The Xplanation

Content Subscription | Containerless Education | Learning Distribution | DIY

Welcome to our Weekly Research Index where we list links and summaries of the salient articles we have bookmarked this week. This list is culled an edited from our ongoing Delicious feed, which is also available via this blog. This Index is divided into broad categories based on our Education and Technology Trends for 2010.

Content Subscription

Topics: E-books and e-textbooks | Textbook rental | Subscription and licensing models for music and video | Subscription models for online news | Copyright and DRM

How Lala and the Web Will Make iTunes Even More Powerful – iTunes | Gizmodo — It looks like Apple will indeed lkeverage its Lala acquisition to move iTunes into the cloud. From the article: “It’s an uprooting of the entire iTunes model: Not only would you buy songs and manage your iTunes library through the web, iTunes could shift to having a serious streaming component, away from “download to own,” as Apple’s been evaluating the impact of Pandora and Lala on iTunes, though the WSJ is more tentative on this point. Also, you may very well be able to put your music in the cloud. Essentially, you would own right to listen to the song anytime and anywhere, not just the digital file you downloaded. There’s also a chance that Apple will use Lala’s ability to scan your current music library, match it up with the files on their servers, and give you access to the songs you already own anywhere via its servers.”

Updated DRM Reference Table « Copyright and Technology — A useful listing of DRM technologies for all kinds of digital content.

Books, and the iTunes Problem – Kindle | Gizmodo — “Simon and Schuster’s plan is to plug ebooks into their own special place in the publishing cycle: Four months after hardcovers. Meaning you’ll have to wait 1/3 of a year after a book’s published to read it on a Kindle or Nook or tablet or whatever. It establishes a value hierarchy, that looks, as the WSJ points out a lot like the theatrical release cycle for movies. It’s true, the movie industry has fared better than the music industry in preserving the perception of value of their content. But if you look, digital movies have slowly crept up to be same-day as DVD. They’re just really damn expensive—15 bucks. It’s hard for the publishing industry to do the same thing—charge a premium for the digital version—since they’re trying to get this whole ebook thing off the ground, not to mention the experience just isn’t as good as a real book, at least not yet.”

Foxit busts out ebook store for eSlick owners | Engadget — This is a partnership with Fictionwise (also owned by Barnes and Noble) and seems to be an extension of the B&N strategy to partner with many devices.

Why The Magazine Industry Wants Its Own App Store. It’s All About The Data. — Eric Schonfeld writes that the new consortium for digital newspapers and magazines is really after the apps and user data. “The existence of this App Store for Magazines (and newspapers, presumably) raises a big question. Why are these print publishers reinventing the digital wheel? A popular app store already exists. It’s called iTunes. And people don’t mind paying for apps there. By creating their own app store, the magazine publishers can avoid paying Apple its 30 percent cut of sales. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason they want their own store is the customer data. Magazine companies may look like paper companies, with a little art direction thrown in. But at their core, magazine companies are database companies. The way they make money is by knowing who their readers are and marketing to them by where they live and who they are.”

News Publishers Plan for Next Generation of Reading Devices | NYTimes.com — Among the problems these companies face are: 1) they are not technology companies and yet their future depends on becoming such; 2) they must cooperate and deliver a standard in unified fashion; 3) they plan to introduce new software and standards into a mix that is already moving toward convergence.

Major Print Publishers Gang Up to Pre-Empt Apple, Already Make Mistakes | Technomix | Fast Company — This is a reaction to the new media consortium that is putting forth a new online standard for magazines and newspapers in an attempt to save that publishing model/format. The author points to a number of bad assumptions by the group. They include: 1) The public wants to consume digital magazines and newspapers in the same way as paper ones; 2) The public will pay for digital magazines; 3) Apple will just take this lying down (not!); 4) The press release is weirdly U.S.-centric.

