Online Education May Transform Higher Ed

Can online education be the rock that disturbs the placid waters of American higher education? Several industry experts believe it will have a significant ripple effect on colleges and universities of all sizes in coming years—but only if it's subject to regulation, governed by a common set of accreditation standards, and widely accepted by institutions who have long clung to the traditional face-to-face model of instruction. More ->>

Running Out of Coolness?

Are our leading manufacturers of digital products simply running out of coolness? Some of the upcoming products for 2012 do not appear to be overly impressive. HP recently generated drawings of a razor thin laptop with a virtual keyboard. Now, anything that HP wants to do to improve the virtual keyboard would be welcomed with open arms, but someone needs to inform HP that razor thin laptops with virtual keyboards have been in use for a while. A second product to be released in 2012 is a watch that functions as a wireless hub, allowing laptops, tablets, and androids to talk to one another for the purpose of sharing information. It seems that the tools provided by Google would suffice for information sharing. This product doesn’t seem very intuitive, as individuals are forced to learn a new way of sharing information. The watch is also very unattractive. It is not clear what problem was solved by creating such a product.

The Media Mat represents a third product that will be released in 2012. This product is a screen that functions like an incomplete Apple iPad, rolling up like paper. Reviews on this item suggest images appear in grayscale, and the product has a slow refresh rate. It is difficult to determine why a roll-up mobile computer is needed.

Sometimes, it appears that our manufacturers of digital products are trying to quickly generate products for the marketplace without consideration of the problems that end users face. Such disregard for customer needs will likely make some great companies appear to be marginal. Over the years, our digital gods have produced some great products, but, at the time, it seems they are running out of coolness.

Free Online Media and Storage

I am an educator who loves to put different forms of media in my content. I also love storage space that's accessible and convenient. And because I'm an educator I need to do it on the cheap, budgets being what they are these days (virtually nonexistent).

The near revolutionary growth of free Web-based tools makes it possible as I will describe, by focusing on two free tools: Jing, and Dropbox.

Jing, by its name alone, doesn't tell you much about what it does. Basically, it's a screen capture tool that records both still images and animations and stores them "in the cloud" at screencast.com, which gives you two gigabytes of free storage space. Jing is available at www.techsmith.com/jing as a free download. It installs in a few moments and places itself on your computer screen at the top in the shape of a semi-transparent gold-and-yellow half circle. Move your mouse over the circle, and it exposes a few simple options:



Upon clicking capture, Jing exposes a cross-hair style cursor which you can use to trace a rectangle around a portion of the screen you want to capture, or a whole window. The animation below shows you the process of capturing a portion of the USF home page.

Once captured, you can save the image or a SWF (Flash) video animation, save it to your account at screencast.com, or save it to the other free cloud storage solution I want to discuss: Dropbox.

Go to dropbox.com and you can sign up for 2 gigabytes of free storage space, provided by an application you download that creates a folder on your computer, which looks like just about any other folder you have except that it is characterized with a little green checkmark type icon next to each item in the folder.

The beauty of dropbox is that you can download the app to two or more computers. I have dropbox on two office computers and on my home computer. And with that capability I can upload a document (e.g., a spreadsheet) to my dropbox folder on my work computer, and have it instantly accessible from the dropbox folder on my home computer.

For a nominal fee you can increase your storage space to 50 gigabytes or more, but with the free account you get 2 gigabytes.

One benefit of this is freedom from the flash drive (a/k/a "thumb" drive or "jump" drive). I know the flash drive has been a tremendous convenience for making files portable, but they are prone to carrying infections (viruses), and I've grown wary of them. I have had no such issues with Dropbox, but don't take my word for it. Run your virus protection software against it and see for yourself.

There is but one caveat I have with any free service you get from the web, and that is decline the option to have the program run on startup. Keep that checkbox unselected (see example below).

In other words do not launch on startup. Having too many programs active on startup creates too much memory overhead that slows down your computer. Just run the program(s) when you need them.

By the way, all of the media you've seen on this blog post have been created with the tools that I've described, except the last one.

Shopping for Good Deals for the Holidays -
It’s Never Too Early to Begin!

I know, I know,  it’s only the beginning of November and already we are talking “Holiday Season”. I’m not trying to rush you – I’m trying to help you get some good deals – and plan ahead. The one site I love is Black Friday Ads.  This website  plans for the “big day” – no, not Christmas, but Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which is the busiest shopping day of the year!

This site not only lists each store and what specials they will have on Black Friday, but they have the scans of the ads too, in a .pdf format, so it's just as if the original ad is in your  hands. For example, as of this morning, J.C. Penney, Kohls, and Toys R Us are already listed there, just to name a few. By posting these ads so far in advance, it gives you time to plan and price shop so you know ahead of time if you are getting the deal of the century.

 It wasn’t that long ago that people waited many hours outside in the cold, damp, early morning hours for a store to open to get the great “deals” that were only available that day. Well, some people still do that – but me? I’m at my computer at midnight on Thanksgiving, picking up all of the things that some people, already frozen, lining up in front of the stores, are waiting for. And let's not even discuss the insurmountable crowds! Me, my hot chocolate and a computer; won't you join me?  Christmas shopping doesn’t get any better than this…and to all a goodnight!

Top Five Education Innovation Trends for 2011 and 2012

The Gilfus Education Group announced its annual predictions, foreshadowing emerging concepts for encompassing information technology and digital content throughout academic and administrative education applications. More ->>