a measure of whether one is getting one’s job done or done well. Check out Suarez’s blog and vision for how we should be working (online) together:

Sources:

• image: Image: ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net retrieved 1/13/2012.
• image: The Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, (c) 1989/2004.
• image: MM900234754.GIF, microsoft clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?ex=2&qu=email#ai:MM900234754|mt:3| retrieved 1/13/2012.
• Video Podcast: A World Without Email, Net@Night, episode 204, http://twit.tv/show/netnight-amber-and-leo/204 retrieved 1/13/2012. 
• Blog post: Reflections from 2011 – A World Without Email – The Documentary by Luis Suarez, http://www.elsua.net/2012/01/06/reflections-from-2011-a-world-without-email-the-documentary/ retrieved 1/13/2012 

Uploaded by imetthewalrus on Jun 17, 2008
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).
Category: Documentary Animation & Cartoons The Screening Room
Starring:
Jerry Levitan John Lennon
Directed by:
Josh Raskin
Produced by:
Jerry Levitan
Written by:
Josh Raskin

Uploaded by 13640 on Apr 22, 2007
John Lennon and his wife Yoko

Whereas “Imagine” evokes nostalgia and some sadness at what the world lost when Lennon was murdered, this next version of Lennon’s “Merry Xmas” calls us to task at how little we’ve accomplished in fulfilling the message of Christmas, that the world should not be the playground of the powerful stomping on the weak. We have so much to fix and undo…

Uploaded by johnlennon on Aug 24, 2010
The Official video for John Lennon ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’

Sources:
I Met The Walrus: Lennon’s Brain Animated by Maria Popova, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2008/11/21/jerry-levitan-i-met-the-walrus/ retrieved 01-13-2012.

These past fifteen years or so, keeping up with tech trends has been my business, and back in the beginning the newspaper would have been of no use (except for the computer store ads in the Saturday Sports section). Local user groups (NOCCC was strong back then) were the first sources of news and computer magazines like Byte and PC World were essential links to information. Eventually TV shows like C/NET TV and the Computer Chronicles and eventually ZD-TV/TechTV filled in the gap as user groups began to fade and virtual communities began to grow through the Internet. TV shows were then replaced by audio and the video podcasts mostly done by full-time podcasters. But I still hadn’t found a consistent “news gathering” process.

When I got my first iPad I was hoping that I would find a much more Eco-friendly way to consume daily news and tech news. I was really looking forward to reading newspapers and magazines on my iPad. One of the first publications to make it’s debut, The Daily, was buggy and I wasn’t really impressed with the quality of the writing style, so I never subscribed beyond the one-month free trial. At the time there were newspaper apps but they were geared for the small iPhone screen and were hardly better than a crippled webpage. This was not the experience I was looking for. In fact the best magazine/newspaper translation to iPad that I’ve found has been the Zinio version of National Geographic. Zinio is an app or wrapper that previously appeared as a Mac and Windows desktop app, but in it’s iPad incarnation not only does it preserve the feel and layout of the magazine but it all offers photo galleries and videos not possible in the paper version of the magazine. The only draw-back is that I have to remember to launch the Zinio app to get to my magazine library, but everything else is pretty seamless. Now that Apple has it’s own “newsstand” version I wonder what the difference might be. Also NG has it’s own stand-alone version. As far as look and feel and multimedia options Zinio works.

Newspaper-wise, in the beginning there was nothing, except for the iPhone versions. Being from the West Coast I was hoping to get the LA Times, but the Times was a Flash-only subscription that wouldn’t work on my iPad. Amazon had a kindle version of several newspapers, but reviews were critical of the offering, mostly related to poor editing and poor image support. But then some time late in the summer I discovered that Amazon had improved their newspaper subscription service and signed up for the Los Angeles Times via Kindle. Ten bucks a month for the daily paper with all of the sections from the original in a semi-blog/onswipe kind of layout. Not too bad. Well, except for when I happened to find almost the exact same version available apparently directly from the LA Times (via an LA Times app), FOR FREE! Doh! To be continued…

Sources:

• image: Newspaper forest green by NS Newsflash/Jon S, http://www.flickr.com/photos/62693815@N03/6277389273/in/photostream/ retrieved 01-10-2012
• video: 2011-02-19 The Daily Before & After by Joe Bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/5463229493/ retrieved 01-10-2012

Speed: I’ve used and spent good money on services like Pogoplug and the woeful MobileMe iDisk and nothing is more frustrating to having a fast new computer and have to watch the spinning-pinwheel of death because all system processes are slowed down to the slowest connection, the Internet connection to the remote hard disk. Dropbox wins because you are working with local storage and only at boot-up and after saves does Dropbox jump in to put the latest version in the cloud.

