That'SLife

On My iPad

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:19:02 +0000

I’ve read a couple of ‘what have you got on your iPad?’ type posts, so decided to join in with a post of my own, of the main screen of my iPad. If you’re interested in iPads in education, try the newly-created Ning, iPads in Education…

iPad Main Screen - click to enlarge

So, from top to bottom, left to right, this is what currently resides on the home screen of mine [ note that when I do buy apps, I usually wait for a special offer advertised on something like AppShopper ]…

AccuWeather
Quite a few of my main apps are connected with the amount of travel I do. This one’s good for selecting cities you’re going to visit, and planning what you might need to take…
Atomic Web
An excellent alternative browser with tabbed browsing and a host of other features lacking in Safari
Calendar
It’s… um… the built-in calendar app
Contacts
The built-in address book
CurrencyPad
Again, for travel purposes, this works a treat
Dropbox
I generally have all travel-related documents, presentations, videos, etc., stored here as an away-from-home backup solution
Evernote
I’m not a huge user, but it’s a handy place to store research until it’s used
Filebrowser
Allows me to browse, interact with and copy to/from shared on my Macbook Pro and desktop PC
FlipBoard
An innovative news magazine with excellent Twitter and Facebook feeds
GoodReader
The best document reader out there (and still under US$1)
iDisk
iDisk functions as my secondary online backup when travelling
IM+
Interfaces with Messenger, Skype Chat, etc. Handy when you’re on the move
iNotes
A slick note-taking app with web clipping, maps…
InstaPaper
I use Instapaper to save references from Twitter for later reading
Keynote
A pretty good implementation from Apple, with a few minor niggles
Kindle
It’s handy being able to synch books between the PC, Mac, Kindle and the iPad
Moodboard
A blank design space which you can fill with images, captions, shapes, notes…
Notebooks
The research tool par excellence…. complex and versatile note-taking app
Osfoora HD
This was my favourite Twitter app until the release of the official one last week
Pocket Tunes
The best way to listen to online radio (even better with jailbroken multitasking goodness)
PressReader
I susbscribe to a variety of world newspapers through this app, Amazing value monthly
Reeder
An interface to Google Reader – great for keeping up with RSS feeds on the go
Simplepedia
An interface to wikipedia with excellent offline reading later
Skype
It’s…. um… Skype
Spotify
Online music service (you need to go premium to use it on the iPad / iPhone…)
sTp
A secure vault for secret documents, research, passwords…
ToDo
Excellent GTD app with good synching to the Mac
Videos
The standard video app for the iPad (films bought from iTunes)
MyWorldClock
Again, if you travel a lot, this app is idea for not waking up loved ones…
XMarks
Keeps my bookmarks synched with my desktop machines

So, what’s on yours?

Wetware Assets Go Rogue

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:01:23 +0000

A post by Paul Maglione examines where ELT textbooks may be going in the not-too-distant future, with references to relevance, weight and other issues. In his post Paul links to another post by Graham Stanley in which, among other things, he talks of the wide availability of published material on illegal download sites. I’ve also not avoided this subject in the past on this blog, and copyright was also the subject of a cafe-style debate at the British Council Moscow Unconference at the weekend (more soon). I also set out some of my thinking about the future of publishing in a post last year: On Books, Publishers and Teachers. I haven’t much changed my mind, but a few things do occur to me…

Teachers here in Catalonia are preparing to return to school tomorrow, and to teaching on Monday. Some of them will be forced to take part in the new ‘laptops in the classroom‘ (or whatever it’s called) project and use new electronic coursebooks provided by publishers such as OUP, Burlington, etc. The teachers I know have had no training, and have had the summer to peruse a half-working demo of one unit copied from a USB stick. Now I suspect the kids will be excited not to be carrying the heavy coursebooks, and even to be allowed to touch a piece of gadgetry more exciting than a pen, but I have to say I feel sorry for the teachers. Without training, this is shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster of a teaching experiment.

And someday soon there will be a small sample research project that concludes that the ‘technology has no significant impact on results’ and the ever-present naysayers such as *** name removed *** will jump on this as conclusive proof that the technology doesn’t work. People with more positive attitudes to the twenty-first century will see it for what it really is, however – human error. If you make dull electronic versions of traditional coursebooks (and yes, I have looked at the sample material) and give it to teachers with no training in the use of the computers, IWBs and other technology they’re going to need, then of course it’s going to fail. But that’s not a failure in the technology. People who spend their lives digging up these spurious ten-person research projects should really think a little deeper about the subject. It’s going to happen, folks – why not try to make it better?

At any rate, whilst this may be happening in countries such as Spain – and despite inroads (both good and bad) in OLPC-style projects around the globe, printed textbooks are here to stay (sorry trees – you will still need to die young; sorry young people – you will still spend a great deal of your young lives divorced from the tools and skills you will need when you enter the workplace) in most countries, for a long, long time to come.

But all this revisiting of the publishing debate did make me think about teacher education books. As I’ve said before, you can get a copy of the book Nicky and I wrote in 2007 from multiple sources worlwide – and only some of them are legal. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is simple availability – if I live in a country where there is no local distributor, where Amazon don’t ship, where there is a cash culture…. how on earth am I supposed to get a legal copy, always assuming I want one?

The new book Nicky and I are working on will hopefully be legally available for the Kindle and other e-readers, and may even be available as single chapter downloads. It may – you never know – even include bonus material in the electronic version… pop-up video material, animations, video guides to software, links to further resources, perhaps an interview with the authors…. My only slight concern, really, is whether books of this nature are really necessary anymore.

