tech-ed collisions

Amazon Kindle for education

Recently I had the good fortune to attend the IMS Learning Impact Conference at Long Beach CA. While I was there I ran out of reading material and tried to find a bookstore. Well, things have changed since the last time I was there (what with the demise of some major bookstore chains) and I was unable to find a good bookstore. In the end I found myself at a Best Buy store looking at e-readers. Amazon had this special on the Kindle with special offers. At a great price, it looked very good and a great solution to my lack of access to some decent books - so I bought one.
I must say that after about an hour's use I knew I had made a rash decision. 'special offers' turned out to be a discounted Kindle with ads to subsidize the price. There were ads across the bottom of the screen, ads in place of the screensaver and annoying as they were, I knew it was going to get a whole lot worse when I got home as they were American ads and well, I don't live in the USA.
Fortunately for me Best Buy has a great returns policy so I returned the device and upgraded it to the 3G version (wish Australian retailers had the same attitude towards customer service).
What a transformation! No more ads and free worldwide access to 3G networks. Think about that for a moment and the potential it offers for education. No more paper text books to weigh kids backpacks down and no traffic costs for downloading content. Now if only education could get it's act together and negotiate something like that.
I have never really given much thought to e-readers and have had an iPad instead however they are completely different experiences. The Kindle leaves the iPad in it's wake when it comes to reading texts. Sure the iPad can do a whole lot more but for the simple use case of delivering text books to students and readability there is no comparison. I have several apps on my iPad for reading but none of them come close.
The only downside I have experienced so far is the woeful keyboard (although you don't use it much). Lining all the keys up vertically as well as horizontally just doesn't work. Touch typists will find it a nightmare. The keys themselves are concave which has the unfortunate characteristic of always catching a light reflection making it very difficult to see the letter on the key (which is hard to see anyway given the lack of contrast to the Kindle surface) which you tend to rely on given the awkward alignment of the keys. For me the keyboard is a usability disaster.
Overall though these things would be fantastic in a classroom in place of paper textbooks (especially the 3G version if you could get access to curriculum texts). They are at a price point well below iPads and while they do a lot less, they really deliver on the functionalty they were designed for.

Cheers,
Jerry
Ps and after all that I found a good bookstore near Best Buy.

Filed under  //   content   gadgets  
Posted July 12, 2011

ASUS Eee PC with XP

Article from ZDNet Australia - the news that ASUS is to sell it's Eee PC with Windows XP. The first time I saw one of these it was being used in a seminar to run 'powerpoint' style presentations and the presenter gave a really compelling demonstration on just how good low cost hardware bundled with open source software can be.

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While I use Linux at home it is still not popular with my children as they do not use it at school. The school uses XP and an older version of Office. This year however we have to get serious at home in providing a good computer for the kids. Perhaps something like the Eee with XP is the answer - and it looks pretty cool too.

Filed under  //   gadgets  
Posted March 5, 2008

For those that seek to discourage the use of mobiles

Some interesting statistics on the use and growth of mobiles in Asia from Ewan McIntosh's edu.blogs.com.

Filed under  //   gadgets   policy  

digital pen/paper combination starting to look pretty good

Due for release shortly is the Livescribe Smartpen. The website demo of this looks very impressive and is certainly bound to have appeal to gadget lovers. Livescribe combines its smartpen with something called dotpaper along with audio recording and integration with applications to create some pretty interesting scenarios. Having your notes synched with audio combined with the ability to upload straight to a blog or other content sharing services should have educational use written all over it. Look forward to seeing one.

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Filed under  //   gadgets  

Biometrics in Schools

Since this blog has just been renamed it may be interesting to comment about a real technology/education collision and that is the use of biometrics in schools. In the last 24 hours there has been a couple of articles in the mainstream press on the use of biometrics. Last night on the news Japan hit the headlines with its adoption of biometrics for processing foreigners entering the country. This follows on from the lead in the USA although in the US I think everyone is fingerprinted and photographed. The justification for doing this is of course the struggle against terrorism. To date I think there has been a mixed reaction to this. Some feel that initiatives such as this are ok if it improves their safety, others have major concerns over privacy and the uses that such information could be put to. This morning on the radio there was a piece on a supermarket chain in Germany using biometrics as a way of paying for your groceries. Using your fingerprint to authorise payment of your groceries brings a whole new meaning to the term 'finger food' (not my joke). The article was aired on ABC radio but I haven't found a link to it yet. I am sure privacy groups would have concerns here. Imagine the uses such information could be put to. Say for example, your health insurance company had proof that your diet was a major risk for certain medical conditions, what would they do with that? Of course if you are paying by credit card or any other payment method that identifies you, the same information would be potentially available. You could try to argue that just because you bought the food doesn't mean you ate it! So what is the purpose of this rant? I wonder whether we may gradually be becoming more accustomed to the use of these technologies and will look back one day and ask 'how did that happen?'. Back in the day when PDA's were nearly a useful thing I used to have one that had biometric authentication. It was a Compaq iPaq with fingerprint identification on it. Walking around the office today I noticed that there is at least one laptop in the organisation that also has fingerprint authentication built in. Is this stuff starting to become more prevalent? What about in schools? I did a quick Google search and there is a stack of information on the use of biometrics in schools being put to use in areas such as lunch purchases, borrowing from the library, attendance etc. Obviously there are major concerns about the use of these technologies from privacy groups, parents etc and there seems to be far more articles about these concerns than the use of the technologies themselves. Some technologies just get snapped up and adopted by the community without much thought while others strike fear into our hearts. Do we pay enough attention to the adoption of new technologies - should we pay more or less attention to specific types of technologies and are we truly aware of all the implications of adopting different types of them. Do we really understand the potentials (good and bad) of those that we accept or reject. Access and authentication is always a challenge and biometrics offer very interesting solutions in this area. In security terms I believe there are three types of authentication that you may be able to offer. These are: something you know (your userid/password. PIN etc), something you have (an access card, key), and something you are (fingerprint, retinal scan etc). There is a line of thought that the presence of two of these types provides reasonably strong authentication. They are all being used to provide the same service yet one of them seems to induce fear rather than comfort in being secure. Its an interesting area and one that I am sure will generate much discussion going into the future.

