Question 344 of 365: Are we ripping the right information?

A DVD was supposed to be one of the most encrypted physical media types to ever be created. It was supposed to have been the best form of Digital Rights Management, one that would stop pretty much everyone from copying software and movies. The days of dubbing VHS tapes was going to be far in the past and we were going to evolve into this brave new world of legitimate content.

As it turns out, when you make anything into a digital version (like a DVD) it becomes infinitely easier to make copies than its analog cousins. It took one single person to reverse engineer the technology and start us on the path of making legitimate backups of the media that we supposedly owned. Now with things like Handbrake, ripping a DVD is easier than recording a movie on TiVo. The one problem is that no matter how easy it has gotten, we still don’t always know where to start ripping. If we rip the wrong sections or the chapters aren’t in the correct order, we end up getting a jumbled mess of media that neither makes sense nor is watchable.

It isn’t enough to have the information. It isn’t enough to have it in a format that is easily transfered. The most important element is putting the puzzle pieces together.

The key for making a good rip of a hard to figure out DVD is to watch what a DVD player does when it plays the movie. If you can see how it navigates on the disk (just by observing the chapter numbers in the right order) you can figure out just how the sneaky disc engineers had constructed it. Once you have all of that chapter information, it is only a matter of dictating what comes next.

That is why we need such good examples of learning for us to rip. We need to be able to watch others who have figured out how to learn and do business and create something new. We need to stop watching those that get the order all wrong and jumble up their intentions so that they are left with no expertise or fulfillment at the end of their projects. We need to stop looking at success as the only factor in determining value.

We need to stop looking at Facebook as something to emulate.

If I rip Facebook, I am going to get the same kinds of unease and mistrust that users all over the world feel toward the service. I will get the mixed-messages of legitimacy and infantilism that are rampant in the millions of Facebook applications available. I will see everyone as a major competitor and no one as a partner. I will not build things that transfer value, but only things that consume it.

Ripping the right information means watching those who listen to the right people and make things work for everyone involved. We should rip writers of great young adult fiction. They have looked into our condition at our most vulnerable time of change and they have figured out what is important to pull out for the rest of our lives. We should rip those who tell the story of Coming of Age because it is all that we ever do.

We should rip those that sing to their children. They have figured out just the right ways of being themselves and playing a part. They have pursued a consistent sense of wonder in children and they persist in the belief that they can hold on to it. If we can rip that moment of shutting the door on the a contented child’s bedroom as they drift off to sleep then we will be one step closer to figuring out being fulfilled.

We should rip those that make up new card games and sports. They have written the rules for complex systems and then they look for ways to win. They have laid out all of the important moves and then they methodically make them. They are masters of using the same 52 items and presenting them in new patterns. If we are to learn anything about the systems we believe in, we must first rip the systems we create.

We must rip all of these elements because we need to copy and remix what is right in this world. We must emulate and augment the reality that we want to see more of. Being the change doesn’t do any good if your change is based upon the wrong information. Rip the good stuff, and being the change becomes the only option.

Question 238 of 365: Why is everything a phone?

I just got the message today that I am now able to call domestic phone numbers from gmail. In one fell swoop, Google has become my default phone service. I can use my computer to call any cell phone or land line for free over the web. It essentially has taken all long distance service out the equation and has made me question the needs for skype, home phones, and even cell phone providers that don’t use VOIP. Telephone service has become data service. Minutes don’t matter and neither do phone numbers. All I need is a contact to make a connection.

And, I realize that this isn’t the first time that the ground underneath telephony has shifted. I get that Voice Over IP has been around a long time. And yet, it makes me realize that everything is a phone now. My computer, iPad, and iPod. Anything that connects to the web is a phone. Soon (with the release of the iTV in a few weeks), my TV will be a phone too.

I didn’t have a cell phone until 2003. I put it off because I thought that the expense wasn’t justified. I didn’t want to just make phone calls from more places. That wasn’t interesting to me when I could pick up any phone and have the same things as I would on a cell phone (minus the contact list). Why would I want a monthly fee to have instant access to others. And, maybe I was right to question the expense. Certainly, Google has.

They do not see the value in the phone calls themselves, but rather everything else around it. They see value in the ads in gmail. They see value in keeping us on any device connected to their networks rather than going anywhere else for our connections. We are moving to a place where phone calls essentially cost nothing. We are going to pay for data. We are going to pay by clicking on ads. And everything will continue to become more and more like what a phone was and not what a phone is today. The actual call will become such an easy portion of our communication that it will be built into every gadget and device we purchase. Phone service will cease. It will just be service.

