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25 Killer (iPad) Apps

Published on July 8, 2010, by in Uncategorized.
The brushed aluminum back of the iPad Wi-Fi
Image via Wikipedia

I have been putting this post off for a while now, but I am finally compelled to write about all of the apps that I am using  on a regular basis on my iPad. I am compelled by just how many conversations I have had about doing more than just consumption with the device. The following list of Apps are what make the iPad essential to me. They are what make it more than just a toy:

Before I go too deep, here are the apps that I have on my iPad right now (While there are a great many Jailbroken apps that I would recommend, I think that it would be somewhat counterproductive to highlight those in this blog post because the vast majority of users are never going to open up their device as I have.):

  1. Accuradio – This is the one and only radio service (other than the amazing NPR of course, which has been downloaded so many times for iPhone and iPad that it hardly needs mentioning in this list) that I have found which I do not find myself skipping through songs I have already heard or artists that I could care less about. I think it is because it is being curated by real people rather than by an algorithm. The stations vary widely, but my favorite is Future Perfect Radio.
  2. IM+ Lite – This is the best way to chat on the iPad (Multiple sessions at any given time, push notification, etc) I use Google Talk all of the time on my laptop, but this was the only reliable way to continue to do so on my iPad. And with backgrounding (either on a jailbroken iPad or in the iOS 4 which is forthcoming), you will never again miss out on a  conversation that you could have taken part in.
  3. Atomic Browser – This is one of the only apps I actually paid for (99 cents). I love the ability to choose tabs over Safari’s odd pagination system. I also love that I can change what the user agent is (this means that I make a website believe I’m running Internet Explorer or another desktop browser). This gives me the opportunity to see the desktop version of every website if I wish to do so, rather than the more limited versions of mobile sites.
  4. Air Sketch Free – Killer. This app allows me to draw on the iPad and have it display on any computer (or projector) that is on the same wifi network. This means that I can present without cords as well as I can allow everyone in a room to see the same thing that I see. Just awesome.
  5. DejaPlay – I have written about this app previously because I think that it is wonderful. It is the best way for me to view videos that my friends and colleagues are sharing on twitter and facebook. It compiles every link that is shared and puts them into an elegant video display. Rather than wasting time down the rabit hole that is YouTube, I can watch my network curate my video library in real time.
  6. GoodReader – Another pay app (also 99 cents) makes the iPad into an uploading and downloading machine. While the app was created for the purposes of viewing big documents, I pretty much exclusively use it for downloading files uploading them to other sites. Here is my favorite use case: I open up GoodReader and pull a file from my e-mail and put it up on Dropbox and then share it out with everyone I wish to. Another thing I do a lot is upload things to FTP sites and web servers that I maintain. This means that I don’t have to wait to get to my laptop to update a file. I also can get access to all of the files on my iPad from my computers without having to use a USB cord. (In fact, I haven’t synced my iPad, ever. I activated it once and that was it. I haven’t seen the need.)
  7. CloudBrowse – Although this is becoming less valuable to me as I find other interesting workarounds, this is still the only way to really get flash or Google Docs to play nicely on the iPad. Useful, if a bit crippled without a paid account.
  8. Dropbox – I have become more and more dependent upon this product to sync everything I need. Whenever I need to look at a file or send a link to someone, I just jump into the app and grab it. What else can I say… it just works.
  9. Sundry Notes – Best App. Seriously. It’s uses are incredibly far reaching. The only thing I can compare it to is Keynote, Smart Notebook, Word, and Skitch all rolled into one. From this app, I can take handwritten notes, typed notes, screenshots from any webpage, insert equations, and do voice recordings of what is going on. This app is ridiculously useful for meetings, brainstorming, presenting, and everything in-between. The export to PDF works great and you can even view your notes online if you want to sync with their service. Oh, and you can annotate PDF’s from your computer if you wanted to do that by syncing them in iTunes. Crazy awesome.
  10. Idea Sketch – A free and well laid out mind mapping software. Brainstorming in here is a pleasure. Export works great and you can even let other people edit your brainstorms if you e-mail them along.
  11. Adobe Ideas – The drawings and writing that you can do in this app are incredible compared to pretty much everything else out there. This is mostly because the app translates your jagged strokes into smooth vector graphics. My favorite part, though, is the enormous drawing area that you can zoom in and out of to draw and write in detail. I guess I would most compare it to an iPad version of the Prezi interface. Slick.
  12. Google Earth – I thought about not including this in the list because of how used it already is, but I think that if you have only used Google Earth on a laptop you are missing out on some of the best interactive learning that is available anywhere. I have spent hours just observing the differences between cities by zooming in and out on Denver and Kansas City. Feeling as though you can control the entire world is just cool.
