Looking for a new smartphone? See the reviews and a list of what are considered to be the
top 10 smartphones for the first half of 2011.
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Thursday, June 30, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
So Many Devices, What Should We Do?
Isn’t technology great? Everything you want is at your fingertips. Laptops, tablets, smartphones; these can provide whatever information you want in a millisecond, no matter where you are. But – which one of these is the better item? That, of course, depends on what you are using it for. For example, I have a smartphone. It is another appendage of mine, I’m afraid. I can do so much with it, such as surf the web, order pizza, read e-books; the list goes on and on. However, I can’t use my smartphone as a substitute for my computer for a number of things. The most obvious are my online classes. I can bring a class up on my phone and read the postings and a lecture, but answering the posts, with my smartphone keyboard, is a real pain. My class experience is much richer on a real computer. Other things such as composing more than texts, also, lend itself to a product such Microsoft Word or the open source program Open Office normally found on your laptop.
But what about the tablets vs. the laptop? What is the real purpose of each? A few good websites to research this are as follows: Buzzle.com, Tablet Buying Guide, About.com and Associated Content from Yahoo.
Finally, there are some phones coming out on the market now, like the Motorola ATRIX 4G that brag about being everything to everyone - in this case a phone and a laptop computer. You can read the review of this product from the Engadget website and see if this, and products like it, live up to the hype. Yahoo has come out with a page on upgrading to new technology - their recommendation - DON'T!
In summary, when deciding on purchasing a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, do some research and make sure you are getting a product that meets your needs.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
10 Excellent Tech Gifts for Your Dad or Grad
Father's Day and graduations create perfect opportunities to buy great gifts like laptops, cameras, and other gadgets...but where to begin? More->>
Friday, June 3, 2011
Rethinking Online Pedagogy
Many postsecondary instructors are teaching online courses, but are these instructors making informed decisions in their online teaching? One common mistake that online instructors make in their teaching is to provide students too much instructional content of little or no relevance. Cognitive load theorists suggest that this practice presents students with too many options, leading students to experience cognitive overload. The recommended solution for this problem is to hide nonessential course content from student view. Hiding unnecessary course content from students ensures that informational resources in a particular course are relevant to instructional topics being addressed in the course and limits student access to nonessential instructional content. Providing students context-specific information decreases the cognitive demands that complex tasks place on the limited resources of students’ working memory.
A second problem that is quite common in online pedagogy is the lack of instructor support for course navigation. Many students become confused or disoriented when attempting to navigate an online course, as students are forced to recall multiple navigation paths. This problem is exacerbated by course navigation procedures that are complex, inconsistent, and insufficient. The recommended approach to helping students navigate an online course is to use a consistent layout and navigation structure. Students should be able to easily locate course tools and informational resources by adhering to consistent navigational routines.
Course organization is a third factor that online course instructors often ignore. A poorly-organized course can increase the complexity of learning tasks in a given online course, making learner fulfillment of learning tasks difficult. The difficulties that learners encounter in a poorly-organized online course result from the instructor’s failure to consider brain architecture in their presentation of instructional materials. This architecture suggests that information is stored in the brain as a network of concepts or ideas. Cognitive theorists use the term “chunking” to refer to this web of ideas. It is recommended that course instructors organize information by themes or categories to achieve such networks that are consistent with human brain functioning.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Using Adobe Connect for F2F
The University of St. Francis hosts virtual meetings on the web through what is known as "Adobe Connect." It's full potential to simulate face-to-face instruction can be examined through an actual teaching event that I managed recently. Here's what happened.
Professor Syd Sklar teaches a course in Outdoor Recreation-- Canoeing, and as a preliminary to the actual event on the waters of Minnesota's lakes, a planning session is held with students here on campus. But one of his students was in Colorado and could not make this essential meeting in-person. Enter Adobe Connect, a video camera, and a conference telephone. Through a web link, the student was able to attend the session in Colorado, and see, by way of a generously large video panel, the camping equipment and apparel that Sklar demonstrated. The conference phone enabled the student to call in and listen to some fairly good audio participation by Sklar and others, or to join in the conversation. Meanwhile, the conference phone audio was piped into the meeting so that anyone else logging in from abroad could understand clearly what was going on.