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Filed under  //   emerging technology   gadgets  

on $100/$150 laptops

Like many others I have been watching with interest the development of the $100 laptop. At work we were even fortunate enough to play with one for a couple of days. The olpc is a great initiative with a fantastic vision and it is interesting to see that there are now companies seemingly building on that to make very affordable laptops for broader markets. Here's one with a claim to costing about US$150. The Medison Celebrity has a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron cpu with 256MB of memory running the Fedora operating system. As a Linux home user with children wanting computers for personal and educational use this sounds great but.... here's the problem for me. At home, in the past, we have had a PC and laptop running Linux. We now have a PC running Windows XP and Open Office. Unfortunately at the school our kids attend they use Windows and Microsoft Office. Consequently, the kids just aren't interested in Linux/Open Office. It's Microsoft or nothing with them. They do use Open Office for some of their homework but don't like the differences and also report back some problems with compatibility at school. It looks like I am stuck with having to find more expensive solutions that can support bigger footprint operating systems and applications until the school starts considering Linux. Cheers, Jerry.

Filed under  //   gadgets  
Posted July 30, 2007

on Podmo

Here's a great local innovation (I like those). Podmo provides 'free community networking for mobile phones'. Its a great service which provides access to content and other services such as messaging at no cost to users. All you need to setup a 'podmo free zone' is a server with Bluetooth radio capability that has access to the Internet (I set mine up on a laptop). The Podmo Server can be downloaded for free from the website. Many mobile phones now support Bluetooth so connecting your phone to your Bluetooth network is pretty easy to do (most of the time). Podmo supports an increasing number of mobile phones and the list on their website is pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately for me, my phone just happens to be an LG phone for which there is no support. I understand there may be some differences in their Bluetooth implementation (so much for interoperability). However, with a bit of begging, I managed to borrow a Nokia N73 for a short time to test this out. To run Podmo on your phone you need to download the podmo player. This turned out to be very easy now that I had a supported phone. Once that was done, registration was simple and away I went. There were a number of different types of downloads to have a look at, some news/information services and a messaging service. What Podmo really needs is more content and services - I'd like to see a web browser in there so that I can get out to the web without incurring charges from the mobile phone carrier. Their website provides a facility to upload content as well if you want to contribute. To me there seems to be enormous potential for education and training with services such as Podmo. It is very simple to setup a Podmo network anywhere. This could be in an education environment, work setting or any number of locations where it would be useful to establish some sort of connectivity. Since most mobile phones support Bluetooth, and the number of phones supported is pretty good and should only get better, the cost of providing network devices could be extremely cheap (get users to use their own phones). Using the Podmo network the connectivity, via Bluetooth, is free which removes a substantial barrier for using mobiles. What is needed is some good educational or training content. There are some obvious limitations such as the range of Bluetooth and perhaps, the number of devices that you can connect, depending on your bluetooth radio/server. Given the vast number of mobile phone models there will always be the possibility that some users may not be able to connect as well but the popular ones seem to be covered. Despite these limitations, I think that this sort of networking is really worth further investigation. Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   gadgets  
Posted July 10, 2007

Here Wii go..

The big hit at home this summer has been the Nintendo Wii. In fact, it has kept us all (not just kids) occupied for far too long. For me Nintendo has (for quite a while) delivered consoles with really interesting user interfaces which I think should have loads of potential in education and training scenarios. The Wii is no exception and using the Wii Remote is a completely different experience to traditional gaming controllers.

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The Wii Remote has motion sensors inside and this is what makes the Wii very different from other gaming platforms that I at least, have seen. Using this technology, games are available that let you swing a golf club, baseball bat, tennis racquet, pitch a baseball or bowl a tenpin bowling ball for example. This adds an extra dimension to the game experience. In other games you will wield your remote as a sword or other implements. Additionally, the remote can be used as a pointing device as well to point at objects etc on the screen. These functions enable really interesting scenarios to be built into games and must have some potential in learning. Watching how quickly children can familiarise themselves with the interface is amazing and it is my guess that the Wii would lend itself very well to educational scenarios for younger audiences. I found that the remote was very good for big movements such as emulating swinging a tennis racquet but less responsive for smaller movements such as putting a golf ball. It could be quite frustrating at times with smaller movements although that may just be a reflection of my ability. However, such inconsistencies would require careful consideration if the technology was used to simulate something in a training environment which required a reasonable degree of accuracy. The Wii can also access the Internet to get to services such as the weather and news. These are accessed through 'Wii Channels'. At last check, the weather channel was operational but the news channel hadn't started yet. If you take the time (and it did take some time) to download a browser you can also access the Web. The browser is currently in beta and is the Opera browser. I understand it will be available for free for a whille but eventually there will be a cost. Connecting to the Internet was very easy (even with my wireless network which surprised me a little). Using the Wii to browse the Web is probably something that I will do very little of however. Using a virtual keyboard is tedious and the screen resolution is not that good and this becomes quite exaggerated on larger screens. The store where I purchased the Wii from believed that at some point in the future, there is likely to be integration with the Wii and other Nintendo devices such as the DS. If so, this would just add to the possibilities that designers can work with. Unfortunately, I don't know whether these technologies will ever be exploited for adaptation to training/education environments though which seems a bit of a shame.

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Filed under  //   gadgets