Take Scott Thornbury’s excellent blog – An A-Z of ELT – as an example. It’s an extremely well-written blog which is a sort of crowd-sourced effort to write the second edition of a print book. Scott is exploring many different aspects of ELT, and many other people are joining in with comments and excellent conversation. All round it’s a fascinating and useful read and I doff my hat not only to the idea, but also to all those who contribute to it. The thing is, when a lot of this goes into the printed book (I presume?), will I need to buy it? Indeed, will I need to buy it at all when I can simply go along to Scott’s blog and ask him a question if something’s troubling me?

The same goes, of course, for Jeremy Harmer, Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney, and all the rest. There’s a paradigm shift in access to everyone and I’m not sure the publishing industry has quite caught up with it all. When everyone has access to everyone else – and when authors are doing much of the promotional work themselves – why do we need to buy these resource books? Can’t we just continue the conversation online? I wonder how long it will take for publishers to catch on that their ‘wetware assets’ (or ‘writers’ as I believe they call them) have ‘gone rogue’ and are frittering away all their ideas online instead of selling them to their rightful packagers and promoters. And I wonder how they will react.

Personally I think the resource book (like the Oxford English Dictionary) has to go online soon – it has to be offered in flexible formats, and with the value added content that only the electronic can provide – that’s where Nicky and I are headed with our next book, and I think it makes a lot of sense. In the meantime, authors who (are there any?) actually make a living from resource books might like to think about just how much they’re giving away online, and how much they make themselves available…

I don’t much mind, myself – I always answer questions, always give away PowerPoints and other materials at conferences and always put them online for download, never turn down a request to be videod, etc., but then I’ve got a cunning plan for the next phase of the resource book

More iPad Tips

Gavin Dudeney — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:21:38 +0000

Aside from my post reviewing some iPad apps I’m using a lot, and the one on getting audio into Keynote on the iPad (and on the joys of jailbreaking…), I keep coming across new things which I think someone else out there must be interested in, so here’s another short post with a couple of tips…

The first goes back to Keynote, and it’s to do with fonts. I have a template which uses Calibri as the main (almost only) font for presentations. On transferring it to the iPad the fonts were all a little too big. I’ve been experimenting with this sporadically over the past few days and my conclusion is this: if you want to send a Keynote presentation over to the iPad, reduce all your fonts by one size in the font size drop-down (so, 18 becomes 14, etc.). This seems to work consistently for me and makes the presentations look perfect on the iPad. Coupled with the video and audio tricks in the post referenced above, I can now pretty much use the iPad as a conference talk device.

The other tip goes back to reasons for jailbreaking – I already noted the advantage of multitasking, etc. Now, if you’re an educator and you’re planning to give talks or workshops on mobile learning, mobile apps, etc., then this is a tip for you – get ‘Display Out’ and ‘Display Recorder’ from the app store in Cydia. The first exactly mirrors your screen to an external monitor via the apple VGA out cable, meaning that you can show everything you do, every app, every movie, the calendar… whatever. As far as I know, this is the only app that performs this function and doesn’t limit itself to developers building the feature into their individual apps. It works like a charm and looks amazing on a decent television (though I’ve yet to try it on a data projector)

The second (Display Recorder) will screen grab avi files of everything you do on the iPad – in amazing quality. You might use this to record tutorials for apps, demonstrations of apps, etc. It’s like a Camtasia for the iPad. Both apps together cost around US$7 via Cydia – though you will need a jailbroken iPad to use them. I’ll be using them extensively in April in my mobile learning talk at IATEFL Brighton 2011.

Finally, if you were too stingy to buy the 3G iPad, or (like me) didn’t see a need for it, if you have a jailbroken iPhone you can buy MyFi for US$20 and turn your iPhone 3G (which I do have) into a wireless hot spot at the flick of a switch. I rarely use my iPhone data allowance each month, but I often find myself needing to get my Macbook Pro or iPad online in Spain for a little surfing – most notably whilst at the airport waiting to fly out. This little app is amazingly efficient at establishing a wifi hotspot from your 3G connection on the iPhone.

I have no idea if anyone who generally folows me is reading the iPad posts, but I suppose I’ll carry on sharing anything I find…

On Multitasking

Gavin Dudeney — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:09:17 +0000

There was quite a bit of fuss earlier this week about the ‘fact’ that multitasking is impossible and destroys our attention and means we don’t actually do anything properly… even the claim that no significant learning can take place if people are not 100% concentrated on the teacher and/or material. Ironically, of course, much of the fuss was made by people flitting between webpages supporting their beliefs, and Twitter, where they posted these opinions.

Now, forgive me my ignorance, but isn’t that good, useful and effective multitasking? And isn’t that, really, what most people mean when they speak of multitasking, rather than the supposed (theoretical? imagined?) image of young people surfing porn, answering emails, chatting on Messenger and listening to music in lectures – you know, the kind of image that gives real multitasking a bad name. Clearly trying to cook a gourmet meal, watch a film, listen to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and fix the car at the same time is not going to work. But, equally clearly, most of us multitask (in the normal sense of the word) quite effectively throughout most days.

Indeed, whilst writing this I am also keeping an occasional eye on Twitter, drinking coffee and I have a comedy programme on the iPlayer. Is anything suffering? Not really – the writing is going fine, I’m laughing at the right moments and I haven’t tipped my coffee in my lap yet…

Everyone banging on about the dangers of always-on access, multitasking, the irrevocable rewriting of our brains due to plasticity, mirror neurons, the collapse of society due to technology and all the rest is simply rehashing a series of webpages which they have drifted to as confirmation of their fears, or to a collection of pop-psych books currently doing the rounds on Amazon. We’ve gone from books on people moving our cheese to books on technology rotting our brains – there’s evolution for you. We’re all agenda moths irrevocably drawn to the candle of information that gives us life and keeps us happy – the light that validates what we do and what we believe.

