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 and 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 | E-publishing | Online newspapers and magazines | Reading

CHART OF THE DAY: Hulu’s Users Are Totally Hooked — “The number of people visiting Hulu remained relatively flat from March to November 2009, with 40 million monthly uniques on average, according to comScore. However, Hulu’s audience is becoming hooked on the service, watching more videos than ever.”

Copia Challenges Amazon, B&N and Sony: Unveils New E-Book Platform and 6 E-Readers — “Copia, a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia’s e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers, as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books.” Copia will also roll out an open platform for OEMs.

Eyes On With Ray Kurzweil’s Blio Ereader App – Blio | Gizmodo — With all the focus on hardware, it is easy to forget that software matters — particularly when we’re talking about e-books and e-content. This e-reader app is impressive and provides the ability to render e-books on multiple platforms. “Designed and conceptualized in part by futurist/engineer/inventor Ray Kurzweil, Blio diverges from traditional ereaders in a couple of ways: first, it’s software, intended to be loaded on a variety of devices, from tablets to iPhones to laptops; and second, it’s full-color, animated and interactive. It contains web content, video and audio embeds. It can render in a variety of ways, all of which are smoothly animated… Backed by Baker and Taylor, the world’s largest book distributor, Blio plans to launch with over a million titles; a couple hundred thousand will be newer/paid titles, while the rest will be public domain material.”

Dreaming Up Textbooks on an Apple Tablet – Digits | WSJ — A number of interesting things about the conceptual presentation in the CourseSmart video included in this article. More than anything, it is a mocked-up representation of an e-reader much like other enhanced e-book readers. Yes, it happens to be “modeled” on a tablet-type device, but the product is a Web app modified for a different screen size. So, when we look at this, we can take the tablet concept out of the picture and consider the merits of the product itself. Having said that, what this does point to is the power of a true Web-based tablet or netbook versus dedicated e-readers. The device that would support this Web product would also support lots of other user productivity tools.

Access your notes even after your textbook subscription expires ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes — Stephen Downes responds to CourseSmart’s announcement that it will develop an application for the new Apple tablet (to support publisher textbooks). “The idea of being required to study something I won’t even be able to read later (without paying a toll) is not only odd and disturbing to me, it is offensive.”

EBook Distributor OverDrive Adds New International Partners | paidContent — “But it is unclear whether those numbers actually translate into any kind of financial success. Taking a page from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), the company declines to reveal any details on subscriber numbers or revenues from either content partners or consumers.” The issue is getting enough content to be able to build revenue models. They may not be here today, but they will never appear without a critical mass of content. Smart move by Overdrive.

Reading on all platforms « Gardner Writes — Nice reflection from Gardner Campbell on e-book, literature, and reading. From the article: “Perhaps one day we’ll think about publishing media the way we think about cups, mugs, and stemware today: it all depends on the occasion, and some vessels are more apt for some libations than others.”

Op-Ed Contributor – There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen | NYTimes.com — Jonathan Galassi asks what an e-book really is and how it fits into the traditional editorial and publishing processes. I think his answer — it’s just another edition — works for trade publications, at least for now. As e-books become more media-enhanced and evolve into new forms of art, and as we consider reducing costs of some book types like textbooks, the definition will no longer hold up. We will need editors and publishers trained in and adept at creating electronic-first content that is read, listened to, and viewed in new formats.

Digital piracy hits the e-book industry | CNN.com — More on digital piracy in the e-book industry.

Containerless Education

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

Seb’s Open Research: The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era — Sebastian Paquet points to the growing availability of medium-quality content via YouTube that is better than incompetent teachers. Great evaluation.

Online schools find ready market in military – Personal finance- msnbc.com — The military is a huge customer in the e-learning business. In fact, many of the standards and formats we have today in the field are the direct result of the U.S. government and its commitment to provide continuing education to military personnel. The problem, according to this article, is that the e-learning education being provided is not always of a very high quality.

E-Learning Queen: New Directions and a New Decade for E-Learning: 12 Predictions – Susan Smith Nash always has good insights into the trends around e-learning. Her list of evolutions for 2010 is pragmatic, spot on, and worth checking out.

