Recently in Technology Category

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.