Image by xcode via Flickr

I would like to register my support for the practice of jailbreaking of smartphones, tablets, and game systems on the principle that these devices are fully-functional computers and should not have their functionality crippled to promote monopolistic business practices by their manufacturers. I believe that “jailbreaking”– or “freeing personal electronics to function properly as the computers they are”– is an essential condition for teaching and learning of 21st Century technological skills.

I was one of the enthusiastic Apple users who went out to buy the first iPhone in 2007. Though the iPhone has since brought the term “apps” into the popular consciousness, the first iPhones did not have an app store and could only run basic apps that were installed by Apple at the factory. A community base of enthusiasts started jailbreaking iPhones to allow that revolutionary hardware to perform new and useful functions that Apple had not built into it. This is what computers are supposed to be used for—enabling users to write and run programs that perform valuable functions! The first iPhone apps were all written by jailbreakers, and those of us users who jailbroke had access to a vibrant entrepreneurial community of people pushing the limits of the iPhone’s capabilities. The law-abiding normies had a crippled phone that couldn’t do many of the functions that we now consider “standard” for a smartphone.

For example: It was a minor scandal for the first two years of the iPhone that it didn’t have two basic and very useful features, Copy and Paste. While Apple put out two phones that didn’t have it (2007’s iPhone and 2008’s iPhone 3G), the jailbreaking community solved that problem in under a year and brought a fully-functional copy/paste feature to the iPhone. This is just one of the many examples where independent developers added value to the iPhone just because they could. It’s unfortunate that they had to violate their Terms of Service and invalidate their warranty to do so.

While Apple’s desktop operating system (OS X) has always allowed users to write, run, and fully own the applications they create, Apple have taken a much more restrictive and user-hostile stance with their smartphones and tablets on iOS. I believe that these excessive restrictions are less about security—they are designed to “lock” users and vendors into having to use Apple’s App Store for all commerce that involves these devices. Once Apple decided to allow user-created apps in 2008, they only allowed them to be sold through Apple’s own store, taking a usurious 30% of all profits from these sales. They rigidly control which apps can be sold in the app store and have developed a reputation for rejecting apps for questionable and contradictory reasons. While these monopolistic practices may be great for Apple, they result in higher prices, less innovation, and less choice for consumers.

I want to stress again that no desktop computer operating system like Windows or Mac has ever attempted to prevent its users from running third-party programs. We have never needed to “jailbreak” a device before because no company has ever been so brazen as to deny users the right to leave one internet service provider (AT&T) and use another one (T-Mobile). Now that Apple has crossed that threshold, other device manufacturers are following suit, hoping that they too can limit their users’ economic choices via technological means so they can squeeze greater profits from their captive users.

Please understand that Apple’s practice of “jailing” technology signals a historic shift—from computers serving humans’ interests to computers serving corporations’ interests.

I think it’s a negative development and I wholeheartedly oppose it.

As an educator, I am interested in empowering young people to actively explore technology. I have seen that open source tools and jailbreaking make it possible for students to “look under the hood” of technology so they can understand how it works. I encourage students to learn how open source tools like Linux, Android, and WordPress work because they are the materials from which a new world is being constructed. Closed and jailed technology tools separate consumers from creators in a way that hammers, nails, wood, and steel do not. Just as lumber producers should not be able to dictate who can build a house with their wood, a hardware manufacturer should not be able to dictate who can write a program for their system. Please continue to preserve people’s right to self-determination with the technology tools they buy. Please preserve our right to jailbreak our devices and learn to master them so we can actively participate in this new world that is coming into being.

Sincerely,
Ted Curran

Oakland, CA

If you’re interested in contributing your voice to keep jailbreaking legal, go to the EFF’s page and get involved!

Related articles

• EFF petitions to extend legal iPhone jailbreaking (tuaw.com)
• Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon? (readwriteweb.com)
• The EFF needs your help to keep rooting, jailbreaking legal (androidandme.com)
• Jailbreaking to Become Illegal Again this Year (techcular.com)
• Like iOS 5? Thank A Hacker (wired.com)
• Untethered Jailbreak For iOS 5 is Coming Any Day Now (readwriteweb.com)
• Is iOS the Future of the Mac? (mac.appstorm.net)
• The iPhone 4S has been jailbroken (geek.com)