  13. Web Projector – One more 99 cent app, here. Although I use my jailbroken capability to project anything on the iPad from the VGA cord, this is the cheapest way I have found to project anything that you can access from a webpage. It works very well and gets updated frequently.
  14. FeedlerRSS – Other than the web interface for Google Reader, this is my favorite (free) way to read the blogs I follow. It works well and lets you get through quite a number of posts in short order. My favorite thing about it is that I can actually see the blog posts in their original context, which is missing a lot of times when I just read it on Google’s site.
  15. Caster Free – I can’t tell you how cool this app is. You may just have to see it for yourself. It is a single stop for creating podcasts from multiple recordings, mixing them, processing them and then posting them to either an FTP site, a blog, or even Dropbox. I can’t believe that this one is free, actually. This is content creation at its finest on the iPad. (I know that AudioBoo and other services do this well, but you don’t own the files like you can here.)
  16. Story Kit – While this isn’t the most polished app in the list, it is one of the most interesting ways to create a book. It would work well with younger folks as well as with very simple content.
  17. Gooey – I use Google Docs to take notes quite often, or to leave myself reminders. This is a great way to add a Google Doc that is a quick note. There really aren’t a lot of features other than a pretty interface with this one, but I really like being able to save a quick note that syncs directly to Google Docs. I also like that it is free. Watch out, though, some versions of this app do crash. Good thing I only need it for a few minutes at a time.
  18. Granimator – Possibly the easiest, most creative art app. Basically, you paint with great drawings. It is meant to create backgrounds, but I think that it makes for a great backdrop for note taking or brainstorming. It also definitely gets my creative juices flowing to see someone else’s creation. Just cool.
  19. PaperDesk LT – If you just happen to have a VGA cord lying around for your iPad and are interested in projecting some drawing, text creation, or other brainstorming activities this is the perfect free app. I really like the way that you can save sessions for later to keep on projecting what you were working on even after you leave the app.
  20. Photopad – The best free image editor. All of the editing features that you would expect from a desktop editor with the ability to save right back to your Camera Roll. I can’t tell you how many screenshots I have rotated and cropped in here.
  21. uStream Viewer – Although we can’t record or stream from the iPad with the current version (although I swear you can see where the camera is supposed to go), I absolutely love being able to attend events in real time with chat. This is the only non-native iPad app in the list, but I think that it really works well in pixel doubled mode.
  22. iDraft – Adobe Ideas does pretty much everything I need from a drawing program and Sundry Notes does pretty much everything I need from a note taking application. So, what do I use iDraft for? Well, to make pretty diagrams and pdf notes with multiple pages. The simple pencil in this app makes it look like I am using a calligraphy pen, with the ability to make thin and thick marks by changing the speed of my gesture. The words I make in this app are nothing short of beautiful.
  23. JabberPad – Possibly the coolest concept for any app on the list. This app uses open protocols (including a jabber server) to create a collaborative whiteboard with any iPad on the same wifi network. Not only that, but you can chat with the other people in the same whiteboard. I can’t wait until you can contribute using your computer on the same network as well. Brilliant.
  24. Analytics (It looks like this is no longer free. I wouldn’t pay 6.99 for it, but it is pretty cool.) – While this isn’t really creating or consuming, it is really nice. This allows me to see my Google Analytics account (or at least the most important info to me) on the iPad. I love just taking a quick glance at how the different websites and blogs I maintain are doing and what I might need to change or highlight.
  25. Desktop Connect (pricey at 11.99, but worth it) – There are many free versions of VNC viewers (log into your desktop or laptop from the iPad) for the iPad, but this is the only one I have found that lets me login to a Mac from anywhere (at least for this cheap). This is because they have a desktop software called Easy Connect that actually authenticates using your Google Account. This means that not only can you see your desktop computer from your iPad no matter where you are in the world, but you can also see any of your friend’s (according to your Google Talk account) computers if they are online. They will have to give you access, but I think that the idea of actually seeing the network of your friend’s computers is stunning.

Well, that is it. That is my list of why the iPad matters right now. Again, there are some missing things that I need to Jailbreak my iPad for, but the ones I mentioned above are reason enough to buy and use an iPad and never look back. The iPad is not a device for mass consumption. It is a device like any other, completely dependent upon what you actually want to do with it. I want to create with it, so that is what I do. While not all of the apps above speak specifically to this need to create, they all inspire me to create more and better. Call me a fan boy if you must, but I believe in creating with whatever is available and it just so happens that I have an iPad.

