OS X LLR Podcast Cover

The newest, 7th episode of my new UW-W podcast (Let Lion Roar!) is now live on iTunes U. In this short screencast, I take a quick look at different ways to deal with Trash in OS X Lion.

In the podcast: deleting files using just keyboard shortcuts (no mouse or trackpad needed); restoring files from Trash back to their original folders; getting rid of Trash for good; and even a secret way to open files directly from Trash, without having to un-Trash them first! All in less than 10 minutes (8:38, to be exact).

At this point, since the launch of LLR podcast in December 2011, the first 6 episodes have been downloaded almost 5500 times.

The more I think about the “flipped classroom” concept, the more I feel that – like so many trendy buzzword-supported ideas in education – the approach isn’t new at all.

My SPAN 330 Sylabus Page, 2007

Thinking back to the years when I taught Spanish Film courses at Lawrence U., I can’t help thinking “but this WAS a flipped classroom!” – even though we didn’t call it that, at the time.

Here is how it worked: Students would read assigned texts (articles, book chapters, handouts), and watch assigned films outside of the classroom. Before each class meeting, students were asked to take an online quiz (usually a simple multiple-choice variety on Moodle, Lawrence U Learning Management System, at the time), as a way to verify that they did not miss an important point of an assigned reading or plot / compositional element in the assigned film (quizzes had unlimited time, and could be retaken several times, with the average of all attempts counting as the final score – this encouraged students to re-try, if they didn’t well the first time).

In-class activities did not include lectures (or film-watching), and instead focused on conversation and discussion: a simple, take-turns walk through the film’s plot (based on a detailed handout with 150-200 small, thumbnail-sized film stills along with the time-codes for each – see image below, right), and then a discussion of how the concepts from the reading were reflected in, or related to, the film in question. The readings, film screening, quizzes, and class participation were all required and some of these elements (quiz scores, discussion participation) were graded. I guess it was a “flipped classroom,” before the now-trendy term was invented… More: I think there have always been courses structured like this, for centuries (no film viewing in the 16th century, though!), especially at universities where student groups were traditionally small, and students were highly motivated.

Stills Handout for Almodóvar's "All About My Mother."

Although it may not be as new as the recent mentions would lead us to believe, I think the flipped classroom it’s a useful and very effective approach. After giving it some thought since my original post about it a few weeks ago, I think I know how it could be implemented in my specific teaching environment: technology training for faculty and staff.

I am planning to try what I’ll call the “app club:” partly, a “flipped classroom;” partly, a book-club approach. Beginning in March, I plan to start posting short videos online on how to use specific software features (we’ll probably start with Adobe Acrobat X), and accompanying self-grading quizzes for each short video (that is, a screencast). We will invite faculty and staff who (we know) use this specific software title to check out the videos, and try taking the quizzes. Then – on a schedule similar to a book-club – once a month, or maybe even once every 5-6 weeks – we’ll invite the group to attend an informal, lunch-time meeting during which we’ll go over any possible questions, or interesting comments generated by participants over the previous month (or 6 weeks, etc.). I even think we could use some fun and informal achievement reward system (for example, printed colorful badges) for those participants who develop high level of mastery and/or participation in the process.

The idea still needs fine-tuning, planning, approvals, and so on, but I think it looks promising, and will offer me an alternative that is  slightly different – and perhaps more effective – than traditional “workshop” approach.

The authoring tool that makes the creation of interactive content inexpensive, fast, and painless is a SUPERB idea: it’s something we really need, and do not currently have, so I was very hopeful when Apple announced their new iBook Author – a (free) tool that promisses to let anyone create rich, interactive eBooks (or iBooks, since they only play on an iPad). Of course, even during the presentation to the press in NYC last Thursday is was obvious that it wasn’t what everybody hoped for: iBooks created with this software cannot be read on Apple’s own computers (not even those running the new OS X Lion), and although most iBooks (ePub files) created in the past can be read on iPhones and iPods, the new ibooks created with iBA cannot – iPad only.