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2011 brought us the buzzword craze of “gamification” in education, or the quest to make learning online more like a video game. Inspired by FourSquare‘s achievement badges as a way of motivating users to check in to location-based services and Mozilla’s promise of outcomes-based badges in lieu of diplomas, we ed-techies went a little nuts for gamification this year. In my post about “The Angry Birds Guide to Online Lesson Design“, I tried to distill what makes video games so motivating, challenging, and fun to see if we could use those insights to enhance online learning. I’m now working on a “proof of concept”, helping a faculty re-design his course to be more student-centered and leverage the tools we have built into our Learning Management System.  I hope to prove that online can match the motivation of video games without trying to “mimic” them with leaderboards, badges, and the outward trappings of games. Instead, we need to look at what works in games and use that to think critically about the way we approach delivering instruction online.

I have been focusing on helping a faculty re-design his course to make it more student-centered using some of the insights I documented in the Angry Birds post. These are not as technically involved as setting up an achievements system, but they use the existing features of our learning management system to reinforce good lesson design. There are many tools in the LMS that enable courses to feel like games, if not outwardly look like them. I think that badges are great for motivating students, but so are grades! The hard part is motivating students to do the readings, master the material, and think critically about material. A lot of this is caused by outdated and debunked thinking about teaching and learning itself.

As in the best video games, students need a safe place to try and fail until they succeed. To that end, we are putting formative reading assessments in the LMS using the Blackboard Tests tool that students can re-try until they’re satisfied with their score. These are really meant for a reading comprehension check and to make sure students understand the assigned readings. We are also using the “feedback” feature in Blackboard’s tests tool so we can give students “clues” after they get a wrong answer– showing them where to find the correct answer in the book. These tests will also inform class meetings, as the faculty can see which concepts students had problems with and address those during the class meeting.

We started designing this course with Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind after I read a great paper on student-centered learning techniques in health sciences ed. It found that over 91% of questions asked of undergrad and graduate level health sciences students are limited to the “Knowledge” and “Comprehension” domains– the two most basic levels of cognition. [annotated link][original article].

We recognize that comprehension questions are essential to ensuring that students have a basic grasp on the content, but that they’re not the be-all, end-all of instruction. As in games, students need to take the basic skills they’ve mastered in one context and apply them to other situations.

Related articles

• What is Gamification? and Why it Matters to L&D Professionals (learningcircuits.blogspot.com)
• Learning Technology – Assessment Tools Needed in Every Classroom (scoop.it)
• 2012 – The Year of the LMS (elearndev.blogspot.com)
• Students report improved grades via Technology/LMS use (moodlenews.com)
• This Time Its Personal (thejournal.com)
• Broadening the Definition of Gamification for L&D Professionals (learningcircuits.blogspot.com)
• 7 Things You Should Know About Gamification (educause.edu)
• Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS (mfeldstein.com)
• Is Gamification Really a Bad Word? (edstuckinthecloud.com)
• What You Need to Know about LMS Alternatives (thecorkboard.org)

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“So, the ‘limiting context’ I am interested in is how the decision to acquire an open source or a proprietary LMS is determined – is it cost, functionality, usability, easy to implement, requires little training, etc., etc. ”

Professional Hosting and Service– Whether You’re Open or Closed

Extensibility: A World of Tools

Is it the same for K-12 as it is in Higher Ed?

Image by Dru! via Flickr

Related articles

• Open Source vs. Proprietary Software (pcworld.com)
• Freeing the LMS (downes.ca)
• The Battle For Openness In The LMS Market (downes.ca)
• Blackboard: Now More “Open” (hackeducation.com)
• Why Sakai Rocks! (dr-chuck.com)
• Linux, Open Source Still ‘Money’ in Financial Services (linuxinsider.com)
• Open source is winning where it counts, so where to next? (technollama.co.uk)
• Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market | e-Literate (mfeldstein.com)

With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K-12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerful suite of free communication and collaboration tools like GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Groups, Sites, and others. While many of these productivity-focused apps have helped modernize the classroom toolset, schools have been secretly pining for a tool to help students, teachers, families, and administrators stay in constant contact the way we’re getting used to doing in Facebook. Several small players have offered Facebook-style social classroom apps– tools like Edmodo, Schoology, and HootSuite have grown up to fill the need for a full featured social network for schools. If Google gets this right, the socially linked classroom with be a reality before the year is out! This is exciting for me, as someone who has been looking at enterprise-level microblogging tools like SocialCast and Yammer as a way to make campus communications easier and more free-flowing. I think this type of technology can revolutionize organizations by making it easier for stakeholders to hold sustained, data-informed conversations with asynchronous tools.