Elsewhere I’ve examined the opposing views – Google making you stupid versus it not… the existence and importance of mirror neurons versus the arguments against their very existence, or at least their importance, the spuriously-interpreted ‘experiments’ of a group of five scientists on holiday, etc. The real fact is, I suspect, that we’re not even close to working out the effect that the changes of the last five to ten years may be having on our inner workings. In the meantime, of course, we can all read the things that make us feel happy and validated, but that doesn’t make any of it necessarily good science, or useful.

And so back to multitasking. We all multitask on a daily basis – and most of us do it very well. If, however, you take it to the extreme, it seems pretty clear to me that it won’t work. In other news, the Pope professes a clear bias towards the Catholic faith…

If you really want something to worry about, read this…

p.s. There’s a little addendum to this now that everyone’s talking about it on Twitter. I sincerely believe people are confusing ‘multitasking’ with ‘task swapping’. And it seems to me that task swapping is a very good thing indeed – it can break up the monotony of a working day, it can give us time to think about something, and it can give us space to gather our thoughts and come back to a task feeling refreshed.

[ curiously, the non-jailbroken iPad forces you to task swap rather than multitask.... you have to think there was a design reason in there somewhere. The only multitasking I do on the iPad, having jailbroken mine, is to have Radio 4 on in the morning while I'm browsing the papers and catching up on email and Twitter. Apart from that, I'm solidly task switching: doing a bit in Twitter before exiting the client and concentrating on email for a while then switching back to Twitter. This works well. Perhaps those who have a down on the whole thing really are confused, as I strongly suspect ]

As I said above, extreme examples of multitasking won’t work, but those people saying how negative it all is are multitasking on a daily basis – in their teaching and training, and I refuse to believe that they all think they’re doing a bad job because of this. Indeed, as @englishraven pointed out, good task swapping is encouraged in teaching and training.

So (as with the great technology debate), why is it that it’s good and acceptable for the teacher/trainer, but s/he considers it bad for the recipient of his/her training. These double standards, which are inherent in approaches like dogme (technology: good for me in my working life, bad for you in yours unless I say it’s alright, and then it’s good…), seem hypocritical, at best… Take this tweet from earlier in the week:

My students will confirm that I discourage laptops in class… [ source ]

Or this from the same source:

…doesn’t technology make stupid people even more stupid? [ source ]

How do you square the circle that says “multitasking is good for me, but not for you“? How do you square the circle that says “technology is good for me, but not for you“? (perhaps because I’m not a stupid person, and therefore it won’t have the same negative effect as it will almost certainly have on you…), and how do you square the circle that says “technology is good for me, but definitely not for your learners in your classrooms‘? Where’s the logic… where’s the consistent thinking…. Where’s the parity, the balance, the understanding of the here and now? Sometimes I wonder, I really do…

There’s an old story which was told to me once by a secondary school teacher in the UK (it may be a joke… best read in the original Welsh accent…) and it goes like this:

“I was in class the other day and a boy put his hand up and said ‘Sir, can I go to the toilet?’ And I said ‘Of course you can go to the toilet, boy. We can all go to the toilet. The question is ‘May… may I go to the toilet? Now put your hand down and ask me again in a couple of minutes’ And in a couple of minutes he put his hand up again and said ‘Sir, may I go to the toilet, please?’ and I said ‘No, boy, you may not.’”

The big question is, of course, are you being put in a position where you’re forced to ask ‘May I…?‘ And if you are, is that acceptable?

I accept that someone may feel that of all the work they do, only parts of it merit the use of technology – but that personal choice completely disregards the feelings, desires and habits of the people in the room. If they feel they can benefit from technology at other times, who am I to tell them otherwise? If they feel they can ‘task swap‘ effectively, who am I to tell them otherwise? Is they’re thinking, sensible people surely they’ll know their limitations, surely they’ll know how they study best? How can I possibly know that, on a short-ish course? In short, who am I to decide how best people study?

If I were doing a course and I was asked to put away my laptop, iPad or whatever, I’d be straight out of the door. Why? Well, for starters, and on a very visceral level, I’m paying… And, perhaps more importantly, I know my gadgets, and I know what I can do with them, what I can get from them and why I have them with me. The trainer may well be a subject expert, but that’s as far as it goes….

They’re not an expert in me, they’re not an expert in ‘new fangled modern technologies‘ and they’re not an expert in study techniques (necessarily), the brain, multitasking, concentration, the effects of new technologies on the brain…. I want to hear what they say, but I also want to balance that with what others say on the Net (and, thus, task swap), and I want to note it down and arrange it in the way I see fit.

It’s my technology, your knowledge. I note it down and interpret it as I want to.

We’ve gone way beyond the ‘sage on the stage‘ level these days… all of us have to learn that we are no longer in total control of the classroom – or training sessions – we all have to learn to let go, to allow voices and opinions in from elsewhere. We have to embrace the multitasking that can take place in the classroom, learn to work with it, to use it as a springboard for examining our own views and for allowing dissent, disagreement and, thus, the development of opinions.

If we insist on clinging on to the old view of me, my views, my knowledge, my space, then the classroom is not an interesting or stimulating place. When we learn to let go we learn to embrace the power of the herd. We learn to help people sift the huge barrel of information. In short, we teach people to be critical thinkers and consumers.

But if our classrooms are made up of us, operating in a technology-free environment… free of distractions and multitasking… then what are we other than people with a controlled agenda?

