Watch learning long tail emerge

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Posted on 14th April 2009 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression, Emerging Online Knowledge, Mobile Learning and Networks

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This animation gives you a place to play with the long tail of study subject webpages. There are four subjects in the Emerger, with clickable samples of how they are connected into ideas that you can click to bring together to teach or learn.

One of the examples here, of comparisons of how Rembrandt depicted hands, seems like a small subject and simple detail. That is true, yet the comparison connects the greatest museums on the planet. Even young children can learn from the pattern that emerges of similarities and differences in the depictions, and for painting scholars the lessons are sophisticated.

Next week I will be using this Emerger animation that I created a couple of years ago in my talk at Design4Mobile. If you are attending, you might want to check out the Emerger here for a look at what I will be discussing. For mobilists, a crucial criteria of creating handschooling is to deliver the long tail you can play with in the Emerger.

I will be speaking at DesignForMobile 2009

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Posted on 27th March 2009 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning

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The second annual DesignForMobile conference, will be held in Lawrence, Kansas (near Kansas City), April 20-22. The event extends this welcome: “Speakers come from academia, industry, design, and research. We’re all interested in the user experience, but we come from many different disciplines to share.” I am proud to be among the speakers, and expect to learn a lot. My topic is “The Long Tail of Mobile Learning.”

In the dozen years I have been participating in the emergence of the online world, I have found edgy conferences in early development are gold mines of insights and contacts. DesignForMobile is that kind of conference, as mobile crosses tech/design/content thresholds in 2009.

As a speaker, I have a few discount tickets to attend for friends of GoldenSwamp. Email me at judybreck AT gmail.com if you are interested in using one of the tickets.

Our education policy should be shiftable

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Posted on 10th March 2009 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Golden Age of Learning, Mobile Learning and Open Content

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Siftables Music Sequencer from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.

We need to walk away from the pathos of 20th century education’s demise and get every kid a pocket full of siftables. What a wonder it would be if every siftable was interfacing the internet, showing related nodes of science, history, literature — whatever a student was working on learning as he shifted incoming ideas, thinking about their relationships. For now, kids with smart phones can browse the internet for these and other subjects — though educators usually don’t let them do that at school.

The siftables are a project headed by David Merrill at the MIT Media Lab. Merrill describes them to the TED audience on a page linked other coverage. The siftables are not browsers yet, but already are powerful pedagogic devices.

A new global education that embraces the internet’s knowledge and connectivity is within our grasp. Am I being too visionary? Or is the ongoing dumping of resources into very 20th century ideas something that does not see reality?

Thanks Matt for the siftables

The Black Cat on this iPhone is not an app

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Posted on 5th March 2009 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression, Emerging Online Knowledge, Golden Age of Learning, Literature, Mobile Learning and Open Content

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The image here shows a highly readable text (clearer on the phone than in the photo) of The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe coming through the Safari browser of my iPhone. The text is from the comprehensive and authoritative collection of Poe works at the website of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. The Society is an open source for reading Poe’s work on any mobile online browser.

Transitional reading through apps
The app store phase in which mobile content delivery now finds itself cannot be the comprehensive and authoritative venue for future mobile learning content. For one thing, there is no reason to duplicate the open collection at the Society of Baltimore for delivery by one or more app stores. There are thousands of content websites already available for academic topics ranging from the humanities and arts through the sciences and technologies, and essentially everything else studied in education. It is a huge and unnecessary effort to organize all of that again for one application and then another.

In the case of works like Poe’s, which are in the public domain, the adjustments to what is available already for larger screens for reading in a mobile browser are highly doable. We need to be perfectly clear that protecting copyrights and making money are the motivations for pushing reading matter through app stores. I am not saying that is not okay. I am only suggesting that long range, accessing reading material — and most other study subject collections — through browsers will prevail.


Diminishing ignorance profitably

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Posted on 3rd February 2009 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Golden Age of Learning, Mobile Learning and Terrorism Undermined

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The image above is taken from the Vestergaard Frandsen webpage about their product LifeStraw® . The page explains: “Half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne disease, and nearly 6,000 people – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water. LifeStraw® water purifiers have been developed as a practical way of preventing disease and saving lives, as well as achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water by the year 2015.”

