Lee LeFever, over at commoncraft, does us a great service--value added. He has created a series of very short, fast-paced, informative little videos that play in your browser. The videos he has produced in the commoncraft show explain in plain English, as he says, various Web 2.0 concepts: social bookmarking, RSS, wikis, and social networking. The best part? He freely shares his creations to help us all and welcomes our including them on our blogs. They all use a common presentation style that is fun and informative. Here's his movie, Social Bookmarking in Plain English. Check out the other great movies. Thanks Lee, for sharing!

Click To Play

Here is a collection of "Best Online Documentaries" which is sub-titled "A comprehensive list of documentaries, to be viewed online for free." To date, 659 documentaries are available at the site in the following categories:

• Anthropology
• Biographies
• Business
• Environment
• Foreign
• (Geo)Politics
• Health
• History
• Lifestyle/Society
• Mystery
• Religion
• Science
• Technology/Future

I have glanced through several of these and am extremely impressed with what is offered. Explore and enjoy.

Also, for your personal enjoyment, inspiration, and learning, I encourage you to subscribe to "TED: Ideas worth spreading", if you are not already aware of this collection of "inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers." The acronym stands for "Technology, Entertainment, and Design." You can explore this rich resource by searching by theme, speaker, title of the talk presented, most emailed, most discussed, etc.. I love their website. When you scroll over an image (on the site, not the picture below) information about that presentation appears. Very nicely done!

I have been listening to TED for some time and find them thought-provoking, inspiring, and just amazing! If you see me on a plane, undoubtedly, you will see me watching a TED presentation or four or five. You can subscribe to them at the iTunes store by going to this link* at iTunes.

Both of these resources can inspire living, learning, and teaching. Celebrate your work in 2008!

*iTunes must be installed on your computer for the link to work.

Wow! I can't believe that I haven't posted in so long on this, my professional blog--not that I haven't been doing a tremendous amount of writing in other places because of my passionate stance in this past election cycle. I try to keep my blog free of partisan politics*, which is very difficult for me to do because of the intensity of my deeply-held political beliefs and my broadening concerns about the future of our nation and the world we are leaving our children.

Additionally, I have been busier in the past few months traveling and presenting to audiences all around the world than I ever anticipated I would be. In fact, I just totaled it up. In the past 7 weeks alone, I've flown over 50,000 miles and worked in four countries with students, parents, and educators from four continents.

Hopefully, with a bit of a slower travel schedule in December, I can catch up on some other things that are important to me, including blogging here as well as working on several recording projects in which I am involved.

In the meantime, I want to share a video I find very moving.

As you watch it, keep in mind that the "Generation We" depicted in this short needs the progressive guidance and wisdom our best educators can offer them.

• We, the educators, need to be front and center in facilitating the development of a better future for our youth, the hope of a better tomorrow.
• We, the educators, need to shape and fashion an educational setting that speaks to the deepest part of who we are inclusively as an American people, what we as a people cherish in our souls, and what we as educators fundamentally believe is sound educational practice for the children entrusted to our care.
• We, the educators, need to aggressively re-evaluate and re-invent our instructional practice.
• We, the educators, need to offer the youth of our nation the very best job performance we can breathe our life breath into in this moment.

Never, in my lifetime, has America needed more what we, the educators of this land, can rise up to provide. Never have we needed to be more politically and civically active, more socially active and responsible, more attentive and inclusive, more participatory in the shaping of our communities and our nation's future.

This is an historic moment. This is the time for metamorphosis!

This is a call to our destiny!

*Not to be confused with non-partisan policy positions such as those espoused by NCLB!

Because you are here!

I talk about this a lot in my presentations: empowering children to make the world a better place because of their school work. The internet affords each of us, adults and children, that very capacity. It affords us as educators the capacity to empower children to create content in school that literally makes the world a better place. In its purest forms, this is such a simple process.

I just came across this project by a young man, Matt Harding, and his girl friend, Melissa Nixon. They just travelled the world with a video camera dancing with people, mostly children, and set it to Praan, by Garry Schyman, who set to music an adaptation of the poem below, Stream of Life, by Rabindranath Tagore. They recruited vocalist Palbasha Siddique from YouTube to sing the piece for the video.