The feature set of iBooks Author gives Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite a run for its money: iBA is free, elegant, simple to use, and although it doesn’t match all the bells and whistles of the iPad apps generated by Adobe DPS, it’s going to satisfy many authors for whom the prohibitive cost and skill set required to use Adobe InDesign CS5.5 + DPS puts creating interactive documents beyond reach. Most importantly, those who want to publish enhanced eBooks will be able to do so without having to pay $395+ every time the document needs to be published or updated ($395 is Adobe price for single-use DPS-produced app, what Adobe calls DPS Single Edition; and that is on top of the already high CS5.5 cost, and the content is still subject to 30% Apple fee, if sold for $).

That said, although iBA is free, it is not released as beta software: Apple released it as a finished product. As such, it has numerous problems that make it clear that this IS a beta release, far from being ready for actual use or serious production. Some features do not quite work (for example, inserting videos works, but setting a poster frame does not, and the final file has a blank placeholder with no poster frame of any sort, although the video actually plays); the preview of the document on the iPad kind-of works: it crashes the new and also none-too-stable, iBooks 2 app on iOS repeatedly, and frequently. The PDF “export” function shown in Apple live demo generates a static, poorly formatted PDF, with an automatically inserted Apple logo and “iBook Author” watermark at the bottom of EVERY single page. Although Adobe PDF has supported embedded video and audio for years now, NONE of the media included in an iBook are exported as actual playable assets to PDF – mere screenshots are inserted into the PDF in their place. I have no idea why anyone would want such a PDF – perhaps it’s intended for proofreading, but it certainly is not viable as a channel for distribution to readers.

it has to be admitted that iBA is a great early draft / blueprint of what interactive books and tools that will be used to make them will look like in the future. Some features are great: I like the ability to highlight text and add notes that can later be seen together on one screen, for easy review of the studied / read material (although I do not like the fact that emailing your notes excludes the text from the ePub to which the comments referred); I love the animated flashcards interface that allows you to study highlighted text fragments and your own comments; I like the visual navigation with page thumbnails at the bottom of the screen; I like the ability to use / insert Keynote presentations, including any of its great animation features. There will be a lot to like, if the rough edges and stability issues are addressed by Apple some time soon.

Screenshots of sample pages from an iBook I created using iBook Author

There are also other serious non-software issues: any files produced using this app cannot be sold other than through iBooks app/store (although they can be distributed outside of the iTunes if the author does not charge money for the content). I know some people will think it’s OK, but imagine how you would feel if Adobe said that any image produced in Photoshop can only be sold through Adobe’s own store, and they’ll take a 30% cut; or if Microsoft decided that if anything you write in Word generates any income for you, they’d like 30% of it, or it’s a no-go… Or, imagine if every photo you edited in Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto gave the software manufacturer an automatic entitlement to 30% of any income the image generates… So, while iBA software is “free”, it limits quite drastically (in a way rarely seen before in software) what you can do with the content you produce using it. Not an approach I’d find acceptable in a professional content production software.

At some point later on iBA has a potential to become a useful tool, but as buggy as it is now, and with its extremely restrictive license it’s not what I hoped for from Apple – certainly a tool I will revisit once it’s updated, but not a reliable, robust content production tool at this point.

Quite some time ago I saw a TED video about Khan Academy  and I have become fascinated by the idea of a “flipped classroom”. I would love to test-drive this idea in a real classroom, and if I ever teach a semester-long class again, I probably will. Today’s article in CHEd brings up a few interesting points: first, as one of the commenters on the article (Robert Talbert) aptly points out, “Simply putting lectures online and then having optional (!) in-class meetings is not what the inverted or ‘flipped’ classroom is about.” He further adds that

“The inverted classroom model switches the contexts of information transfer and assimilation from the traditional model. Transfer takes place outside of class (often through online video) and assimilation inside of class. The operative word here is “AND”. The inverted classroom is predicated on having a robust, active classroom environment where students work on challenging problems aimed at making sense of the information they’ve seen, under the active guidance of an expert learner. Jettisoning the in-class meeting (which is what you do when you make it optional) would be like taking a traditional classroom and jettisoning all the outside-of-class work, because you’re left with essentially the same thing — a bunch of lectures followed by a bunch of exams. And this is not the instructional model that serves students best.”