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Question 155 fo 365: Who do we root for?

Published on June 5, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Cover of "Spellbound"
Cover of Spellbound

Along with the finals for the NBA and NHL going on this weekend, there was also another kind of competition that garners far fewer onlookers: The Scrips Spelling Bee. Tonight, on network teleivision no less, a girl from my home town of Cleveland took the prize. She spelled every word right for 9 rounds of hopelessly challenging competition. I didn’t really know much about her, but I rooted for her over anyone else because of that one geographical thing that we had in common. I rooted for her because of all e competitors, she was most like me.

One of my favorite documentaries of all time is called Spellbound, which is about the road to the national spelling bee. It tells the stories of about 10 different children who are all vying for the title. It is compelling because of the personalities of the kids. They are so genuine in their quest, and at a certain point, you would be happy to se any one of them win. Knowing that only one of them can win in the end, makes us watch all the more intently to see just which words trip up the young scholars.

The personalities that we root for most in the movie are not neccesarily ones that we are most like, but we do have to be able to see ourselves in them. We do not relate to the child with the lisp who has been studying only away with his tutor for the last 5 years and has never attended school or other social activities. We do not root for the kids who are entirely naturally smart and do not feel the need to study at all. Instead, we root for the second-generation Mexican-American. We root for the hyper kid who can’t quite yet play the star spangled banner on his guitar. We root for the flaws, the ones that we know should lose but don’t because of some drive to be better.

You can’t for too many people, though. You have to choose your favorites. And there in lies the problem. Everyone has flaws. Everyone is like you. Everyone has enough humanity within them to be related to. So, in the end, it is alway about who can tell the best story. I am not talking about the American Idol or Olympic interlude kind of story, but rather, a story of details. It isn’t so much that having overcome obstacles makes me want to root for you because everyone has had to do that to a certain extant. It is how many details of those obstacles are you willing to reveal that makes me want you to win.

A board game is not so interesting as Stratego played every night with a younger brother. A favorite pen is not so interesting as an engraving of a favorite quote from a book on a own that never leaves your side. A microscope is not so interesting as one that is broken in two because you couldn’t see what your father was trying to show you about germs.

I root for the details because there really isn’t anything else to differentiate one experience from another, otherwise. This is one reason that I think trending topics and hyperlinked profile categories are going in the wrong direction a lot of times within social networks. The details are skimmed over as if they weren’t the most important aspect of rooting for someone. There is no narrative in 140 characters, especially in the retweet happy twitterverse we exist within now.

YouTube is flying directly in the face of this trend toward homogenization of people to root for. We can look at many of the videos available on most channels and immediately know which ones we are interested in rooting for and which ones just do not have a compelling story. Video is where we are going to get back to our competitive and idiosyncratic ways. Even with the prevelence of parody, each remix is unique and speaks with a single voice. Even with the enormous amount of crap being uploaded every minute, it is through individual action that we are contributing to the mass of people ready to be cheered on. We are truly an audience to approve or disapprove of the details, which is more than can be said for the fast paced news feed on Facebook.

But I still think we need to work on rooting online. It still looks too much like voyeurism. I should be able to rate and cheer for a particular idea of detail, and not jut simply “like” something. I want to find a way to wave a pompom at an individual contribution. If rooting is in the details, I want to be able to search by detail and perform my own commentary and support for it.

Essentially, I want to be able to focus on the backstory and let the actual competition gradually become less important. It will still matter, but because I know that background, I will be able to better cheer on the people that I find valuable.

Go red wheelbarrow, Go!

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Question 107 of 365: Are we occupying or transforming our idle time?

Published on April 18, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

My brothers played hockey. Smelly, cold, and rough and tumble. They had early ice times and late night games. They played from mighty mites on up through peewees and then in high school too. Hockey made sense to them in a way that it never did for me.

I used to stay home during their practices, that is once I had done enough time in the ice rink arcade. For years I faked playing video games in there, living vicariously through people who seemingly had quarters coming out of their ears. But when I was old enough to stay home, I did. I knew that there was only so much locker room stench I really needed in my life, and once I had reached my limit, I said no more.

So, I stayed home and had marathon sessions of Saved by the Bell. I should have been doing homework, so I would try to turn off the TV from time to time, but I never was able to resist one more episode. Because of this I can go head to head with anyone who believes they know more about Zac Morris than I do, unfortunately it isn’t something that comes up all that often. I wanted to escape from my responsibilities into a world that was made for the protagonist, where the affects of doing whatever you wanted were never felt for very long (see the episode where Zac scores extremely high on SATs without doing any work in school). I just couldn’t turn away, at least not when the alternative was math worksheets or projects that had been dreamed up decades before.

