Recently in Technology Category

A number of recent changes to the social media technologies I use daily force me again to reflect on the habits design decisions cultivate in us. The decisions made by Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple are, of course, design decisions with a decidedly commercial interest.  Even so, their willingness to make substantive changes to the way we interact with one another through their sites is teaching us all something about the habits we need to cultivate in the digital age.

Facebook, of course, just implemented some fairly radical changes to its user interface, adding a twitter like timeline on the right side of the screen, integrating Spotify, adding a timeline, and curating more content from friends it thinks will be of interest to you. They have followed Google in making it easier to direct a specific post to a group of friends right from the status update text box. And they have implemented, among many other things, a subscribe feature that allows anyone to subscribe to your FB page.

Google, for its part, continues to roll out changes to its new Google Plus platform, recently adding the ability to share circles with others. What seems on the surface to be a simple design decision has wide ranging implications for the number of people following you and for your ability to follow new people.

Apple has just rolled out its iCloud service, rendering its previous Mobile Me service obsolete. In so doing, they announced to anyone with content on Mobile Me, that it would no longer be supported after June 2012.

On Wednesday, September 28th at 4pm eastern, we in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies office will take another step out into the great technological unknown by recording an episode of our Liberal Arts Voices Podcast live on a Google Plus hangout.

I hope that anyone interested in what we are doing in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies office will join us. Here is a link to my Google Plus profile where you will find the Hangout when it is available.

The official guests on the episode will be leaders from the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council, a dynamic group of student leaders who have always been willing to engage with new technologies with me in interesting and enriching ways. That they will be with us for this experiment is only proper since they have helped us grow our community through Twitter and Facebook.

The impetus behind this experiment is first to perform what we preach about the importance of practice in learning about new technologies. We will see what Google Plus adds to our discussions on the Liberal Arts Voices podcast, and we will experience directly what it takes away.

I have long had the vague idea that newspapers need to recognize that the core of their business is the business of their communities.

Sometimes the experiences of your friends have a way of making vague ideas poignant and concrete. 

Nicolas Carr's article in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, considers the impact new media technologies are having on human cognition. Although he recognizes the reciprocal nature of the human-technology relationship, he focuses primarily in that article on what technology is doing to our abilities to read, concentrate and comprehend.

This summer John Dolan, Director of Digital Media and Pedagogy, and I are heading up a summer digital research project in the College of the Liberal Arts. 

In the months since my last posts on using Mendeley, Zotero and the iPad for academic research, my experience has been more fully informed by practice. This fall I was able to research, develop and write an essay on Plato's Apology for a talk and seminar I will be giving in Bogata, Columbia at the Universidad de los Andes.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes:

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times (44).

I am happy to report that Mendeley has developed an iPhone app that brings us a step closer to the digital research model I hope to implement in the months to come.

Before I mention a few of the limitations of the application, I want to celebrate its very appearance. This is a huge step forward in mobile bibliographic and reference computing.

About three years ago, I had a phone conversation with a person in the sales department at Thomson Reuters, the company that makes Endnote. The purpose of my call was to see if they were developing a version of Endnote for the recently released iPhone. They told me that they did have plans, once Apple released the Software Development Kit, to develop a mobile version of Endnote. Already at that point, I could see the value of having my references so easily accessible.

Although that application has yet to materialize, I shifted, in the meantime, to Zotero because it facilitated the sort of collaborative research I hoped to put into practice with my students. As I mentioned in my previous posts on digital research more generally and on the way I use of Zotero in particular, a significant limitation to all the bibliographic software was the inability to use anything other than the web browser to interface with my reference libraries when using my iPhone and iPad.

I turned to Mendeley in the hope that I would find an application that would have all the collaborative functionality I required even as it allowed me to organize, read and annotate pdf files in a way that would integrate with my word processing software. I am very happy with Mendeley when I am sitting in front of a desktop computer. However, it is critical to the model of digital research I am trying to establish that all my references be accessible to me on all my devices wherever I am.

This is where the new iPhone application, even if it is tantalizingly labeled 'Lite', adds substantive value to my research workflow. The application syncs with my Mendeley libraries beautifully and allows me to read any of the pdf files I have posted to it. In the photo on the right, you can see the collections exactly as they appear in the Mendeley Desktop application and on the web.