This project is brilliant, from the way it was conceived to the way it was executed. Matt connects to and shares the joyous rhythm of life that has pulsed through all of time to unite us into one humanity. To see his finished project is to just want to stand up and start dancing with them–everyone, everywhere. What a joyous and celebratory journey made possible by a simple idea to create a new kind of music video that brings people, the world over, together in harmony through social media.

Watch the video, and then check out the next video of Matt talking about how they did this.

Brilliant! Joyous!!

In the video below, Matt talks about the project.

The lyrics, which are adapted from a Rabindranath Tagore poem, are also very significant in understanding the full scope of Harding's vision. The poet describes an epiphany in which he sees all of existence, from the natural world around him to the entire history of humanity, dancing with the same blood - the same stream of life. Thus in Harding's video we are all tied by this unseen energy, personified in dance, and illuminated by the joy that surrounds us as we watch. In many ways Facebook, YouTube and the rest of the Internet have improved our access to the stream, but it is up to us to follow Harding and continue to make art that ties humanity together.

[From Obtusity: The Life-Throb of Ages: Garry Schyman "Praan"]

The photo below was shot by Tony Vincent when I was working in AZ a couple of weeks ago. I was demonstrating the use of Ustream.tv to this group of administrators. Tony, the master of handheld computing, got out his iPhone, launched the Ustream.tv app on his phone, and found the channel I was broadcasting in real time. I was unaware that Ustream had just released this app  so you can watch live streams on your iPhone. Amazing!

Tony then shot this picture with one hand while holding his iPhone with the other. So, that's me, live, in the distance, and then being streamed on his iPhone in the foreground. Regrettable that my computer's iSight camera was pointing directly at my stomach at the time of the shot! :o) You will also notice that I had another USB camera attached to my computer and facing the audience. I was broadcasting a picture in a picture, which is shown, at an angle, in the bottom left corner of the iPhone's stream in the photo. The text chat from those watching is shown at the bottom of the iPhone's Ustream window.

You have to wonder where all of this is ultimately going?

This short article, from makeuseof, gives 10 great YouTube URL tricks. I've posted before about one of them but had no idea you could do all of these things with a YouTube URL. Check out the above link for the details on how to:

1. View high quality videos
2. Embed Higher Quality Videos
3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
4. Hide the search box
5. Embed only a part of Video
6. Autoplay an embedded video
7. Loop an embedded video
8. Disable Related Videos
9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
10. Download Video

Nice!

Warning Label: This post condenses a lot of thinking into a few words. It's a tad political but addresses some big issues.

I have long lamented the death of liberal arts education. I have even begun to wonder if the liberal arts could exist in a world inundated with terabytes of data overload heaped high in a technological nano second. In the world I see forming before me, the human being, the well being of which should matter most to all of us, can hardly begin to construct significant meaningfulness, can not build real information from all of the data, to address really significant people problems. We are people, not data. We are humans, not numbers.

Our nation seems to have become powerless to determine our own destiny as people, as human beings. The politicians, the public relations firms, the entertainment industry, the media, and others sway our attention and attempt to build some artifice of tolerable consensus while the unthinkable has been happening all around us. We live in the fog of "freedom of choice," but having the most choice about the things that matter the least while ignoring all of the elephants in the room.

I've seen the media, trying to find its way in the newly emerging social networks that appear to be abandoning traditional media forms, treating everyone as the professional expert, giving the uninformed their 15 seconds of fame. And, I see over and over, that most Americans lack the reasoning skills, the knowledge of or even access to facts, the depth of curiosity, the transformational flexibility of thought, the commitment to the common good to make a meaningful contribution.

We have become overwhelmed and stupefied, incapable of recognizing, celebrating, creating, and sharing beauty in all the multifaceted forms beauty can take. Our K-12 education system, more and more narrowly focused on less and less, is producing a product that is perhaps more easily governed, but can not govern, problem solve, or create. This education policy which places increasing emphasis on outsourcing education to private industry, is, in the long term, absolutely unsustainable. And the market place, as we have so explicitly seen in the last 18 months, is completely incapable of handling matters critically related to our common good as a nation. What if Social Security had been privatized before the crash of Wall Street? Do we want to place public education in the hands of for profit corporate America?

