By Lisa, on January 12th, 2012%
So a friend of mine has an iP*d (dotted out to avoid the deluge of advertising in my comments), and I go to show her one of my classes, and I notice to my horror that none of my painstakingly embedded YouTube videos (including lecture intros I recorded) are visible.
Of course, I had done some research before using them instead of my embedded Quicktime clips in my own hand-Javascripted pop-up windows. And I thought I knew to use the old embed code because some browsers can’t handle iframes, and some students don’t know what a browser is, and are using Internet Explorer 0.02 or something.
But of course, the old embed code for YouTube is Flash, and iEverything doesn’t want Flash, it wants HTML5, which is supposedly the new YouTube embed code so…. aaarrggghhh.
Next task then, after redoing all the clips (we’re talking about 50 clips over three classes) the first time to change to YouTube embed code, is to redo all the embed codes.
So then I happen to notice I have also embedded a slidecast from Slideshare in my lecture too. Turns out that’s Flash too. I can get a sneaky iframe code from here, but I see that it won’t do audio. The audio is still Flash. My alternative version is on HTML pages with Quicktime audio, but it’s the wrong audio codec so the iP*d won’t play that either.
Which also means that all my lecture audio, obviously recorded in a wrong codec, has little play symbols crossed out. At least they can hear the music. I must have used a codec the sucker likes for the music clips somehow.
What other horrors await, I wonder? I know my students all bought this thing, this iP*d thing that I don’t understand because it’s just a big screen that I can’t connect anything to or do anything with, so I don’t have one and don’t want one. To cater to it is soooo annoying.
By Lisa, on October 9th, 2011%
By Lisa, on October 3rd, 2011%
I’ve been reading Nicholas Carr’s post from last week about the Kindle, where he points out that e-books not only reduce books, but add unnecessary elements to them (such as Amazon’s linking the “interesting phrases” in a text). He knows that the “reading medium will, as always, influence the act of reading”. I understand his despair. But I think one of the problems is that “e-readers” are being called “electronic books” because they have text. But they aren’t books. They are, for lack of a better term, web pages without the web.
 ImageShack How do we deal with the efforts of the new technologies to couch themselves as the updated version of the old technologies? They call these products (Kindle, Nook, etc.) “e-book readers” in the same way that they called automobiles “horseless carriages”, because people hadn’t yet developed a new vocabulary for a new technology. E-book readers have little to do with the book or reading, although initially that is their first use. As Carr notes, the model is commercial, and simple reading cannot be enough economic activity to satisfy.
In the early days of e-readers, I often wondered why these e-readers they had wi-fi. If they were for reading books, you could download the books to your computer (after paying, of course) and then use a USB cable to transfer them to your e-reader. This is, after all, what we do with mp3 players. But, as with smart phones, the e-readers let you download items directly over a wireless network. This means the intent is different than just pay-and-consume. The intent is clearly pay-and-pay-some-more, so the transformation of the text was inevitable. Carr writes in another post that the idea of “bookishness” was just a metaphor to Amazon, a marketing tactic to get readers to buy the product.
I think it might help if we depart from the marketing ploy, and start thinking of e-readers as mini-tablets, which are themselves mini phone-OS computers, which are dumbed-down versions of real computers, which are becoming small boxed versions of the internet. The Kindle Fire is clearly a tablet, connected to the “cloud” via a browser. Its only resemblance to something you “read books” on is that it is a pay-and-consume object. Its purpose is to access the web to buy things, to turn everything into the consumer web. Its effect will be the same as smart phones and iPads, a closure of the open web as it is replaced with App World.
So none of this is about books, or even text (except as a form of “media”). It’s about multimedia consumption devices, mini-entertainment centers. Some of that entertainment might be couched as text, but that doesn’t make these pieces of technology “electronic books”. There is no such thing as an electronic book. There are books, and there are electronic devices. I like them both, just not for the same reasons.
By Lisa, on August 23rd, 2011%
I went shopping for a tablet, but I was looking for something really specific. And before I get flooded with iP*d advertisements, I’m not interested because I’m mad at Apple (don’t get me started) and I want Flash.
The specific thing is Tinychat. When I am in the classroom, I wanted to broadcast my class to sick students at home quickly and easily. Tinychat’s “broadcast” button did the trick. My classroom computer is stationary, and on the side of the room. Students could see me and part of the class from the side, but audio was too far away, and the many microphones I tried didn’t work well.
 So I started bringing my MacBook, setting it up on a desk at the front, and broadcasting from there. I could turn the laptop around and point it at the class, or bring it to a student’s desk for groupwork. On “lab days”, most students had a laptop, so their group could “bring in” the home-bound student and work with them, also in Tinychat.
But I’m so lazy that my MacBook is too heavy to carry the 75 feet from my office to the classroom. So why not a tablet? Those things can be put on a stand, and they have cameras on the front and back. I could just switch the view back and forth, right?