Cole Camplese and I were invited to be part of this year's Learning Design Summer Camp at Penn State. The presentation topic that was proposed to us was strong in and of itself, but when we got together to really flesh it out we thought we would try something that modeled the ideas we really wanted to cultivate in the PSU learning design community.

Both of us were very fond of the work done in the Hacking the Academy project at George Mason and wanted to explore how our own community could be part of a much larger initiative. When we really worked to explore our thinking, the Hacking Pedagogy concept was born. Although there is risk in depending on the community to collaborate with us in this endeavor, we felt the only way to truly model what a cooperative learning event could look like was to take that risk.

To move from a teaching practice centered on the pure dissemination of content from teacher to student to one rooted in truly cooperative practice should be the new ideal for us as a teaching and learning community. Our goal is to provide a kind of field guide that is cooperatively developed and edited over time so that we as a community of educators can draw upon the wisdom of this group. Over the next two weeks, culminating with a cooperative session at the Learning Design Summer Camp, we will ask you (the Internet) to share with us evidence that education can be transformed, that it can be designed to empower a shared sense of ownership among participants, that it can be improved when learning spaces are made into genuine learning communities.

We know this evidence exists across both the Penn State and social web. We know this because we read, listen, watch, and engage with it each and every day as we do our work. What we feel it lacks is a center of gravity that serves to coalesce it into a working resource that can be continually mined, edited, added to, and utilized to guide new forms of teaching, learning, and design practice. The recognition that we as a community have more to offer than each of us can contribute individually will guide our cooperative session at Summer Camp.

The content of this series will be created collaboratively in an attempt to perform the dynamic, open and responsive pedagogical practices for which it advocates. Such an approach recognizes the intimate, reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, process and product, student and teacher. The very processes by which the texts, podcasts, videos, and images brought together here are gathered, culled, edited, revised, discussed and disseminated afford us an educational opportunity. Our product itself will be a compelling expression of the power of cooperative pedagogy.

How to Collaborate

It is really easy to be a part of this ... we are simply asking you to lend us your content by tagging it with the tag psuhack across the social web or with the #psuhack on twitter. We will spend time looking through the submissions and see if we can identify a handful of overarching themes around which we can organize our content. At Summer Camp we will present the themes and introduce you to the loosely curated artifacts so that we can hopefully come to a shared vision of how to organize our publication. It is our hope that during Summer Camp you not only think critically about how this can impact your work, but consider adding new submissions live during the session.

Again, our goal is to both model the emergence of a cooperative learning environment and to create a living "field guide" that can serve as an ongoing form of inspiration as we go forward with our work. Even now, you can start to see the Hacking Pedagogy contributions flowing in by visiting the PSU Voices page. We talked a bit about it on ETS Talk 61 as well. Here is the feed from the most recent things being posted as "psuhack" on the Blogs at Penn State platform:

It seems that my quest to close the digital research circle has been joined by a few fellow researchers. 

1. Download bibliographic information and pdf files into my Zotero library using the Zotero Firefox plug-in.
2. Sync with Mendeley to bring the Zotero information and the files into Mendeley.
3. Have Mendeley organize my pdf files to a folder on Dropbox.
4. Using the iPad Dropbox application, connect to the folder into which Mendeley has organized my files.
5. Pull up the paper, read it in Dropbox without annotation, OR
6. Using the Open In button at the top right, open the file in iAnnotate for the iPad and do annotations right there.
7. Sadly, to return the document to Dropbox, you will need to email it back to yourself and overwrite the file in Dropbox - this is the weak link at the moment.

So, we are getting closer here. I am very hopeful that a Mendeley iPad application will have adequate annotating capabilities and file managing abilities, but until then, this just might work for me. 

Last month in a post about closing the digital research circle, I wrote about using the iPad to read, take notes on pdf files and integrate those files into a bibliography program. We are still some distance from the vision of the closed research circle, however, there are some positive new developments.

First, I upgraded my Zotero account by buying 1GB of storage. This allowed me to transfer all my citations along with their pdf files to the Zotero servers. This was a decisive step because now, when I access my Zotero libraries through the web, I can read the pdf files directly from the Zotero servers.

This is important because now through Safari on the iPad, I can access those files directly and read them right there on the iPad or iPhone, for that matter.

My research assistant, Josh Testa, and I have begun using a closed but shared group library to collect articles. He is gathering them together in the shared group, leaving me notes as to what he thinks is relevant in the article to the book project on which I am working, and I can view both the pdf files and his notes online.