Magazine publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme | Engadget — I’ve tagged articles about this previously but now the consortium of magazine publishers has made it official. “Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation, and Time Inc. … [will provide] a vehicle for selling publications for just about any device (including smartphones, e-readers, and laptops), the content will be optimized for multiple operating systems and display sizes, and according Time exec John Squires, it will all be DRM-free.”

Sesame Street Digital Books Brought to You By the Letter Y – SesameStreet — Sesame Street is catching up to Disney and offering its own e-books. They are partnered with Impelsys and making these available as online-only offerings.

Sony Reader Store goes 100% EPUB on Friday | Engadget — We’ve known this was coming, and now here it is! Beginning Friday, Sony is going 100% ePub.

Universal, Sony and EMI Opening a Music Video Site, Vevo – NYTimes.com — Vevo is a new site, created specifically for music videos. It is an attempt by recording label;s to generate additional revenue from their content. The site will use YouTube for its video streaming and will also syndicate videos to a number of sites. ““It will be a higher-quality experience around music and videos than anything else that’s currently out there,” Rio Caraeff, Vevo’s chief executive, said in an interview. Mr. Caraeff said the site would host 30,000 music videos by the end of the year. To underscore the exclusive nature of the Web site, Vevo will also carry original programs by artists for their fans.”

Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog: Making eBooks “The Next Big Thing” — Some interesting comments in this article about trade e-books. For example, “Isn’t it interesting how we publishers value the intellectual property but consumers (like Michael Honig) always seem to focus on the cost of goods, or lack thereof? Perception is reality though and although Amazon generally offers significantly more than 10% off the print cover price, plenty of publishers don’t want to cheapen the IP and wind up pricing the ebook at or very close to the print edition. Btw, the current rule of thumb where I work is to price the DRM-free ebook bundle (including epub, mobi and PDF formats) at 80% of the print price. Is that the “right” price? Who knows, but we also experiment with even deeper discounts from time to time and it based on the results we still default to the 20%-off model.”

Apple Will “Invent” Music Streaming – Subscription Service – Reviews by PC Magazine — “What Lala offers Apple is the ability to maintain its focus on music “ownership,” while making said music available in the cloud. The service makes it possible for users to access purchased music online, meaning that music libraries aren’t tied to a single machine. You can stream your entire collection on any PC—and more importantly, mobile devices that have the Lala software installed. It’s not quite the all-you-can-eat subscription service offered by the likes of Rhapsody—but for those who have spent a lot of time and money compiling extensive electronic music collections, it may actually prove even better. ”

Jeff Bezos On Kindle & eBooks – GigaOM — In this interview, Jeff Bezos says that he doesn’t think it will be long before Amazon is selling more e-books that print books. He also says that “Amazon wants to offer ‘every book ever printed in every language, all available within 60 seconds.’” Looks like they plan to complete very nicely and directly with Google. Everyone else better gear up in a hurry.

Apple Buys Music Service Lala At A Steep Discount | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD — What does it mean? Apple is getting into the subscription music business to maintain its lead. Here are some options they might provide (taken from http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/12/how-apple-could-use-lala-for-s.php): “1) Tiered Pricing: With a Lala purchase, Apple could easily employ a tiered pricing model for a streaming service. Users would continue to purchase streams on a per-song basis while also having the option to download songs through the iTunes store. 2) Full Subscription: In contrast to this model, Apple could also follow MOG’s lead and launch a full subscription service with links to purchase Apple downloads. 3) Full Subscription with Download Limit: And finally, different still, there’s the opportunity to employ Microsoft’s Zune Pass model. The company could offer a $15 dollar per month subscription streaming music service with the option for users to download their ten favorite songs per month to keep.”

Hearst’s Skiff Joins a Cadre of E-Reader Subscription Options – Digits – WSJ — The author makes a good point here. Skiff is not unique in its plan to offer subscription-based content related to magazines or a specific device. It’s a crowded market and already served by other players who deliver lots of other content as well.