It was when I was left alone like this that I understood just how idle my life was. Without the presence of interesting goals or progress toward something of value, I was just looking for something to distract me until my parents came home. That was when I first noticed how much time I really had to do “nothing,” but it certainly wasn’t the last. Before I could reflect upon it, I had lived some of the most insignificant moments of my life in front of the television and computer. Before I knew that Collaboration would engage my mind, I saw that entertainment could distract it. Before I understood that creation would bolster my confidence, I saw that consumption would provide escape.

And yet, I did figure out what would truly bring about my happiness and let me transform my idle time by controlling the ratio of input to output. I realized this as a function of being bored. I starting to write on a daily basis. It was becoming engaged in poetry and the conversations that it held that allowed me to finally turn off Saved by the Bell and find something more worthy of my time than Zac Attack (the fictional band that Zac Morris created in a dream episode). Unfortunately, I don’t think it can be writing that does it for everyone. I also think that we are distracting ourselves more easily than we ever have before.

Netflix on Demand, DVRs and similar services are creating a culture of entertainment that feels more like creation. Because we can play, pause and fast forward all of our content (even print, audio and images), it seems as though we are doing something. There is no longer the sense that other people are going to create a marathon of episodes for us. We are creating that marathon for ourselves. We are now active participants in our own idleness. Before it was being pumped at us, but now we are choosing to turn on the fire hose and leaving it on because it feels like we are moving from the pressure.

We can no longer accept that boredom and idleness are the same, mostly because we are no longer bored when we are idle. We don’t give ourselves the chance to be bored. We must always be engaged by the content at our fingertips. We must always be searching YouTube for the next viral video or be reading up on the next Apple rumor. In that way, we are occupying our idle time in self-made distraction. We are crafting the environment that occupied my time for years while my brothers were off playing hockey. And yet we are feeling transformed in this environment, and that is what I am most worried about.

It is the fact that our idleness has become so interactive that is disguising our preoccupation with it. We are no longer able to simply be bored and to let that run its course. Because inevitably, boredom leads to invention, at least it did for me. I wrote in the quietest of times and spaces. I wrote when there was nothing to occupy me. But there aren’t those times now, and that is a turn for the worse. While I am not going to make an argument that certain devices, like the iPad, are turning our culture in one of consumers rather than social creators, rather I would like to state that it is the way in which we are consuming our content that allows us to confuse idleness with participation.

In one last analogy, I believe that our instinct to create playlists of music has been compared to the mix tape or cd of just a few years ago. Unfortunately, I do not buy it. Now, our playlists are made up by Pandora or iTunes Genius technology rather than by people. We share them far and wide through project playlist and other such sites. There are no hand crafted covers or agonizing over tracks. While I do not wish to bemoan the past, I think that believing that the playlist and the carefully crafted mix are the same is one more way in which we are confusing a mere occupation of our idle time with a transformation of it.

If I can be so bold as to suggest:

We need more boredom. We need more mix tapes. We need more writing.

We need less false interaction. We need less occupied minds. We need less playlists.

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Question 101 of 365: What is the next vanity?

Published on April 11, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
MUNICH, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 20: A Bavarian dr...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I used to fall asleep in crazy positions.

My parents tell this story about me falling asleep with my chest over my knees at the foot of the bed in Disney World. While that is basic fetal position, it is usually done on your side or your back. I was just folded in two, taking up the smallest footprint on the bed possible.

The one that I remember, though, is falling asleep in our van’s middle bench-type seat. I somehow became unbuckled and dangled myself off with my knuckles touching the ground and the rest of my body somehow staying on the bench. The reason I remember, is that I woke up like that. I woke up to my mother telling another woman about me. She kept on talking about the crazy ways that I would fall asleep and then she went on to talk about other things that were more flattering and personality driven. I wish I could remember more of those.

I realize now that I didn’t start moving and fully wake up because I wanted her to keep on talking about me. I wanted to know what she and this other woman thought about me without asking them. In short, I was vain. I had this sense that other people would talk about me when I wasn’t in the room (or awake, apparently), and I wanted to know what they were saying. It was one of the first ways that I knew that the world continued on out of earshot and eye sight.