I am still missing an integrated way to annotate the pdf files, but we are moving in the right direction here. The iAnnotate program on the iPad is improving, but the manner in which files are transfered remains unwieldy. What I really need is a way to pull the pdf files from the Zotero server onto the iPad, annotate them, and have them sync back up with the Zotero database. If the Zotero database functioned more like Dropbox does on the iPad, and if Dropbox had the functionality of iAnnotate built into it, then we would be very close.

As it stands, I am nevertheless excited to see how the group library Josh and I are working on will grow and, in particular, how this sort of collaboration will shape my work in unanticipated ways.

I have been looking for a way to close the circle of my digital academic research. The idea is to do rigorous philosophical research without paper, taking full advantage of cloud computing, the syncing of notes, articles, bibliographic information, and the ultimate production of academic work in a completely digital environment. 

I have been living with the iPad for only a few days, but I am beginning to feel the power and limitations of the device. My comments here are impressionistic and rooted in my own peculiar use case as an Associate Dean and a faculty member who teaches philosophy with technology at Penn State.

It is already clear to me that the iPad does not replicate the experience of the iPhone even though many of the apps serve the same functionality.

The iPad is much less intrusive in collaborative contexts than either a laptop, which tends to come between members of the group, or an iPhone, which isolates individuals, severing each from the dynamics of the whole.

Because the iPad is more like a notepad, it feels more natural and legitimate to use it in the context of a meeting or as a device on which to take notes during a lecture.

Impact on Pedagogy
These factors suggest already how the iPad should find a comfortable home in the classroom.

The number one reason my students tell me they don't bring a laptop to class, despite my encouraging them to do so, is that it is too heavy and they don't want to carry it around with them throughout the day. 

It will be easier for students to carry an iPad in their bag all day.  Further, because it does not intrude on face to face conversation, it will allow us to blur the boundary between the online and in-class dimensions of a course, opening a more porous and dynamic relationship between digital and embodied communication in the classroom learning community.  Information from the internet will be more easily integrated into the in-class discussion without disrupting the dynamics of the discussion itself. That discussion too will find its way into the various modes of digital expression online. 

I can imagine students easily referring to online information, participating in the back channel discussion via twitter, posting comments on a blog even as they remain engaged in and indeed add to the classroom discussion itself. The fact that the iPad can only do one thing at a time might actually be a benefit in a classroom context with regard to keeping students focused on the material at hand.

Increasing Productivity Across Platforms
In my educational role as an administrator, there are a number of very positive advantages of the iPad.  I use Evernote to keep all my notes in sync across various platforms - a PC, an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone and now an iPad. This gives me easy access to all sorts of information that is easily searched on the fly. 

Further, having all my email accessible on the device is excellent. I use Penn State's IMAP email service, so all my mail remains on the server no matter which device I use to access it. I am very much looking forward to the evolution of Dropbox so that I might be able to use it to sync files on which I work in Pages for the iPad.  (See the short conversation about this Cole Camplese and I had on his blog.) 

You will also see a copy of Things on my screen capture.  I am a big fan of this program as it allows me to keep track of multiple aspects of a wide diversity of projects.  I am decidedly not a fan of paying $20 for the iPad version after paying $49 for the desktop version and $4.99 for the iPhone version.  Added to this is the fact that they are still working on implementing cloud sync and I would have given up on Things if it did not allow me to implement my email strategy which involves keeping my inbox clear by doing triage on incoming email by either responding, deleting, filing or adding it to a project or new To Do in Things.

For those at Penn State with an iPhone or iPod touch, integrating the iPad into the WiFi network is fairly straightforward, although I am always surprised to see how many people just turn off the WiFi service on campus with the iPhone because they don't follow these instructions: http://kb.its.psu.edu/article/1310 that describe how to install the wireless 2.0 certificate on their iPhone.  The iPad is easy to set up for the Cisco VPN on the pennstate wireless network too: just follow these instructions for the iPhone on the iPad.

In the end, I am happy with the iPad despite some limitations that always come with the early adoption of a new device.  I think the iPad will open up a compelling set of new possibilities for educating with technology in the months and years to come.

Over the past few days I have been thinking more intensely about the meaning and nature of academic transformation.

In the wake of the TLT Symposium at Penn State last weekend, I traveled to Orlando to participate in the National Center for Academic Transformation's Redesign Alliance conference. I have been struck by a contrast that disappoints me from a national perspective even as it  encourages me at local level.