Newspaper Outsourcing — This is a nice presentation on how to manage newspaper organizations for the new millennium — what can be crowd sourced, outsourced, and managed in-house.

Too Much Joy» Blog Archive » My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement — A great post from a musician’s perspective on digital royalties for recording artists. Lots of insight here. The bottom line is that, moving forward, there has to be absolute and real-time transparency in royalties for artists and authors.

Containerless Education

Topics: OER and open content | Social networking and social media | Social learning | Learning Communities | Content Standards | Pedagogy

Big OER and Little OER ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes — Good definitions here. “Big OERs are institutionally generated ones that come through projects such as openlearn. Advantages = high reputation, good teaching quality, little reversioning required, easily located. Disadvantages = expensive, often not web native, reuse limited; Little OERs are the individually produced, low cost resources that those of us who mess about with blogs like to produce. Advantages = cheap, web (2) native, easily remixed and reused. Disadvantages = lowish production quality, reputation can be more difficult to ascertain, more difficult to locate.”

OpenCourseWare and the Future of Education | The Tech — From the article: “OCW is more than simply recording lectures and posting problem sets and exams. A dedicated staff is necessary to deal with publishing the various formats of media and keeping OCW updated and relevant. This sums to $4.1 million per year, although OCW has managed to cut about $500,000 from its budget in FY 2009. Since its creation, 22 percent of OCW’s expenditures have been covered by the Institute, 72 percent has been paid for through grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and 6 percent has been covered by donations, revenue, and other sources. Unfortunately, grant funding runs out in two years. With that in mind, while many are asking how OCW can be sustained, others are wondering if it should be at all.”

WikiHow Gets Pretty, And Hits 20 Million Monthly Visitors — The amount of 2nd-tier and 3rd-tied “educational” content continues to proliferate. as we did with Wikipedia, we will see this content begin to infiltrate our more formal education venues in the next 12-24 months.

Facebook Hits 100 Million US Users, Astonishing Growth in SE Asia | Penn Olson — The social networking site is still growing at an impressive rate and now boasts more that 100 million users in the U.S. with the dominant demographic being 19-34. Growth also booms worldwide with major inroads in S.E. Asia.

The Fischbowl: I Read (?) The News Today, Oh Boy — Here is an example of how the new media consortium for online newspapers and magazines is being reported on by educational technologists. As Karl Fisch writes, “More evidence that the way we interact with “text” is changing.” While I don;t think the business concept will necessarily save newspapers and magazines (at least not the publishers as we know them), I do think the technology being demoed is exactly what reading will become (is becoming) in education and for educational e-books.

Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » Reflections on On-line Educa Berlin — “Probably the biggest trend is the movement away from a focus on VLEs towards looking at the use of social software for learning. And, linked to that, is a growing realisation or concern about the gap between the way (not just) young people are using social software for communication, leisure, information seeking and learning and the way educational institutions are stumble trying to manage learning through the walled gardens of LMS systems and VLEs.” It is a growing trend and one that will eventually reshape the educational technology landscape. People want their content and learning with fewer container restrictions. Period.

Shifting Education | David Truss :: Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts — Nice post by David Truss on the stages educators go through as education moves to a digital reality — unshifted, shifting, and shifted. To the unshifted, he says, “Shift or retire… regardless of your age and number of years experience. We have the means to teach differently, now! It doesn’t start tomorrow, it starts today.”

I’m so Passé That I Don’t Know 95% of These Social Networking Sites – Social Networks – Gizmodo — A nice timeline of social networking along with approximate users associated with each. This was done several months ago, evidently, so user statistics for high-growth sites like Facebook are a bit off (350 million and rising).

Academic software for research papers | Mendeley — This is a faculty research collaboration portal driven via a desktop application. This will do well int he short term but has less viability long term because it is not completely in the cloud, and because it is too focused to survive the coming convergence of academic productivity/portal environments.