Not a lot has changed, I’m afraid. I am still vain, and I still want to know what others are saying about me. I don’t pretend to be asleep now, though. Rather, I empower my eavesdropping ability using a variety of technologies. I run Google Alerts for my name, getting daily update whenever someone mentions something on the web about me. Hootsuite performs a perpetual search for mentions of my username. My blog gets an alert whenever someone links to me, as does my Google Analytics account. My Facebook and Flickr accounts are alerted any time I am tagged in a photograph. I even get updated on Slideshare whenever someone likes one of my presentations or decides to embed it into their website. There is a certain science to my vanity now.

The problem is, where does vanity go from here. How can I possibly eavesdrop on more people or figure out just how good or bad the things are that people say? To me, the future of vanity actually lies in the moment with my mom in the van. She wasn’t tagging me in a photo or linking to me as a person, she was simply talking about me in casual conversation. She was telling stories that didn’t require any technology to augment their reality. Yet, if I hadn’t woken up, I would never have known that those words were being said.

So, I believe that the future of our quest for vanity and self-branding will be in the power of voice and conversation. In the not so distant future, I believe that all speech will be able to be parsed and tagged. Moreover, I believe that all conversations will have the capacity to be auto-tagged and analyzed. I’m not saying that all of our conversations will be recorded, but I think that everyone with a device in the pockets will be able to use it to see the networked representation of what they are talking about.

For example, I like to talk about movies frequently. I believe that if I bring out my phone and plop it on the table in front of me, it will be able to pull up all of the information about the movie that I am speaking of without me having to type it in. It will follow the conversation on screen and continue to present me with further topics to explore, further ways to travel down the rabbit hole. In doing so, it will be tagging my conversation and it will allow me to play it back if I would like to or publish it (and the conversation path) along with it.

With a technology such as this, vanity will be a very real part of our lives every day. We will be able to know exactly when people are speaking about us and be alerted as to the context of that speech.

I also believe that this will happen in video first. I believe that we will start to tag each other in speech with the videos that we are creating. Now that YouTube has decent transcription service going on all of their videos, we aren’t too far from making that text live, searchable, and hyperlinked. As soon as the conversations in video response become tagged with our names and our ideas, video will be the next thing to start making us more self-aware.

The next vanity will be the same as the first. Our words will make us more and more vain because we will always know our references. We will become a part of the taxonomy of communication. We will have an analytical value based upon the number of conversations that are about us. And that will be scary and validating, seductive and pointless, ugly and freeing; all at the same time.

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Question 55 of 365: What is the unit of measurement for an idea?

Published on February 24, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

We measure  and rate everything.

We measure how much things weigh, how many calories we consume, what rating a movie should have based upon violence, how good a meal was, how long our batteries will last, and on and on. We even measure our measurements, like how often we take a poll or how correct our prediction of the weather may be. The only thing that I can figure out that we don’t have good way to measure is ideas.

We don’t know when an idea starts or when it ends. We don’t know where they come from or where they go. We have almost no way of telling with an objective rating system whether an idea is good or bad. Essentially, we have no unit of measure for an idea.

But, I would like to. I would like to know the value of an idea, at least in relative terms. I would like to know when a new idea is being formulated so that I can grab onto it and help to create it. I would like to be able to say that a certain document, or video, or audio recording has a definite number of ideas and then be able to enumerate them so that I can see their value.

I understand that this process may be taking some of the art out of idea making, but I believe that if we had a better way to measure an idea against another one, we could actually come up with better ideas on the whole. I believe that if we had a mechanism to break a piece of content up into idea chunks, we could advance those ideas and build greater things off of them without letting the superfluous ideas weigh down the ones with real potential.

For example: If we were able to separate out every idea within the Health Care bills that are proposed to congress and weigh each one carefully, we would have a mechanism for separating out the very good ideas from the very bad ones. Obviously, what is a very good idea to one person might be a bad idea to another, and yet, when they are all wrapped up into one document, there is simply no way to tell where people stand on any given concept. It is my contention that with enough participation and collaboration on identifying valuable ideas, a lot of the subjectivity will go away. Mostly because the ideas that get the most debate are probably the ones that are the best ideas. The ideas that no one is debating probably can either be passed through or killed on the spot. Those ideas don’t require our focus, the ones that are contentious and will produce a reaction, are the ones that we really need to solve.

And yet, if we have no unit of measurement for ideas, how can we go about this process?

So, here is what I am proposing: What if every video that was produced could be split up into idea chunks and then rating on an individual basis. What if every document that was created could be highlighted according to the same idea chunks and rated on a scale that makes sense. What if every piece of media could be broken down so as to provide data about that object.

If we started there, what would the ratings system be? What is the scale that we could measure an idea against? Perhaps the relevance scale, or the passion scale, or even the understandable scale.