Ecto – Welcome! — “EctoLearning is a social, collaborative, online learning environment that directly addresses the needs of the modern learning environment by making the new communication skills and competencies for content creation and sharing central to the classroom experience. EctoLearning is also a full Learning Management System (LMS) with attendance tracking, grade book, and a sophisticated assessment engine including the use of rubrics based evaluations.”

iPods and educational applications have Minnesota students giddy about learning – TwinCities.com — We used to read about laptop programs in schools and now we have iPod Touch programs. The devices are popular with kids, are ”kid-sized” and focus on productivity.

How to Teach with Google Wave | The Chronicle of Higher Education — Overview of Ray Schroeder’s course taught with help from Google Wave. “Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his “Internet in American Life” course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a “wave” to discuss the impact of the Internet on energy sustainability.”

Lanny on Learning Technology: A little reality check — Lanny Arvan takes issue with the idea that someone might offer 9 hours credit for a 5-week course. I agree with him, but the bigger issue here is the whole notion of the credit hour and what it really measures.

Top News – Open courseware gains momentum — Will states really adopt open textbooks in the U.S.? “Texas State Representative Scott Hochberg thinks so. He sponsored a bill that provides for the adoption and use of open-source textbooks in the state, beginning Sept. 1, 2010, by creating a digital repository of textbook content that will be managed by the Texas Education Association. This move, he says, will save the state at least $250 million a year. ‘We were due to spend about $225 million to replace the grades six through 12 literature books in the state. We can buy the content for under $20 million,’ he said. ‘Someplace between $20 million and $225 million, there’s a cost savings.’” Hochberg said using open textbooks is not only cheaper, but also more efficient and faster when it comes time to purchase new editions.

Apple Product Announcement Scheduled in San Francisco Wednesday, Jan. 27 | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD — For all the naysayers, there will indeed be a major product announcement from Apple on January 27, and it will be the iTablet/iSlate device.

Blog U.: Irrelevant Facebook – Technology and Learning | Inside Higher Ed — Joshua Kim says Facebook is becoming increasingly irrelevant in his world of educational technology. From the article: “As I’ve started to use Twitter to connect with my learning technology community this network has started to grow and strengthen. As of now I follow 247 people/organizations on Twitter, and have 153 followers (you can find me here). Save for one or two people, all the people that I follow center around learning technology, social media, and innovation in higher education. The hashtags I follow (see this list for some great educational hashtags) are also essential for staying part of the conversation. And we all know how important Twitter has become in preparing for and participating in professional conferences.”

Drape’s Takes: Open — Darren Draper provides a nice, reflective summary of the debate on open education that took place last week in the blogosphere. This is a good place to start on the subject in case you missed the beginning of the movie.

Notes on Digitization in Higher Education « Higher Education Management Group — Keith Hampson writes: “The speed with which changes in the education field will unfold is difficult to predict. Nevertheless, there are already symptoms of changes on the periphery of higher education.” Among the changes he points to are: 1) an increase in online courses; 2) the rise of corporate universities; 3) K12 homeschooling and online schooling; 4) the growth of informal learning.

Strategy – Faculty – The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor | NYTimes.com — These are the realities of the time. “In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are.” The numbers aren’t going back up, either. The fact is that the teaching and the education game has changed and is evolving into something different. Stay tuned for the final version — we’ll be through that phase transition by 2020.

DiegoLeal.org: On the relevance of education — This is a great set of mini-interviews captured by Diego Leal at the Open Education Conference in 2009. He went around to a number of prominent thought leaders in open education and asked the following questions. First, is education relevant? Second: If so, how can we make it more relevant?

As Honor Students Multiply, Who Really Is One? ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes — I saw the original article in the NY Times — referenced in the title of this post — and had the same thought that Stephen Downes did. “The idea that some club designed to recognize achievement must inherently be exclusive seems wrongheaded to me.”

Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » A radical definition of Open Education — More on the discussion about open education, this time from Graham Attwell. This is a thoughtful piece with substantive references. I particularly like this assertion: “If Open Education is to mean anything, it has to address the question of social divisions including class, gender and race. I am unconvinced this can be done from inside the existing educational institutions, although of course is will need the support of those working in those organisations. Instead I think we need to use the power of the internet to provide opportunities for education and learning outside the present system and to embed those learning activities in wider communities than the present institutions address.”

The state of social learning and some thoughts for the future of L&D in 2010 — This is a great summary of social learning today, what it is, and the tools people use to accomplish tasks. The author also provides models of how social learning occurs within institutions and organizations.

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

Top News – New electronic devices could interest schools — I think e-readers are interesting, particularly for publishers and for schools looking to restrict electronic devices to e-books and actual digital copies of print textbooks. For everyone else, the tablet is the way to go. There will also be versions of this device available under $400.

Spring Design announces partnership with Borders, lowers price on Alex reader | Engadget –
Now Spring’s Alex e-reader is even more attractive at $40 less and with a Borders partnership. This is particularly good for Borders as it now has a better e-reader than Barnes and Noble. We’ll see if it can parlay this into sales quickly.

There Are Officially Too Damn Many Ebook Readers – ebook readers | Gizmodo — From the article: “There will soon be two kinds of happy ebook-reader owners. The people who paid a fair amount for a reputable ebook reader from one of the companies they already buy books from, and the people who spend like $50 on a no-name ebook reader that supports a lot of formats, who gets every book they can think of as a pirated copy over BitTorrent. Everyone else—both the buyers of tier-two ebook readers and the makers of them—are going to be screwed.”

Hanvon debuts new line of WISEreader e-book readers | Engadget — Here’s another e-reader company that will be pushing devices to a store/site near you in the future. Hanvon has “just introduced five new models in its WISEreader line. Those include the N500, N618, N628, N638, and N800, which all sport Vizplex e-ink displays that range in size form five to eight inches and, in all but one case (the N638), use an electromagnetic panel and pen for note-taking complete with handwriting recognition.”

Plastic Logic (Finally) Shows Off The Que, Its (Very Expensive) Kindle Competitor | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD — It costs $800, it lets you read and work on Office docs, and it is positioned as a “business device.” Hmmmm… Sounds like a netbook/tablet to me. It offers more functionality that the Kindle, etc., but is too high-priced to compete with them on their own turf. Moreover, other tablets have already appeared using the Android platform that will do this for a much lower price. And then there’s the little thing called the Apple tablet. All in all, I’d say Plastic Logic has a non-starter here. Oh, they’ll sell some product in the next twelve months through partnerships, etc., but they will get squeezed out of the market for being too much and too little.

ICD’s Tegra tablet officially dubbed the Vega, headed to T-Mobile UK | Engadget — From the article: “It’s been a long, strange trip for this particular tablet, but it looks like ICD’s once mysterious Tegra tablet has now finally found a home at T-Mobile UK, where it will soon be offered as the Vega. Somewhat interestingly, T-Mobile is now positioning this one as a tablet for the whole family, and says that the device is designed primarily to sit in the kitchen to let families keep watch on the household calendar and manage their schedules — although it’s also of course still capable of things like 1080p video playback, and just about everything else you’d expect from a 15-inch Android-based tablet.”

Mirasol shows prototype reader-like device playing back color video, might be headed for the Kindle | Engadget — This may be the future of screen technology for tablet and e-reader devices. “What’s interesting, though, is that this panel is not only color, but it can play back video when used with the right processor. In other words, a powerful enough Mirasol reader could double as a small tablet, and we imagine you could actually browse the web with some level of enjoyment. The demo we were shown was nothing short of stunning, and we were told that it could scale up to fit within 9 to 10-inch slate / tablet PCs.”

enTourage eDGe Dualbook On Sale in February For $490, Combines Ereader With Tablet – enTourage eDGe | Gizmodo — Okay, this is more like it. A dual-screen, dual-purpose e-reader under $500. From the review: “The dual-screen enTourage eDGe sounds more than decent, for anyone considering either an ereader, tablet PC or PMP. I like convergence when it actually works, and this Android job sounds like it works. The device has a 9.7-inch e-paper screen on the left, and a 10.1-inch LCD screen on the right. Wi-Fi is included for web browsing, or downloading ebooks, and a noise-cancelling microphone and 1.3-megapixel camera allows for video and audio recording, with audio files saved as MP3s.”