I have added the mobile device in a child’s hands. At least half the world’s children suffer from ignorance. Mobiles are a practical way of preventing ignorance.

The LifeStraw®  story carries a very important lesson for those who would prevent ignorance: Vestergaard Frandsen makes a profit by providing the individual water purifiers, and several other refugee products. There is money to be made by giving people what they need to transform from refugee to productive citizen. The potential for making the money and the transformations is huge.

For more on these thoughts, there is an article in the New York Times this morning about Vestergaard Frandsen:

. . . There are plenty of charitable foundations and public agencies devoted to helping the world’s poor, many with instantly recognizable names like Unicef or the Gates Foundation.

But private companies with that as their sole focus are rare. Even the best-known is not remotely a household name: Vestergaard-Frandsen. . . .


How kids today could know as much as Grandma did

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Posted on 27th January 2009 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Mobile Learning, Networks and Schools We Have Now

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The picture above shows my Grandma (2nd from right, front row), born in Kansas City in 1884, with some of her schoolmates. Below is the text of an email that is being sent around the internet about how very much more school kids in Kansas learned in Grandma’s day than they do now. Any of the kids in the picture could have told you all about syllabication and the the inclination of the earth, I would bet.

How could kids today know as much as Grandma learned in her Kansas school? There is nothing on the final exam shown below that could not be easily learned by a student with a mobile in her pocket that browses the internet. Grandma would have loved it BTW. When she was a young woman she was a high tech secretary skilled on a typewriter by around 1900.

UPDATE: A reader sent me this message to my email: “The test appears to be a hoax that’s been circulated by email for several years now. [Link to Scopes.] Didn’t want to point this out in the comments though.” I appreciate this reader’s heads up very much, and have just read the Scopes evaluation.
I find it fascinating that Scopes does not seem to say the exam itself is a hoax. Instead it states: “Claim: An 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards. Status: False.” [ital. Scopes'] Scopes then launches into a lengthy criticism of this “false” email content along these lines: “Just about any test looks difficult to those who haven’t recently been steeped in the material it covers. . . .” I actually had 2 grandmothers educated in Kansas public schools before 1900, both of whom I knew well. I am certain they could have done the arithmetic in the test, and guess that they would have known most of the other questions’ answers. They were both grammar whizzes with beautiful penmanship. I got my public school education in Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, and recall learning most of the answers to the questions on this “false” list. Even if such tests were not given in Kansas in the 1890s, I know first hand that they were given in Texas in the 1940s.
All of that aside, what I wrote in this post originally stands: Any generation would benefit from having what is known by humankind in their pocket. Today’s kids do, and my Grandmas both would have loved it!

UPDATE #2: After writing the above update, I decided to check my bravado about being able to find things on the internet. Here, from the Salina Journal is a report directly from the Kansas source: 1895 Salilne County exam continues to raise interest.

THE TEXT OF THE EMAIL:
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, KS, USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th GRADE FINAL EXAM
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2 . Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no Modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of lie, lay and run
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?
8 Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U. S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided. (more…)

Sony PSP delivered 25 million page views last month

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Posted on 19th December 2008 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning

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In this interesting MobHappy post, Russell Buckley gives this breakdown of mobile surfing devices:

In the US, 8% of all such pages are served over wifi, which is a pretty impressive figure and has increased by 5% since August – so we’re seeing fast growth of the trend. But for iPhone, this figure rises to an amazing 42%.

In the UK, the stat is also 8% for total usage and a staggering 56% from the iPhone.

In both markets, the iPod Touch is the second biggest device for consumption of mobile web pages, beating the Nokia N95 into third place in the UK and the Sony PlayStation Portable in the US. Yes, that means that 25 million page views were viewed last month on a PSP.

The last sentence in the quote reminds us that there are more devices than mobile phones out there being used by individuals to access the internet. It is a fair guess that most of those using PSP are student aged. These devices could be used for learning from internet knowledge pages.

I used to rant in this blog, saying that kids already had mobile devices in their pockets, and that we needed to make those devices into good ones for accessing the internet. As the statistics above make plain, the whole internet is now right in their hands.