IATEFL 2011 – mLearning

Gavin Dudeney — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:09:15 +0000

I’ve just finished filling in the online registration form for the IATEFL Annual Conference 2011, to be held in Brighton. I’m going to do a talk on mLearning as this coincides nicely with a new book that Nicky Hockly and I are currently researching, and also with a new course (mLearning in Practice) which we’re launching in October of this year. Take a look at the talk abstract below, if you’re interested – any thoughts?

TITLE: Location, Location, Location: mLearning in Practice

ABSTRACT: In this workshop I will be looking at recent developments in mobile and handheld learning (mLearning) and the rationale for bringing connected, mobile devices into the classroom. The workshop will look at various applications which can be blended into classroom teaching as well as ways of incorporating mLearning into homework and extra-class study.

(A longer summary is viewable after the fold…)

SUMMARY: Many learners in a variety of contexts these days have smartphones, iPhones, Android-based devices, iPads, iPod Touches, Kindles and a plethora of other handheld devices which have the ability to connect to the Net and access a wide variety of information in multiple formats.

This set of tools is further enhanced by increased access to wireless networks and other means of connecting to the wider world whilst mobile. Indeed, market penetration of mobile devices – and the accompanying infrastructure – is far greater than that of fixed or laptop computers, thus enabling a more inclusive use in educational settings.

However, it is still the practice in most institutions to require both teachers and learners to turn off such devices during class time, thus depriving them of this rich source of input.

Much of this attitude may be put down to a number of factors including lack of experience on the part of the teacher, fears over control and attention distraction and a general unease at the creep of technology into our classrooms.

In this workshop I will briefly look at the history of mobile and handheld learning, as well as a rationale for blending it into the curriculum (in appropriate contexts), before moving on to a practical demonstration and discussion around applications and their classroom use.

Participants will have a chance to share their experiences and teaching ideas with the rest of the group.

De-Caff

Gavin Dudeney — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:39:48 +0000

Picture the scene… it’s about five years ago, pre-iPhone and iPad, pre-smartphone (more or less) and WiFi is still expensive in most places. You go into your local coffee chain on Sunday morning with your loved one or perhaps a group of friends, armed with the Sunday papers. Everyone pays an outrageous amount of money for a coffee with a name longer than it takes to drink it, they sit down and they start reading the papers. Nobody’s talking much…. Occasionally someone pops their head out of a broadsheet to comment on Tony Blair or someone, but generally it’s a nice quiet Sunday morning in company… the odd laugh….

Now, transpose it to today and I’m sitting in the same coffee bar with a friend. He’s reading a dead-tree paper and I’m reading mine on the iPad. The scene is the same, really – and so is the interaction. Except, of course, that since there’s free WiFi, I can also check related articles, clear up discussions when we don’t agree, etc., etc. Except that’s about to change – see this article from The Economist.

Now I don’t know about you, but I do so hate it when people tell me I can’t do something in public. It wasn’t rude five years ago when we were all reading dead-tree versions, so why is it rude now? Is it… no, say it’s not true…. is it because technology is involved? And that’s bad, obviously…Is it because we’re alll becoming antisocial idiots? The Internet’s rewiring my brain (a good, but highly speculative read, by the way) and I’m a gibbering idiot, you know…. except maybe I’m not… It’s tricky to tell these days as we enter a new era of braindom…

My guess is that, although couched in ‘social‘ terms, the coffee shop ban on WiFi is less to do with encouraging us all to be more social, and more to do with encouraging us to drink our ridiculously-named and expensive coffee as quickly as possible and free up a table for someone who’s going to order a sun-blushed tomato and Bavarian radish panini to go with their kumquat smoothie.

It’s about profits, folks. These coffee shops don’t care for your well-being, they want your cash. And they want it quickly, efficiently and with as little trouble as possible.

You see, it’s called ‘ubiquitous’ because it’s everywhere – and if it’s not in your coffee shop then you’re doing something wrong. You can’t put it back in a box, it doesn’t fit anymore. So when the article says “started turning off Wi-Fi on the weekends. The experiment led to success, they said. People who otherwise avoided the café came in“, it doesn’t prove anything, really. It’s a different clientele – all you’ve done is swap one bunch of people for another.

It’s like the smoking ban in pubs (of which I thoroughly approve) – you get a different clientele inside (and yes, of course they’re happy), but you get loads of smokers outside… and if they’re outside, are they spending as much? My guess, however, is that those who can afford mobile connected gadgets probably have more buying power than those who don’t (unless they spent all their money on the gadgets), so who’s fooling who?

There’s also an implication, of course, that everyone’s addicted, can’t live without it. I don’t think that’s true – I’m prime addict material, but I’m perfectly capable of going out socially without recourse to my iPhone or iPad. However, I do like having it around in case it proves itself useful – directions to somewhere, solving the great Chuck Norris debate over lunch the other day…. It has its uses, but it remains off in social company, generally.

If I’m at a tech conference, or with a tech-enthusiast friend such as Jeremy Harmer we might engage in a bit of app one upmanship or a ‘have you seen this?‘, but that’s as far as it goes. I can even go on holiday without access to the Internet occasionally.