Most social classroom apps I’ve seen organize course activities (like commenting on discussion questions or sharing relevant links) into a Facebook-style activity feed where recent events appear near the top of the home screen. Photos, videos, and links to outside websites are automatically previewed inline, making it easy for people to see where they’re being linked to. Users can send private messages or public ones, deciding how they want to communicate and with whom. Discussions can be formed around any kind of posting, from a quick status update to a long-form blog post or multimedia artifact. These conversations can last long after the original posting, only drawing attention to themselves when a new comment is added. Users can form friendships, groups, and organization pages to support the many different types of interactions that people have.

These features will come as no surprise to Facebook users– the social network has so thoroughly revolutionized the way we think of online collaboration that  its influence is felt in every tool in this category. Google Plus is no exception, but it also advances the form in a few key ways:

• It gives simple and precise controls to help users share information only with the people they want to reach. No more accidental overshares.
• It provides an integrated interface where chat, video conferencing, and RSS news reading intermingle with social status updates.
• Google has stated its commitment to integrate its many diverse services into G+, and it will continue to grow into a central hub for communication and collaboration.
• It remains to be seen, but a G+ for Apps could very likely help schools to keep communications inside the school community instead of defaulting to public status. This may allay privacy- and copyright-related concerns caused by the wide-open nature of Twitter and Facebook. This is a prime selling-point of these education-focused social learning apps as well as the enterprise microblogging apps.

Even this week’s announcement of Pearson’s OpenClass Learning Management System may be disrupted by a G+ for Apps, as it looks to be little more than a social “glue” to organize students and teachers into courses so they can share documents in Google’s suite of free services. If G+ provides simple tools for schools to organize students and teachers into courses, cohorts, programs, organizations and the like (maybe by interfacing with Student Information Systems?), it may give the LMS a serious run for its money.

What are your thoughts on Google Plus for Education? Please let us know in the comments.

Related articles

• Pearson adds free learning management tools to Google Apps for Education (betanews.com)
• North Carolina A&T State University goes Google (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)
• New Presentation Options in Google Docs (freetech4teachers.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google in Education and Chromebooks (Sept 2011) (speedofcreativity.org)
• Back to School with Google Chromebooks (hackeducation.com)
• Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

Just enter the username you want in the search bar and it will give you a graphic visualization to let you know if that name is available on your favorite social networks. If you see your name is available, just go to that site and sign up!

This is also great if you’re picking baby names and want to make sure that your future offspring has reserved the very best usernames on all the hot services. For example, young Genghis Curran will not have to worry about adding a “1″ to the end of his Twitter handle (though he may get picked on a lot!)

Thanks, NameChk!

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• Check Username Availability (bloggingtips.com)
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If you’re like me, one of the first computer skills you were taught in school is how to use a word processor. We all mastered the art of formatting words for the printed page because we were still using computers in a paper-based world. As more business and education activities move online, we are spending ever more time writing in web-based text editors, where our ideas are being automatically encoded into divs, spans, ps and ems– a language that too few of us speak fluently enough to reset the margins or change the font size.

Still, the status quo is for people to write their documents in an offline word processor like MS Word, then copy and paste into the text editor of the web-based tools they use to collaborate. Though this sounds like an OK approach, I often see people wondering what all that weird MSOffice XML code that comes along is doing there. Worse, they save the word file and upload it, forcing others to download the file before they can see what it says.

I believe it’s time for students and mainstream users to compose documents using web design tools, not paper design tools. By using desktop writing tools like Blue Griffon or Scribefire, you can compose valid HTML documents using the same simple controls you’re used to seeing in your webmail, blog editor, or learning management system. If you pay attention, you will probably also learn the basic HTML concepts that help us create good looking, semantically valid documents for the open web. The controls on a web-based editor give you hints as to what’s happening in the code of a web page, and they allow you to go look at the code produced after you added blockquotes, an ordered list, or a heading 3 using the simple, intuitive buttons.