This is the heart of the matter for me: the process of creating--creating beauty. It is action. It is imagination. It is valued. It is liberal arts education.

I marvel that, in a time when we have the affordable technological capacity to create virtually anything we can imagine in our minds, our minds, detached from our hearts, have lost the capacity to imagine anything worthy of creation. This is the tragedy of an education system, once the envy of the world, that is focused solely on the memorization of a minimum body of information detached from the reality of the significant issues facing our world and the world our children will adopt.

I read many education blogs. We are all guilty of pumping out megabytes of bandwidth about what is broken in our field.

Enough already.

It is time to begin imagining what can be, what is now possible. This is the hard intellectual and creative work on which we must focus our insight, our talent, our passion, our imagination, our expertise, our collaborations, and our deepest convictions about the common good.

I think educators needed to vent our frustrations. But that time is done.

Bennington president Liz Coleman's February, 2009, TED presentation, a call for reform of higher education, is, for my mind and heart, refreshing and invigorating. She speaks brilliantly, for those who have an ear to listen, about transforming education into action-oriented artistic expression focused on the common good. She uses carefully chosen vocabulary and provokes thought designed for action. This isn't CNN: You can't just hear her and "get it." You must think carefully about what she is saying. Her words are as weighty as her message. The presentation is below. Here are just a few ideas from her 20 minute presentation about Bennington's action plan:

... The more powerful our reach, the more important the question: about what. ...

The continuum of thought and action are [the new liberal arts] life's blood, knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential. [Experts in the field will join the faculty] in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good. Students in turn continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly. ...

The most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil, but between competing goods. This discovery is transforming. It undercuts self-righteousness, radically alters the tone and character of controversy and enriches dramatically the possibilities for finding common ground. Ideology, zealotry, unsubstantiated opinion simply won't do. This is a political education to be sure, but it is a politics of principle not of partisanship. ...

We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion, and boldness of our students, faculty, and staff on developing strategies for acting on the most critical challenges of our time. ...

The glacial silence we have experienced in the face of the shredding of the constitution, the unraveling of our public institutions, and the deterioration of our infrastructure is not limited to the universities. We, the people, have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to our doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance beyond waiting another four years. We persist also in being sidelined by the idea of the expert as the only ones capable of coming up with answers despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators. ...

[We need those who pursue a very highly defined area of inquiry, but...] This single-mindedness will not yield the flexibilities of mind, the multiplicity of perspectives, the capacities for collaboration and innovation this country needs. ...

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed. Well, you have two things. You have a mind and you have other people. Start with those and change the world.

Her TED talk:

For some time now, I've been perplexed about how to get a quality video that plays in the Flash media player. Most of the encoded videos I see playing in a Flash player are so heavily compressed, they look, well, quiet frankly, just awful. I know YouTube is encoding more and more of their video, which plays in their Flash player, using the H.264 codec from Apple. Those videos look awesome as the H.264 codec produces a high quality visual result with a significant reduction in file size. But how are they doing it?

After dabbling with this issue for some time, I have stumbled upon a solution. It might not be the "correct" way, but I have discovered a compression process that works. If you have a better solution, do share!

Compression Overview
Video files are large: huge, in fact. The original example file I will be using in this post was 403 megabytes for a 1 minute and 45 second video at a size of 820 pixels wide and 550 pixels tall. (This file was already compressed using H.264 when I exported it from a much larger HD movie I had created from 150 of my photographs.) Therefore, we need to compress movie files so they can be played over the internet. When you export a video file, you choose how the video file will be compressed. Compression can become a complicated process really fast because each compression option typically has numerous different parameters.

Perhaps the most important choice is the first one: which type of compression (called a codec--which stands for compress/decompress) you will use. The codec is the way the video is compressed before you upload it to the internet server (compress) and the way you decompress it to play it on the end user's computer (decompress). When a video will not play on your machine, odds are high that your video player (QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer) does not have the same codec on your machine the movie was compressed in and therefore can not decompress the file so it will play on your machine.

