Anywhere-Anytime Computing

The above is just another term for Mobile Computing or "Just in Time Computing". Portable communication devices such as the iPhone, and other smart phones offer advanced capabilities beyond a typical mobile phone, with computer-like functionality and can include small keyboards, video and still cameras and voice recorders. They also offer both Wi-Fi and cell phone web connectivity.

With upcoming major developments in the iPhone SDK, iPhone 2, and Google's Android, a critical mass in usability will soon be reached. Students' content viewing and listening opportunities have already been greatly expanded with the use of portable devices as the iPod. In a parallel manner, their opportunities for content creation (text, images and video) and immediate sharing, via the web, will soon be expanded with the introduction of these new portable communication devices.

Two recent cases of student-created content, a SATA and a TRIP, would have benefited greatly from “anywhere-anytime” connectivity: The SATA Peru Wiki and the more recent TRIP to Russia 2008 blog

The above students, in foreign countries, had extremely limited and infrequent access to networked computers. Considerable more content would have been created with better connectivity. Uploading of images was very difficult. In the SATA Peru wiki, students were often attempting to move 3+ MB images from a digital camera to a computer, and then upload them on a slow connection, at the few times they had access. This was even after emailing them to please follow posted directions on how to reduce file sizes in Picasa and iPhoto. Eventually, the faculty member ended up emailing most of the images to an assistant here, who would then post them.

With a smart phone, capturing images and possibly video, uploading to a collaborative web site, and writing would be easy, anytime day or night. We need to evaluate potential benefits for SATA and TRIP experiences. Other student-generated work can benefit from “anywhere-anytime” connectivity, these pedagogical situations need to be researched and identified. Technical requirements also need to be identified, along with equipment and services that meet them. It will probably be wise to evaluate first-hand different options. Finally, pilot projects need to be implemented.

Initial cost estimates: Equipment $2,000 (4 smart phones, 2 for staff and faculty testing and familiarization, 2 for distribution). Service, TBD, currently estimated at $1,200-2,000/year per phone. This should come down in time.

Here are some interesting links I ran across, as I start my research in this area:

The 2008 Horizon Report on Mobile Broadband, which suggests a 2-3 year "time-to-adoption." I think appropriate technologies will be here by year's end for early adopters to implement successful projects.

Camera phones used in videojournalism, this has applications in education

Reuters Mobile Journalism Toolkit, which includes a small real bluetooth keyboard, this makes typing considerably easier.

International Cell Phone Service, a good overview from Travel Insider

SXSW is getting BIG

My brother Ralph, who has lived in Austin for about 8 years while working on DSPs for ARM, kept telling me about this hip little film and music festival called SXSW. Kept trying to get me to fill out a travel request so the college could pay for me to get out there! I did not feel it appropriate, though I could stay for free with him, with no lodging costs. I kept an eye on the SXSW web site from year to year, noticing the annual increase of bands, indie films and other media events. My brother, who is a techie who also loves music, must have really enjoyed seeing this annual growth.

It appears that SXSW has gotten real big this year, reaching national prominence, with a lot of buzz on the web 2.0, as its interactive program achieved critical mass. Even Twitter has upgraded their servers and "tuned performance" in preparation for this event.

There must be some "great stuff" at SXSW, here is a clip borrowed from Read-Write-Web regarding "Lessons Learned at 37 Signals", one of my favorite companies.

Lesson 5: Question Your Work Regularly
At 37 Signals they are always asking questions to make sure they are doing the right things. Internally, this list of questions includes:

- why are we doing this?

- what problem are we solving?

- is this actually useful?

- are we adding value?

- will this change behavior?

- is there an easier way?

- what's the opportunity cost?

- is it really worth it?

Many of the above questions are relevant in our instructional technology work at the college level.

I already made plans to go to NERCOMP for a work day, and then to Fort Myers Beach area for my vacation. Next year, I'll have to look hard at going to Austin instead for both!

OLPC's designer, Yves Behar, speaks

The above, from Scribemedia, briefly explains some of the thinking that went into the One Laptop Per Child computer. Though designed for children in developing countries, it got me thinking whether it would have any practical or pedagogical uses for students in higher education in developed countries. I think it's time to buy one! Well, got to have two to test the OLPC networking...

OLPC starts mass production

Picture of the first XO-1 coming off the assembly line. Above image from the One Laptop Per Child Wiki. There are some great photos in the Khairat Chronicle page, taken by Carla Gomez Monroy. Here are a few...isn't a child's smile one of the greatest things in the world!

