I am not a big cell phone user and I have one of those phones and those accounts that is pretty expensive. I encouraged the high price plan because my cell phone offers a way to access my email remotely and this does come in handy on occasion. My wife went along (actually encouraged) the idea because somehow talking on the phone is a virtue and unfortunately one of those virtues that does not come naturally to me.
My wife does keep trying and I have to give her credit – the newest suggestion seems interesting. Her constant attention to hundreds of blog messages has uncovered Jott.
Jott is a beta online service. You connect to a number and speak the name of an individual – you say “me” if you want to send a message to yourself. The recommendation is that you set a speed dial on your cell phone – like I would know how to do that ;). You speak for up to 30 seconds. Jott translates speech to text and stores the text message and the audio in the Jott account of the individual you have identified. It actually works.
Perhaps I think in text rather than audio. Jott is perfectly suited to my “style”.
I think I prefer to assimilate rather than to accommodate (Piagetian terms so ignore if my way of thinking makes no sense). I like to find ways to fit new experiences into my existing ways of doing things. I have always done my academic work by taking notes and highlighting. The articles in the journals on my shelves are highlighted. I guess I am not sure why I think the highlighting in the books and journals and the notes I have accumulated in digital form for the past 30 years (some I had to enter when I started working on computers) really save me much time. When working on a project, I typically have to reread the original works anyway.
The move to online resources has caused me some frustration. While I can download nearly any article to my desktop as a pdf from my university library, I have been struggling with what to do next. I have settled on a system for storing, tagging, and searching pdfs (see comment on Yep), but there is still the matter of “processing” the material I collect. For me reading is not enough.
I have found a new tool that looks promising. It is called Skim. I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee for the tools I use, but this one is free. Skim allows annotation, highlighting, and some other methods for marking up pdfs (see below).
When saved, these additions are available to Skim, but apparently not to other pdf readers (or at least the ones I tried). At least other pdf viewers can open the files modified by Skim. I would hate to invest a lot of work in a system that relies on a proprietary file format and then find one day that the company decides not to upgrade their product.
What is kind of interesting is that the marked text content can be exported in various forms including RTF. The material marked in the image above resulted in a file with the following content:
• Highlight, page 1
External storage provides a way to deal with the typical delay between listening to a lecture and studying lecture content.
• Circle, page 1
Mark Grabe *, Kimberly Christopherson ent of Psychology, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND USA 58202,
• Text Note, page 1
Students who are more likely to skip class use online notes differently.
The combination of a system for marking up pdfs (without eliminating the opportunity to read the pdf using another tool) and the ability to export notes and highlighted material for the development of personal resources looks promising.
This is a Mac only product – don’t have to say that very often. 😉
You might want to read this link from AppleInsider before changing over from iMovie06 to the new iMovie08. It appears that some features you may have grown used to in the ’06 version are no longer available. The post at AppleInsider makes it sound like Apple went for simple almost assuming the most common interest of iMovie users was to post something to YouTube.
I can’t say I have had the opportunity to work with the new product yet, but I would be concerned that movies would lack chapters. Since it might be time to load software into school labs for the Fall, those considering the new version of iLife might want to take a little time to investigate this issue.
Summaries of a recent survey of students, parents, and educators concerning social networking have been appearing on educational blogs (e.g., 2 Cents Worth, TechBlorge). The reason the results of this survey interest these other bloggers and me is that the survey seems to indicate the response of schools to the assumed dangers of student social networking exaggerates the dangers as reported by students and parents.
Use of social networking among age group is increasing (some data from present study contrasted with 2002) and students make a surprising amount of use to accomplish educational tasks on their own.
Safety issues and inappropriate experiences associated with social networking do exist, but are lower than many adults assume – especially educational officials.
Online experience may help students learn to deal with inappropriate experiences.
Those looking for recent statistics may find the report helpful. The survey data include:
reports of the frequency of social networking activities and changes since 2002
frequency of several categories of inappropriate and dangerous experiences
proportion of schools blocking or forbidding various types of online experience while in school.