Microsoft CEO unveils new HP tablet | Reuters — Microsoft finally got around to showing off a new tablet with HP, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the much-hyped Courier. And, it looks like the delivery date will be mid-year. It’s touted as a PC mobile device and, while nice, has nothing to stem the tide of excitement about Apple’s impending announcement.

AT&T Will Sell 5 Android Phones — AT&T’s exclusive partnership with the iPhone will end in the middle of this year and the company is already beginning to stock its Android coffers to help it compete with Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile.

Tablet is the new book | Salon — The author gives a recap of current e-book affairs and then explores how the tablet (specifically, the Apple tablet), may affect the publishing/book industry. I agree with the promise of the title, although it is hard to say when we can expect the full form evolution to take place (in the next 5-10 years certainly). As the book becomes more than its former print self, it will be fascinating to see how we approach writing, editing, and reading.

Will E-Readers Help Spread Knowledge, Or Wall It Off? Here’s A Scorecard That We Can Use | paidContent – Upendra Shardanand, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Daylife, puts out a scorecard for measuring e-readers/e-books and the current batch comes up wanting against his system. The problem, using Shardanand’s own criteria, is that we continue thinking of e-books as simple re-presentations of print objects. Until that notion evolves, we will keep coming up with the same answers.

DASH: Sony Reveals Pocket Internet Device — It’s a “pocket Internet device” or, in other words, a tablet. It has a 7″ color touchscreen and is designed for surfing the Web and viewing content.

U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2 — A good set of mobile stats for the past year.

Hands-On With Entourage Netbook, E-reader Combo | Gadget Lab | Wired.com — One of the trends emerging from groups like Entourage and Microsoft-HP is the true dual screen device with an e-reader and a netbook. This looks promising and the sub-$500 price point is really nice.

The Google Phone Is Here: $180 on Contract, $530 Unlocked – google phone | Gizmodo — The announcement came and, while the phone is cool, it wasn’t the game-changer some had hoped for.

Nexus One previewed with Flash 10.1 beta: careful what you wish for (video) | Engadget — This is a great introduction to the work being down at Adobe to get the new Flash player functioning on the Android OS. There are many possibilities here for educational content.

Nexus One vs Droid vs iPhone [Comparison Chart] — Now that Google’s Nexus One is out, we can start comparing it to other market leaders. From the article: “Bill Shrink has put together a handy comparison chart that breaks the devices down (including Palm Pre too) on all key features. There are a few obvious differences — the iPhone still lacks multitasking while the Android devices have fewer apps — but for the most part, the devices are fairly similar on paper.”

Android or iPhone? Wrong Question « abovethecrowd.com — The point of this article is that the iPhone is a market-opening product while Android is a market-growing product due to its openness and generic applicability. The iPhone is singular and Android phones will be ubiquitous.

Mobile Ad Impressions On Android Double Since October — Android marches on. “Mobile ad network AdMob has just released its latest stats tracking the rise of Android, and it’s clear that Google’s mobile platform is quickly gaining steam. AdMob writes that between October and December, the number of ad requests worldwide from Android devices increased a whopping 97% to over 1 billion ad requests. In other words, the number of requests from Android devices doubled in just two months.”

Spring Design Alex hands-on | Engadget Galleries — It’s a Nook! No, wait, it’s not. It’s Spring Design’s dual-screen e-reader. Also runs Android. Has announced partnership with Google Books. The CES presentation should be interesting.