Blue Snowflakes before winter

Now isn't this the cutest little mic you have ever seen? It's the Blue Snowflake. Portable, USB plug-and-play, so they say, for Macs and PCs.


Hopefully it will sound as nice as it looks. Available for less than $100 in a month or so. Blue's Snowball also looked nice, but it took a while to work out the bugs. Hopefully by now they have the digital experience needed to get it right the first time. This is just in time for a high-tech stocking stuffer!

Electronic Musician had a pretty thorough review of six USB mics last April. All the mics rated well, they "characterized the Blue Snowball as having the brightest reproduction of the bunch. It has excellent clarity, and its dual capsules, two polar patterns, and pad setting are a plus. The rear coloration in omni mode was a minor annoyance." This indicates how there is no perfect mic, you really need a "kit", depending on what you are recording. Or determine your recording setup before you buy your mic.

If you have any mics you don't need any more, I can provide them with a good home.

How not to plan a successful wiki

One of our professors, Manuel Lizarralde, was recently in the DCC scanning hundreds of pages of books to PDF so he could "travel light" on his trip to Peru, for a semester-away with a group of students. I had not heard of this before, and thought it was a great opportunity for the students. On the Sunday before his Thursday departure I got the idea of providing him with a digital camera and an iPod with mic, for the use of the students to capture their experiences.


I offered the idea on Monday, and he gladly accepted it. Later that night I thought of starting a wiki for their experiences and use. I ran this by Manuel on Tuesday, with a quick demo, and he agreed to try it. Manuel was too busy to learn wikitalk though, and had emailed a student, Leia Crosby, to try and contact me for some basic instruction. I put the wiki together on Wednesday morning, and late afternoon Leia called me by cell phone, rushing between trip preparation tasks. We agreed to meet later that evening. Short on time, I spent about 35 minutes teaching her basic wikitalk. The next morning the students left the college about 7:30 am for the trip to Peru, and I came up with a logo for the wiki.

I was not sure what to expect, but I think it has turned out pretty nice so far. Here is the SATA (Study Away Teach Away) Peru wiki.

Many of the pictures are Manuel's, but some are the students'. Almost all the entries are from the students (Manuel signs his), with Leia teaching the others basic wikitalk. Due to slow network connections from Peru, Manuel emails the images to his stateside wife, Anne, who posts them to the wiki, and usually also inserts them in the students' writings. These are totally theirs, and not edited, but they seem a little too busy for page layouts, so Anne helps out here. Below are the students, in front of their current location in Cusco.


We are not quite sure where this is going, but it's an exciting project. Usually we plan things in great detail to ensure success, in this case there was no opportunity. The lack of planning actually seems a positive attribute this time, as no limitations were placed on the wiki's direction and purpose, which can evolve and grow with any changing needs over time. I do wish I had a full hour to teach Leia wikitalk though!

Wiki-related videos

I know my posts are too long. With today's short-attention-span sound bytes they are possibly as relevant as a Jane Austen novel. WHAT, a 140-character limit in a web app, who the heck would ever use it! Bound to fail.

I write for myself, but to satisfy those wanting, or should I say NEEDING, a short post here it is.

Found a nice site today of Wiki-related videos, maintained by WikiAngela, at right, the co-founder of Wikia, which "is supporting the creation and development of over 3000 wiki communities in more than 70 languages. Part of the free culture movement, Wikia content is released under a free content license and operates on the Open Source MediaWiki software."

There are all kinds of interesting links in the above URLs. We also use MediaWiki ourselves, and though we only have less than 10 wikis at this time, it's nice to know we are in such good company.

The institutional layer cake

I was thinking a few days ago that the most rewarding part of my position, to me, is assisting students learning. They are, after all, the customers, without which we would not have a job. And our youth provide us with the hope and opportunity that someday the world will be a better place to live in. My second most rewarding activity, in general, is to assist faculty in using appropriate technology to meet teaching goals. I now saw two "layers" to my job:


Then, I must admit, I got a bit carried away. I started thinking of the other layers, or major aspects, of my job and came up with the idea of a "layer cake" of major forces that affect me. This provided a more interesting visual than a stack of bricks or a pie chart, and I cooked up a rudimentary cake after an hour in Illustrator:


Each layer is a major factor affecting my position. The "Icing on the cake" consists of all the little perks one might like: an office with a nice view, monthly ice cream socials, a convenient parking spot, etc.