If (as was suggested on Twitter this morning) they start banning it at conferences – because, I suspect, there’s a fear it might detract from the star speakers and reduce the impact of their very presence – then I’ll simply stop going to those conferences. I like to be able to follow links, check sources, compare thoughts and interpretations and – more obviously – share these things with people who are unfortunate enough not to be able to attend, usually due to financial reasons. And I think others enjoy that too – and benefit from it…

So please don’t treat me like an irresponsible child – don’t take my toys away because you think you know best. Because clearly you don’t. I will de-caff if I have to – there are plenty of other places I can get a coffee or a pint and have my Net access. Your loss. I was going to order the fresh juice too…

Keynote – Ipad – Multimedia

Gavin Dudeney — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:29:33 +0000

Just a short one…

A few people seem to be having problems with embedded audio and video in Keynote on the iPad. The truth is that it’s not as advanced as it could be, and audio is a little tricky, video itself works fine. The trick is to prepare the presentation on the Mac and embed the audio and video in the presentation. When you save the presentation, make sure in the General Preferences of Keynote you have a check mark next to ‘Copy audio and movies into document’, which will package everything into the keynote presentation itself. So far, so good.

Using iTunes (the App tab of your iPad) you can then transfer the presentation to the iPad and import it into Keynote. This works perfectly well for video, but audio disappears – you’ll find in edit mode you can play the audio, but in presentation mode it’s nowhere to be seen. Until Apple sort this little issue out, there’s a pretty easy workaround that ocurred to me today: turn your audio files into video files. I’ve been doing this by importing them into Camtasia and adding a blank title screen to the video. This means when you export the video, you get a white box as the picture and your original audio, and can add it to a slide where the audio plays quite nicely, fooling Keynote into thinking it’s actually playing a video.

That’s a bit of a bother for a lot of people, probably, so try the following: open the audio with QuickTime on a Mac, do a ‘Save as’, choose a video format and (though I haven’t tried this method) theoretically it should export a video-compatible file which will work just as well. Now none of this is particularly elegant, but it’s a workaround that works, and cures one of the little issues I’ve had with Keynote on the iPad. Hope it helps…

I Cracked (Literally)

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:56:35 +0000

Having written more than enough about my love affair with my new iPad, I duly noted that the lack of multi-tasking was beginning to bore me, particularly as I was using the machine so much. And then I stopped and thought… now that jailbreaking is legal, and since my Ipad is only WiFi and not wedded to a 3G contract with an operator (which can be a bit tricky), why shouldn’t I just go ahead and jailbreak the damn thing and get multi-tasking and all the rest. So I did..

The jailbreak took approximately four minutes, nothing happened to my machine, all apps and data still present and correct and nothing amiss. And, of course, I ended up with the Cydia app installed. The Cydia app is the ‘alternative app store’ (in case you don’t know…). I then duly fired that up, downloaded free apps to add multi-tasking and app cycling and another to get more icons per screen and since then it’s been an absolute joy. Battery life is unaffected and it’s great to be able to stick the radio on in Pocket Tunes while the day’s newspapers are downloading in PressReader and I’m catching up with what’s happening on Twitter and in my Inbox.

So that’s it really – cracked, stable, serene and multi-tasking. Now it really is a beast of a gadget and I’m spending more and more time on it each day…

p.s. If you do jailbreak, don’t forget to back up your blobs and change the root password. Or, as Monty Python might say, “my hovercraft is full of eels” – this sentence probably makes as much sense if you’re normally human…

iPad – Second Thoughts

Gavin Dudeney — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:53:57 +0000

I’ve had the iPad for nearly three weeks now, and I’m having second thoughts, so I am… My second thoughts mainly revolve around the feeling of “Blimey, I quite liked it for the first few days, but now I love the thing“. Not in any sort of rude or unsavoury way, you understand, more in a platonic and cerebral fashion.

In terms of usage, it’s become my number one gadget both at home and away from home (be it in town, or on longer trips). There are a lot of reasons for that, but primarily it all revolves around ease of use, always on, convenience, battery life and the array of apps I’ve installed. Plus, yesterday, I tried the VGA out for the first time on a flat-screen HDTV and it looked stunning. So what exactly am I doing with it?

Well, at the moment it’s more a case of what am I not doing with it. Here’s the software I’m currently making most use of:

1) Native Apps
The calendar, contacts and mail all synch via MobileMe with my desktop PC (Windows 7), the laptop and the phone. Being able to add an appointment to one of those and have it instantly added to all the others makes travel a breeze. The calendar is extremely comfortable to use on the iPad, and responding to mail via the virtual keyboard is quick and easy. I have tried a small bluetooth keyboard, but since I type like an innacurate slug, the difference is really not that great.

The big difference, of course, is screen size – this makes inputting data so easy. It also makes reading more comfortable, and things like shopping online, buying books from Amazon, filling in web forms, etc., is suddenly no bigger deal than it would be on a normal computer. This, for me, has been the really big thing – it’s easy to use, so you use it regularly and often. Sitting on the sofa and getting this kind of thing done beats sitting at a desk all day.

I don’t make much use of the Videos or YouTube apps, or Maps – but it’s the ‘office’ tools that make it.

2) Paid (or free) Extra Apps

I’ve experimented with quite a few, but here are my favourites…

Browsing
Atomic Web for its tabbed browsing and other enhancements, Perfect Browser for its VGA output

Office
Pages and Keynote are pretty good, but need some problems ironing out. However, I’ve transferred documents and presentations and they’ve come up exactly like the originals

Documents
GoodReader is the best I’ve found in terms of handling PDFs, etc. It can connect to multiple sources (MobileMe, Google Docs, etc.) as well as normal FTP servers, etc. Quick and easy to use, you can protect documents from prying eyes. I’ve also played with DocsToGo and QuickOffice, both of which have their advantages. I’m not quite sure which one I’ll stick with yet. The best notetaker for me is either Note Taker HD or iNotes – again, I haven’t used either of them long enough on the road to tell. If you want decent handwriting recognition, then try WritePad.

