Stephen's Untold Stories

This should be an interesting project. Anybody know of any other schools that are doing something similar?

According to The Arizona Republic, Amazon.com Kindles will be provided free to every student in professor Ted Humphrey’s honors class on the history of human culture and thought.

The Republic says Humphrey’s class is part of a national pilot program that aims to reduce costs and paper and compare e-books with traditional textbooks.

The 30 required books for Humphrey’s year-long course usually cost students about $475, but the Kindle (a wireless reading device that downloads e-books and displays them on an electronic screen) is expected to cut this expense in half.

If the students finish the course and participate in an evaluation, they get to keep the Kindle, the newspaper reports.

Link to article.

Yet another university starting to use Moodle. I wish mine would follow suit.

The University is in the process of transferring to Moodle, a user-friendly Learning Management System (LMS) which allows students more interaction between each other and the professor.

Four thousand institutions are using Moodle. The Moodle Pilot team has examined how other universities have made the switch to the system.

“UNC Charlotte and Asheville have switched over, and other UNC schools are also considering making the move,” Dulberg said.

The entire system won’t change until summer 2011, when Vista will completely cease to exist. Three semesters will be given for the changeover, encompassing spring 2010, fall 2010 and spring 2011. If a new course is developed during this time frame, it will be done through Moodle.

The plan is to first migrate Vista users onto Moodle for one-and-a-half years while maintaining WolfWare. The initial goal is to have WolfWare powered by Moodle Beta for production-level usage by January 2010. WolfWare users will be migrated when file management tools, and other WolfWare tools not currently in Moodle, are implemented into Moodle.

Read the rest here.

I will be using SPSS quite a bit as I work on my dissertation. It is an amazing statistical program.

I.B.M. took a big step to expand its fast-growing stable of data analysis offerings by agreeing on Tuesday to pay $1.2 billion to buy SPSS Inc., a maker of software used in statistical analysis and predictive modeling.

Major technology companies have made a flurry of such purchases in recent years, grabbing suppliers of software that helps businesses and governments organize and analyze data to make better decisions. The industry segment is broadly known as business intelligence software. In the last couple of years, I.B.M., Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have collectively spent more than $15 billion buying makers of such software.

In the recession, corporate spending on technology is being trimmed. But business intelligence software, analysts say, stands out as an exception because it is seen as a tool to help identify cost-cutting opportunities and emerging market trends.

Read the rest here.

Is this a new or old service?

I hate to report this, but the answer for many teachers is “not at all.”

Photo from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Look at all those Macs! I see the same thing where I work….way more Macs than PC laptops.

Caption added by Will Richardson.

Original photo here.

The key word is, of course, “slowly.”

Smartphones now have hundreds of applications meant to educate kids — from graphic calculators to animation programs that teach spelling and phonics.

And while most public schools don’t allow the devices because they’re considered distractions — and sometimes portable cheating tools — some school districts have started to put the technology to use.

The key, educators say, is controlling the environment in which they are used.

In St. Mary’s, Ohio, a school district of 2,300 students is continuing a pilot program where third-, fourth- and fifth-graders are assigned PDAs, or personal digital assistants, for use as a learning tool in the classroom, and at home. They use applications created by a company called Go Know! to draw pictures and create sketches, journal and write essays, said Kyle Menchhofer, the district’s technology coordinator. Other applications create flash cards for spelling and math.

Students took the phones on a museum field trip where they took photos, uploaded them to a server where the teacher could view the assignment and wrote blurbs about what they saw.

Read the rest here.

They started this a year ago, and here are the results.

We knew the “what” already: ACU handed out 957 devices to incoming freshmen, as well as 169 to faculty and another 182 to staff. It wasn’t a blind move, or a gimmick; it was the result of much research, planning, and even a faculty contest to submit ideas for implementing technology — namely, the iPhone — into the curriculum in ways which would be beneficial, non-distracting and begin to chip away at the age-old paradigms of the lecture hall.