Spring Design Alex Android Ereader Hands On: Shut Up, Nook – Spring Design Alex | Gizmodo — The gloves are off in this review of the Spring Design Alex e-reader and the comparisons between it and the Nook. “The Spring Design Alex, the other dual-screen Android ereader, is what I had hoped the Nook would be: an ereader for hardware nerds. The hardware is thin to the point that you worry it might snap—a common thread in ereader design, actually—but it feels about as sturdy as a Kindle. The screen is standard matte E Ink, which did a good enough job at blotting out the harsh lighting in the conference center. The bottom screen is a bit taller than the Nook’s, giving the whole device a gangly look. But it’s not the screens that matter, it’s what’s on them: That is to say, whatever you want. The Nook’s screens are like content ghettos, with the top intended just for ebooks, and the bottom for navigation. On the Alex, there’s effectively no barrier.”

Spring Design’s E-Reader To Access Google Books | paidContent — From the article: “The Alex e-reader is getting some content thanks to Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Just ahead of CES, parent company Spring Design has partnered with Google so that users of its device will be able to directly access more than one million public domain e-books via Google Books. Several other e-reader manufacturers boast similar agreements. Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), for instance, both offer access to Google’s public domain books via their respective e-book stores.”

Microsoft to reveal HP built Courier slate tomorrow? | Engadget — Looks like we’ll get a look at the Microsoft-HP tablet tomorrow. They will have to present lots of wow with the hyped anticipation of the Apple tablet later this month.

Blog U.: iSlate / iTunesU / Higher Ed | Technology and Learning | Inside Higher Ed — Joshua Kink gives his take on why the iSlate, Apple tablet, will make a big difference in Higher Education.

Interead expands COOL-ER e-reader line-up, announces additional content | Engadget — Some pre-CES news from Interead on their COLL-ER e-readers. “Interead already let out some early word about its COOL-ER 3G e-book reader with a little help from AT&T, but it’s now made things doubly official, and also take the opportunity to announce a new WiFi-equipped COOL-ER Connect model. While details on it are still a bit light, the reader will apparently boast a touchscreen of some sort, weigh just 5.8 ounces, and be available sometime this Spring (the COOL-ER 3G will follow in “mid-2010″). What’s more, Interead has also now announced a new range of content offerings for its e-book readers, including the Coolermatic application, which will give users access to more than 1,400 newspapers, along with “select websites,” and even Twitter feeds (no posting though, it seems).”

Skiff Reader is largest yet, will be hitting a Sprint Store near you | Engadget — From the article: “Amazon’s Kindle DX may be big, but it’s not the biggest any more. The Skiff Reader is here to take that crown — despite being a mere quarter inch thick. It packs a 1600 x 1200 11.5-inch touchscreen (finger and stylus) that, as you can see from the above screenshot, should do much better justice to magazine and newspaper layouts than we’ve yet seen from an e-ink-based reader. That’s exactly the sort of advance Hearst was promising when it first mentioned the device last month. Skiff includes 4GB of on-board storage (just over 3GB is available for content) with SD card expansion, and there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack for tunes and, hopefully, text-to-speech. Content can be side-loaded over a mini USB jack or delivered via WiFi but, more importantly, 3G is also on offer thanks to Sprint.”

Mobile Apps: The Ultimate Threat to Search Engines? | GigaOM — We search when we want to find something on the Internet. However, if we already know what we want, we go directly to the source. Seem like a no-brainer, right? Well, the latter is a bit of what’s happening with apps — users are “finding” things they want in a context outside of traditional search and then going to purchase those things form the app. This is a potential disruption to traditional advertising revenue related to big search engines.

Freescale’s $199 Smartbook Tablet Design Means Tablets For Everyone (Later This Year) – Freescale smartbook | Gizmodo — “Freescsale, supplier of the chip that powers the Kindle as well as about 70% of the ebook market, has just developed a 7-inch tablet reference design that will basically be the genesis of many tablets starting 2010. And it’s $199.” Significant in this tablet design is the preference for browser-based activity. This would favor Google’s Chrome_OS strategy.

Design – Apple’s Eagerly Anticipated Tablet Computer Could Have Big Impact on Design World | NYTimes.com — This is a good discussion of the promise of Apple’s tablet device, with an emphasis on product design. However, one of the key statements about Apple is that the company has a way of getting us to really love its products as opposed to simply liking them. From the article: “Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.”