The WordPress Text Editor- Simple, Elegant, and a Great Learning Tool

Web Processors: Some Promising Tools

My favorite text editor to work in is the default WYSIWYG editor in WordPress– especially now that they have added the distraction-free writing interface called “fullscreen”. It is an uncluttered, minimalistic writing interface like WriteRoom or OmmWriter that allows you to focus on your work. The WordPress editor gives you as much or as little assistance as you need with formatting your document, but it also finds little ways to challenge you to expand your HTML coding skills. I find this nice balance between easy and challenging has kept me using (and growing with) this tool. The downside to this approach is that it’s really best if you have a WordPress site– it feels a little silly to fire up a website just so I can dash off a document to someone. [A note to devs: I would definitely pay a nominal fee to have the WordPress fullscreen editor in a standalone desktop app. Make it so.]

For offline writing, I am starting to really appreciate BlueGriffon, a free HTML5 authoring app along the lines of NVU or Kompozer. It can do sophisticated HTML5 and CSS3 formatting in a simple graphic interface that brings high quality, modern web design tools to the most technophobic. (OK not the MOST technophobic– more like newbies with a taste for mild adventure!) The tools in Blue Griffon go from underlining, bold, and italics to helping you work with div placement and styling without touching a line of code. This tool is truly the most user-friendly way I’ve found to make the difficult art of web design feel less threatening to non- coders.

Imagine all the hours of your life you’ve spent working in MS Word– if you had spent that much time in Blue Griffon while trying to bang out those last minute term papers, you would be a seasoned web designer before you finished high school! And that’s my point– the tools we are expecting people to use today support a 20th Century workplace, not the collaborative, computer literate populace needed today.

You will find links below to some other promising HTML editors for web-based writing. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on

Romantic vs. Classical Worldviews in Writing for the Web

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This all reminds me of Robert Pirsig‘s discussion of Romantic vs. Classical thinking in his towering work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In discussing how different people approach maintaining their motorcycles, he touches on an interesting dichotomy in the way people look at the world. [excerpt] The “Romantic” is described thus:

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings
rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It
does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic
conscience.

He contrasts this worldview with the “Classical” which he describes as:

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws…which are themselves
underlying forms of thought and behavior….  Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal… Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.

He uses these distinctions to contrast himself from his friend. He, a classicist, takes pride in understanding what makes his motorcycle work and performing his own maintenance. His friend, a romantic, doesn’t care how it works– just as long as it works and he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty fixing it! As you might imagine, his friend’s approach is put to the test when his motorcycle starts to malfunction.

This same distinction is alive and well among computer users today– most of us want to get into a tool and have everything “just work”. We don’t want to know anything about what’s going on under the hood, as long as we can drag and drop everything where we want it to appear. That was great in the desktop era where apps and the OS could protect you fom ever having to think about code. (Thanks Steve!) However, the web has some very rigid underlying rules for what works and what doesn’t, and I often see people suffering panic attacks because their romanticist attitude is coming in conflict with some real classical realities of the web. The worker of the 21st Century will be the one who can successfully unite an artistic viewpoint with the technical skills to bring it about, and there is no better way to learn that blend than coding for the web.

Your Thoughts?

I’m very curious to hear your reactions– do you think students need to learn HTML or do you think it is a dying art that will soon be done by machines? Do you think it’s possible to completely replace your Office suite with an HTML editor? Leave a comment and let us know!

Related articles

• Text Editor Anywhere Moves Text From Any Program to Your Favorite Text Editor [Download Of The Day] (lifehacker.com)
• Full Screen Text Editor for Chrome (madrasgeek.com)
• What are the defferences between text editor and wysiwyg editor (wiki.answers.com)
• Elements 2 is a restrained and remarkable text editor for iPhone and iPad (thenextweb.com)
• WriteRoom Takes iPad Text Editor Crown (wired.com)
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• BlueGriffon EPUB Edition (bluegriffon.org)
• BlueGriffon: A Cross-Platform Open Source WYSIWYG HTML Editor [Review] (techie-buzz.com)
• Disruptive Innovations announces BlueGriffon EPUB edition software (teleread.com)
• Ten WYSIWYG HTML editors for Mac OS X (tuaw.com)
• BlueGriffon 1.1.1 (bluegriffon.org)

How do you do it?

1. Go download the Tilt plugin for Firefox.
2. Navigate to the website you want to screenshot
3. Pull down Firefox’s Tools menu and invoke Tilt
4. Position your website in the most awesome way possible
5. Shoot and edit your screenshot with your favorite screen capture software like Jing, Skitch, or good ol’ Grab in OSX
6. Drop that screenshot into your presentation, document, or whatever creative piece you’re working on!

It’s really that simple! I’d love to see what you do with this tool– please leave links to your 3D presentations in the comments!