Ebooks
Has to be the Kindle app (apart from anything else, I already had a decent library in Kindle)

News
PressReader plus a subscription for unlimited world newspapers on a monthly basis – reading them is easy on the eye and a very enjoyable experience. Reeder for an elegant interface to Google reader for keeping up with blogs. Also worth a look is the magazine subscription app Zinio.

Social Networking
Osfoora HD for Twitter – apart from the elegant interface, it works nicely with InstaPaper for downloading and reading embedded links later. Sadly at the moment there are no native-size apps for Facebook, LinkedIn, Dopplr, Foursquare and the rest, but these are bound to come in the next few months.

Creativity
SketchBook is amazing, though I draw like a lettuce drives… Photogene works as a very capable image editor and I’ve been using that quite a lot. I’ve fallen in love with MoodBoard Pro and Popplet for visual brainstorming, and iThoughtsHD makes a very good ‘traditional’ tool for the same.

Media
Pocket Tunes is a great interface to worldwide radio stations. Air Video does an excellent job of streaming video from any desktop or laptop computer to the iPad in real time.

Miscellaneous
Skype still works a treat, though I’ll be happy to geta proper resolution version of it in the near future. FileBrowser gives you full access to files and folders on any networked machine, allowing for easy viewing or copying to the iPad. I’m still stuck on Things as my organiser software, still wedded to Evernote and have been enjoying the various interfaces to things like Wikipedia, Amazon, BBC news, etc. The Adobe Connect app works well, and I really hope we’ll soon see similar apps for Elluminate and a decent (i.e. working) Moodle interface. I’m tempted by Wolfram Alpha…

Fun
Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not much of a fun person…. But I do like a decent game of Backgammon (if that counts as fun)

That may be it at the moment. The simple fact is, though, that the iPad works well as a machine for getting things done which is fun and attractive to use, and I’m spending more time on it each day than on any of my other work tools. The interface, the battery life, the tools, the fun – they all add up to an amazing user experience. And with Skype and WiFi, the lack of phone is not noticeable at all.

I only have one gripe now – and it’s something I said I hadn’t noticed in my first posting – and that’s the lack of multi-tasking. When I first started using the iPad I didn’t see it as necessary. But then I wasn’t expecting to be using it quite so much. When you do use it a lot then that becomes an issue. I want my radio playing, Twitter open, and an email window… I know it’s coming in the update in the Autuman, and I can’t wait. Once that’s in place, I can’t think of a single reason not to use the iPad for a lot of what I do, nor a reason not to take it as a primary machine on work trips.

You can say what you like about evil Apple and locked down systems and all the rest, but it’s an amazing piece of electronic wizardry and I’m a convert. But I won’t keep banging on about it – enough is enough…

Summer Shorts

Gavin Dudeney — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:12:00 +0000

ELTAS Tech Tools Day

Just got in from Stuttgart and the ELTAS Tech Tools Day yesterday. Stuttgart turns out to be a mostly very pretty city with some lovely squares and a very busy nightlife and it was good to see people out enjoying themselves last night in the centre… plenty of drinking, laughing and all the rest, but no sign of any yobbism or anything of the sort. This came on the back of a very surreal dinner in a garden populated by a men’s singing club and featuring DJ Hans, the octogenarian disco wizard who spins the discs and sings along to them. All most odd, but very pleasing.

The Tech Tools Day, superbly-organised by Karenne Sylvester (@kalinagoenglish) for ELTAS was a resounding success, with Karenne pulling in a great collection of speakers and making sure the day went off without a hitch. It was a heavy day for the participants, I think – plenty of input in hot rooms, but there is a host of backup options including a Ning, so they’ll all get a chance to go over the materials again in the coming days.

Highlights for me were… …Petra Pointer’s (@TEFLPet) elegant and well-planned talk on Twitter in the classroom, and Mike Hogan’s consummate presentation of the sub-€100 IWB, from building to using it, right in front of our eyes (and he did it twice, just to prove it wasn’t a flash in thye pan!). The software isn’t as well-developed as the major players, but that can only be a matter of time, and I was truly impressed to see it in the flesh. Huge congratulations to Karenne and everyone else who worked on the event, and a big thanks to Shelly Terrell (@shellterrell) for the taxi services.

Hits, Pageviews and Unique Visitors

Karenne and I also had a chance to talk about the discussion on Twitter earlier this week about blog ‘hits’ and blog ‘visitors’. There seems to be a deal of confusion out there in the blogosphere as to the difference between the numbers and what they mean. Simply put, it goes like this: a visitor is generally a person (a ‘unique’ visitor) and is usually identified by, amongst other things, an IP. It’s generally about as accurate as you can get in terms of measuring how many people are visiting your blog. Some people will also use ‘pageviews’ – the number of pages viewed over a certain period of time – to measure the popularity of a posting.

Hits, on the other hand, are notoriously much higher and much less accurate. How so? Well, a hit refers to the loading of individual elements on a webpage. So, if your latest blog posting has ten images in it, you’re likely to get a minimum of 12 hits per person (10 images, the page they sit on, and – probably – a stylesheet). If you add in all the other elements on your blog page (navigation buttons, interface images and elements, javascript files for those utilities you have down the side and all the rest), a single person opening one of your blog posts in their browser could easily register 30 or more hits.

In short, a likely scenario goes like this (just an example, obviously):

1 person = 4 pageviews = 80 hits

So if you have 20,000 hits, that may only be the equivalent of 250 unique visitors (or people, as some call them!)

What this means, of course, is that if you’re counting hits along those kinds of numbers, you’re going to have to make quite an adjustment to have an idea of the real number of human beings visiting your browser (it may be as low as 15-20% of the total number of hits, depending on the complexity of your average blog post). The only real way to do this is to run analysis software on your log files, or use something like Google Analytics.