Most Recent Copy: This may be a first world problem but I don’t want to have to think about where my most recent version of whatever document is stored. I’ve done the floppy-disk/USB-stick/mini-external hard drive shuffle hoping that I saved the right copy to the right disk. Sooner or later the most recent version is going to get over-written by an older version. And I don’t want to have to download anything to work on it. I just want to go to the folder with the document, click, run and save. Period. Any “solution” that requires that I download a version from the cloud to my device, work on it, save it, then push it up to the cloud, is just replicating, the “copy-copy-where’s-the-most-recent-copy” game. No. That’s a non-starter.

Blocked Ports: Generally the first two reasons are enough for anyone to bail on the online storage game. This third one is really ugly and makes one realize that the reason most folks don’t even bother with this space is because getting stuff to work can be much more difficult than anyone is willing to deal with. I love the idea of accessing my files via the Internet from any Internet-connected device. My ISP, apparently, has a different thought about such services and I’ve never been able to get Pogo-plug (version one hardware and more recent software versions) and Back-to-my-Mac to work, I believe because as soon as a connection is made my ISP blocks the ports needed to make the service(s) work. Thus, any service that requires that I have a tunnel from my files on my home computer to my cloud connection is only as good as the link that my ISP allows, and that generally doesn’t work. I’m sure that there’s some secret incantation that might make these services work. I don’t want to find out that my connection doesn’t work when I’m trying to access my work/files from clear across the country. Fail.

Local Backup: One fear of working and storing work in the cloud is only having one copy on the latest version … in the cloud. Things do fail in the cloud. And things do get “accidentally” erased online. So, because the latest version of the files are stored locally using DropBox, one unexpected benefit is that when time-machine backs up my work I have that latest version backed up where I might have a backup solution working (one at work and one at home). That’s a plus.

I use Google Docs for all of my work documents, but I’ve used the files and folders GUI so long that I don’t know if I can adjust to having them only exist in a google doc where they can get lost or accidentally erased. Also, anything that requires that I download a version to work on it goes back to the Most Recent Copy dilemma. No go. So, if Insync can deliver on all of these things AND be cheaper than I might give them a look. But only being cheaper isn’t going to fly with me.

Sources:
Insync: Wave ‘Bye, Bye, Bye’ to Dropbox by Daniel Cooper/Engadget. http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/04/insync-wave-bye-bye-bye-to-dropbox/ retrieved 1/9/2012.

CloudOn Brings Free Cloud-Hosted Microsoft Office Functionality to iPad by Eric Slivka/macrumors. http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/cloudon-brings-free-cloud-hosted-microsoft-office-functionality-to-ipad/ retrieved 1/9/2012.

As I recently posted on twitter, I wasn’t entirely successful posting a photo a day on flickr (mostly because I take way too many photos that need some level of editing and insist on posting them in chronological order, etc., etc., etc.). But thanks to an iPhone app called Everyday I’ve been capturing an image of yours truly almost everyday since buying the app in early 2011. I wasn’t as strict as I should have been framing the photos, so it’s a much more jittery video than it could have been. And except for my hair growing out (and being wonderfully styled) the passage of time isn’t as obvious and will probably require a much longer time span than just one year. Oh boy.

On a much more beautiful and celebratory note, Kathy Craven’s boyfriend, Mike Cardwell posted the following video highlighting how they celebrated the coming of the new year. Enjoy.

New Year’s Eve from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.

This is how my family and I spent the last few hours of 2011. This is an in-camera effect using bokeh. No animation of any kind was used in this video.

Best viewed Full Screen.

Thanks to everyone who helped on this project!

Kathy Craven
The Craven Family
Ryan Nielson
Aidan Cardwell
Kellie Martin
Nick Loring from Digital Graphics Plus
Chris Altsman
Brett Brinkerhoff for letting me borrow his rig

Happy New Year!

Catch Mike’s work at Market Match Media and can be contacted at Michael@marketmatchmedia.com