I wish research of this type were more commonly funded to be conducted by researchers at educational institutions whose goal was to publish their data in peer reviewed goals. To gain full access to the data collected by Grunwald Associates it appears you must pay several thousand dollars. More information about the questions asked in the survey are available from the Grunwald Associates site. What I wish I had the opportunity to review are the details of the methodology. The published pdf describes the student sample as consisting of 1277 9-17 year olds who responded to an online survey. The Grunwald associates site describes a nationally representative sample of 1000 teens/children. An online survey could mean different things and many approaches would not really generate a representative sample of all youth.
To have the National School Boards association behind the position that schools are overreacting to the dangers of participatory web activities and missing out on activities that interest students seems a good thing.
The new Apple products were announced today and while the new iMac upgrade looks great there is no “low end” machine. It looks like 20″ and 24″ models with the low end (educational price for individuals) at $1149.
I am just concerned that this may seem a little too much machine for K12 labs and older Macs will not be replaced with the 20″ model. The Mac mini still exists (supply your own monitor and keyboard) at a significantly lower price point and I was not confident this line would be continued. I guess this or the smaller MacBook are the alternatives from Apple’s perspective.
The new iLife08 tools in combination with a .mac account (still $100 per year I think and now at 10 gig of storage) would seem to offer some great opportunities.
Today, Will Richardson offers a post examining blogs as textbook and what the learner must do for the blogs to fill that role. To be fair, it is really more complicated than a contrast between the information sources. It is probably more “read a book” vs. “integrate what one picks up by reviewing blogs”. The entry considers several issues – how many blogs can you handle, how to you pick the blogs, and how to process/save what you pick up.
I find myself caught in a dilemma I wonder if Will has considered. I write a book that among other topics advocates that students can learn by authoring multimedia content. So, I support the “learn by authoring” concept. I assume there must be some input to the thought process that generates the products students create. Blogs, personal experiences, etc. could certainly provide this input. Will and I are in agreement so far.
The phrase “blogs as book” is a little more of a challenge. I wonder if Will considers his unique position in making such statements? Does he feel a little strange suggesting that blogs can be the equivalent of or superior to a book? If this is true, how does he justify selling a book? Why not just encourage educators to explore blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. (and attempt to store an account of what you have learned) instead of suggesting they purchase a book about blogs, wikis, and podcasts?
I have my own answer to this issue. I will leave it to you to evaluate whether or not the argument is self serving. I review both books and online resources. I think one gets a very different perspective especially with books vs. blogs. I believe this as a reader and I believe this as an author. Although important, the difference for me is not the review process, editors, and all of that quality control stuff. It is the difference in depth and integration. I think it is important to see if someone can tie the pieces together and I think there is much more of that in a book than in a blog. I understand that my own learning requires that I tie ideas together for myself, but I want to test this macrostructure against that created by someone else. A book is more and less at the same time – it is a one shot effort to show how many issues and topics fit together that as an author I am not allowed to patch up tomorrow.
I have a version of this discussion each semester when I begin my classes. It goes something like this.
“Yes, you must purchase and read the book.”
“Yes, if you read the book, you must still come to class.”
“Yes, the book and I sometimes talk about the same things.”
“Why would you want to just listen to what I and the other students in this class have to say? Think of what you pay for that experience. For just $75 more, you have the opportunity to read what an expert has to say and compare all of these sources.”
Never sure exactly how well this logic goes over, but it does make me feel better.
Recent Senate hearings on the Internet are available for review. Andy Carvin, learning.now, offers a great summary of the hearings. If you take the time to view the archived presentations, I would encourage your careful attention to the presentation of Dr. Finkelhor. His approach, based on survey data collected from teenagers, offers insights that may surprise some because he emphasizes the role of the risk taking behavior of teenagers. Public impression must acknowledge this reality because methods of dealing with the dangers must accept the role the behavior of victims plays. This should not be confused with “blaming the victim”, but rather an effort to understand so that productive interventions might be developed.
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