Here is what I see as the future of our telephony:

We will be completely device independent. No matter where we are, if someone is trying to reach us via voice the things around us will ring. Refrigerators and tables will have confirm or deny buttons. And then we will have phone calls with the air around us because everything will be a microphone. It will just be too easy to accomplish. We are living in an internet of real objects, and each one will be able to connect to our Google Voice account (or whatever it becomes) because the alternative is to give up connection to some other service that is willing to do this for free. The value of communication will continue to be around the amount of data it requires to make these calls and not on how long we are on the phone. Because with our voice will will be sending files and video to one another to any screen that just happens to be around. And those bytes that we send will be where people make their money. We will pay for the privilege because we are already on the phone. We are already communicating and the cost of sharing has been completely obscured. And, sharing is what the future is all about.

And the future started today.

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Question 96 of 365: What’s touch got to do with it?

My son wouldn’t stop screaming in the Apple store today. I tried to give him crackers and even Vanilla Wafers to try and get him to entertain himself. But still he wailed. He threw his food on the ground and then screamed until I picked it up for him to throw again.

This was at the second Apple store we went to today.

The first store we went to, I let him out of the stroller and let him run around. The store wasn’t really supposed to be open yet, so there wasn’t anyone there except for the “trainers.” I was all alone with the iPads, except my son wouldn’t let me get a good look. It was like he was trying to make sure that I didn’t become too attached to the “magical” device.

He nearly knocked one off of the table and almost knocked over a couple of signs before we decided that the training time before the store was open was not an appropriate time for a screaming one and a half year old. And yet, all I wanted to do was to let him see it and touch it. And that is what he wanted too. It was a shame that there wasn’t a kid’s iPad section, with foam rubber on the ground and huge numbers of kids apps ready to play with.

So, what was I able to do with an iPad while parenting my child who is not quite ready for the intricacies of new technology? I have written an e-mail, opened up a number of apps, checked out openspokes.com (everything but the flash video works great), and checked out Pages. While those 7 minutes (total) are not enough to write an in-depth review, they are enough to make a single pronouncement: my son will likely use a touch screen of some kind almost every day of his life.

While I do not believe that the iPad itself (at least not in its current iteration) will be what my son uses in the future, the power of telling a device what you want it to do with your fingers is exactly what my son expects to do, all of the time.

He didn’t want to watch me touch the giant screens. He wanted to do it. He wanted to run his hands over them and make them do stuff. Whenever I bring out my laptop to show him something, he immediately thinks that I am going to check e-mail or look at something that will distract me from time with him. When we pull out the iPod touch, he immediately thinks that it is something for him to touch and for us to interact with, together.

That is the difference of touch. Touch is for working together and for sharing, a computer with inputs that must be learned (keyboards, mice, etc) is for being alone. Touch is for changing what is in front of you, traditional computers are for making incremental shifts (in text, in presentations, etc.).  Touch is for show and tell, the desktop is for sit and stare.

While many people are arguing that the iPad is turning us back into consumers rather than producers or creators, I would like to argue that touch devices like the iPad are what will teach my children to never be satisfied with sitting back and only being entertained. Because they will literally be making changes to what they see with their touch, they will always question the content that is in front of them. They will want to manipulate every type of media. They will want to watch movies with on screen chat. They will want to read newspaper with commenting always turned on. They will want to draw on everything and manipulate where the buttons go and what they should do. I’m not sure they will even know how to simply be consumers.

My children want to touch everything, so why should I usher it out of them by introducing computers that do not require this creative part of them. If I believe that touching other people and giving my kids toys that can be manipulated (blocks, legos, crayons and the like), why should I not extend that to the devices that I ask them to use.

If we are really talking about making our schools, our businesses, and our personal life more intuitive and filled with authenticity, touch is what we need.

Not the iPad, but touch.

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Question 94 of 365: Should we buy and sell our screen real estate?

My wife and I sold our first house this weekend.

It was the place that both of our children started their lives. It was the first place that we could truly call our own. And, it now belongs to someone else. It is theirs to experience and tell stories about. It is theirs to raise their kids and try not to kill the grass in. And I am happy about the whole process.