Learning and Content Distribution

Topics: LMS | Campus technology | Mobile technology and mobile learning | Apps | Augmented reality and social learning | Netbooks, tablets, and e-readers | Search

Why I Hate Ereaders, And Doubt They’ll Ever Hit the Mainstream – eReaders | Gizmodo — Some quotes from the article: “They’re impractical and expensive. It’s such a Sony trait, to reinvent the wheel when the current model is still going ‘round perfectly… . I have no beef with reading ebooks on a mobile phone or tablet, however. During September of this year, there were more ebooks added to Apple’s App Store than there were games, according to San Francisco-based analysts Flurry. There’s an obvious advantage to reading an ebook on an iPhone, as chances are you already own one. You don’t have to fork out several hundred dollars on a new device that just displays lines of e-ink. iPhones are devices which serve more than one purpose, and while some ereaders allow for music playback and even gaming, you’d never buy one just to play MP3s on. Same story with tablets… . Provided the cost of the ebooks doesn’t outweigh the cost of a paperback, it’s an extra bonus for anyone who owns one of these multi-purpose devices.”

Asus Eee Pad Tablet In The Works | Geeky Gadgets — More tablet goodness. From the article: “It looks like Asus are working on a tablet which will be called the Eee Pad, and will be a device with a 4 to 7 inch touchscreen display, and it will offer a range of tablet and MID functions.”

State of the Art – Barnes and Noble’s Nook Reader Fails to Live Up to Promises | NYTimes.com — We all wanted the Nook to be the next big thing so badly, we may have succumbed ot holiday hype, according to this article. “nfortunately, we, the salivating public, might be afflicted with a little holiday disease of our own: Sucker Syndrome. Every one of the Nook’s vaunted distinctions comes fraught with buzz kill footnotes. That “color touch screen,” for example, is actually just a horizontal strip beneath the regular Kindle-style gray screen. (In effect, it replaces the Kindle’s clicky thumb keyboard.) ”

Interead COOL-ER 3G e-reader announced, adds wireless to the mix | Engadget — COOL-ER is getting cooler (sorry, couldn’t resist). From the article: “Interead has big changes in store for next year, including the aforementioned WiFi and deals with AT&T for bandwidth and NewspaperDirect for access to over 1,300 newspapers and magazines.”

5 Higher Ed Tech Trends To Watch in 2010 — Campus Technology — The five trends listed in the article are: 1. More Interactive Classrooms; 2. More Information at Your Fingertips; 3. Mashed-Up Technologies; 4. Breaking Out of Technology Isolation; 5. Capabilities that Go Beyond 1:1. Numbers 3 and 5 warrant the most attention as we find students and instructors going beyond the traditional paths and containers for education, and as we see them bring more and more technology devices into the educational mix.

Survey suggests campus technology is underused — From the article: “Fewer than half of college students responding to a national survey said their professors are using instructional technology, and educators worry that the technology gap between faculty and students might hinder campus learning. The study also revealed a jump in the percentage of students who use technology to prepare for college classes. Eighty-one percent said they used computers, social networking, and other tools to study, marking an 18-point increase from 2008, according to CDW-G’s “21st Century Campus Report,” which was released this fall.” There is definitely a gap and it is increasing. This is one of the factors that could make universities increasingly irrelevant to students in coming years.

Amazon’s Kindle winning battle, but Adobe poised to win e-book war — This article points to Adobe’s strength in the overall e-book market. Adobe has long been a player in the distribution of digital textbooks and has recently announced renewed efforts to be a leader in this market. Adobe has provide server-side DRM support for PDF-based e-books and now supports ePub as well.

Apple Pitching Tablet to Publishing Industry; Spring Launch Expected | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD — I guess I can be fooled multiple times because I’m actually tagging/reporting this. The interesting part to me is not the tablet itself per se, but rather the proposed 30/70 split being pitched to publishers related to content. Obviously, the device would leverage the app store heavily.

