Ruralocity Blog

Last week I worked on a small school project in which we explored the merit of iPhones in education. Abiliene Christian University, it turns out, is on the forefront of this cause, with an excellent blog called iThinkEd posting the progress of their study into the matter.

Today, ACU announced they will begin handing them out for free to incoming freshmen, beginning this fall. Students will be able to “receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances” via web-based applications developed by the school.

This is very intriguing! Makes me kind of wish I’d contacted them last week about their work; they’re going to be hammered with requests now. Good luck, ACU!

(Via Engadget)

I’ve been putting the Apple TV through the paces the last couple of days. This evening I queued up the music collection from my iMac in the other room, turned on shuffle mode, and streamed away. This is a great way to rediscover your music collection, and makes it easy to put some background music on while you, say, work on homework.

My favorite feature, though, is podcasts. My history with podcasts has been hit and miss. I’ve had trouble getting into them in the past because of either quality issues or, more usually, I didn’t want to be tied to a computer to view them (I do listen to some audio podcasts on my iPod, though, while mowing the lawn).

Before the Take 2 version of the Apple TV system software was released a few days ago, you had to use iTunes on a Mac or PC to download podcasts, then either sync or stream them to the Apple TV. This isn’t complicated, and would probably be the route to take if you have podcasts to listen to or view for a class or clips you want to hold onto for the long term (like, I have the entire Tiki Bar series on my iMac’s hard drive). With Take 2, though, you can browse and search iTunes’ podcast directory directly on your TV. This makes podcast consumption more like channel surfing. The upside of this is I’ve found some interesting things to watch or listen to I probably wouldn’t have found via previous channels.

My favorite so far is Play Value (you can watch online, if you want, without an Apple TV). Play Value is a show that talks about the history of the video game industry in a format similar to the I Love the 80s series on VH1. The production quality is high–the video itself is in 720p high definition, and the experts, who provide commentary on the topics such as the rise and fall of Atari or the torrid backstory behind Tetris making its way outside the Iron Curtain, are actually a little more believable as “experts” than, say, the B-list celebrities VH1 trots out for Top 100 Songs of the 90s. Definitely worth a view.

What’s this have to do with instructional technology? There’s quite a bit of content an instructor could find and assign, out there in podcast form, that the instructor could assign or make available as support material. I remember when I was a kid and films and slides (and, eventually, VHS tapes) had to be ordered in advance, a member of the AV club had to wheel in a projector on a cart, and we sat waiting for the film to snap or smolder in the intricate gears of the projector. Downloadable media such as podcasts is the AV club of the 2000s. Take a look around, you may be surprised at what you’ll find.

Apple finally released the Take 2 version of its Apple TV system software. I updated last night. The focus of the new software is downloadable movie rentals directly from your TV. In all honesty, I probably won’t use this service a whole lot–we’ve got Netflix and that works just fine for me.

Podcasts are another story. Now you can directly browse or search Apple’s podcast directory and download straight to the device. I gave a few a try. Audio-only and standard or low-definition video podcasts downloaded and played quickly. A five-minute HD file took some additional time–for these it may make more sense to download them to a PC in the background and then stream them to the Apple TV.

I want to see how this technology may apply to distance learning, especially as online video continues to take off. Can I get more from a clip if I can easily access and view it on a large screen, from the comfort of my couch or easy chair? How can educators take advantage of HD quality to present better videos? And how do instructors integrate this within the big picture?

Any thoughts?

I bought an Apple TV last week and got it hooked up over the weekend. I haven’t purchased movies through iTunes for it, and probably never will, but have been streaming the heck out of my music collection. I’m also looking forward to some of the features coming in the “Take 2″ version of the Apple TV software.

