Scarlet Umbrella|Adventures in Mobile Technology

Both my Mom’ house and our neighbors’ next door have wi-fi. I was at my Mom’s this weekend and I learned that the highschoolers in Mom’s county are now given laptops in high school. Since the bus stop is right between my Mom’s house and our neighbors’ house, they have been using our wi-fi to finish up their homework and browse the internet before school starts.

Because I’m a total tablet nut, I immediately saw this as an opportunity for tablets to be used instead of conventional laptops. Time posted an interesting article about the problems with America’s school system and a lot of their attention was devoted to outdated teaching methods and the lack of technology. My passion is improving science education and I immediately began to brainstorm ways to solve many of the problems with current American educational methods that Time was commenting on.
Let me begin with a disclaimer before anyone tries to rip my head off. What follows is a description of an ideal world where all school systems were funded equally and received adequate funding. I am a realist, however, and I understand the difficulties with deploying new technology in schools. The issues of cost both in acquiring new technology and training teachers and administrators to use new technology can make any deployment of new technology seem daunting. But I think the benefits warrant the cost.

Let’s take a field trip to what I like to call the Modern School. In this school, students are given a small slate tablet and a portable keyboard at the beginning of school. That’s it. These students don’t have to carry backpacks around all day because all of their textbooks are in ebook format and are preloaded onto their tablets. They can annotate their textbooks without getting into trouble. In fact, their teachers encourage them to take notes in their textbooks! They can highlight and make lecture notes without getting in trouble for defacing rental textbooks. Students can look up words that give them trouble using dictionary software and get the correct pronunciation for the words as well. Look at those SAT vocabulary scores going up!

Lectures are different at the Modern School. Teachers post worksheets on the class website at the beginning and students work along with the teacher in filling them in. Teachers don’t mind tablets in lectures. They can see that their students are paying attention to the lecture and they don’t have to talk over the background noise of 30 keyboards clicking. Since these students have OneNote and its recording functions, they feel comfortable participating more in class. They aren’t worried about missing a few notes because they have the lecture recorded and they know that the teacher is recording her screen notes as well and will post them after class.

The teachers at the Modern School don’t like lecturing. They know that the average attention span is about twenty minutes. They break up their lectures with different activities. Students participate in group work- made easier by the ability to send files to each other and make edits to each others’ work. They also participate in activities and chats with their sister class in Japan. One of their recent assignments was a paper written with a partner in their sister class. Because of the ability to track changes in a document, both teachers were able to see the work that their students had done and grade accordingly. The students learned how to work with international partners which will help them when they are ready for the business world.

Okay, let’s get back to the current world. Every bit of technology I described exists today. When students graduate from college, they are going into this world. Business is increasingly project-driven and teamwork-oriented and having international clients and partners is a way of life. So why are our schools stuck in the 19th century (and yes I DO mean the 1800s)? Yes, the deployment of this technology will be somewhat challenging. Any change is. However, we will be preparing students for the “real world” and I think that’s reward enough.

business, education, software, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc

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Hugo Ortega has a great set of videos up describing his use of a Samsung Q1 which has been his only PC since before Christmas. What’s really nice is that he also goes into the various accessories available to improve your UMPC usage and the solution he has developed to the short battery life problem which has plagued UMPCs since their introduction. I’ll let you watch the videos to find out the solution but let’s just say that he can get a full day’s work done!

Unfortunately, Hugo has also convinced me that the Q1 is the way to go for UMPCs (and that I need to get a UMPC) and the UMPC fund (now at $200) has been officially renamed the Q1 fund. The question now is Celeron or Via?

gadgets, mobile, origami, samsung, samsung Q1, UMPC

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Maybe it’s because of my recent Zune woes but the Sandisk Sansa Connect really caught my eye. Engadget has great video coverage of the Sansa Connect. Among the features that I found interesting are the ability to “recommend” music (send music) to your friends and supposedly acquire the license via wi-fi so the song won’t disappear after a few days. The Connect also has microSD slot so the unit can be expanded. Best of all, you can supposedly access and download music using any wi-fi connection. Looks great!

