Wrapping Up This Semester

Well, I am getting ready to wrap up this semester. I would say that it has been as productive as it's been busy!

Professionally, I taught one college-level course during this semester in addition to my day-to-day duties. Our staff of six has been reduced to four this semester due to some colleagues taking positions elsewhere. So we've been running a skeleton crew the past few months. We hired replacements that start next week and I'll sure be glad to be at full capacity again.

Personally, my wife and I are expecting our first baby in July. So we've been busy getting things ready for our new addition. We started child birth classes this week, so the semester here is ending at just the right time. On the other side of the spectrum, my grandmother, who helped raise me, had to be put in a nursing home this past month. This was a very difficult decision for her and our family. But I think it's the right choice. I've been having some mixed emotions over the past few months—I guess that's why they call it the circle of life.

Academically, I've done a ton of research and writing about e-books this semester. But the irony is that I haven't really had time to read any. So, I'm looking forward to get some reading done this summer. Does anyone have any recommendations related to education or technology?

Well, I think I am signing off for the semester (unless something really catches my eye in the next week or so). Best of luck to everyone!

Followup on Second Life Synchronous Discussion

I facilitated an online discussion about using e-books for my Instructional Applications of the Internet class last week. The technology we used to meet was Second Life (SL).

Initially, I was prepared to conduct this discussion using the voice chat feature. But as we were waiting on the Kent State island to all meet up as a group, I noticed that music was piping into where we were meeting. After asking some people in the class, you can turn off this music using your individual preferences. I turned it off on my client. But I wasn't sure if everyone else in the class had turned their background off, though. So, I decided to hold my chat via text.

I am a pretty slow typist, so the discussion didn't do as smooth as I think it would have using DimDim. When I would start typing a comment or question, it seemed as though we were already discussing another point by the time I finished my point. This was kind of frustrating.

I really don't think the avatars added anything to the chat either. They were more distracting than anything.

There were also two people in the class posting on the Vista discussion board asking where to meet in SL. I had to read their posts, get their SL handles, and invite them to teleport to where we were holding our discussion. Finding a place to meet in SL is much, much more difficult than just providing a link like we did with DimDim.

While I think SL has its purpose and applications, I felt as though it detracted from my discussion rather than enhanced it.

If we would have spent significant time as class learning the ins and out of everything that SL can do, perhaps we could used the discussion to leverage some of the more advanced features of SL. I fully understand that there is some value in using SL for discussion so that we are at least exposed to SL. If it wasn't for this class, I wouldn't have any real understanding of SL.

I think the overhead to getting SL to work is not worth the benefit for a synchronous, text discussion. I think that using SL for just a text chat is equivalent to only using car to listen to the radio (and not driving it). While your car certainly has a fully-functioning radio, it's main purpose is to be driven. And while SL has a working text chat feature, it is really designed to do something so, so much more than just text chat.

My So-Called Second Life

I am leading an online, synchronous discussion in Second Life tomorrow evening. The topic of the discussion is electronic text books, which really don't have anything directly to do with Second Life.

I've never used Second Life before, though I have seen it demoed at workshops. I know I am late to the party, but I am pretty impressed with it. I have spent a few hours figuring out how to navigate, chat, fly, and even speak with my own voice.

I can see why Second Life seems to have peeked in its popularity a few years back—it really takes a lot of time to get yourself acquainted. This is definitely not for the casual user. It really takes practice to get good at figuring your way around. I do have to say that the Caledon Oxbridge University Community Gateway provides an excellent tutorial on how to get started in Second Life.

After a few hours of use, I do find that the experience is really unparalleled to any other service I've used before. Only time will tell if the extensive learning curve will be worth it for my needs.

Hopefully my discussion goes well tomorrow. Either way, I'll blog about my experience facilitating a discussion in Second Life. Wish me luck!

Perils of Pocasting on the Road

Well, I spent the past four days in Las Vegas (which is about too and half days too long to be in Vegas if you ask me) attending the NAB 2011 show. I was there to evaluate new equipment that Oberlin College will be purchasing for the Art and Cinema programs for the next year.