However, signing those final papers and seeing the check get deposited in our bank account made it all so surreal. It also brought home the idea that it isn’t something that happens every day. I had never before sold a piece of earth to another human being and I don’t anticipate doing it again for a long time. But, the feeling was so nice and so other worldly that it made me want to think about space in a whole different way.

I owned that piece of land, that space, for a period of time. And with a few notable exceptions (doing illegal things within it), I could do whatever I wanted to with it. While I own many objects, a house is the only space that I have ever owned (although, I guess you could argue a car is a moving space I own, but let’s not get too semantic). And then I started thinking about the spaces that I own online. While I am a huge advocate for the cloud, I don’t think that I can make the case that I really own much of what is up on the internet with my name on it. If all of the hosting services I pay for and Google (which, I mostly don’t) went under, I would be left with nothing. So, I went after a more literal definition of space that I can own.

I own my screens.

I own the displays in my devices that let me interact with all of the data that exists in the same way that I own my house that lets me interact with the other people in my family. Our family owns couple televisions, a couple computers, some cell phones, and an iPod or two. This screen real estate is owned outright. And while, I never had thought about it this way until I sold my first house, what if I were to sell part of that screen to someone else?

What if I wanted to sell 1/10th of my laptop screen to an advertising firm? What if I wanted to lease 1/4th of my TV to my favorite entertainment company? What if I wanted to create a commodified market for screen real estate, where users could actually set the price of their own screens depending on their willingness to click on products and services and the percentage of their screens they wanted to part with.

It seems to me that the companies and advertisers have it exactly backwards. They are dealing with a middleman, a reseller of real estate. They are buying ads from Google or from a television network, when they could be buying it directly from the users. They could be working directly with the customers who will be the ones actually buying their product rather than working with a company who will not. I get that Google is the one distributing the ads, but I don’t think we need a distribution service at all if I am accepting the responsibility for selling off 20% of my screen. I am no longer a passive part of the contract with content providers and marketers. I am no longer trying to fast forward through commercials because I have selected the ones that I want to see. If I have leased my screen, then I must sit through the ads that companies want to push.

And I am now choosing what to be sold. I can choose only technology advertising, or food, or local. If companies really want to get smart, they will stop talking to mobile and location-based ad gurus. They will start talking to users about just what kinds of things they would be interested in selling their screen for.

For example, I would sell 1/10th of my computer screen to a running banner of local deals on food, new technology products, and books and periodicals. I would love to be pushed that information in exchange for a few hundred dollars a year. I would be a more informed consumer and I would be able to afford more of those want-based (rather than need-based) purchases.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it seems as though many people don’t think that I own my screen enough to sell directly to me. They think that they have to go through a different company that provides the software or the web-service to reach me. It is almost as if Google is putting up billboards on my front lawn and then selling other people the opportunity of putting up ads. But, if they would have just asked me in the first place, I would put up signs for them, so long as they give me a good deal on landscaping or driveway sealing.

Let’s cut out the middleman. Let’s establish a marketplace for screen real estate. Realtors optional.

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I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
 
The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
 
So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
 
For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
 
Shouldn’t it always be this way?
 
(As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
 
Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Truth in advertising…

I have had quite a few people follow me on twitter recently that weren’t exactly people. They were organizations and schools. They were large groups of people that all somehow are tweeting with the same account. This, is a little unsettling to me and I’m not sure why.
 
I guess it is partially because I believe it is a little less than genuine to have a single voice represent an entire entity. I also believe that many groups are joining twitter simply to advertise that they are on twitter. This is even less genuine.
 
To me, an organization should encourage all of it’s members to become a part of a learning network. It should ask all of it’s employees to have heir own voices and then stream them all into a single place. The school should aggregate the conversation about learning in their space, not merely give updates as to the merits of their latest program changes.
 
You raise the level or discourse about any topic by giving that discourse an official channel. By asking all participants in an organization to tweet on behalf of that organization, you can actually find the pulse of what is going on. Which is, after all, the major goal of Twitter.
 
Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Create your own MobileMe (Sync Everything, at all times).

An aside: it is too bad that every post I write seems like an attempt to get back into the habit of posting, but I suppose until I start blogging consistently again, that is just how it is going to have to be. I have missed way too many things that I have been thinking about to ever fully catch up, but perhaps I can start anew. Anyway, here are my latest thoughts.