Clearly my answer here is the start of a much bigger conversation, but perhaps it is time to consider just how we are having our conversations about the most important issues of our day. Perhaps we need to be thinking about how we can at least agree on the measuring stick by which all ideas can by rated. Because as it stands right now, we either look at things on the whole which doesn’t allow for much analysis or we are all using different terms which only let’s us claim victory according to those terms.

As I think through this, I wonder about this video. For all of the ideas that he talks about in his Open Letter to Educators, I know that some are good. I know that some are inconsequential. How can I talk about one without talking about the others?How can I give his entire work 5 stars while I know that only a few of the ideas are really going to bring about real change?

If I could break things up or boil them down, I would have a better chance of figuring things out.

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Question 40 of 365: Why can’t we focus on making something, rather than the something itself?

Published on February 10, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.


It is the product that we are after: the book, the video, the iPhone, the worksheet, and the report. These products are the result of a huge amount of processing, working, collaborating, and creating. And yet, we are so focused on the product itself that we have almost no idea how it came into being. We are so interested in what the product can do for us, the idea that we could be learning from  the creation of that product and helping ourselves to the knowledge of what it takes to create something great is simply left behind.

I have three examples for this kind of misguided focus.

The first is of a single YouTube video. For effect, let’s choose a meme: Takeing a picture of yourself every day for a number of years. The result of this meme is a serious amount of introspection, reflection on what matters in one’s life and an amount of dedication to an idea that many people do not choose to follow. The video is just the byproduct of this reflection. It can garner a huge level of interest, but the process is what matters, not the object at the end of it.

Other videos are even further removed from the process. One of the most engaging videos in education, social media, and technology in the last 10 years was created by a friend of mine, Karl Fisch. He did a powerpoint presentation that gathered a lot of data about technology, schools and the ways in which the world is changing. The process that he went through to create the powerpoint was rich and worthwhile, and every iteration that has been created off of his original vision has undergone some version of the process. Yet, all of the people that have watched the video believe that the final product is what should be the conversation starter. I believe that the process of thinking through the implications of technology, education, informatics, design, and comparative analysis is where the power lies. If we truly followed the example of this process, we would all be trying to find the data in our own lives that will enable us to anticipate and engage in the future instead of taking someone else’s observations on data and declaring it to be gospel.

A second type of product worship happens when a piece of technology becomes the focus of endless discussion. Facebook is a product that you would think could focus on the process of creating intricate networks of people for all kinds of reasons, but in fact, the majority of the conversation about Facebook is about how to get the most friends, make money, or all of the content (read: products) that gets shared on that ever expanding network. The conversation rarely is about what an individual’s social network requires in order to be a sustaining and engaging aspect of a healthy social life. Facebook, as a product, too often wins out to Facebook, as a creation of interconnected stories that add value to your life.

The final way in which I see products being the focus of all attention is within the “upload” button. The upload button has become a pervasive part of the online ecosystem and it has quite simply turned all of our actions into looking for a product that we can “upload.” Whether it is a powerpoint uploaded to Slideshare, a photo uploaded to Flickr, or any type of file uploaded to Google Docs (now that it is basically an online hard drive); all of this uploading is causing us to focus on getting everything we do into a package that is uploadable. While I am seriously in favor of placing my work on the cloud, the fact that all of the collaboration and thought behind each product doesn’t get uploaded with it is a serious problem. Google Docs gets it right when you start from scratch in there. You can look back at the revision history and see what contributions and thought process made it an important document. However, that is only one path, and it is still incredibly hard to follow a thought process through a revision history.

What I want is a system that allows me to see the process of creation, from start to finish. I want to see everything that goes into answering a big question. I want to hear the fits and starts of answers. I want the “umms” to hang in the air while someone formulates a new thought. I want the rough edges in the middle drafts and the clean lines of the final one. I want the upload button to be modified into a “record” button. I want that button to be the beginning rather than the ending.

In essence, I want a YouTube that can show me how the ideas were birthed and provide a backstory to fill in all of the things that were left on the “cutting room floor.” I want a Facebook that allows you to see the connections and understand the true importance of each one. I want a social network that can look at the quality of content and not just the quantity (or the ability to view huge amounts of it). I also want a cloud-based service that doesn’t let the upload button to reign supreme. I want the uploaded work to be an iterative process, one idea leading to the next.

I guess that is asking for a lot, but perhaps this is more about my process of building it than it is about the product I want at the end. Right?

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Question 12 of 365: Which words cause us to act?

Published on January 12, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.


Action is a relative term.