Player Overview
When an end user plays a video, the computer uses a media player application to decompress the video file so you can watch it. Macs typically use QuickTime. Windows typically uses Windows Media Player or QuickTime, which also works on a Windows machine. When playing a video file from internet, the browser often uses one of these players, often within a browser window, to play the movie file.

Perhaps because Internet Explorer was so issue riddled for so many years, causing QuickTime movies to fail to play in the Internet Explorer browser, many people turned to the Flash player, which works fine on Windows and on Macs. YouTube videos, for example, play through the Flash player to maximize browser compatibility. The only problem with the Flash player is that the codecs typically used for flash movies compress the video so much they create very poor playback quality.

Compression Codecs
Two of the standard codecs used for movies played through a flash player are On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark. These codecs shrink the file down significantly! But the problem is they look, well, "compressed." You can see very noticeable "compression artifacts." To my eye, On2 VP6 creates fewer compression artifacts than Sorenson Spark. But both are just unacceptable to me.

The H.264 codec, created by Apple Inc. produces the most natural video image of any codec I've ever seen. Typically, when you have great video quality, the file size is huge. But, amazingly, the H.264 codec gives both glorious video quality and small file sizes. This has rapidly made the H.264 codec very, very popular. YouTube, for example, has started using the H.264 codec for its high quality videos.

Comparison of Codec's Video Quality and File Sizes
In the images below, you can see a comparison of the image quality and the file sizes created by the H.264 codec, the On2 VP6 codec, and the Sorenson Spark codec. The comparisons are all based on an original movie that was 820 pixels wide and 550 pixels tall even though the pictures are considerably smaller.

All of these examples were exported with a data rate of 1,200 kbytes per second, which is another parameter that has a huge impact on video quality. A data rate of 1,200 kbytes per second is insanely high for the web but produces much higher video quality. (The higher the data rate, the more bandwidth playing a single movie file will consume. Web masters typically try to conserve bandwidth as it costs them money.)

You can click on any picture to see the larger image thus seeing the compression artifacts more clearly. Notice, in example one, the QuickTime .mov file compressed with the H.264 codec is by the far the clearest with clean, crisp black borders around the individual pictures in the movie. However it is by far the largest file size!

The Flash flv file, in example two, compressed with the On2 VP6 codec is drastically smaller. But, when you click on the image to see the full size version, you will see that the black borders framing the pictures are noticeably jagged and the image loses detail.

The Flash flv file, in example three, compressed with the Sorenson codec is slightly larger than the On2 VP6 codec but is still drastically smaller than the H.264 codec result. But, when you click on the image to see the full size version, you will see that, not only are the black borders framing the pictures noticeably jagged, but the area around the cactus in the bottom right is heavily pixilated (boxy), the child's face lacks detail, and the image has become blurry.

Again, these issues are not very noticeable until you look at the images full size, in the size the movie file actually will play in the browser. So, in my mind, the question has always been, "How do I get the pristine visual clarity of the H.264 codec into an flv file format that the Flash player can play in any browser with the fewest issues?!" The answer is below!

The Solution
I took the original QuickTime .mov file compressed with the H.264 codec and exported it as an mp4 file, yet another file format, using the H.264 codec. (If I had only known this little trick when I created the original movie file of the 150 photographs, I could have created the original as an mp4 file using the H.264 codec instead of a .mov file format. Thus, I would have avoided recompressing the file and probably would have acheived even greater visual detail!)

The mp4 file format is considerably smaller than the .mov file format. And since it too can be compressed using the H.264 codec, you get excellent visual quality.

And here's the amazing part. To get the .mp4 file format to play through a flash player, it must have an .flv file extension. All I had to do was replace the .mp4 file extension with the .flv file extension, and, amazingly it now plays in the flash player! But best of all, it is now the smallest file size of all: only 16.1 megabytes!