Last night I started looking at the high definition podcasts available through iTunes. There’s some neat stuff there–my favorite Tiki Bar TV is there in glorious 720p, as are about a half dozen others I’ve subscribed to but have yet to check out. This has gotten me thinking again about using podcasts in online video delivery–would people get more out of education via online video if they could sit in a comfortable chair or couch and watch it on a normal-sized television, rather than at a desk in a small window on a computer? I’ve got some work coming up involving online video and will play with this more.

While I wait for my MacBook’s hard drive to clone so I can reformat it and install Adobe CS3* I’m using the Asus Eee PC I mentioned the other day. I talked about it a bit in the blog I write in for work. The keyboard is driving me nuts. I have a feeling it’s not as bad for non-touch typers, or for people with small fingers, but I’m still having problems (I have trouble hitting the I key, for some reason, and keep hitting Return instead of the apostrophe).

The small screen isn’t too bad–I had to dink with some config fles to shrink down the default font sizes, but after that I can actually see most of what I need to see on the limited screen.

OK, I’m resorting to hunt-and-peck. And still can’t hit the damn I key for some reason.

* So, if you’ve got a Mac and partitioned your hard drive as case-sensitive, you can’t install Adobe CS3. So I’m doing a full backup, then I’m going to reformat, then I’m going to install CS3. I;m thnkng a stern letter to Adobe may be in order.

OK, I’m not positive this is a permanent return from my self-imposed hiatus, but here you go. Much has been going on.

One: I finished my requirements for my independent study about social networking’s place in education. Verdict: I should have done a better needs analysis. Also, Ning kind of sucks as a social network for folks new to social networks (struggling to keep from saying the word newbie here, especially since my target audience really shouldn’t be newbie in any sort of general technology upheaval in my opinion). If I were to do this all over again, I’d stick with Facebook or host my own network. But maybe I should’ve just pointed out the benefits of the much more popular Classroom 2.0 network.

Two: I don’t think I’m going to use said social networking project in any way for my final project two semesters from now. I’m over the social networking thing, or at least how I implemented it; and some cool things are potentially coming down the pike (or is it pipe?) at work. I’ll get into those in the next couple of months if they pan out.

Three: I ordered me one of these today. Will it replace my normal day-to-day laptop? Probably not. But it’s actually been getting some good buzz, and I’m all for tiny and cheap when it comes to electronics. I got the mid-level one because I hear ASUS is being cool about not voiding warranties when you try to break open cases for memory upgrades and junk.

Four: You can easily create custom ringtones for your iPhone now, if you’re on a Mac. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will say that all my iPhone problems (of which there are only like two) started when I tried a hack way to put something besides one of the officially provided tones on my phone.

I’ve only played with the latest version of Apple’s Mac-only productivity suite for an hour or so, but these things I know:

• Keynote: I have the most experience with prior versions of Keynote, having adopted it over an increasingly crufty and frustrating PowerPoint:mac about a year ago. I’m excited about the new Record Presentation feature, which does most of the work of ProfCast but spits out file formats a little more useful to me–Flash, PDF, QuickTime (not iPod-specific), etc. I’m also curious to see how Keynote will play into the iChat update coming with Leopard this fall. And I’m not sure how often I’ll be firing up Flash in the future–
• Pages: Pages seems a little more like a word processing app that does some solid desktop publishing, as opposed to the other way around in the previous version. By the looks of things it may be ready to replace Word as my regular word processor. As a little aside, I really could have used the nifty storyboard template last spring. Oh well, maybe now I’ll actually do storyboards for my projects.
• Numbers: I’m a little intimidated, but I’ll figure it out. The examples provided look awfully slick, and I like the idea of marrying data with narrative and design to tell a story.

In sum, iWork ‘08 is a must-have addition to any Mac-using instructional designer’s toolbox.

I set up a tumbleblog several months ago. As you can see, I never did much with it and didn’t really see myself using it even from the get-go. It’s a neat idea, but I already had this going. So I moved on.