So I go into Best B*y, and spend three hours trying to bring up Tinychat on each tablet. It was a joke. Most wouldn’t load the program at all. When they did, the login fields kept floating away. I couldn’t click in the login window with my finger to enter my info. When I did, only three actually loaded a Tinychat window (the Motorola Xoom, the HP tablet, and one other that’s slipped my mind). None of the three of these would broadcast from there.
So I spoke with a salesperson who listened carefully, and told me these would do one-on-one chat but not what I was trying to do. As we talked, we go around to the OS. He noted offhandedly that these tablets are based on phone-OSs, expanded for a big screen. I might want to try a small netbook instead.
So I finally got it. Tablets are big phones, not small computers. And now I really don’t want one.
By Lisa, on July 13th, 2011%
I’m immersing myself in Bernie Dodge’s EDTEC700 seminar in Mobile Learning, and going through materials from EDUCAUSE’s Mobile Computing 5-Day Sprint from April, but my thoughts are out on the range with the cowboys.
I am always wary of EDUCAUSE because of its central IT/administrative focus and corporate sponsors, but the people in the discussions supported the opportunities and concerns that are forming in my own mind about the taming of the wilderness.
 Not so long ago, the internet was the Wild West. Those of us teaching on it when it was new, long before technology plans and wireless hotspots, may not have had a lot of spiffy technologies but we had pretty much total freedom. Over the years, the wild horses have been corralled and tamed by Learning Management Systems, the swift emergence of central IT, and the even swifter development of graduate degrees in educational technology and distance learning.
In the first part of the EDUCAUSE Now podcast #38, Bryan Alexander, Terri-Lynn Thayer, George Claffey Jr, Joanna Young, and Gardner Campbell discuss how movile devices are affecting higher ed:
EDUCAUSE Now #38
I am hearing here an echo of the early web-based teaching concerns: how can we keep the freedom? Mobile devices permit all the affordances of the internet (massive amounts of information, social contact, and fun distractions) to be carried around. This provides opportunities to teach in new ways.
Just as some profs didn’t want (and still don’t want) the internet impacting their teaching and their classrooms, some don’t want mobile devices in the classroom (the Turn Off All Mobile Devices in Class syndrome). But, as Gardner Campbell says in the podcast:
“Rather than raise a generation of students who will be waiting until the bell rings so they can go outside and consult their mobile devices, we can and must incorporate the riches these mobile devices present to us into teaching and learning.”
At the same time, out of conferences like this come directives, often along the lines of :
“From a planning perspective, CIOs should assume that the entire user community wil require support for one or more mobile devices.”
“…those institutions with with a well-defined strategy for exploiting mobile technologies will discover significant advantages.”
(These are also from EDUCAUSE, the recent Review).
Last time, the internet cowboys were on the open range. This time, the mobile learning cowboys are already outnumbered by the bank managers, sheriffs, back room accountants in green visors, and federal marshals. There are concerns about central IT and others taking control. I sense these “stable” forces working hard to figure out how to promote the advantages of mobile learning while “organizing” it into “plans” and “strategies”. To me, that means an inevitable restriction of the range by fences.
True, the very mobility of mobile learning should mean it will be more like fencing in birds than cows, but technological and commercial limitations take care of the rest. Apple’s success has already shown that people care more about style and snaz than independence and creativity. (I am currently being “encouraged” to buy a new iPod since Apple refuses to create software so I can update my “old” one, even though nothing is really different inside except a camera the software could ignore.) “Apps” now dominate, and many are proprietary, even when they operate on systems that are open source (like Android). Even QR codes are patented by Denso Wave, though they choose not to exercise rights .
 Arcade Saloon, Eldora, Colorado 1898, Denver Public Library So the railroad investors and moguls will make sure whatever range isn’t limited by managers will be limited by their products.
My hope is that the mobile cowboys will do as much as they can now, making models of independence and creativity, before we enter the next age (which should be, what, a year from now, at the outside?). Those who exercised insane creativity on the last frontier seem to be the only forces holding the web itself as an open space, against the enclosures of property-owners like Facebook.
So let’s do some jailbreaks and fight in the saloons before things get really civilized (and dull) around here.
By Lisa, on February 23rd, 2011%
Sometimes students need to stay home. In fact, my “don’t you dare come to class sick” policy says they must.
I’ve been finding ways of broadcasting my class so they can attend from home, and this is the simplest yet.
I set up my laptop with built-in webcam and just open a room in TinyChat. I click “Start Broadcasting”, and it selects my camera and broadcasts to whoever is in the TinyChat room. This is the same thing we’ve been using for groups to contact group members at home, just with the camera on me.
Audio has been trickier. The audio pickup on my iMac isn’t good at a distance, though it’s better than the omnidirectional mic I tried, which is obviously better for meetings where the mic is 6 feet or less away.
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