Related articles

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• Review: Firefox 5 Web browser (macworld.com)
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You may have heard Blackboard’s announcement that it’s being acquired by Providence Equity Partners. If you are in the midst of an LMS Evaluation (like we are), you may be wondering what this news does to the level of service that Bb will be able to provide in the future. Though Bb CEO Chasen reassures us that everything will be just the same under the new regime, it’s instructive to look at what would motivate a private equity firm to buy Bb, especially since it’s been losing LMS market share quickly as viable alternatives emerge throughout the marketplace.

In Michael Feldstein’s article a while back–before we knew who the potential buyer might be–he speculated that it might be a private equity firm.

Let me take a little detour here and comment briefly on the possibility of Blackboard being acquired by a private equity company. Joshua Kim has publicly lamented about a potential acquisition of Blackboard by private equity as being bad for education. It is important to keep in mind that this would not be an entirely new phenomenon in the world of educational technology. SunGard, Datatel, and Cengage (my employer) are all owned by private equity companies. In general, there are two types of approaches that private equity takes to companies that they acquire. One possibility is that they milk the company for cash as much as they can and then sell off the parts. That’s the kind of approach that became infamous during the big leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s. But often private equity will buy a company because, for whatever reason, they think that company is under-performing and that they can turn it around relatively quickly. In that case, their goal is to build up the company and sell it at a profit, either to another private investor or through an offering on the stock market. It’s a bit like flipping a house. I make no judgment here about what the likely impact of private equity purchasing Blackboard might be. My point is simply that there is no particular reason to believe they would automatically do a worse job for customers than, for example, Google might simply because they are a financial services company.

It appears that Providence Equity believes Blackboard below its potential and wants to build it up into a more profitable company so they can sell it off at a profit. The Freedom of Information Act inquiries Feldstein referred to back then were all focused on universities that had left Bb for other competitors (especially open source LMSs). I think they were trying to figure out whether it was still worth its valuation despite the fact that it’s losing so much share of the LMS market. Their other products (like Bb Collaborate and Connect) may provide a larger share of the revenues as the company moves forward.

From the Bloomberg Article:

It’s the portfolio of technologies that Blackboard has built and acquired that makes them so attractive across online learning, mobile access to learning resources, distance learning, as well as tools to help schools communicate to their students,” Auty said in a telephone interview today.

I guess we will all have to wait and see what happens next. What are your thoughts?

Related articles

• Blackboard Buyout Arrives, At Full Value (BBBB) (247wallst.com)
• Blackboard Seen Losing 50% Gain With Private Equity: Real M&A (businessweek.com)
• Some Caveats in Considering Blackboard as a Buyout Target (BBBB) (247wallst.com)
• Providence Equity Is Said to Be in Lead to Buy Blackboard (businessweek.com)
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Image by hardeep.singh via Flickr

In my last post, I recommended using a password manager like LastPass to help you create strong, unique passwords for all of the different sites you use. If you don’t like the idea of storing passwords in the cloud, the next best way is to create a mnemonic password formula. The way it works is to create an easy-to-remember “formula” that enables you to use a different strong password on each site. It consists of a strong password that’s the same on every site(so you can remember it) but with a different component for each site.

Here’s one method:

Take the first letter from each word in a favorite song lyric. I just happen to have “Panic” by the Smiths on right now. The first line is

Panic on the streets of London/ Panic on the streets of Birmingham

If you take the first letters from each word, you get:

PotsoLPotsoB

Already, that’s pretty cryptic because it’s not a dictionary word and it has both upper and lower case letters. It’s also easy to remember because I can just hum it to myself. Then you can add numbers and punctuation to make it stronger

PotsoL/PotsoB4220

I added a slash where it would come in the lyrics, and I put my dog’s birthday backwards. Now I have a very strong password that’s easy to remember. This is the part I commit to memory. Very strong, but it doesn’t solve the problem of having different passwords on each site.

Next step is to add the first three letters of the site into the password. We’re going to have [memorized password] + [first 3 letters of site name].

My Facebook password would be PotsoL/PotsoB4220+Fac

My PayPal password would be PotsoL/PotsoB4220+Pay

So what you end up with is a very long and secure password that’s different on every site and easy to remember. This is just one way of creating a mnemonic password, but it’s the best way I know to do this. Of course, the trick is that you have to be consistent in your formula. If you don’t stick with the exact formula it’ll be a nightmare to recall it. Not to mention what a hassle it is to have to type this every time.

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