The Medium & The Message

At Stuttgart airport waiting to fly home, I watched a set of tweets coming in, initatiated by Scott Thornbury (@thornburyscott) about the value of people tweeting from a conference. Scott is of the opinion that it reduces talks to soundbites, distorts his ‘message’ and is potentially not an accurate portrayal of his talks. Many people on Twitter who get few chances to go to conferences begged to differ – for them it was a chance to at least get a feel for what was going on at a given conference, and even – yes, even – learn something.

I think, though, that Scott may be missing the point. In the pre-Twitter era there was nothing to stop anyone leaving a talk at a conference and reporting it on to fellow teachers in a series of short sentences (oral tweets) and there was nothing to say that this would be any more accurate than what is happening now. Once you give your stuff to people in a conference room, they are free to interpret it and recast it in any way they like (or in the way they understand it. The medium may have changed, but the message undoubtedly hasn’t (or perhaps it has, as everyone leaving a talk will proably have heard something subtly different from everyone else. We have no more control over what people take away and share than we did in the pre-Twitter era.

The big difference, of course, is that now more people can ‘enjoy’ conferences worldwide with the help of people like Graham Stanley (@grahamstanley) and Jeremy Harmer (@HarmerJ) who tweeted so diligently from Brazil late this week. I’m all for it, myself – it’s great to hear a little of what’s happening when we’re not there.

Research and Development

For purely R&D purposes, you’ll understand, I’ve been testing out an iPad for the past four days – and I have to say I’m impressed, very impressed. Web browsing is a pure delight, as is email reading and writing (as someone who doesn’t touch type, the virtual keyboard is as quick for me as a normal one, though those with more developed skills mightnot find it so), the Kindle app for the iPad knocks spots off reading on the Kindle, newspapers viewed on PressReader are absolutely exquisite, video looks amazing, Twitter is incredibly usable and Keynote delights with easy editing, video embedding and all the rest.

The wifi-enabled battery life of over ten hours means a whole day out with something smallish and light and, frankly, I’m really sold on it. I could see myself going to a conference with just the iPad at some point. Haven’t noticed the lack of Flash, and I haven’t been annoyed by the (current) lack of multi-tasking support, since closing and opening each app is done in the blink of an eye.

The big difference, I suppose, is in screen size – the screen is beautiful, bright, responsive and reading anything on it is a joy… Here are some screenshots from today’s Guardian G2 (click for bigger versions…):

G2 Front Cover

G2 Inside Page

G2 Inside Page Detail

Second Life – The Long Goodbye

Gavin Dudeney — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:29:42 +0000

There comes a time when you have to admit you were wrong, or perhaps misguided, or simply that you were a little bit ‘out of time’, or perhaps – better said – that somebody let you down and maybe it wasn’t your fault. And this is one of those times, because it’s goodbye to Second Life for me, at least in its current incarnation – in terms of teaching and training – and I’d like to try and explain why…

When I started with Second Life it was a much smaller place than it was now. There was no voice, it crashed constantly, there were ´Black Wednesdays´without access as server updates were done, and there was lots and lots of downtime.

During that time I persevered… I learnt the tools of the SL trade – I learnt to build and script and texture… I made a lot of friends and I built our first island and there we offered free teaching spaces for people, and eventually started the annual SLanguages conference. And the reason I did all this is not because I was convinced that SL was the future of education, but rather that I thought it was the future of the web (not SL, you’ll understand, more the notion of 3D). But I also thought it had a place in education in certain contexts.

Indeed, I learnt to script in SL by taking lessons in SL, and it was a fantastic experience. And I used that knowledge to further our SL presence…. taking on two more islands, going into the rental business and scripting a large set of free tools for educators – tools which enhanced language teaching, tools which integrated with web services, bringing in blogs, wikis and much more. It was an exciting and creative time.

And SL improved too. Black Wednesdays disappeared and the viewer became more stable. Voice was introduced and changed the face of many events (when it worked), and so on. But there was still one thing that didn’t change – it was cripplingly difficult to get started with SL for the casual visitor (unlike, say, Skype or Adobe Connect) and the ‘first hour experience’ was terrible.

Add to this the need for high-end equipment, a fast Net connection, decent phones and a microphone, some money to make you look a little less like Spongebob Squarepants and all the rest and you get a system which doesn’t lend itself to much use over and above the committed. And, having worked in education and technology for a long time, I know that these people are still few and far between. On a scale of 1-100 I’d put SL at the 100 end of the scale in terms of people being willing to invest the time and effort…

The period in which I found myself having less time to invest in SL also coincided with the new viewer which brought HTML on a prim to SL and made a lot of tools (mine included) largely redundant. And I’m very happy about that – media is now much easier to use in SL, as is any web content, and this has changed the lives of many educators who now don’t have to fudge solutions in-world.

But I can’t get on with the new viewer at all – all those windows popping up, three clicks to do what it used to take one click to do, useful things hidden away, useless video RAM application.. I could go on, particularly as I now spend a large amount of time in SL waiting for my avatar to change from a cloud of smoke into the sexy, virile cartonn character we all know and love. But often I can’t go on (at least in SL) because voice isn’t working properly and loads of people are chatting about that rather than about anything useful.

So I’m on a quad core machine with 8GB RAM and 2 x nVidia 9600 cards and a downstream that regularly comes in at around 12MBits. How is this possible? Every event I go to there are regular users (people who know how to configure and run SL) complaining that voice isn’t currently working for them, that they can’t hear anything. It happened to me and a large percentage of the audience today at a high profile event on Shakespeare.