Instead of a conference telephone, a "boundary microphone" (with a wide audio pick-up pattern) could have been used to enable all participants to be heard.
The student responded to an impromptu questionnaire that the meeting was informative (on a scale of 1-5, she rated it a "4") and that both the audio and video information was adequate (versus inadequate).
And still the technology's potential was not fully realized. There were handouts to share; if prepared as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) documents, these could have been pre-loaded into the meeting and downloaded by the student. In fact, PDFs can be displayed in the meeting, zoomed in to focus on key salient points, and navigated to show the student-at-a-distance what is necessary at the "teachable moment."
If there are several guests, a polling feature enables the instructor to quiz or survey the students, not unlike that of using a "clicker" in a face-to-face classroom. The polling questions have to be prepared in advance, of course. If web links need to be shared, they can be typed into the chat window, and they will appear as live links.
There is also a whiteboard, and for desktop sharing, a screen shot can be captured and overlaid with a whiteboard to annotate whatever is displayed.
All of these features go well beyond the capabilities of a simple "Skype" session, are pedagogically important, and are cost-free to the faculty user.
The human resource requirement is intensive, with a learning curve that some consider steep but that others believe is quite intuitive, but there are instructional designers in the Center for Instructional Delivery who can facilitate. I myself hosted Prof. Sklar's meeting and ran the video camera so that the content could be most effectively presented.
Several faculty have mastered Adobe Connect to the point where they truly can host a meeting and produce results without on-the-scene support from CID.
Professor Syd Sklar teaches a course in Outdoor Recreation-- Canoeing, and as a preliminary to the actual event on the waters of Minnesota's lakes, a planning session is held with students here on campus. But one of his students was in Colorado and could not make this essential meeting in-person. Enter Adobe Connect, a video camera, and a conference telephone. Through a web link, the student was able to attend the session in Colorado, and see, by way of a generously large video panel, the camping equipment and apparel that Sklar demonstrated. The conference phone enabled the student to call in and listen to some fairly good audio participation by Sklar and others, or to join in the conversation. Meanwhile, the conference phone audio was piped into the meeting so that anyone else logging in from abroad could understand clearly what was going on.
Instead of a conference telephone, a "boundary microphone" (with a wide audio pick-up pattern) could have been used to enable all participants to be heard.
The student responded to an impromptu questionnaire that the meeting was informative (on a scale of 1-5, she rated it a "4") and that both the audio and video information was adequate (versus inadequate).
And still the technology's potential was not fully realized. There were handouts to share; if prepared as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) documents, these could have been pre-loaded into the meeting and downloaded by the student. In fact, PDFs can be displayed in the meeting, zoomed in to focus on key salient points, and navigated to show the student-at-a-distance what is necessary at the "teachable moment."
If there are several guests, a polling feature enables the instructor to quiz or survey the students, not unlike that of using a "clicker" in a face-to-face classroom. The polling questions have to be prepared in advance, of course. If web links need to be shared, they can be typed into the chat window, and they will appear as live links.
There is also a whiteboard, and for desktop sharing, a screen shot can be captured and overlaid with a whiteboard to annotate whatever is displayed.
All of these features go well beyond the capabilities of a simple "Skype" session, are pedagogically important, and are cost-free to the faculty user.
The human resource requirement is intensive, with a learning curve that some consider steep but that others believe is quite intuitive, but there are instructional designers in the Center for Instructional Delivery who can facilitate. I myself hosted Prof. Sklar's meeting and ran the video camera so that the content could be most effectively presented.
Several faculty have mastered Adobe Connect to the point where they truly can host a meeting and produce results without on-the-scene support from CID.