Multilitteratus Incognitus

Alright, so here it is, week 6 of NRC01PL. Even though I am technically  in the same week as everyone I guess I am still marching to the beat of my own drummer.  I wanted to join the live session on Tuesday, but other things intervened.  Oh well. The topic of this week is the personal learning assistant.  Hence my little callout to the four major virtual assistants (Siri for Apple, Alexa for Amazon, Cortana for Windows, and Google...for Google). I actually did try asking Cortana to "show me something to learn" but  I guess the bing search engine didn't know what the heck to do with my query. Google wasn't that much help either.  We haven't reached the point yet where they know enough about me in order to recommend something.  It's a little odd given how much data google probably "knows" about me. So, what is a Personal Learning Assistant (not to be confused with Personal Assistant for Learning)?  According to Stephen the PLA is a platfo...

These couple of weeks that have passed I have been on vacation. While on vacation I was able to meet with a colleague that has taught for my applied linguistics department. We didn't plan to talk shop but the discussion did veer toward linguistics. <br> <br> We started talking about text messaging and linguistic research, and of course what can SMS linguistic data tell us about user behavior and communication. Then I had a brainstorm: I'd love to see results of research (or participate in research) that compares text messages with telegrams. They both are meant to be quick, short, and to convey a message. I think this would be a great line of research. I wonder where one could get a corpus of telegram text.

Well, one more campus technology conference and expo is done! The Campus Technology annual summer conference is the nation’s premier higher education technology conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning using the latest in applications, social software and immersive platforms. Initially I was thinking about writing a blog post per day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), but I had way too many interesting conversations with presenters, participants, and vendors to be able to do this (brain stops working after a certain point, you see).  So I thought I would pick 3 of my top sessions, and my top vendor of the show and talk a bit about these. KEYNOTES First of all, the keynotes by Mark Milliron (Chancellor of Western Governor's University) on "Deeper Learning Conversations ...

I am in the process of finishing up the Mobile Learning Manager certification course (also known as mLeMan) and I am on the final unit.  Here are a couple of interesting videos.  (More on my experience with mLeMan later on...if I don't forget ;-)  ) The first is Mobile Madness: Making Sense of the Converged , Multidevice World from: IDCeXchange   held on 4/292011 This second video is  Mobility, Clouds and Intelligent Industries: Positioning for the 3rd Wave of IT Industry Growth

OK, so today was the penultimate day for  "getting started" types of mobile development workshops. Today's topic, as you might surmise from the title, was Android development.  Today's development environment was Eclipse with the Android SDK.  The nice thing about Android development is that it is all XML and Java, which is pretty nice. I am familiar with XML and I did do Java as part of my computer science BA way back when.  Today the Computer Science curriculum at UMass Boston does use Eclipse as the IDE (integrated development environment), but back when I was in intro to computer science we used TELNET over a 56k modem (eeeek!) to connect to a terminal, use EMACS and compile something with javac which ran in the terminal; thus text-only, no GUI. Having seen XCode and Visual Studio 2010 in earlier "getting started" workshops, I have to say that both Xcode and Visual Studio win over Eclipse.  They both seemed snappier, compared to eclipse; they both...

OK, now some of my fellow Apple people, and some of you Android fanbois will scoff at me for going to a Windows Phone 7 development workshop, sponsored by Microsoft, but I'll tell you it was fun!  I think that as much as I like the iOS , Windows Phone 7 , with the MetroUI  seems interesting as platform and with the backing of Nokia I think we'll see it rise up and be viable competition to Android and iPhone (if apps come out that is...) In any case, the workshop was pretty interesting and it gave me an opportunity to mess around with Visual Studio, something I haven't done in three or four years, since I was a student in the MSIT program.  I have to say that  developing for WinPhone7 seems to be quite comparable to designing iPhone apps. From the top level, and from the quite limited exposure I've had to them, the IDEs ( Visual Studio and XCode) seem pretty comparable at this point. The one thing I noticed is that both Microsoft peeps (hey, I actually met Edwin...

Week 2 of mobiMOOC is underway - and there's been a ton of discussion during week 1! (much more than I expected actually).  It's amazing to me than mLearning has become synonymous (these days) with smartphones, apps on those smartphones and mobile data.  One doesn't have to go too far back in the research literature to find mLearning to be something that was based on regular phones, using regular SMS and MMS messages, and even voice communications! In the shuffle in the developed world we seem to have lost that simplicity of just voice and SMS/MMS and we've gone with things that require expensive handsets and expensive data plans.  Even if you get a sort of cheap Android phone (certainly cheaper and an iPhone ) you still have to pay for a data plan.  I don't know how data rates are in countries other than the US, but until recently (recent being 3 years of fewer) data on a phone cost a lot and you just didn't get that much of it! I know it's tempting...