While I was putting my cake together, I thought of adding a "Rating" scale next to each variable (from 0 for poor to 5 for great), as a prototype for an interactive Flash project. Then, as each slider is moved back and forth in its scale, the total average at the bottom would dynamically update. If one wanted to leave a scale out of the average, "Don't count" can be selected.

I'm not sure how useful this tool would be, for someone searching for a position in this line of work, to use to compare different job situations. One way to improve it may be to include a "weight" function for each attribute, say from 0 to 10. Then, if the referenced feature, say "Salary and Benefits," was considered very important, it would be assigned a 9 or 10, and this would be appropriately factored in the total average. Each scale descriptor could also be left blank, for use as a general evaluation tool, allowing one to enter their own major job factors.

When I created my illustration late at night, I put a wedding cake topper on top of the above cake! I thought if all the layers "tasted great" it was a prediction of a successful match between employer and employee.

In the cold reality of this morning, I took the topper off. It was just a bit too cute. But one can decorate their own cake. I'm sure a smart alek will ask if you can have your cake and eat it too. The answer is yes, for what good is a cake if you can't eat it.

Wikimania, FLOSSE, and Cell Phones

As we start new wikis for the Fall semester in our installation of MediaWiki, I spent more time learning about the open-source software. First, I created a better support structure in case I was not around. I had many pages of printouts on how to start and customize a wiki and condensed them into a wiki page on how to start a new wiki in our own install.

I have to refine these a bit more, and have a team member use them to start a wiki. I always receive useful feedback when others follow my initial directions, which are then improved.

I still have to come up with a better way of automating daily backups. Right now, I'm using MySQL Administrator to copy the databases, but I'm not happy with the backup procedure of the apache documents folder. We also make a mirror of the entire drive each week with NetRestore, which can be restored to a spare computer in about 10 minutes.

One of our CS students is attempting to implement math equation support, but no success yet. This seems a difficult and less-than intuitive process, without clear instructions. If we do succeed, we'd like to document the steps to help anyone else. I had spent a fruitless day attempting to "make" textvc myself, and decided it was an ineffective use of my time to go any further. I had reached my level of incompetency, the student had the misfortune to stumble in my office to return a cable for a friend, and the rest is history...

I was wondering where the upcoming Wikimania was this year, and Google gave me the FLOSSE Posse link. The conference is in Taipei, a little farther for me than the one in Boston last year. I now wish I had attended it.

FLOSSE Posse is a group blog from members of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE), carrying out reportage of FLOSS and Open Content in Education, there is some good info on the site.

One nugget was a reference to Knowledge Building, an activity which wikis seem to support very well. To summarize Wikipedia's entry:

"Knowledge building refers to the process of creating new cognitive artifacts as a result of common goals, group discussions, and synthesis of ideas. These pursuits should advance the current understanding of individuals within a group, at a level beyond their initial level of knowledge, and should be directed towards advancing the understanding of what is known about that topic or idea.

The teacher becomes a guide rather than a director and allows students to take over a significant portion of the responsibility for their own learning including planning, execution and evaluation.

One of the hallmarks of knowledge building is a sense of we superseding the sense of I, a feeling that the group is operating collectively and not just as an assemblage of individuals."

Another eye-opening idea I found in FLOSSE Posse is that networked communication, and the Internet, may come to third world countries via cell phones, and not the computer . Over 97% of Tanzanians have access to a mobile phone, though only one in 10 houses has electricity. These cell phones are becoming agents of social change, and are narrowing the "digital divide" more so than computers. This bodes well for technology like the iPhone, which enables one to do more than possible with a standard phone, and is closer to a computer. The cost of these technologies have to dramatically drop to make them affordable in third-world countries (and even in industrialized nations!). Google is now spending hundreds of millions on it cell phone project, there seems to be a bright future in this area.


There is an on-line community and a wiki at Shareideas on the use of mobile communications for social and environmental benefits.

The last good link I will mention found at the FLOSSE Posse was to Open Educational Resources, educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses re-mix, improve and redistribute.

We live in an exciting time when it comes to rapidly developing networking and collaborative technologies. It's even more rewarding to use these, and see them used, to improve the way people live, communicate, and learn.