Clicker iPhone app superior to plain clicker

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Posted on 16th December 2008 by Judy Breck in Mobile & Ubiquitous and Mobile Learning

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The Wired Campus reports: Mobile College App: Turning iPhones Into ‘Super-Clickers’ for Classroom Feedback. The iPhone image shown here from the article displays the cloud response possible with the app — and not possible from the simpler “yes” or “no” and multiple choice responses of clickers. Here are some of the other advantages from the article.

The idea for such a system is far from new. Several companies sell classroom response systems, often called “clickers,” that often involve small wireless gadgets that look like television remote controls. Most clickers allow students to answer true-or-false or multiple-choice questions (but do not allow open-ended feedback), and many colleges have experimented with the devices, especially in large lecture courses. There are several drawbacks to many clicker systems, however. First of all, every student in a course must have one of the devices, so in courses that use clickers, students are often required to buy them. Then, students have to remember to bring the gadgets to class, which doesn’t always happen.

Using cellphones instead of dedicated clicker devices solves those issues, says William Rankin, an English professor at Abilene Christian who is coordinating academic uses of iPhones there. Because students rely on their phones for all kinds of communication, they usually keep the devices on hand. The university calls its iPhone software NANOtools — NANO stands for No Advanced Notice, emphasizing how easy the system is for students and professors to use. “We see it as a kind of super-clicker,” he says.

The iPhone app makes the personal mobile a clicker if it is an iPhone. The final step will be when clicker apps are open source for all mobile phones via the internet.

Carnival of the Mobilists #153 includes The Idea School movie

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Posted on 8th December 2008 by Judy Breck in Carnival of the Mobilists

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GoldenSwamp is honored to be on the mobile midway this week at Carnival #153, where our link about The Idea School is one of the featured posts.

Maybe by 2030 we will have dozens of Einsteins

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Posted on 7th December 2008 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge and Mobile & Ubiquitous

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There is an article today in Yahoo! News speculating on: “Is Einstein the Last Great Genius?” The Yahoo! article quotes from its Live Science source an earlier article that asks: “Will there Ever be another Einstein?” The conclusion to the Live Science article is quoted below in this post; what it says is quickly becoming outdated.

The speculation in these articles about the emergence of genius misses a HUGE factor. In his book Jump Point, Tom Hayes explains (page 11) that by 2015 five billion people will have their own Web-enabled devices. Almost every adolescent on earth — thus virtually every potential Einstein — will have access to what is known and a way to publish his or her ideas.

Maybe by 2030 we will have dozens of Einsteins — by tapping the entire world population instead of only (more…)

Idea School glimpses golden age of learning

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Posted on 3rd December 2008 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning and Mobile Learning

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This video is on YouTube and comes from the Aditya Birla Group in India. While America’s politicians have no new ideas for education, and the privileged kids on New York’s Upper Eastside have not thought about using their mobile phones for learning, the golden age of learning is dawning. Just not here in America.

Thanks, Russell !!

Time to dive into mobile learning

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Posted on 3rd December 2008 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression and Mobile Learning

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Last week I was changing back to street clothes after a water aerobics class at Asphalt Green, a fitness center on Manhattan’s Upper Eastside. Two girls from one of New York’s finest private high schools arrived for their swimming class and pick lockers nearby. I interrupted their chatting with an apology and asked if they were allowed to have mobile phones at school.

With the assurance of privilege, they said, “Oh yes, as long as we keep them,” looking a bit askance, “unseen.” They went on to explain that everyone, meaning the school authorities and teachers, knows they have the mobiles. The assumption was that I would know that they would not abuse the privilege. (Not, I am sure, at the price that someone is paying for their schooling.)

I like high school kids, and trust them whether they are coping with the foibles of privilege or the temptations of some often awful high schools within a mile of these girls’ fancy prestigious school. One of the best things about high school kids is that they are candid — open and honest.

It is fair to assume that the two girls I was quizzing — and the high majority of their schoolmates — did not have low-end mobile phones. These were the sort of kids who have the latest smartphone on their person all the time. That led me to my next question. I asked them: “Do you ever use your mobile phones in class — to study or learn something.”