Is action the clicking of a button on a webpage? Is action the filling out of a form? Is action telling a friend or coworker about an idea? Is action standing outside holding up a sign, or waiting in a line? Or is action simply taking an interest where apathy and doing nothing is the alternative.

There is a science to persuasion, to getting others to do what it is that you would like. We see this every day in the decisions we make to advertise for ourselves, for our ideas, and for our products. Whether we like to admit it or not, each blogger or YouTuber or teacher or entrepreneur is trying to convince anyone who will listen to pay attention for one minute more. We are trying to convince someone to care about what it is that we are saying. We are trying to get someone else to act engaged or act like they want what we have to offer, whether they really do or not.

So, if that is what I am doing, which words are the ones that cause that action as much of the time as possible? People are turned off by simple commands. Look here or Click this have their place, but it isn’t a substitute for actual engagement. At the end of the day, I want actions that are authentic. I want people to want to build something with me.

I guess the words must be authentic too.

If I am asking for others to respond with genuine interest, I had better be genuinely interested in the problems that they are having. I had better find a way to express the feelings that they would express themselves if they had only typed the blog post with their own fingers. And, I guess I better have a solution too. The solution is what will cause someone really to turn from a passive viewer to an active participant. I must solve the thing that has been eating away at someone for too long. I must resolve the issue that has plagued someone, create peace within a tortured experience.

So, I will. I will put the solution into words. I will make the pitch that allows someone else to take part. And, I hope to do this without telling lies or trying to be something that I am not. I hope to do this without selling out or selling air. I hope to solve problems by starting with my own.

I guess other people might have the same problems too.

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How did Kaplan beat us to it? Or, Who’s getting rich off education?

Published on January 16, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
mckinley public school
Image by Firesign via Flickr

So, I was just watching some TV with my 6 month old son while my wife catches a nap, and I saw this ad for Kaplan:

I have to say, except for the fact that Kaplan is basically saying that they have a monopoly on these ideas, I really like the ad. Unfortunately, I’m not totally sure why a for-profit university beat the public school system to the punch. I’m not totally sure why we can’t run ads like this on television or the radio. Why is it that we cannot raise money to change education and then put these ideas out there without a brand associated with them. Why is it that these proposals are being co-opted faster in ad agencies and places like Kaplan then in school districts.

I can just see people using this video in their PD sessions and saying, “We should do this.” Yet, without a support system, they are going to turn to a one-stop-shop solution like a for-profit entity. I can’t help but feeling like this is already happening.

I remember a really great moment in a Podcast not to long ago (I think it was Kevin Honeycutt’s Driving Questions, but I’m not sure) when an interviewee said that the question he is always asking himself is, “Who is getting rich on education? If it isn’t the students, the teachers, or the public, then it isn’t worth paying for.” If the learners aren’t benefiting from the forward thinking of all institutions, then we need to seriously ante up again. So, if there is anyone who has a few thousand bucks lying around, I think it would totally be worth it to invest in some advertising time. But, instead of having the Kaplan tag line at the end, let’s have a link to a network of teachers that are actively pursuing change.

I do still have to give Kaplan credit, though. This is a great ad, and it is the kind of message that most people aren’t being exposed to. I just wish we would have done it first.

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Should kids be excited about Standardized Testing?

Published on January 14, 2009, by in Uncategorized.
the case for standardized testing
Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr

I have been given the task of trying to find ways to pump up kids who are not all that excited about standardized tests. I am supposed to put together a quick reference guide for others who are experiencing a less than enthusiastic response to the CSAP test which comes upon us every March.

The questions I have about this are as follows:

  1. Is it possible to excite kids about standardized testing?
  2. Is it important or valuable to excited kids about standardized testing?

I know that it is possible to get kids excited about learning. I have seen kids take on extra responsiblities in order to learn more. I have seen students literally leap out of their chairs because they wanted to voice their opinion or had a writing piece to share. Is it really possible to get kids excited about working diligently on an assessment of their learning? Is it really possible to make sitting in a desk and filling in bubbles authentic? (I would say, no… but that isn’t what I am being charged with, is it?)

So, how valuable is it to get kids excited about CSAP? Well, the scores directly relate to school funding, so perhaps it is very important to get kids excited. Perhaps it is justified. Perhaps creating videos to prove that a system needs its kids are completely worth it:



Or, is it possible, that we are going about this all wrong. Is it possible that we are trying to gift wrap a process that is inherently filled with flaws so that we don’t have to deal with those flaws. Is it possible that creating these sorts of resources is simply putting off the difficult work of changing the way we assess students? Is our creativity and resource finding prolonging the life of a process we want nothing to do with?