The TLT Symposium was a dynamic, vibrant and innovative event that used technology and face to face communication to engage participants - faculty, administrators and students - by challenging us to think critically and imaginatively about teaching and learning in a digital age.  NCAT has been a rather traditional conference in which faculty and administrators rehearsed some of the ways course and program redesign have been able to "increase efficiencies" and "improve learning outcomes."

The contrast between the two gatherings was striking from the moment I began listening to Kay McClenney, Director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, give the opening keynote address at NCAT. Although she had a number of important reminders, most notably that engagement matters and that we "need to do education differently with technology," one point she emphasized struck me as unfortunate: "Students don't do optional."

This was infelicitous not only because it has become an oft repeated mantra at the conference, but also because it amplifies and reinforces what seems to be a common underlying assumption that students must be coerced to perform academically. This became palpably clear when McClenney reported the results of a survey of community college student attitudes in which 90% of students themselves say they have the motivation to succeed and 84% say they are academically prepared. The audience of administrators and faculty responded to these data with derisive laughter.

Allan Gyorke has blogged a bit about the session and he makes the point there that some students DO optional, reinforcing it with concrete examples from student engagement at Penn State. I, however, would like to emphasize here that when faculty respect and empower their students, new and often surprising possibilities of engagement open. We close ourselves to those possibilities when we enter into relation with our students skeptical of their motivation and disdainful of their degree of preparation.

It is no excuse here, as I heard in one session, that we are inheriting twelve years of bad educational habituation. This was said in a session in which faculty were at a loss as to what else they might do to engage students in psychology beyond an allegedly innovative redesign in which frequent quizzing with random questions "at least gave the students the structure necessary to retain the information" they needed to proceed. Upon hearing this response, I was completely deflated.

Contrast this with the elevated sense of optimism I felt hearing the ways some my colleagues at Penn State and others, like our keynote speaker, Michael Wesch of Kansas State, are using technology to empower students to take ownership of their own education. The power of the models these colleagues are developing lie in the way they use technology to relinquish some traditional sense of faculty control in order to regain authority, as Wesch so nicely put it, through student discussion. To do this well requires recognizing that students have something to say and that they want to make their educational experience relevant.

I have seen the educational power of relinquishing some control to empower student engagement in my own philosophy courses.  I hope that all our efforts to redesign courses and programs are guided by the overarching goal of transforming ourselves and our students in ways that make them and us able to live more meaningful lives.  That endeavor must be, at its core, cooperative and practiced.

Despite my frustration, I will end on this positive note and leave you with links to some of the strategies I learned about that might help us redesign education along the lines I suggest above: Learning Emporium model, Buffet model, Calibrated Peer Review.

Upon reading the 2010 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium, I was struck by how the key trends in technology they identify might help us meet challenges they articulate.

Let me mention a two challenges in particular and suggest how three recent trends could in fact help cultivate abilities that help us meet these challenges.

First, they rightly recognize that "the role of the Academy - and the way we prepare students for their future lives - is changing" (4). Under this general heading, they emphasize that it is incumbent upon educators to "adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today's learners" (4).

The second challenge involves the manner in which digital media literacy (I would substitute "fluency" here) is becoming a "key skill" in every discipline and profession. Because of this, they go on to say that educators who do not help students develop digital media literacy skills are putting their students at a disadvantage. More specifically, they insist that "digital literacy must necessarily be less about the tools and more about ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative" (5).

The talk of "skill" here strikes me as too limited, for we are really speaking about a whole set of abilities, indeed, of actively cultivated habits of thinking, learning, acting and teaching. If we understanding the challenges as involving abilities in this more active sense, then the key trends in technology the NMC identifies can be seen as holding some of the keys to the very challenges we face.

Here is what I have in mind.

Take three of the main trends:

1. "people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to;"
   
2. "the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and ... decentralized;" and
3. "the work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature" (4).
   

Current trends are leading us toward and habituating us to a digital world in which learning and teaching are ubiquitous, decentralized and collaborative.

It seems to me that if we can cultivate the habits of teaching and learning in such an environment, we will be well on our way to "adapting our teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today's learners." I would insist, here, however, that faculty too should be included under the heading "today's learners." 

If teacher and student alike can enter into digital community with one another in collaborative and dynamic ways, we can cultivate together the abilities to think and see things differently, to tell new narratives and to respond to one another in more relevant and productive ways.