The iPhone Finally Gets Live Video Streaming With Ustream Live Broadcaster — Now the iPhone has streaming video too. From the article: “The Ustream Live Broadcaster has just gone live in the App Store tonight and yes, it allows you to stream live video from the iPhone to the web. And yes, it even works over a 3G connection. And yes, it’s awesome. While one of the key features of the iPhone 3GS was video recording capabilities, that was limited to recordings that were captured on your device and could be uploaded to the web after they were done recording. With the Ustream Live Broadcaster, you can easily record videos right to the web, and allow others to watch them as they’re being recorded. These videos can also be archived so that people can watch them later, if they choose.”

Aluratek Libre eBook Reader PRO sports monochrome reflective LCD, $179 pricetag | Engadget — Just when you thought it was safe to get back int he water… Another e-reader! But wait, this is actually a fairly important release as it is not E-Ink-based but rather sports an LCD panel. From the article: “Extensively dubbed the “Libre eBook Reader PRO,” the unit uses an unnamed 5-inch monochrome reflective LCD panel, with 24 hours of continuous use off a battery charge. Not as great as E-Ink, but it should be plenty for most people, and the resultant $179 price is hard to knock. The Libre is ePUB and PDF compatible, and comes with a 2GB SD card — just the right sort of barebones-yet-functional we appreciate.”

Blog U.: Dreaming of EDU Apps – Technology and Learning | Inside Higher Ed — This is a great set of nominations for EDU apps. Kim points toward the iPod Touch or the iPhone, but these should be extended to Android and netbooks (Chrome_OS) as well.

If You Can Draw It on a Whiteboard, You Can Send It to a Kindle — This article discusses Luidia’s IWB solution that allows users to send IWB info to computers and now Kindle devices via standard formats such as BMP, JPG, or PDF. The YouTube video provides a nice overview and the article discusses the implications.

Living Stories — “The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment. The project was developed by Google in collaboration with two of the country’s leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritized on one URL. You can now quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load.”

IDC: Apple App Store to Top 300,000 Apps in 2010 — So says IDC. According to this article, however, “This estimate may yet prove conservative. In the past year, the App Store’s catalogue increased at a much faster pace, from 10,000 apps to more than 100,000 applications, according to Apple. Were the current rate of growth to continue, the App Store would cross 1 million applications in a year. So IDC forecasts a major deceleration in growth.”

Offline Gmail Becomes Standard Feature (But Still Uses Gears?) — Offline Gmail is out of beta and using Gears (in spite of earlier announcements of its imminent demise). “The company has already implemented its Gears plug-in on two other products in addition to Gmail: Google Reader and Google Docs. Meanwhile, other companies have also adopted the technology including online office suite Zoho and to-do list app Remember the Milk.”

Pandora Is Coming to Your Car | GigaOM — This is key for media subscription services — extending their reach to facilitate the daily lifestyle. “Net radio provider Pandora is preparing to move more aggressively into the automotive space, with deeper integration with car radios and controls on the horizon. During an early afternoon panel at the SF Music Tech Summit, chief technology officer Tom Conrad said the company’s mobile strategy will first hinge on a transitional phase in which its smartphone apps will be controlled from dashboard or steering-wheel interfaces, before dispensing with the smartphones altogether as the service is built into web-connected cars.”

Building the Google smartbook dream machine — Here is a good list of functionality that can make Android netbooks the killer device. The biggest items for me are multitouch screen, audio/video input channels/tools, and ubiquitous network capability (phone/WiFi). With these, Android-based netbooks will occupy a category all their own and make serious dents in botht he e-reader and notebook markets.

Google Launches Real-Time Search — Google has launched its real-time search and it definitely expands its appear. “Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web — for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone and Android for now).”

Google Goggles: Visually Search the World
— This is what I like to call augmented reality in the form of search. It also shows how our phones are increasingly becoming extended productivity tools — front-line tools for getting information and producing content. From the article: “How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google (Google Wave) will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device, and it adds context to your real-world surroundings.”