But that’s not the neat part. Last week I was introduced to 120 Minutes, a tumbleblog hosted at the same service I tried. If you’re anywhere around my age there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the MTV show of the same name–”alternative” music videos from the mid-80s through the mid-90s. In college we stopped whatever we were doing Sunday nights to watch.

Each entry in this tumbleblog is one video, uploaded by someone somewhere on YouTube. There are usually four or five added daily, so it’s like I get a mini video show each morning when I fire up my RSS reader. And the other night, I loaded up the site on the Wii and Betsy and I watched videos on TV. How novel! Music videos on a television!

Yeah, the copyright police are probably kicking and screaming–but come on. The unidentified person running this tumbleblog isn’t making a dime off of it, and MTV hasn’t shown any of these videos in a decade.

I spent three days last week at the MACE MTI Conference in Bonner Springs, Kansas. There were some really slick presentations I hope to write more about soon, and a couple of total duds (Apple’s podcasting presentation probably did more of a disservice than anything to their wonderful suite of tools for this application). What excited me most, though, was meeting people who are really using technology in their schools. Where I work we constantly get reports that teachers are still petrified of technology. Granted, this conference was attended by the high-achievers, but overall I don’t buy it anymore. Folks at MTI represented all sizes schools, all grade levels, all ages, and all subjects. And they were extremely receptive to new ideas.

Anyway, I don’t want to keep going because it will turn into a rant–so let me just say that I’m excited about pushing an envelope or two and helping the people I met last week keep ahead of the game.

After many disappointing efforts to edit my screencasts in iMovie, only to have the software totally munge the video quality during the conversion to one of its native formats, I finally hit upon the right string of Google keywords to find what I needed to know. Simply put, you need to determine your resolution up front, specify that resolution in your screen capture software, and render the video in a codec that works well for this type of footage (I’ve read recommendations for both Apple Animation and Apple Intermediate).

Screencasts, of course, are mandatory for any online software training these days. We use this technology extensively in the Stratepedia Learning Labs to provide short-and-sweet how-tos for our own, web-based software and other apps we use. They’re also easy to incorporate into a Moodle-served course–just upload a video clip (or link to a file on a streaming server) and you’re good to go.

This tutorial provides the low-down. I use Snapz Pro as opposed to iShowU, but the same principles apply. I did a couple of tests this afternoon (one at 640 by 480 and one at 720p) and they both turned out beautifully. So now we get to redo our video clips–on the one hand kind of a bummer since much work has been put into them, but on the other a chance for us to one-up ourselves, even providing clips in high definition. These are going to look beautiful on our site, now that I’ve taken a shine to using pop-up windows in Moodle to display video clips and slide shows.

Everybody knows I use Moodle quite a bit, but what they might not now is I now use Keynote exclusively for anything I’m doing that’s slide-y in nature. Hey, if it’s good enough for Steve Jobs it’s good enough for me.

One of the things I like about it is just how easy it is to export the file into multiple formats. For a presentation I’m doing later this week I’m going to use a Moodle “course” in tandem, to distribute my files and hopefully keep the conversation going after everyone’s gone home. My presentation is actually several smaller presentations. I’ve been serving them up in both PDF and Flash formats. The latter is particularly useful–here’s what I’m doing:

1. Export the Keynote presentation in Flash format.
2. (optional) Open the HTML generated by Keynote and change the dimensions of the Flash container to, say, 800 by 600, or another size if necessary. This does involve getting into the HTML, but the only things you need to change are the numbers–everything else can stay the same.
3. Log into your Moodle course and enter the Files area (in the Administration block). Upload both the HTML and the SWF files that were generated by Keynote.
4. Turn editing on in your course, then add a File resource. Point it to the HTML file. Have it open in a new window, (optionally) turn off all the resizing, menu bars, etc., and make the window size 850 by 650 (or something appropriate to what you set the dimensions to in step 2).

That’s pretty much it. Not too difficult, huh? I love it when the tools actually make life a little easier.