Or, are we just making Standardized tests a little bit easier to swallow?

Maybe a bit of both. Either way, I’m pretty sure I still have to do the assignment. If anyone has a way to make CSAP more exciting, let me know.

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“Hope Online” Professional Development 11.14.08

Published on November 14, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

Do Not turn off your cell phones and laptops.
If you have them, use them.

(Throughout this workshop, you can ask questions via text message by texting hopeonline and your question to 41411. You can also add to our questions without a cell phone by going to http://www.textmarks.com/HOPEONLINE)

I am not here today in order to introduce to you a brand new initiative that will require extensive amounts of training and make your life busier before you see any real benefit. I am also not here today to say that there is any one tool or strategy for making the ways in which you work actually work.

Rather, I am here to ask you a lot of questions, mostly about what you are spending the most time with in your job. What are those things that take away from what you would rather be doing, the rewarding experiences of working with kids and other adults who are working with kids.

In order to do this, let’s get one thing straight. Information is infinite. Attention is finite.

You gather a seemingly insurmountable amount of information every single day from e-mails, voicemails, web sites, student data paperwork and many other sources. It can be even more daunting to think that there is more information out there about how to organize that information. With your attention stretched so thin, it is hard to think that there are ways of getting any of it back. We are still going to try, and for the most part, we are going to look at solutions that are already in your workflow.

Well, I would like to present you with a few possibilities for a different way of organizing information.

The first is I would like to use my voice to listen to my e-mail, create e-mail, put an event on my calendar, send myself a reminder, create a text, and post to my blog. While this service has a name, I would much rather you think about the strategies that I am using in order to create more time for other things. Because I am able to use my voice to do these things, I can make efficient use of my drive time (of which, there is a lot).

Dial2Do – A way to use your voice to get things done on your cell phone.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I would like to next highlight the use of short messages to capture information. Many times, I need to be able to capture information from myself and others, but there is no time in order to send out an e-mail. I need to be able to capture it now. So I send a text message to a service that aggregates the information for me and for everyone else who I invite:

TextMarks – A way to both capture information and share information through SMS.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I use e-mail a lot. Well, perhaps that is an understatement. I am available by e-mail about 20 hours of any given day. With that in mind, I would like to be able to use e-mail in order aggregate archive the most important things that I am sending out. I want to be able to attach anything I want and have the archive understand it.

Posterous – The e-mail blog that don’t even have to sign up for.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

Now, if I am on my computer and I want to capture information on a topic. I want to capture it as I am doing my research, not go back afterwards and document what is going on. I want to be able to simply highlight text and pictures and have them all simply show up in a webpage that I can e-mail to someone or share with somone for them to add to.

Google Notebook – Collect text, pictures, and movies from webpages in order to be shared later with others.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

Well, what if I want to show others exactly where to go on a webpage using my voice. I would like to guide people through a series of webpages that I think are important. I want to do this in less than 5 mintues too.

FlowGram - Create a screencast of webpages and archive it to send to others.

An example of using this trategy to create something.

Now I would like you to figure out what you would like to be able to do in terms of aggregating and storing information. Brainstorm things that you don’t know are possible. Think about how you gather information now and how you would like to change that to be less attention heavy and more information heavy.

Now that we have all of our information gathered and stored, we will want to collaborate and talk about that information. The easiest way to do that is to meet face-to-face, but for much of the time, that requires significant driving and serious scheduling.

So, I want to come together with a few others to talk something out. I want to be able to see, hear, and write with them. I don’t want to have to set up log in to anything. I just want to hit a power button.

Tokbox – Always on Video Conferencing.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I would like to work on the same spreadsheet with someone else so that I don’t have to send e-mails of the same document back and forth and get lost in the versioning. I would also like to be able to have information be entered into the spreadsheet via a form that others can fill out so that I don’t have to do as much data processing tasks.

Google Docs – A truly collaborative version of office

An example of using this strategy to create something.

NaNoWriMo(2)

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Humor olco5

Finally, I really want all of this stuff to be accessible in one place. I would really like to not have to remember exactly what all of these sites are. I just want one place to go to where it makes sense to find all of these things. Almost like a well-maintained professional development environment for hope.

Our IQity classroom - A one stop shop for learning tools, collaboration, and further professional development.

Now I would like you to figure out what YOU want collaboration to look like at Hope. Brainstorm
things that you don’t know are possible. Think about how you collaborate now and how you would like to change that to be less
attention heavy and more information heavy.

© Learning is Change