Amazon beefing up Kindle’s functionality for vision-impared users as B&N’s Nook stays silent — Engadget — “…From the article: “Amazon promises to release an audible menuing system for navigating the unit look-free. Amazon’s also prepping a new “super size” font, that doubles the current largest font in height and width. It all sounds great, but it also seems like a subtle dig at Barnes & Noble, whose brand new Nook reader is skipping out on text-to-speech (for this generation, anyway). Barnes & Noble claims that it’s due to the sub-par experience on “other devices,” but for now that means the Kindle might just be most accessible dedicated e-reader around — at least once this new software rolls out, supposedly by summer 2010.” The development and support effort are significant enough that Amazon seems to be taking the textbook market more seriously.

Intel sees rush to Netbook app store | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News — As further proof that netbooks occupy the niche between phones and notebooks, they are getting their own app store. Better yet, the store will come pre-installed on netbooks using Intel processors. This is an important step for netbooks in general and really opens them up to the developer network. For the devices to gain the kind of traction we envision them having, they will need to have app functionality that takes them beyong the typical OS and beyond the reach of Microsoft.

Nook Chases Kindle at Snail’s Pace: Rich Jaroslovsky (Update1) – Bloomberg.com — From the article: “But the Nook falls short in one critical area: speed. In just about every important function — opening a book, turning pages, and especially starting up — it lags behind its competitor. How slow is it on start-up? Achingly slow. Might-as-well- go-pour-yourself-a-cup-of-coffee slow. Maybe two cups. Amazon’s current-model Kindle 2 takes about three seconds from the moment you release the power button until you can start reading. On the Nook, it takes a minute and 50 seconds. ” It seems that the geeks are enthralled with the possibilities and the business guys are disappointed with some of the current reality. Probably because the business guys are doing the investment.

Barnes & Noble Nook Review – Nook review – Gizmodo — Well, it looks like the Nook has really started to arrive and we now have actual hands-on reviews. This reviewers opening paragraph is a fairly strong statement: “Do this now: Disregard all other ebook readers on the market besides Nook and Kindle. Unless you plan to get all of your books from back-alley torrents, or stick to self-published and out-of-copyright PDFs, you are going to need a reader with a good content-delivery system, one it connects to directly via wide-area network. And as long as you’re set on e-ink as your preferred means of digital reading—and it’s still the choice that’s easiest on the eyes and the battery—you’re going to need a reader that isn’t crapped up with gimmicks that supposedly compensate for the slow display.”

Novelties – Multiple Screens Built for Textbooks as E-Books – NYTimes.com — “Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., said that the enTourage device was part of the next generation of e-readers, which would be hybrids. ‘They won’t just be a netbook or a tablet or an e-reader,’ Ms. Epps said, ‘but a combination that will bend the categories consumers expect from electronics.’ E-textbooks have special requirements that can be addressed by hybrids like the eDGe, she explained. ‘The devices have to render graphics faithfully, ideally with color,” she said, “and students should have the ability to take extensive notes and share them,’ as well as have access to whatever interactive elements publishers provide. Until such features come to market, Ms. Epps said, ‘electronic book readers are great for reading novels, but they aren’t right for textbooks.’ The key thing to remember here is that netbooks already address many of the issues for e-textbooks and, on a related note, the success of e-textbooks is not dependent e-readers.

Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: Book Reflection: Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching — This is a nice review of a really cool book on using Moodle for language learning. What’s exciting about the book is that, Moodle aside, it seems to offer better “how-to” suggestions with regards to language activities and open technology. Another way to look at this book is as a roadmap for what learning solutions need to support for online language instruction.