The Apple tablet and its potential – Marc Flores – Digitalia | True/Slant — The tablet is about convergence, and its potential goes beyond mere entertainment. From the article: “We spend so much time talking about entertainment, media and the Internet that it’s easy to forget about business and education. A few days ago, I was speaking with Rosa Golijan of Gizmodo and she mentioned the idea of getting textbooks on a tablet. Imagine that! Instead of purchasing heavy and enormous paper books, we could get them digitally onto a tablet. Textbooks could potentially become cheaper this way since there is no paper or printing necessary, and a “rental” option could be considered: you pay for your textbook at the beginning of the semester, and like renting a movie on iTunes, it expires after a certain amount of time. When the quarter or semester is over, your textbook vanishes from your tablet. This is also good news for the environment: books and subsequent editions and updates can easily be made electronically.”

Google Tablet: Google and HTC To Launch Apple iSlate Rival [RUMOR] — This isn’t surprising news. What it points to, more than anything, is the seriousness of tablet development in general and the sizable market this is likely to be.

How Will We Teach? | NBC Dallas-Fort Worth — This is a video looking at how schools might change because of legislation in Texas that allows school districts to choose how they spend their money on textbook materials — allowing them to spend textbook funds on e-readers and/or laptops. The interesting quote form the clip is this: “The challenge will be to identify viable careers for the future as opposed to focusing on jobs from the past.”

Google Nexus: Not Enough to Beat Apple iPhone? | ABC News — The value of this article is in the assessment of Apple’s product strategy and how the Cupertino company has learned from its various product experiences. One of the keys, mentioned by the author, is the concept of perpetual innovation.

DIY

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

Ford radically reinterprets cabin tech interface | CES 2010 | CNET — I don’t know if we need all of this stuff while we’re driving, but it sure makes me think about buying a new Ford! Seriously, great UI upgrade, media integration, and it even has Twitter read back.

It’s 2010—Who Listens to Five Hours of Radio Per Day? – data consumption | Gizmodo — No wonder I’m so tired all the time.

RIM’s BlackBerry Presenter makes mobile PowerPoint all too sexy | Engadget — This is something I’ve certainly been waiting for — a device that might lets me utilize the full power of my BlackBerry. I’m talking about “the new BlackBerry Presenter, a slick little module measuring 86 x 60 x 23mm that connects to your compatible handset wirelessly and lets you beam up a PowerPoint preso via VGA or S-Video connection. As you mesmerize your crowd with the 24 supported animations and 55 transition styles, you can read your notes right from the comfort of your BlackBerry’s display, controlling the whole show without a single laptop in sight.”

Skype to offer video service on LG, Panasonic TVs | Reuters — First we have Cisco and Polycom moving video conferencing into the home with a new product, and now Skype is partnering with LG to bring its service to your living room TV.

Cisco, IBM tackle home video conferencing | The Register — “Cisco and IBM are expected to introduce home video conferencing services this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. On Monday, IBM and Polycom said they have expanded their partnership from selling pricey corporate video conferencing wares to introducing new services targeting consumers. The service will rival yet-to-be-announced consumer market telepresence products from Cisco, which are also expected to be unveiled at CES.” I don’t guess it matters whether we really need this or not, just whether we think we do or whether Cisco and IBM can sell it to us. Still, I do think this is indicative of an increasingly distributed world that is connected by technology.

Internet Explorer losing users as other browsers set share records | Engadget — From the article: “In the last quarter, Chrome, Safari and Opera all set new personal bests for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent respectively. This period marks the first time Chrome has pipped Safari to third spot, while their collective prosperity comes at the expense of IE, which continues to hemorrhage users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month. Microsoft’s 62.7 percent slice might still look mighty, but projections from Net Applications suggest it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of this year.”

WordPress Android App Coming Soon [RUMOR] — It’s nice to see that WordPress is continuing to expand its connectivity to all major device platforms. In addition to the iPhone and Blackberry, there will soon be a mobile version for Android.

Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010 — As far as predictions go, I can’t really disagree with any of these. I think the tablet, Android, and Chrome_OS will have the biggest immediate impact on education.