It may just be that the key trends in social media technology are cultivating in us, when they are used in imaginative, innovative and nuanced ways, the very habits we will need to meet the challenges we currently face.

After talking to trusted people, thinking things over and otherwise working through the transition I am making to Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the College of the Liberal Arts, I have decided to embrace the model that Dean Chris Brady uses over at the Schreyer Honors College at PSU and tweet in two voices.

So, you can now find me at:

http://twitter.com/LAUSDeanLong

And, as always, you can still follow me at:

http:/twitter.com/cplong

Both twitter accounts will be written by me, but the LAUSDeanLong will be used to speak directly to undergraduate students, highlight the things we are doing in the Office of the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in Liberal Arts, and reach out to alumni.  LAUS is Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies.  The cplong account will continue to be the more personal voice I have cultivated over the past few years of twittering.  I hope many people will follow both voices.

Now, there is another transition I am making on this Long Road.  It is time to allow my daughters to determine their own web identities, so I have asked them what they would like to be called as I talk about them online.  We have determined that my five year old will be referred to here as ArtGirl because, as she says, "I am into art."  My four year old will be "DancinGirl" as she loves to dance.

These changes reflect the changing dynamics of my web presence as I move into a new professional role.  Although I will continue to blog about my life as a father here, I have started a new password protected Posterous account to chronicle some of our everyday activities.  For those who are interested, please email me for the password.

One of the great privileges of my summer faculty fellowship has been the opportunity to work with creative and thoughtful educators and designers who were able to help me think more holistically about my identity on the web.

I have been blogging here on the Long Road since June 10, 2007, attempting to give voice to certain dimensions of my personal, political, academic and teaching life. Over time, however, it has become clear that my attempt to "blog the philosophical life" involves multiple dimensions that are somewhat separate even if fundamentally integrated. 

Perhaps this is simply the digital articulation of the deeper, existential question of personal identity.

In any case, the redesign of the website that we have rolled out in the course of the last few weeks grows out of an ongoing dialogue with all the great educational designers and IT managers at Education Technology Services, but in particular with two who deserve special mention and thanks here: Brad Kozlek and George Webster.

George has patiently and expertly worked with me to design the font, colors, look and feel of the site.  He was always willing to change things I found problematic and willing too, to change them back when I realized that the way we had it first was best.

The design itself is based on this image of an antique map of the arctic I found online as I was searching for an inspiration for the colors and feel of the site. The map captured the spirit of the central metaphor around which the long road is organized: the attempt to chart in words the course of a life.

The long road is now composed of three blogs feeding a main home page, which serves as a pathway into the larger site. George worked with me to design the icons that go with each dimension of the site.

 
the long road is the site on which you will find my attempt to put things personal, political, remarkable and mundane into words.

digital vita is the site that gives voice to my academic life, including information and resources related to the various presentations I make.

socratic politics in digital dialogue is the site related to my research and teaching regarding the nature and practice of Socratic politics. It hosts the Digital Dialogue.

One of the main purposes of redesigning the site was to host the Digital Dialogue, the podcast I developed during my faculty fellowship. The Digital Dialogue is designed to generate discussion around questions concerning but not limited to the nature of digital dialogue, its political possibilities, the excellences associated with it and the impact it might have on our pedagogical practices.

Brad added the Yahoo! player to the site so that people could easily listen to episodes of the Digital Dialogue right from their browser.  Everyone can also subscribe to the podcast through iTunesU by clicking this link which opens iTunes on your local computer.

I hope everyone enjoys the new look of the site and continues to return frequently. You are, as always, warmly invited to comment on anything that appears here should you be so moved.

Many thanks to George and Brad for their great work on the site.

Although I fancy myself someone who takes advantage of the web, I must admit that I find myself repeatedly going to the same sites all the time: the New York Times, Slate.com, the Centre Daily Times, Google Reader, Truthdig.com, etc.

I mentioned this at dinner the other night and recently minted Dr. Michael Brownstein, suggested that I needed StumbleUpon.com. When I returned home, I checked it out and have found it thus far to be quite refreshing.

I signed up for a free account, was asked about some of my interests and then was able, on a click of a button, to plumb the vast recesses of the internet. StumbleUpon.com serves up websites based on your interests and you can teach it what you like and don't like, share with friends and email sites you find interesting.  There is even a way to limit it to University sites if you want.  I uploaded the StumbleUpon Firefox toolbar, and now when I have a moment, I just click the Stumble! button and see what happens.