Keep in mind, as you watch the video below, that the file is actually twice this size. It was designed for a larger window size (820 pixels wide) that will not fit in this blog's post area (about 500 pixels wide). So you are seeing it much smaller than it was intended to be seen.

In Darren's comment, posted to Prepare to Geek Out , he asked what flash player I was using to play the video in that post. Well, to answer his question requires a whole post (probably deserves more than one!).

Quick Answer
The JW FLV Player which can be found at longtailvideo.com.

Things I like about the JW FLV player:

• You can purchase a license (which I have done) or use the free, non-commercial, creative commons version of the player, which has restrictions.
• You can skin the player to have a particular look and feel.
• You can include plugins that add additional functionality, like the link or embed code at the end of the video, which they call the Viral Plugin.
• You have several monetization options, which really don't apply to me, but others may find of value.
• You have a web-based setup wizard that allows you to configure the code you will place on your site.
• Site implementation is rather straight forward.
• You can embed metadata into your player for each implementation of video on your site.
• If you want to dig deeper into web video compression, embedding, streaming, and the javascript API, they offer some really good tutorials. (Just noticed these!)

Things that tend to go sideways for me about the JW FLV player:

• The web-based setup wizard gets quirky for me by not showing the preview in the setup wizard window when I use a skin. At first I thought the skin was just not working, but it was. The preview in the setup wizard window was all that wasn't working.
• The setup wizard offers two types of code for your blog: javascript based code and an embed code. For some reason, (lack of sleep?) I had the hardest time figuring out how to get from one to the other. It isn't hard at all. I just missed the obvious, I guess.

Another Option
However, my favorite option for a flash player is SlideShowPro. SlideShowPro is unbelievably powerful and so totally slick! It can be vastly more than just a flash player you embed on your site with content. You also have other purchase options and can, for little money, purchase SlideShowPro Director, which is a complete and incredibly powerful content management system for photos and video. But with all of this power, comes a bit of a learning curve.

I've been playing with (learning) SlideShowPro on my personal site for my online photo collection, which contains over 10,000 photos, all managed through Adobe's Lightroom 2 using SlideShowPro's Export plugin to upload the photos into SlideShowPro Director and using SlideShow Pro for Adobe Lightroom and SlideShowPro for Flash to create the actual slideshow itself that then links to the content in SlideShow Pro Director. I've been dabbling with it on and off now (more off than on really) for about a year. I'm just now getting to the point where I think "I get it."

Here's a brief example of my workflow:

• Shoot photos and import them into Lightroom 2 for tagging, touchup, and organization (Or make videos and upload them to SlideShow Pro Director)
• Arrange the photos into collections (albums and galleries) in Lightroom 2
• Export the albums directly out of Lightroom 2 at full size into SlideShowPro Director (You don't have to use full size, but this has its rewards!)
• Create a flash based slideshow in Lightroom 2, using the SlideShowPro for Lightroom plugin, or...
• Create a flash based slideshow in the Flash application itself using SlideShowPro's Flash component
• Embed the flash player on your site.

Using the above workflow, the flash player can be linked to the media RSS feed from any SlideShow Pro Director album or gallery of albums. (I frequently use the exact same flv player over and over again but linked to a different content RSS feed.) As you update the contents in the album or gallery in SlideShowPro's Director, it automatically updates the content that is played in the player! And, with the options I implemented, every time an end user hits my photos in full screen mode, SlideShow Pro Director checks out their screen size and then creates images from the full size images on the server that are the exact size of their monitor--no compression artifacts and no pixilated upsampling. Total sweetness! SlideShow Pro Director is a very, very powerful content management system: smart albums based on EXIF meta data, tags, managing image focal points, etc.

The flash player you create in Lightroom or in the Flash application has numerous customizable features and looks totally professional. In fact, if you know a lot more than I do, you can dig into the bowels of the Flash and Director API and create whatever you can imagine. And, you have the ability to intermix video and photos. The photos can pan and zoom. I could go on and on about this series of products.

Rarely do I actually recommend a product, but I must say that I highly recommend SlideShowPro's entire family of products. They are affordably priced and very powerful. Installing it on my server was very straight forward. (You can also have them host your content for you for a recurring fee.) And they have had excellent support for me when I had questions. I've even had email exchanges with the owner of the company to solve a problem or make some feature requests. These guys really are listening!