The incoming freshmen were given a choice between an iPhone, an iPod touch, or neither. Unsurprisingly, every incoming student accepted one or the other, with about 36% choosing a iPod touch over an iPhone. This is in large part due to the fact that the school, for several reasons, was unable to provide any contract with the iPhone, and many students had existing cell phone contracts which would result in a significant enough penalty to discourage starting an AT&T plan. Even among those, though, there were some iPhone switchers willing to pay the price.

The ACU iPhone initiative would be a gimmick if research wasn’t done in post to determine its results. Several surveys were taken (with an unusually large percentage of respondents), and information was compiled. One of the questions asked was about the distraction level the iPhones and iPod touches generated in the classroom. George tells me that, in a post-semester survey, 90% of the faculty and staff stated that the devices “were not a distraction in class.” Students reported that they were bringing their devices to class, and that their performance, grades and class work all benefited. The studies also revealed that 82% of the students had used the web portal at least once per week during the Fall semester, 49% said they were given at least one assignment that required device usage outside of class, and 60% of students said they had regular opportunities to use the device for at least one class.

On the faculty side, about 65% of the 167 iPhone/touch-using faculty and staff members responded to survey questions on topics such as demographic and experience factors, personal and classroom usage, and perceived impact on student engagement and performance. An overwhelming majority of the respondents deemed the program a success, said that there was adequate communication and that the device was easy to use and implement. 70% responded positively about the course calender, 83% were in favor of online course documents, 63% for podcasts, 74% were happy about in-class internet searches, 76% responded favorably to the devices’ role in taking attendance, and a whopping 87% stated that they felt comfortable about using the devices for required course activities. The research also revealed that faculty were using the devices to students’ benefit, even when the students in their class didn’t have them. All in all, a positive response from the faculty and staff, and a desire for further training and continued app development.

Read the rest here.

Say it isn’t so!!

Steve Miller is not agoraphobic and has not got Swine Flu. So why is he under virtual house arrest? The answer, strangely enough, is because he’s allergic to WiFi. No, really.

Although not widely publicised, nor understood by many in the medical profession, Electrical Hypersensitivity (ES) is said to cause symptoms including sleep disturbance, headaches, concentration problems, limb and joint pains, impaired balance and hearing loss.

Steve Miller knows all about it, because he has the thing and it is keeping him trapped inside the 18 inch thick granite walls of his remote detached house near Falmouth in Cornwall, UK. When he ventures out he feels sick, dizzy, confused and suffers from agonising headaches.

A trip down the local high street is a nightmare, and most pubs are out of bounds for Steve. As are, for that matter, airports and hotels. He can no longer travel by train because of the pain and suffering his condition causes.

And it’s all caused by WiFi.

Read the rest here!

Almost 4 million views as of this writing.

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs.

Read more here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

I wonder how long they practiced this.

Beautiful video!

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world (Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

If for some odd reason you aren’t currently using Skype, this video will help you learn what it’s all about.

Pretty good stuff here.

Head over to the NASA Apollo 40th Anniversary Page!

And I was lucky enough to be there!

Sometimes I forget how I much I like their music.

Thanks, Bruce!

A lot to think about here.

Web 2.0 tools have critically elevated the social networking activity and skills of individuals. Not only are young people highly active in social networks, but older individuals are also showing a huge increase in their use of these tools. The attraction of older age groups is, of course, social connection and community building among professional and casual peers and friends.

The most effective pedagogical approach using new technology is social constructivism, as it builds on social interaction and engagement, which is at the heart of Web 2.0 technology.

Read the rest here.

More amazing stuff from NASA.

A team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources for the restoration effort. These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA’s Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for 36 years.

“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11. “The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event.”

See them all here!

Astronaut Mark Polanksy is Twittering from the Space Shuttle.

http://twitter.com/Astro_127

I don’t care if you have a Twitter account yourself, or even if you hate Twitter. This might change your mind.