Here is a link to my public profile on StumbleUpon.com if you want to see the sites I have said I liked.  If you join, feel free to make me a friend on it so I can see what you have discovered.

Yesterday Alan Levine, aka cogdog, gave a presentation on 50+ Ways to Tell a Story using Web 2.0 technologies. The presentation was excellent as it introduced us to a variety of tools available online for telling stories. The power of Levine's presentation was the way he told and retold the same story about losing and then finding his dog, Dominoe, using the different tools.

Over the last few months, I participated on an Educational Technology Services "hot team" that focused on researching the educational significance of grassroots video. If you don't know what grassroots video is, check out our white paper, which gives a good summary. 

I hesitate to write this after what has been such a difficult roll out for Apple of MobileMe, the Application store, firmware upgrades for the iPhone and iPod Touch and, of course, the introduction of the 3G iPhone.  Time will tell if these new dimensions of the Apple empire will be successful, but I thought I would update my ongoing evaluation of the iPod Touch.

Incrementally, things are getting better, but the process remains slow and frustrating.  I am very hopeful that with the introduction of the application store and the SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch, some progress will be made on the Cisco VPN situation.  Once this functionality is available, I am convinced that my iPod Touch will be transformed for me into the best PDA devices I have ever had.  Thus far, however, there is no solution for the Cisco VPN issue and this leaves me with an unconnected device during my hours on the University Park campus of Penn State where I work.  (I have steadfastly resisted - with the help of my wife who always keeps me grounded in such matters - paying the outrageaous costs of an AT&T plan for an iPhone.)  If the VPN situation is worked out, I think I have a device just as good at a fraction of the cost.

As for the other issues about which I wrote previously, let me summarize:

1. MobileMe, if it starts working, promises to solve my calendar issues.  I actually prefer to use the web version of iCalendar in MobileMe when it is operational, but this has been rare this weekend.  If Apple intends this to be "Exchange for the rest of us," they will have to make it more reliable. Apple has addressed one of the issues I had with the calendar application: you can now determine the specific calendar to which you want to assign an event.
2. ToDo problems.  Still, there is no integration of the ToDo list in Mail/iCal from my MacBook Pro to my iPod Touch.  Why?  I should be able to view and edit a single ToDo list from my Mail and iCal applications on any of my devices.  Change something on the iPod (if it had ToDo functionality) and it should sync with the MBP and vice versa.  I am still using dedicated entries in my address book to write ToDo notes to myself - pathetic. Although I think the free Remote app that Apple developed for the new Application store is useful and techonolgically innovative, they should have spent less time developing that and more time perfecting the existing applications on the iPhone and iPod Touch. [Update: Apple seems to have integrated ToDo list functionality through MobileMe IF you set up the me.com mail account on the iPod Touch.  A new folder appears called Apple Mail To Do, but it does not seem to sync with the Mail ToDo list yet. I tried adding a To Do item in Mobile Me through my calendar, it did not immediately show up in my Apple Mail To Do folder on the iPod. On the other hand, I have taken to Zenbe's List app for the iPod Touch/iPhone.  This works well, syncs with the web version and is accessible through iGoogle.  Not the integrated option I wanted, but it is nice in any case.]
3. Here I will just restate, verbatim, what I wrote about descriptions of podcasts: There remains no ability to access descriptions of podcasts on the iPod Touch.  This is an issue of continued frustration for me as I sort through podcasts that have collected over a few days and would like a simple way to view their content without listening to the introductions of each one. [This was a feature of earlier generations of iPods which has been lost.]
   

I have tried some of the free new applications from the Application store and they show a lot of potential.  The Weatherbug application already is far better than the Weather app that came with the first software upgrade.  Now I just wish I could remove that older one.  The application store and the SDK promises to bring much innovation to the device, but as it now stands, almost a year after it was introduced, there remain too many frustrating inadequacies.

These are so much the more difficult to live with as we begin to see the real power of the device and platform unfold.  All I can say is that I hope independent developers will succeed where Apple has failed with respect to integrating Mail, iCal, etc. into a more coherent and functional system.  And I hope that Apple will succeed, where is has so far this weekend failed, in making MobileMe a truly seamless experience in cloud computing where all the information related to my daily life and schedule is available to me anywhere I can get online.
 