But there is an issue... It took me some time, a good bit of time, actually, to get my head around how the SlideShowPro product workflow would unfold for me in a practical application on my personal website with all of my photos. As I didn't use the product consistently and have zero knowledge of Flash, the learning curve felt intense to me. But, let me assure you, for me, it was absolutely worth it! I really think I should have just hit it hard for a few days until "I got it" rather than dabbling a little here and a little there. Now, they have a very nice collection of excellent video tutorials that make understanding the process much more obvious!

Which Option to Choose?
For an occasional video embed, probably the JW FLV player would be the best option. It's less complex and more straight forward. But if you want to deliver instructional content on a regular basis, I would suggest a very close look at the SlideShowPro product line for video and photo content management. I can envision this being used to deliver online staff development in a school district. I think that even as a classroom teacher, I would be all over SlideShowPro.

So, Darren, with the awesomeness you do with your math students, if you're looking for a routine video management system for their math instruction, to upload your classroom interactive whiteboard instructional videos as well as your movies that bring math to life, I'd look seriously at SlideShowPro. Check out their introductory video at this link and imagine that being the digital hub for your math class!

I am convinced that the iPhone 3Gs is impacting the world of online video. In the last 6 months YouTube reported a 1700% increase in video uploads to the site via mobile devices. When the iPhone 3Gs was released, uploads began increasing 400% per day! And why not? It's insanely easy to capture, edit, and upload on the device!

From the YouTube blog:

This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows your videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through your social networks. It takes just a minute to connect your YouTube account to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts. Complete a simple, one-time connection on our upload page to allow all your friends and followers to get a real-time stream of your uploads to YouTube, which can be essential in this age of citizen reporting and ubiquitous sharing.

When the iPod Touch is released with a camera and the ability to capture, edit, and upload video via WiFi (which I think is inevitable), the numbers will swell even more.

So now is the time for educators to come up to speed with video to capitalize on cool to create curricular cognition. And what better time than during the summer? Take those family videos and learn how to edit them and get them on the web. Then extend this learning to your teaching.

How easy is it exactly? Well, using only the iPhone 3Gs, here is a short 12 second video I shot of the cat this morning. It took about 10 seconds to edit the ending (cut the part when he jumped down off of the tub) and 10 seconds to upload it to YouTube. And then I took another 15 seconds to go to YouTube to get the embed code and paste it into this blog post. Total production time from start to posted: less than 1 minute!

But, you will not use this tool in your teaching because it is dead easy to implement. You will use it because the educational application of video production for learning can empower the highest levels of authentic engagement, critical thinking, problem solving, learning about learning, and focusing on curriculum based essential questions all neatly bundled up in one powerful learning by careful design package. The challenge isn't technical, it's designing the learning around the new form of engagement.

As I have time, I hope to post more about the video upload process. Using YouTube makes what I did this morning effortless. But you have many other other options as well.

This is an interesting PBS 5Across video featuring the conversation among Leif Hansen, Annalee Newitz, Dom Sagolla, Deborah Schultz, and Dr. Jim Taylor about the impact of technology in our lives.

A LexisNexis survey found that if you add up the time people spend using email, web browsers, instant messaging, and Microsoft Office, it comes to 15.9 hours per day. That's extraordinary.

Quotation: MediaShift . 5Across: How to Deal with Technology Overload | PBS

Below is a casual outline I made while listening to the video (and yes, I was multitasking so the outline is very loose). If you would prefer to skip to a particular section in the video that interests you, go to this link at PBS' MediaShift site and watch just that section.

