technology

Another Angle on Social Networking

This morning's Chronicle dispatch points to a new social networking site about social networking projects, including those emerging from university environments such as Stanford.

The push technology will make it easier to keep an eye on. We'll see a year from now (and probably just six months will do it) what type of impact the site does or doesn't have. It's great being able to get to this type of information but there is also the goal of maintaining a balance of being overloaded by same information.

Cell Phone Info

Liz Lawley points to two features we all can use on our cell phones:

mobile phone services that make me happy

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself using two services a lot on my mobile phone, and when I talk about them at conferences people tend to “oooh” and “ahhh”…so I thought I’d post about them here, as well.

The first is one I thought most people knew about, but I’m finding that’s not true. It’s Google’s “411” service for automated directory assistance. You call 800-GOOG-411, and are prompted for city, state, and business name or type. It then gives you a list of matches, and you tell it which item on the list is the one you want. Then they connect you. There’s no charge for this at all, which makes it a whole lot better than the phone company’s directory assistance. And the voice recognition quality is very good.

The second service I’m enamored with is also based on voice recognition. It’s called Jott, and when you call their number it listens to your message and transcribes it for you. You can have it send the resulting text to you or a contact via email or SMS. You can even have it send the text to a web service like Twitter, Remember the Milk, or your blog. It’s ideal for times when you say to yourself “I need to remember to…” but you don’t have your computer or a notepad handy. The voice recognition is really amazing, and it will let you spell out words that it might not interpret correctly. This evening, for example . . .

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Webmonkey is back!

Jeffrey Veen informs us that Webmonkey is back . . . and better than ever. I've certainly missed it as the best "one-stop shopping site" for web design info.

Post-It Notes

We know that Post-It Notes were an accidental discovery at 3M. Today, I accidentally discovered this Post-It Notes YouTube Contest - nothing to sneeze at: $10,000 top prize and top 10 finalists are awarded a laptop.

YouTube Numbers

Every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to the video-sharing site, which now shows hundreds of millions of videos each day.

Creepy Treehouse - Definition

A recent post on ACRL Blog points out another angle to the marketing approaches being used to "overlap" social networking sites that are based on social networking and learning applications whose purpose is often quite different. The question is, does it work?

I’ve just learned a new technology term - “creepy treehouse.” I first heard the term via an article in Inside Higher Ed on Blackboard building an application so it can be accessed from Facebook.

In doing so, the company is implicitly conceding that students are less inclined to flip through Blackboard pages to kill a few spare minutes. “This is specifically to take advantage of the fact that college students spend a tremendous amount of time on Facebook,” said Karen Gage, Blackboard’s vice president of product strategy. “I think that what we know is that socializing with your friends is more fun than studying.”

Well, duh.

“Let’s face it,” the app’s introduction page says. “You would live on Facebook if you could. Imagine a world where you could manage your entire life from Facebook — it’s not that far off!”

Oh, I can’t wait. Why would I ever want to leave Facebook for even one minute?

“You have to access a different system to get your course information and you don’t always know when something new has been posted or assigned, so it’s difficult for you to stay on top of your studies.” (Only if your face is so constantly stuck in Facebook that you don’t have a life.) “We get it. That’s why Blackboard is offering Blackboard Sync™, an application that delivers course information and updates from Blackboard to you inside Facebook.”

Okay, maybe that actually sounds kind of helpful, being able to push readings and assignments to a place where students can be reminded of them. But I was mostly struck by one of the comments on the article: “This is creepy treehouse.”

A creepy treehouse is a place built by scheming adults to lure in kids. Kids tend to sense there’s something creepy about that treehouse and avoid it. Hence, a new definition: “Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.”

It’s an interesting take on that vaguely unsettled response we sometimes get from students when we try to be too cool, try too hard to seem fun and playful, when we make familiar toys unpalatably “educational.” Setting up an outpost in an attractive playspace with an ulterior motive is just . . . creepy.

And maybe students want a different space when they’re working. On our campus students come to the library to study. They like being surrounded by books, they like the sense that this place is different than their dorm room. Sure, they goof off and check their Facebook profile and sometimes catch a few z’s. But when they’re working, they enjoy being in a place that dignifies their work, and they like the ambiance of seriousness, one that connects their work with a larger purpose. They’re writing about ideas in space filled with words and ideas, and they become connected. It’s a very different kind of social network, one where they become part of an age-old conversation.

High Performance Computing - How We Can All Benefit

Dan Reed's most recent post about his latest project points out the importance of long-term thinking regarding the future of technology. Most importantly he shares a group resource - the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).

Solitaire in Class

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

May 15, 2008

Web Surfing in the Classroom: Sound Familiar?

Over at the New York Times’s Freakonomics blog, Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres praises the University of Chicago Law School’s decision to eliminate Internet access in some classrooms. But more importantly, he recounts an amusing sketch from the Yale’s “Law Revue” skit night, which is worth sharing in full:

One of the skits had a group of students sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on.

All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged and demanded that the student explain why she was playing cards. When she answered “My laptop is broken,” I remember there was simultaneously a roar of laughter from the student body and a gasp from the professors around me. In this one moment, we learned that something new was happening in class.

—Catherine Rampell

Technology Parameters at MUST

Want to Download? Take the Quiz

For all the high-tech tactics colleges have employed to slow or block students’ illegal file sharing activity, few have actually turned to methods used in the classroom to get the message across. A university in Missouri thinks it’s found the right solution, combining an age-old teacher’s tool with a dash of discipline.

Last academic year, Missouri University of Science and Technology, in Rolla, received some 200 Digital Millennium Copyright Act “takedown” notices from the recording industry, notifying the institution that users of its network had made copyrighted works available for download. This academic year — at a time when colleges across the country have been experiencing sudden spikes in copyright complaints — the university received eight. Karl F. Lutzen, a systems security analyst at the university, chalks it up to Missouri S&T’s unusual method of regulating students’ network usage: In order to download (or upload) files on any peer-to-peer network whatsoever, all on-campus users have to pass an online quiz on copyright infringement.

But not just once. Passing the test — with a perfect score — enables peer-to-peer access for six hours on the user’s on-campus registered machines, presumably enough time to download that (legal) song, TV show or e-book. The next time, the student, staff or faculty member has to go to the intranet Web page and take the randomized test again, for a maximum of eight uses per month (which, kind of like vacation days, can accrue to at most 20).

                    

Next Generation Wireless Network - National

The New York Times reports the plans that are in the works for the next generation national wireless network. Seamless is still quite desirable. Yesterday I noticed that some of the new Toshiba laptops come with the Sprint wireless network pre-installed.