A Liberal Arts Education is committed to cultivating habits of thinking and acting capable of responding to the world in ways that open new possibilities for human community.  It is oriented in part by what may be called the reading life and the writing life.

Last October I wrote with some frustration about the limitations of my iPod Touch, three months later, it is perhaps fair to revisit the list of issues I had with the device to see what has been addressed and what remains to be done.  

After hearing the Education Technology Services (ETS) Talk, number 35 in which issues were raised about the limits of Facebook and other aspects of Web 2.0 social networking that were feeling a bit cumbersome, I have been thinking about what Web 3.0 will be like and what we might anticipate for its impact on pedagogy.

My sense is that the sort of control over content that the next version of Moveable Type will offer to the Blogs @ PSU program points in the direction of Web 3.0. I imagine that Web 3.0 will bring an increased capacity for us to have complete control over our own on-line identity and digital expression regardless of whether we belong to a proprietary social network like Facebook or del.icio.us or Flickr. Rather, I will be able to develop and customize a digital space accessible to anyone willing to subscribe to the feeds -- Twitters, Pictures, Blog Posts, etc. -- that I am publishing about myself, my work, my life. My students, family, friends will have access to my information on a variety of platforms, again, regardless of whether or not they belong to a common social network. They will engage with my content both passively and actively using cell phones, laptops, desktops and new devices like the Kindle throughout the course of their day, not limited by wires or walls. It seems to me that a number of interesting pedagogical possibilities would open up in such a world.

I imagine too that I am vastly underestimating the new creative possibilities that the technologies on the horizon will bring to us. I probably have described something that belongs more to Web 2.1 than Web 3.0. But, it would be very interesting to hear any speculation you might have about what Web 3.0 will look like. In three years, say, what new pedagogical possibilities will be open to me as a faculty member committed to weaving technology into my courses in order to teach students how to articulate themselves and critically engage the world in and through the digital medium?

I received my new iPod Touch the other day and have had a few days to play with it. On the whole, I would say that it is very close to being one of the best handheld devices I have ever owned. At this point, however, there are significant drawbacks that are extremely frustrating. Let me mention a few issues:

• There is no ability to add events to the calendar. This is particularly galling because the iPhone has this functionality and someone at Apple decided to disable it on the iPoT. I can't think of a rationale for this, and it is extremely frustrating, particularly because of a second point:
• There is no support of Cisco's VPN software which is required to get on the wireless network at Penn State, where I teach. So, I have a beautiful new device with a calendar and WiFi capability, but I cannot get access to WiFi on campus where I spend much of my time, and I can't add calendar events locally on the device without WiFi access.
• To add to the calendar woes, even if I have WiFi access, Google Calendar as optimized for the iPhone does not yet work with the iPoT. (I can't help but hope this is just a matter of time.)
• There is no ability to access descriptions of podcasts on the iPoT (or the iPhone). I find this ridiculous. It is as if they designed the device without having a human use it in real life.

OK, having unloaded some of that frustration, I should mention that I have never owned a handheld device with the beauty and functionality of the iPoT's interface. The pinching, the flicking, etc. makes browsing the internet (when I have access) a real joy. I have even taken to reading Slate and the NYTimes on it as my preferred mode of interacting with these sites at home.

This interface and the device itself has enormous potential for teaching and learning. It would give students an easy way to edit, add and comment on blog posts from anywhere on campus (if the VPN issue is addressed). It allows for the viewing of enhanced podcasts, which look beautiful on the relatively large screen. My blog sites (The Long Road, CpL ePortfolio, my First-Year Seminar and my 20th Century Philosophy course) look wonderful on the machine and I anticipate that with MovableType 4.0, if you are to believe the boys at ETS Talk, my blogs and those of my students will be yet more accessible on the iPhone and iPot.

In all, I very much want to love this machine, but I can't until some of the basic flaws are addressed. My hope is that they all can be handled via firmware or even software upgrades in the very near future.

I am beginning to think about the significance of RSS feeds and how they might be used in teaching. Google has a number of tools of potential importance for teaching. For example, the Google Reader allows me to aggregate blog posts from my students. The advantage of the Google Reader is that I can post feeds directly to a website. So, for example, if I want students to look as a specific story, I can add it to my shared feeds and add the code to my blog, website or even ANGEL. It would look like this:

The nice thing about this is that I can alter the content by sharing and unsharing items in the Google reader. I can imagine using it to call students' attention to specific issues, and to have them call my attention to things of importance to them.