Taking Breaks

• How can technology serve your goals
• How does it get in the way of your goals
• 12 stages: curiosity, invite participation, cut back ... get curious again
• Good or bad? = Is work work good or bad for me
• Rescue time: Break Minder (Windows), Time Out (Mac), Freedom (Mac)
• Input days or Output days

Virtual vs. Real World

• Life is dirty; Tech is cleaner and more linear
• Tech driving us vs. us using it
• Sharing physical space
• Always on, always live
• What can't be digitized from face to face

Online Etiquette

• What are the new rules, the new contexts
• Internet is a teenager
• Reflection versus speed
• Etiquette around when we are to respond to things

Psychological Issues

• External validation
• FOMO (Fear of missing out)
• Technology addiction
• Law of unintended consequences

Benefits of Technology

• Avoid judgement by shedding part of our identity
• Transparency

Implanted Technology

• Biology and technology = deeper disconnect spiritually
• Need info at my fingertips
• Need to be bored which provides discipline
• Expectations of what being present means

We are entering a new age of cool! Apple's iPhone is a game changer! Here the iPhone serves as an interface between a device and our experience with the device in real world use, enhancing the experience by bringing us a richer context in real time. (Of course, that's only part of this brilliant story.)

I'm wondering when we will begin to see such application in the field of education. Maybe it's already out there and I've missed it? All I am aware of are educational applications that pretty much emulate the way we have been doing school already. I'm having a hard time myself, getting my head around ways the iPhone/iPod Touch can be interfaced into a learning environment to add a really deep contribution that extends the experience in real time. I wish I were just more creative!

The bike wheel contains all you need so that no sensors or additional electronics need to be added to the frame and an existing bike can be retrofitted with the blink of an eye. ...

By using a series of sensors and a Bluetooth connection to the user's iPhone, which can be mounted on the handlebars, the wheel can monitor the bicycle's speed, direction and distance traveled, as well as collect data on air pollution and even the proximity of the rider's friends. ...

The Copenhagen Wheel is part of a more general trend: that of inserting intelligence in our everyday objects and of creating a smart support infrastructure around ourselves for everyday life... The Wheel has a smart lock: if somebody tries to steal it, it goes into a mode where the brake regenerates the maximum amount of power, and sends you a text message. So in the worst case scenario the thief will have charged your batteries before you get back your bike."

(Via MIT’s big wheel in Copenhagen.)

by writing their own Math App for the iPhone and iPod Touch they cut themselves a slice of the π
. Now, this is math problem solving--what math instruction is all about! The short video is cute.

I speak often about teachers using their interactive whiteboards to create screencasts of curriculum content to publish to the web.  Sal Khan, who created Khan Academy, speaks of his journey into teaching, which started by his making videos to help his younger cousins with their math.  His work has become a sensation.

In this  presentation he speaks a little about how and why he has done this.  He speaks to the format. For those teachers interested in using screencasts to support your instruction with students, watching this video is a must. He goes on to share some wonderful points about 16 minutes into the 22 minute video.  It's worth your time.

The fact that this can be done, in total, from storyboard (if they had chosen to) all the way to upload to YouTube, on a $299 device, the iPhone 4, that also happens to make phone calls, is astounding. When Apple makes this all possible on an iPod Touch and the iPad, they will rock in the education market!

I really think that the accessibility of these powerful tools will demonstrate an increased need for creativity and empowering message.  Since virtually anyone can now create stunning rich media, what is so important that you are compelled to say it with tools that can render your message so powerfully as to compel global action?

We live in a very different time than just a few years ago...

Be sure to watch it in full screen.

Proof of concept: The video greeting when you first hit my main blog page (not individual post pages from a Twitter link, for example) was created by and purchased from the Canadian artist, Mark Gervais. (It's sold as a package of several different holiday video files for $4.00. He also has some great Halloween animations we use here at the house for our seasonal haunted house.)

With a simple bit of code, mediaboxAdv, which I've written about before, opens the file when you first hit or refresh the main blog page. (Yes, one can structure it to do this on individual archive pages as well.) Last year I used a still image. This year I was delighted to learn that the same bit of code will autoplay a video file! All you have to do is link to your video file on the server!

If you are comfortable tinkering under the hood of your blog (adding a bit of code to the template and storing a few extra files on your server), you could use mediaboxAdv for special announcements on your class or school blog or website. You could even have it play a short video welcome.

But this post is more than just a proof of concept. I wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and the very best life has to offer in 2011!

Tim