TSI: Videoconference with Library of Congress

I think this is one TSI section that went perfectly. A couple of years ago I met Judith Graves, the Digital Project Coordinator at the Library of Congerss (LOC), at an Internet2 Spring Member Meeting. I was fascinated to learn how many resources the Library of Congress has, how many have been and are being digitized, and the variety of programs they sponsor. In addition to this, the Library of Congress also supports many Virtual Programs & Services, one of them being live videoconferences with experts at the LOC (Link in above page). Judith had given a nice presentation at the I2 meeting on both the on-line and free videoconferencing resources at the LOC, which she coordinated.

I faithfully saved Judith's card, and was waiting for the right opportunity to videoconference with the Library. The Tempel Summer Institute seemed an ideal venue. Most of the faculty had never participated in a videoconference, and it was a good opportunity to showcase new technologies, how we use Internet2, and the resources of the LOC and its experts. Our videoconferencing now runs on the Connecticut Education Network when connecting in-state, then switches to I2 when connecting out of state. Our own campus I2 subnet is also extremely efficient, thanks to the dedication of our network administrators. I don't want to jinx anything by stating all three networks, which have to work together, have been extremely reliable, and have never failed us when needed, so please forget I said it!

We have a portable videoconferencing unit in the DCC which can be moved to any classroom in Blaustein, though only three have I2 connectivity for now. However, 18 months ago we also installed a better videoconferencing system in the Dilley Room, shown below, a classroom in Shain Library. Coincidentally, the equipment was funded by a grant procured by Prof. Bridget Baird, who was also one of the participants in this year's TSI.


This is our only "professional level" facility, with two cameras and two large plasma monitors, so we decided to use it with the LOC. The room is small, but well-laid out for 16 participants sitting around three sides of a large table, with clear sight lines to both the far-end monitor and any data projection used at either end. In the above photo, the 6-foot screen displays the computer at either end, and the far end participants are viewed in the center plasma display. This 42" monitor is considerably bigger than apparent, the photo is distorted by a wide-angle lens. The left-hand wall-mounted 50" monitor is used when the teacher is at our college, and simultaneously teaching students both at our end and at the far end. In these cases, our instructor sits or stands to the left of the projection screen, facing our class. We then use the large monitor on the right to display the far end class, this is easily viewed by the instructor.

Our primary camera is mounted such that the far end can clearly see all of our 16 participants, without panning, as shown in this image. The Dilley Room was not originally designed to videoconference, and it took a lot of experimentation and effort to get equipment locations and sight lines worked out. We ended up actually mocking up working camera and monitor locations, as a few degrees and inches either way made a difference.

About 8 weeks before the videoconference (VC) date we preferred I contacted Judith by email, and filled out the on-line form requesting a videoconference. Judith was flexible enough to develop a custom program for us: a half-hour demonstration of a few of the many Library of Congress assets and services that may be relevant and useful to us, and a half-hour of Q&A with our faculty. A month before the videoconference I ran a one-hour connectivity test with the LOC's technician, Donald Blake. I always run at least one test before a videoconference. If I have never connected to the other end-point, the test is for the duration of the future videoconference. The test went without a hitch. We often leave our VC units on all the time, so I asked Donald to dial in for a short period a day or two before the conference, to check connectivity. Judith also had asked me to send some information along on the TSI faculty's interests and courses, to gear the presentation to their fields.

The videoconference itself went great. Along with Judith, Laura Gottesman (Digital Reference Specialist) and Sheridan Harvey (Women's Studies Specialist) participated from the Library of Congress. They all had taken time to research a bit of information on Connecticut College, New London, and some of the faculty's interests. This information was interwoven throughout their presentation, between general LOC facts and resources, and lent a personal note to the videoconference. The half hour of presentation and half hour of Q&A were not consecutive, but also interspersed, allowing for a more informal and friendly atmosphere. The LOC staff came across as pleasant, with good communication skills, and worked very well together.

We had a very good network connection so there was very little latency, or delay, in both of our audiovisual signals. This resulted in a more natural experience than in many videoconferences, where there are awkward slight pauses at the end of each sentence. You never know if they far end is done speaking, or if they are going to start talking again as soon as you start to say something! This leads to an experience that is not quite as transparent as "being there", which is always one of my goals in producing a videoconference.

Thanks to Judith and her colleagues, our network folks, Internet2, and the Connecticut Education Network, our videoconference with the Library of Congress was thoroughly enjoyed by our faculty, and was one of the highlights of the week.