Second, as is apparent from the thoughts of the Stanford student who took the class, finding the right balance between technology-based learning and personal, one-on-one, traditional teacher-student contact is VERY tricky, and much more so at institutions that are selective, charge their students a lot of money for tuition, and create an expectation of privileged access to resources and instructors for their students.

The whole thing made me think if / how I could possibly use the idea of a “flipped classroom” in m own technology training… Not sure. Will give it some thought…

via BusinessWeek

Here is an interesting interview with Tim O’Reilly about the technology advances in healthcare. Made me think of a few articles I read recently, and new healthcare devices:

• Portable ultrasound devices that work with consumer electronics, such as an iPhone [via BusinessWeek].
• Inexpensive wellness/fitness tracking gadgets, such as FitBit or JawBone Up.

Not surprisingly, I was impressed with this short demo done for iMaschine by Jamie Lidell (despite the fact that the app got relatively poor reviews on iTunes, and was compared – not quite favorably – to NanoStudio).

The video is hilarious. It’s impressive to see how one can improvise using just the iPhone [the demo is a riff on one of Lidell's most popular, great pieces, A little bit more]; on the other hand it made me laugh and alost feel a little sorry for the woman who’s in bed next to him, trying to read a biography of Ghandi. Talk about a distraction – your partner beginning to scream next to you in bed without warning. Here is the video:

The video made me want to hear the original song, and then – one thing leading to another – the song expanded into a mini Lidell concert. Here is the short playlist that includes just the very highlights – four or my all-time-favorite Lidell tracks.

As much as I like BaseCamp, I was glad to see that with today’s official launch of Asana, there will be some healthy competition in this field. Asana is a brainchild of former Facebook programmers, including a Facebook co-founder (and the world’s youngest billionaire) Dustin Moskovitz, and – at first glance – seems to be much simpler than BaseCamp (but also missing some features I am accustomed to, like a calendar). For the time being, it’s also free (“Asana hopes to creep in from the bottom using the consumer Web trick of making the product free—at least for groups of up to 30 people” via BBW) . It has already generated quite a lot of media buzz (wit today’s BusinessWeek article leading the way with extensive background info. and overview). I plan to give it a try and try to use it for a forthcoming (small) project to get the hang of its usability.

Futuristic Microsoft video

I like the fact that we have more than one strong operating system for smartphones. Among Apple iOS, Google Android (Gingerbread), and Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, there is enough variety to accommodate different preferences and tastes. I’m partial to iOS, and here are two articles that list two good reasons for that. One, from Wired’s Gadget Lab points out that many Android phone manufacturers do not keep the OS current on their phones. For comparison, my over-3-year old iPhone 3G could still be upgraded whenever Apple released a new version of iOS, until the most recent iOS 5 update on October 12th, which finally made itac obsolete more than 3 years after the initial release of the hardware model (compare that to the 1 year obsolescence for some Android phones mentioned in the article). The second article, from GigaOM, aptly points out that the recently announced, beautiful Nokia phones that will run Windows Phone 7.5 Mango will face a different sort of a challenge – one of trying to persuade the potential customers to learn a radically different OS, one that replaces by-now-familiar interface of phone apps with “a concept of ’tiles’ and infinite scrolling”.

I actually find it ironic that while Microsoft takes the time to produce beautiful futuristic videos (like this one), it’s actually Apple that makes these things actually happen… I do not read Wired, Bloomberg Business Week, El País, Harvard Business Review on a Microsoft tablet. like the one envisioned in the future reality. Instead, I read them here and now on my iPad.

Image of Siri interface from iPhone 4S

By default, Siri [the voice assistant on iPhone 4S] uses Google for search; so, if you hold the home button, and say “Siri, search the web for ‘ostrich’” it will find the results of Google search [Wikipedia as the top entry]; however, it turns out that you CAN use the other alternative search engines if you prefer: just say either “Bing ‘ostrich’” or “Yahoo ‘ostrich’” and it will use these engines for web search instead of Google. When you use one of the other search engines for the 1st time, Siri will also ask if you want to make this non-Google search engine a default. Even if you do, you can always search Google by just saying “Google ‘ostrich’”. Learned this on  http://searchengineland.com, and tested on my phone – works GREAT. Talking about Siri, enclosed is a screenshot of one of conversations Siri and I had earlier today.