Edit: here’s the correct link for the Sansa Connect video coverage.

mp3, mp3 player, Sandisk, Sansa

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Welcome to the first part of my new series: Susy’s list of the Best of CES. Unfortunately there aren’t scholarshipships to CES (sponsors take note!) so I was unable to attend. Still, like every other neophiliac, I have been monitoring the CES coverage and trying to get a hint as to the upcoming cool gadgets. What follows is an eclectic list of gadgets that are useful, interesting, awe-inspiring or just caught my eye for whatever reason.

Nokia’s N76 is Nokia’s first entry into the thin cellphone area.  At first glance it looks like a RAZR knockoff but the N76 has some nice features which separate it from the RAZR clones.  Among these features are expandable memory up to 2 gigs via microSD, a 2 megapixel camera, video at 15 fps, music, FM radio, and all the benefits of Symbian S60.

Here’s the reasons it made my list:

• style- one of my main problems with smartphones is that the one area that such phones seem to lag in is working as an actual phone.  The N76 is thin and light which makes is easy to put it up to your ear and use it as an actual phone.
• a better camera than the RAZR
• video capability
• Symbian-finally a slim phone that can run serious applications
• color- just kidding, but it is nice that it comes in black and red

cellphone, CES, consumer electronics show, gadgets, nokia, smartphone

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My Christmas present to myself was a shiny new brown Zune to replace my 3G iPod. (Pictures will be forthcoming once I return from being out of town). My initial impression was very favorable: the Zune is lightweight, attractive, and the finish is very nice. The finish is actually kind of difficult to describe- the best I can come up with is smooth and velvety. The color screen is also clear, bright, and easy to read.

I wish my impression of the installation process was as favorable. The first run of the software installation process stalled midway through so I was forced to do my first reinstall. Following my first reinstall, I tried to add music to my library. My Zune did not recognize any of my mp3 files which are located on my C drive (I even put them into the My Music folder). I tried to rip a CD to see if the software would recognize it- also a failure. I then reinstalled the software following Microsoft’s own recommendation for a clean install. The Zune software still did not recognize my music. I took off the software and I cleaned out my music. I reinstalled the software and then imported my music back onto my computer. This is where I am currently and my Zune software is still not recognizing my music.

I would be inclined to say that this a bug with my machine but I’m not the only one who has blogged about problems with Zune software. James Kendrick and Aran Johnson among others have blogged about problems with Zune software installation. I’m going to try my luck with technical support when I get back home. I have to say that overall the installation of the Zune software seems to be hit or miss. This is particularly worrisome for the success of the platform. Coming into the market so late in the game, the Zune really needs to have all the bugs ironed out. Most consumers aren’t willing to go through multiple installs to get a product working. I’m hoping that Microsoft releases a software update soon that gets most of these bugs ironed out.

Microsoft, mp3, mp3 player, software, Zune

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My first experience with Linux was with Redhat 7.3 back in the day. I liked the security and ability to customize but I was turned off by the difficulty installing packages (dependency hell). I recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake on my new Windows laptop (a Panasonic R3 which I intend to rave about in a new post). My first impression is that Linux has changed dramatically in the four years since I have played with the platform. Ubuntu installed in a straightforward manner. I used Ubuntu’s built in partition utility to add two partitions to my hard drive (after backing up my data of course). Ubuntu installed without a hitch and right out of the box I was able to use my screen brightness hotkeys and wireless (nice!). With a little tweeking, I was able to adjust the screen brightness hotkey so that it went through a range of brightness levels instead of the high and low levels only which was how the screen hotkeys worked right after the install. My only concern is that you do have to go in and manually edit a configuration file, something that I am comfortable with, but a novice user may not be comfortable with. To my pleasant surprise, my usb hard drive automatically mounted!!!!! Finally!! I have been waiting for some flavor of Linux to get this perfected. Dapper Drake comes with Firefox 1.5 but I was able to use an installer script to update to 2.0 without any problems. I was also able to get Enlightenment 17, the upgrade to Enlightenment 16 my favorite Linux window manager, up and running easily. In conclusion, so far Ubuntu is working really well as a second operating system on my Panasonic R3. Linux has come a long way as an operating system. I’m going to go into more detail about my Ubuntu experiences in future posts but I’m beginning to see what the buzz surrounding Ubuntu as a Linux distro is about.

Linux, panasonic, Ubuntu

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