Before I go into the details of how to sync yourself completely, I want to tell you why I even undertook this idea. Well, our school system uses an extremely proprietary e-mail and calendaring system called firstclass. Every person that uses firstclass in our schools is locked in to using the firstclass calendar for appointments and things of that nature. But, because I have seen the light of using Google Calendar (open API, shared calendars, embedding, etc), I refuse. In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea of converging the two that I speant an entire weekend (when I wasn’t having fun with my family) on getting Firstclass to sync with Google Calendar, and then eventually my new blackberry that the school district provided for me.

So, this is how you sync everything:

Calendars:

Contacts:

Now, for the details…

(Update: I didn’t put this in the initial post, but I think it is worth mentioning that Firstclass does have a way to sync with both Palm Desktop Software and SyncML directly, but since my district hasn’t set either of these up, I thought it was important to try and find a better way of doing things… there are also third party services that do some of this, but I want a FREE workflow)

In order to get your first class calendar to talk to anything else, you will need to export it as a iCal file:

Now, you may look at this picture and ask, why I wouldn’t just export it as a blackberry file and skip all of the steps in the middle. Well, there are a few reasons. One, if I did this, all of the events would be duplicated every time I exported and imported. Two, because I am on a Mac I do not have any blackberry desktop software to make this sync work.

So, onward we go to iCal. First, you will need to set up your Google Calendar to sync with iCal, using this handy dandy tutorial from Life Hacker.

Now that you have your Google Calendar set up to sync, simply import into iCal your latest and greatest export from Firstclass:

Now, if this isn’t your first time doing this, you will end up with a lot of duplicates. If that is the case, just use the iCal Dupe Deleter. This is also a good tool for deleting duplicates from Google Calendar if you have ever found yourself with too many of one item.

Now, you have synced completely to your Google Calendar and you are ready to sync to your blackberry. Simply point your device to this address and download your over-the-air sync application.

You can now enter an event in Firstclass, iCal, Google Calendar, or on your blackberry and they will sync with one another. Pretty cool, right. But, we are not done. If you would like to have your calendar in an even more universal Format, you can put it on a SyncML server, like Funambol.

All you have to do is download their blackberry application and you can sync to your heart’s content there.

For Contacts:

I understand that MobileMe does a lot more than this, but I believe that if we can create a FREE workflow for each one of our teachers, students, and administrators that syncs information to the place that they need it, we will be able to have the conversations that truly matter. We will no longer be stuck trying to find information, it will always be ours. Although you may not geek out at all that I am proposing, I think there are some pretty heavy implications for continuity in the systems that we are creating. If you have figured out any more syncing tricks, please leave a comment and add to the value of our collective research.

Imagery in Blogging (and Cell phones in the Classroom)

As my students work more and more in the non-fiction realm due to their new found niches, they have a tendency to lose sight of just how descriptive and beautiful their writing can be. As a blogger, I have found that some of my greatest pleasure is derived from my ability to string together an image or a particularly well described passage.

A blog is informative, but stylistically so. The ability to craft a unique image within the information is a virtue that we should all be striving for. So, in an attempt to put these words into practice, here is what I am talking about.

Topic: Cell phones and iPods in the classroom

With his two fingers pushed together, carefully spreading them outward across the screen, one of my students was doing something that I had never thought of a couple of years ago. He was blogging from his iPod. Immediately, we gathered around the gadget, pondering its significance. It was distracting and powerful: the ability to blog about anything at any time. Just think if twitter wasn’t blocked at school.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around cell phones being used for things other than voice. I have been saying for quite a while that we need more laptops in the classroom, as many as there are laps. But can’t we get done most of what we need with our plans from verizon and AT&T? Watching the mini-safari browser spin into action leads me to believe that we aren’t far off from this reality.

I want my students to be thinking about how they can utilize their cell phones in my classroom not how they can sneak a look at what time it is on the display when I am not looking. Their cell phones are bejeweled with authenticity. In many cases, their cell phones are so representative of their lives that given the choice of losing a cell phone or a limb would cause them to pause to think.

Where is the research that says cell phones are great for the classroom. Well, mostly it doesn’t exist yet, at least not that I know of. If anyone has seen any great studies or has done some great work with non-laptop ITC, please share. All I have right now is anecdotal evidence from my classroom and the presentation from K12 Online 2007. Surely there is more to it than that.

I have italicized (for my students) the moments where I intentionally added imagery or description in order to make a potentially boring subject interesting (at least to me). My hope is that blogging moves closer to this style and further away from the dense writing of academic papers. Let me know what you think about either idea.

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