While I was there, our class podcast was due. So I had the bright idea of creating my podcast in my hotel room. In my podcast I would share products I saw at the show for the Oberlin faculty. I thought a podcast would be a good venue for this. I looked at the podcast like I was doing a radio piece just for the Oberlin faculty. While I thought it turned out OK, recording on the road presented some challenges:

• Hotel Internet: For $11.99 per 24 hours, one would think the internet connection would be a little more stable.
• Air Conditioning: I broke my podcast into little segments (one segment per product). It seemed as soon as I was close to being done completing a segment, the AC in room would start blowing and I would have to start all over again.
• Paper-thin walls. In the time I was recording I was interrupted by the following: housekeeping, the vacuum in the hallway, someone sliding a menu of a pizza place under my door, and loud, drunk people (of course) screaming the hallway.

But I was glad I finally got it done and I learned two lessons:

1. Podcasting is a lot harder than it looks or sounds.
2. If you are going to create a podcast in a hotel room, place the "Do Not Disturb" sign on your door.

That's all I have for now. I hope we receive our grades for our website soon. I just want to make sure that I am on the right track. Hope to see you next week when I do my synchronous discussion.

E-book readers are everywhere!

18 months ago, I was flying from New York City home to Cleveland. The woman next to me on the airplane had an Amazon Kindle. While my office had one first-generation Kindle that we lent to faculty (not very popular, I might add), I remember taking a mental note about the woman's Kindle since it was one of the first times that I had really seen an e-book reader in the "wild".

Fast-forward to last week. On a flight from Florida to Ohio, I counted no less than 4 iPads and 6 Kindles on the airplane. While on vacation in Florida, I noticed people from all age ranges (from young adult to grandmothers) reading various e-book readers at the beach or the pool. Some even kept their e-book readers in one-gallon, clear plastic baggies so the reader would get sandy or waterlogged.

It seems that the "beach book" has been replaced by the "beach e-book reader". It doesn't have the same ring to it—but have you ever tried turning a page of an actual book while inside of a Ziplock bag?

Advantage e-book reader.

Changing Education Paradigms

My boss shared this video with me today. I found it to be insightful as well as thought provoking, yet it does not provide any concrete solutions.

What does everyone else think about Sir Ken Robinson's thoughts on Changing Education Paradigms?

iPad as Media Creation Tool

There's no doubt that in the last year that the popularity of iPads and other tablet computing devices has soared.

For the most part, the iPad and other tablets have excelled as media consumption devices. They are wonderful devices to watch movies and videos, listen to music, and read web sites and electronic books. But as media creation tools, these tablets really lack. Sure, you can compose text in many apps including Apple's Pages, but the lack of a physical keyboard really makes typing more difficult than on a desktop or laptop. Even drawing on an actual computer is much easier if you have access to a graphics tablet and pen.

Creating and recording audio on tablets is easier than drawing or writing, but I wouldn't say that the iPad is a better audio creation tool than an actual computer—until now.

At the iPad 2 launch a few weeks ago, most people (myself included) were most excited about the new device. But the launch of GarageBand for is equally exciting. It makes working with and creating audio easier than on a computer. The ability to press the screen and make a drumbeat, to glide your finger across the glass and strum guitar strings, and playing piano keys is no much more natural using the touchscreen than using the QWERTY keyboard on your laptop.

There are really dozens of apps that truly impress me for the iPod/iPad, but these apps usually do not have a Mac/PC counterpart—they exist only on a mobile computing platform. But GarageBand for iPad is a perfect supplement for GarageBand for Mac. It is not quite a fully-fledged replacement for the Mac version, but it is a great place to start on an audio composition and then send it over to your Mac, especially is you are experimenting with virtual instruments.

Most of the shortfalls of creating media on a tablet occur when looking through the lens of how this would work on a desktop. Maybe we need to re-imagine how we create and communicate using a tablet— utilizing the device's strengths instead of looking at it as a touchscreen laptop.