Author: Oscar Retterer

Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images, video clips and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills and techniques that are used in television & film.

Wall Street has called the end of an era and the beginning of the next one: The most important technology product no longer sits on your desk but rather fits in your hand.

The moment came Wednesday, May 26, 2010 when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

[Source: New York Times]

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features – a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

A color version of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader may come eventually, but it won’t be soon. Adding color to the Kindle’s “electronic ink” display is a difficult technical challenge and a color screen is “still a long way out,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting in Seattle.

[Source: USA Today]

Just over half of teenagers text-message friends, while only 38 percent call on their cellphones daily, and just 30 percent on a landline.

[Source: New York Times]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/24drill.html

Last week was a big one for Google fans in higher education. Google Wave opened its doors, and Google Voice now lets students get calls forwarded from their old numbers to their new phones.

Google made one more announcement last week—about a new course-scheduling system, CloudCourse—that could potentially have implications for higher education.  CloudCourse is integrated with Google Calendar and allows users to schedule classes, look up user profiles, and sync the service’s data with internal university systems. CloudCourse was built entirely on Google’s App Engine, which allows users to build and host Web apps. Google hopes that CloudCourse can serve as an example of how to use the App Engine.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]

The World Bank has created a new Web site, data.worldbank.org, to make available for free online more than 2,000 statistics on development that previously had been available only to paying subscribers. Some of the databases include data that is more than 50 years old. The data for more than 200 countries covers such topics as infant mortality, life expectancy and educational achievement. The data is accessible in English, Spanish, French or Arabic.

The World Bank’s decision to make much of its data available for free is part of a global movement, according to Beth Noveck, director of the White House Open Government Initiative. Data.gov, formed a year ago to boost access to federal data, and other public agency efforts to increase data availability are designed to empower individuals and communities to take action on issues of importance to them

[Source: Federal Computer Week]

American college students today show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact don’t make fine distinctions between news and more personal information. Yet student after student, in a recent study, demonstrated knowledge of specific news stories.

How did they get the information? In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story.

This is a Wordle data visualization of the 111,109 words the students in the study wrote about their experiences of going 24 hours without media.

[Source: blogs.worldbank.org – Susan Moeller]

Netflix have updated their iPad app to support the tablet’s video output functionality, meaning those users with Apple’s component, composite or VGA adapters will be able to hook up a bigger screen. Netflix for iPad v1.0.2 supports up to 1024 x 768 resolution, and is available as a free download.

[Source: Everything iPad]

On March 3 and 4, 2010, the ELI community gathered for an online focus session on mobile learning. This white paper is a synthesis of the key ideas, themes, and concepts that emerged from those sessions. The white paper also includes links to relevant focus session materials, recordings, and archives. It represents a harvesting of the key elements that we as a teaching and learning community need to keep in mind as we work to integrate mobile technology into teaching and learning in higher education. It is clear that while the application of mobile technology to learning is just now getting under way, the potential is enormous and we can expect that the rate of development will be very rapid indeed.

The May 2010 issue of Academic Commons available online now.

In this issue:

• How librarians at five Illinois institutions worked with anthropologists to conduct an ethnographic study of undergraduate students’ research processes
• A free, online language exchange community that allows faculty to easily include target language conversation with native speakers in the classroom
• Using Second Life as a means to simulate a Plato’s Cave and deepen students’ understanding of the text
• How a small college in Vermont developed brought trans-national dialogues into the undergraduate curriculum and enabled their students to learn with and from students in different countries and cultures.

Students in an executive certificate program at Rutgers this summer will be equipped with an Apple iPad tablet that includes pre-loaded program materials.

[Source: Campus Technology]

Over the last two decades, there have been few, if any, academic institutions that have not built new classrooms and integrated advanced classroom technology in them. Many of these undertakings have been successful, in the sense that the faculty, students, and administration thought that the technology was useful, that it worked as expected, and, that both teaching and learning goals were met in the new facilities.

It is likely that the vast majority of advanced technology classroom projects succeed in some measure, though far too many fall short of fully meeting the expectations of those who envisioned, funded, and built them. And there are several ways in which advanced technology classrooms can disappoint users.

[Source:Campus Technologyy]

Experts offer up their top picks of web 2.0 apps that are having a big impact on teaching and learning in higher education.

[Source: Campus Technology]

It’s light, portable and can handle e-books. So why are some schools banning the iPad?

[Source: Higher Ed Morning]

For the most part, Flash has always been the standard for showing video on the web (think of YouTube and Vimeo), supported in all browsers with the only exception being the iPhone and most recently, the iPad. But now, with HTML5, the new video tag is creeping into our lives and opening up many new, exciting and standardized media possibilities for web developers.

Some quick resources to get started…

An Ohio research project is investigating just how students would prefer to get the text for their courses–whether in hard copy form, in versions suitable for mobile devices, or in some other digital format.

[Source: Campus Technology]

Apple’s iPad isn’t having an easy time during college admissions season. The tablet is having difficulty being accepted at George Washington University and Princeton University because of network stability issues. Cornell University also says it is seeing connectivity problems with the device and is concerned about bandwidth overload.

[Source: Wall Street Journal]

The popular blog moves to The Chronicle of Higher Education and brings all its content along for the ride.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education]