The girls looked at me quizzically and said, “No.” When I then suggested their was a potential there for them to use the Web on their mobile in class, they said, in a tone where I hoped I had caught a whisper of respect for their questioner, that they had never thought of that.

As teenagers will wonderfully do, they then said to me that they thought using mobiles for learning was a good idea. They may have just been showing off their good manners to me — but there was no doubt that in one of America’s best schools, for these students, using mobiles for learning was a brand new idea.

Really good mobile Web access has only been around for a few months. Mobile Web access is getting better and better, and is trickling down into more mobiles. Is thinking of mobile learning at school the tipping point around the corner? Why not just dive in now?

Mobility and equalization are coming

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Posted on 19th October 2008 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning, Terrorism Undermined and Wireless Broadband

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This post continues my previous post about the remarkably important forecasts in the foreword to Vern Fotheringham and Chetan Sharma’s new book Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence. Its foreword is by Mark Anderson, CEO of Strategic News Service, who is known for his ability to predict trends into the future. In the following two brief paragraphs, Anderson hits two education nails on the head: mobility and equalization. Education will not be able to go merrily along the analog path into the future while these powerful forces change everything else:

As though the global trends named here were not sufficient drivers to warrant attention to wireless broadband, there is another, equally compelling set of accelerants, all coming under the umbrella title of mobility. On every level, from lifelong residence to lifestyle to work, humans are becoming more mobile by the decade, and wireline bandwidth, while growing, is increasingly not appropriate to our needs. Cars today have more computers in them than houses, but get a small fraction of the comparative bandwidth. That will change.

Finally, it is worth noting that wireless bandwidth will be the Great Equalizer of this century, providing citizens and countries equal access to the world’s information and commerce. Countries which, like China (yet to move to 3G), choose to put politics ahead of this trend, will become case examples of what not to do, while those such as India which push aggressively for wireless bandwidth will be emulated worldwide, for the hope and prosperity which this form of being connected can bring.

Tech has ruled content in the digital world — but that is changing

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Posted on 15th October 2008 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Findability, Mobile & Ubiquitous, Mobile Learning and Open Content

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A powerful example of the trend toward content being served by tech is the Kyte Mobile Producer software. Kyte delivers the same content to the full range of devices that interface internet content — at the same time! That is an important step forward for teaching, learning, and educational collaboration. Think for example of the news this month that researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have generated a digital zebrafish embryo which is the first complete developmental blueprint of a vertebrate, as shown in the image. In the days of print — and even recently in digital media — students and teachers would get this news from different periodicals, books, and lectures as the information trickled differently to various outlets. With Kyte, the news from EMBL could be distributed as the same content at the same time: to desktop computers, mobiles, blogs, video channels, social networks, and chat groups (think: study groups for edu :) .

Gannon Hall, KYTE Chief Marketing Officer, shown above in a demo video of the new software, puts it this way: Kyte is a “universal digital media platform. . . . The power of Kyte really lies in the distribution of content and user engagement.” Kyte provides this list of features:

Kyte Mobile Producer delivers live video streaming over 3G and WiFi networks from your Nokia N-series (N95, N96) device and enables you to distribute that content across the web by embedding your own Kyte video channel into blogs & social networks. Everyone can produce and distribute live videos now across the web directly from your Nokia S60/Symbian smartphone!
Kyte also delivers web audience interaction and community-building via live group chat on your Kyte channel.
Kyte also features a mobile-optimized website for viewing live Kyte channnels on your Nokia smartphone!


Carnival of the Mobilists #145

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Posted on 13th October 2008 by Judy Breck in Carnival of the Mobilists, Mobile Learning and Uncategorized

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Whilst the economy may be in systemic melt-down the world of mobile blogging continues to go from strength to strength. So beat the gloom with this week’s round up of the blogosphere’s best mobile reportage at Carnival of the Mobilists 145 touching down at mjelly -  whoop whoop!

Our thanks to James Cooper, Carnival Host for this upbeat barking for Golden Swamp:

“In a similar vein, Judy Breck, the Carnival Queen has contributed a post suggesting that Mobile is part of a silver lining to the economic mess, at least for education, given that networked forms of learning are so much cheaper to deliver than traditional class-room based teaching.  The post has has received a lot of interest and comments on her blog.”

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