Author: Teb Locke

The entire story is very relevant to our group, but I found this section about the possibility of Google becoming a player in the LMS market especially interesting.

Even though Blackboard continues to grow through acquisitions, Klopfer says the company could face competition from Google in the collegiate market. That’s if the focus of learning management systems shifts because of demand for more online collaboration.

“If that transition happens, a company like Google stands to gain from that because they have a lot of those collaborative tools,” he says.

Many college students already use Google’s suite of applications, including Gmail, Google Docs, Notebook and Book Search. Google has also set up a Web site for educators complete with apps for the classroom.

via From Chalk To Bytes: The Digital Classroom : NPR.

The iPad — part iPod, part laptop — hits stores this week. Omar Gallaga, who covers technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman, says software developers and media companies are eager to gain from the device.

via Apple’s iPad To Hit Stores This Week : NPR.

By RIK FAIRLIE

A couple of weeks ago I hauled a carload of old tech products to an electronics recycling event. I paid $10 to get rid of two old desktop computers, a non-working Apple TV, a couple of cell phones, a network-attached storage NAS drive, two ancient iPods, and a photo printer. At the time, I considered the money well-spent, since I created fresh space in closets and muted my partner’s complaints about the mountain of gadgets I have amassed.

Now I’m not so sure. That’s because I just learned about Gazelle, a site that will pay you to recycle your old products. The company buys a range of items that includes computers, cell phones, MP3 players, LCD monitors, external hard drives, digital cameras, camcorders, and more.

…

via A Site That Pays You to Recycle – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com.

For a little $1 iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry.

It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone.

And it can ruin the sleep of cellphone executives everywhere.

Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number — a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.

…

via State of the Art – Line2 Allows iPhone Users to Sidestep AT and T – NYTimes.com.

Wikipedia is advocating for users to add videos to its online encyclopedia, which could give academics a new forum in which to share their multimedia work.

Three nonprofit groups — Miro, Mozilla Drumbeat, and the Open Video Alliance — began a campaign this month with support from the Wikimedia Foundation encouraging users to upload videos onto the Web site. Wikipedia asks that videos be short, under 100MB, and comply with the encyclopedia’s rules.

via Wikipedia Pushes for Users to Add Videos – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Ada Lovelace (for schools) on Prezi

A classics professor says students in his Latin classes are usually lousy translators of Horace and Ovid—mainly because they don’t understand the cultural references in their poetry.

So now the professor, Roger Travis Jr., requires students to do weekly role-playing exercises online to put themselves in the shoes (or sandals) of the ancient Romans.

…

via Classics Professor Requires Latin Students to Play Ancient Roman Roles Online – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A million dollars a year is a lot of money, yet colleges can hand over that much or more every year to software companies that supply and maintain essential systems for accounting, human resources, and student enrollment. Now, fed up with the fees, some colleges are ditching giant vendors for a small company that promises to support this software at half the price.

But a deal that sounds too good to be true may turn out to be just that.

Cost-conscious colleges are caught in the cross-fire of a legal battle between Rimini Street, the low-cost maintenance provider, and Oracle, a software powerhouse that serves hundreds of higher-education customers. In January, Oracle sued Rimini Street for running what Oracle calls an “illegal” and “corrupt” business model.

…

via A Small Company, Promising Major Savings on Vital Software, Lures Colleges – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the emerging world of e-books, many consumers assume it is only logical that publishers are saving vast amounts by not having to print or distribute paper books, leaving room to pass along those savings to their customers.

Publishers largely agree, which is why in negotiations with Apple, five of the six largest publishers of trade books have said they would price most digital editions of new fiction and nonfiction books from $12.99 to $14.99 on the forthcoming iPad tablet — significantly lower than the average $26 price for a hardcover book.

But publishers also say consumers exaggerate the savings and have developed unrealistic expectations about how low the prices of e-books can go. Yes, they say, printing costs may vanish, but a raft of expenses that apply to all books, like overhead, marketing and royalties, are still in effect.

All of which raises the question: Just how much does it actually cost to produce a printed book versus a digital one?

…

via Making the Case for iPad E-Book Prices – NYTimes.com.

We’ve recently been talking about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, so having seen it mentioned in ProfHacker.com, figured it should be posted.

One of the basic principles behind David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity cult book is that you should mostly use your brain for what it’s good for: thinking, analyzing, and creating. You can free up the mental energy to do these kinds of high-priority and high-reward activities if you stop using your brain as an information storage and retrieval system, things that it generally is less skilled at. Now, obviously, we all have certain kinds of information well stored and easily retrievable in our brains, and you could train your brain to perform all sorts of memorization feats. But unless that in and of itself is your goal, it’s generally more efficient to store some pieces of information outside your head…

via Try a Mind-Sweep – ProfHacker.com.

Science writers know as well as anyone how much information a diagram can contain. We often labor to express in words what a researcher was able to convey in a single image.

But while a drawing can be rich in information, it’s information that’s usually inaccessible to computers. If you draw a diagram on the screen of a tablet computer, like the new Apple iPad, the computer can of course store the drawing as an image. But it can’t tell what the image means.

MIT researchers intend to change that, with a new system that can interpret sketches. If a chemist, for example, uses a stylus — an inkless plastic pen — to draw a molecule on a tablet computer, the software can identify different types of chemical bonds and element symbols and determine the structure of the molecule. Similarly, if an electrical engineer draws a circuit diagram, the software will identify the circuit’s separate components — like resistors, capacitors, batteries, and simple wires — and display them in different colors.

via Sketch-interpreting software.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/sketch-tablet-0219.html

The admonition offered by legions of mothers — “Don’t sit so close to the TV” — isn’t really an option when it comes to e-reading devices. You have to get close to the screen to use it

The act of reading is going through a number of radical transitions, but perhaps none is more fundamental than the shift from reading on paper to reading on screens. As consumers decide whether to make this jump and which technology to use, one key question is how reading on a screen affects the eyes.

First of all: doctors say that reading on a screen won’t cause any harm.

via Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

The Optimist, ACU’s student-run newspaper, will be available on Apple’s new iPad device when it premiers in 60 days, making it the first collegiate student publication to take advantage of Apple’s latest technology.

via Optimist to publish on new Apple iPad | The Optimist.

In a sign that Amazon wants to upgrade its Kindle e-reader to compete head-on with the Apple iPad, Amazon has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch-screen technology, a person briefed on the deal said Wednesday.

via Amazon Is Said to Buy Touchco, a Touch-Screen Company – NYTimes.com.