Glide Seeks to Deliver a Richer OS — Right In Your Browser – GigaOM — The notion of the OS inside the browser has traction well beyond Google’s Chrome OS. From the article: “The new version 4.0 extends Glide’s focus on cross-platform, cross-device, browser-agnostic collaboration and applications. You can download it free as of Monday here, and run it as you would run a plug-in in almost any popular browser. Glide OS offers collaboration, productivity and syncing applications which you can use directly from its online desktop. You can use Glide’s own word processor, presentation app, groupware environment, email client, and much more, and Glide OS comes with 15GB of free online storage. You can upgrade storage from there for $4.95 in 20GB increments.”

Netbooks: What You Need to Know About the Next 6 Months – Netbook roadmap – Gizmodo — An informative article that outlines the hardware evolution horizon for netbooks in the coming year. More power, better video, next-generation chips.

Taiwan Plans to Roll out E-readers in Schools – PC World — So, Taiwan and China have agreed to promote the ePub standard, and Taiwan is also planning to use e-readers as part of its digital education plan. This is an interesting move and it will be interesting to track as netbook devices copntinue to evolve and some begin to feature touchscreen capabilities.

A New, Now Netbook You Can Actually Buy: PsiXpda — And here I thought there wouldn’t be a new tablet or e-book to hit my radar this week. I’ve tracked a new one every week since September 23, and now it’s the PsiXpada. Horrible name, a bit pricey, but a very nice product. The product has both touchscreen and keyboard, and is smaller than typical netbooks. It features bluetooth and wireless. I almost have to agree with the company’s Web site — this may be the ultimate “pocket” computer.

DIY

Topics: Content publishing tools | Wikis and blogs | Web usage trends | Personal learning tools | Technology mods and experimentation

Single-media schools, multimedia world – Dangerously Irrelevant — Scott McLeod comments on the recent report by the Global Information Industry Center that detailed current quantities of media consumption in the U.S. He points out, from the data, that print only occupies a small portion of data consumption for the average American yet it represents the primary method of instruction and information acquisition in education. McLeod asks, “How long are American schools going to get away with these kinds of expansive disconnects between how we consume information in schools and in our daily lives?”

Nielsen: TV Viewership Drops Slightly | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD — “If you make your money in the TV business and you want to sleep better at night, you can tell yourself that this is just a single report, and that a 0.4 percent drop isn’t that big of a deal. And you can note that people are still spending almost all their time in front of the TV–129 hours a month is 32 hours a week, which is basically a second job. But if we see more of these declines? That’s a problem, and it’s probably an inevitable one: It just stands to reason that the more time people spend logging on at Hulu or Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, the less time they’ll have for the boob tube.”

Next steps in considering Interactive Whiteboards for our (Higher Ed) classrooms | Emerging Internet Technologies for Education — This is part of a series on using Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) in Higher Education. The particular experiment referenced in this article uses open software, a Wii remote, an laptop, and an LCD projector (see http://knol.google.com/k/john-r-sowash/wiiboard/dslx39dvg5mc/2#). The concept is to create an IWB solution that is low cost yet provides the functionality required for Higher Ed instruction. The considerations for the work conducted by the author and his team are worth the read.

One Third of People Send Naked Pictures of Themselves Using Cellphones—What About You? – sexting – Gizmodo — “Here’s some data to think about before sending that next picture of yourself neekeed (aka sexting): 17% of the recipients forward the image to someone else. But how many people have actually sexted? A third of young adults have sexted at least once in their lives. Almost half of those saw it as a normal sex practice, while the rest thought it was a “serious problem” but did it anyway. You know, because if you do these things, you will eventually go blind and get pimples.” Enough said and sent. Ouch.

Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: DiigoNotes- “Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age” — Some notes from Miguel Guhlin on this report. It is a most interesting and informative read. “A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college in six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research. Almost all of the respondents turned to the same set of tried and true information resources in the initial stages of research, regardless of their information goals.”

10 Web trends to watch in 2010 – CNN.com — Many of these predictions seem kind of old to me. However, I’m completely on board with the emphasis on real-time services and content curation.