Of all the improvements (the changes to the forums, the blogs, the bloody shopping site and all the rest) why is it that the overall experience isn´t really that much better than it was two years ago? I think that’s where I’m heading…. it’s frustrating not to improve at a better pace, it’s frustrating to see competent users still having voice and other problems and, well, it’s just frustrating sometimes.

But you see I really do like SL – I like the fact you can build and script, share video and music (when it works) chat to people using text and voice (when it works) and I like the social side of it an awful lot. I have plenty of friends in SL and I like to sit and chat with them – it’s been social, it’s been fun and it’s also been professionally fruitful a lot of the time.

But really, I can’t help thinking I get more out of blogs and Twitter (in terms of professional development), and more out of other social platforms (and I’d include Elluminate and Adobe Connect in there too) than I can see myself getting out of SL these days. So whilst I will continue to interact socially there, the thought of trying to teach is really quite painful.

It´s one thing to run an event like SLanguages (though it is still fraught with dangers such as voice problems, new users not training up before attending, etc.) but quite another to try to run an interactive and participatory class when the toolset is limited and when the investment needed is so great. And I’m not even talking about the financial investment there, either…

Some time ago I co-wrote a chapter for a book about Second Life. Tha chapter my colleague Howard Ramsay and I wrote was entitled “Second Life: Overcoming the Entry Barriers in Hogher and Further Education”. Looking back at that chapter now I can’t see a great deal of change, and those entry barriers are, at best, a real detractor in terms of getting educators in, but – at worst – they are very good reasons not to even start.

Sometimes it does come down to the shiny-shiny, and for me this is one of those times. SL is too demanding and too unreliable for most educators. It pains me to say this, but I just don’t think it’s improved enough, or become easy enough for most people to bother. There are better ways of doing most things you can do in SL in terms of education, and – almost five years down the line – as far as I’m concerend SL hasn’t delivered enough to make it worthwhile.

I still think the future of web interactions is 3D, and I still think avatars are a grand idea, and I still love the concept of a vast space to be wandered and enjoyed… but I have to conclude that in pure terms of investment (time and money) SL doesn’t make much sense, at least for most educators.

So later this year we´ll be dropping two of our islands and handing over the SLanguages conference to a team of people who have the drive and enthusiasm to take it forward (I’ll truly miss organising and running that) and we’ll be refocussing time and budget on mobile learning, which I now think has finally come of age (screen size, usability, connectivity, etc.). Some call it fickle, but I think mobile has come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, and the possibilities are very exciting. Plus, you don’t need high-end equipment and shedloads of patience with mobile, most of the time.

I know many will be surprised and disappointed at this turnaround, and some will see it as vindication of their ante-diluvian views on technology, but hey, whichever camp you fall into (even the ‘told you it was crap’ camp [ which it patently isn´t, so don't bother! ] ), you’re most welcome to leave a comment here…

On Being Busy

Gavin Dudeney — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:42:12 +0000

Actually, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can I get back to you later, please?

IATEFL Pwned

Gavin Dudeney — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:06:46 +0000

When I looked at the programme for the IATEFL conference in Harrogate I was delighted to see just how many technology-related talks there were this year: over 50 out of a programme of around 400 talks. It seemed to me that technology had finally become manistream and that was a real pleasure for me. Apart from those talks there were signature events such as the Longman one run by my dear friend and colleague Nicky Hockly, the LTechs SIG pre-conference event which blended Twitter, Second Life and ‘real’ life perfectly and also the online conference, which featured live TV, recorded sessions, forums and the ever-present Twitter backchannel.

For those who see no purpose in – or need for – technology in learning, just try the recorded conference and have a think…

However, what was more surprising to me was the great joy and pleasure of meeting up with the PLN from all over the world. Speaking to Andy Hockley after the first evening, we both commented on how odd, yet how pleasant, it is to walk into a pub and see around twenty people, eighteen of whom you feel you know really well, but have never met. There were huge hugs and smiles, meet-ups arranged by Twitter, the photographs. Watching people rushing over to meet online friends with odd names, shouting out their delight. It was an amazing feeling.

But more amazing was watching what happened on Thursday in some of the tech-related sessions run by members of the PLN. Normally for a tech talk one might expect thirty or forty attendees (more, of course, depending on level of notoriety or particular content), but this year each session was a mob-scene with people sitting on the floor, standing up in corners and yes – being turned away (I was turned away from two because the rooms were bursting). The real joy, though, was watching what happened at the end of these sessions. Again, normally you’d expect three or four people to approach the presenter to ask a question. This year was different, however – I stood watching as lines of twenty people formed to kiss the presenters, hug them and express their joy at the session and the collective success of the PLN.

It was truly an amazing feeling, and I think the conference was pwned by the techies, no doubt about that. Techies who are human, loving and supporting. This was our first conference and I can’t imagine what it’s going to feel like next year, but I know I can’t wait.

As with every year, I had less time to go to things, and more time running around working on the online side of the conference, having meetings, etc. It does get harder every year, knowing more people and having more to do means that I don’t get to many sessions and don’t have time to really spend with everyone I would like to spend time with. Like many others, I spend most of each day running down corridors noddign at old friends and acquaintances and saying the ever-popular ‘we must catch up sometime’. But it rarely happens… and that’s a shame. I’m just glad I get to spend time with lots of them online, in Twitter, Second Life and elsewhere during the year.

I did manage some of the evening sessions, and the odd publisher party. It was good to see old friend and colleague Lindsay Clandfield launching his Global series, a little of Jeremy Harmer and Steve Bingham’s beautiful music extravaganza, the Pecha Kucha featuring the amazingly-beheeled poet Karenne, the sparkling Burcu and others. I loved Petra Pointer’s talk on Twitter – elegantly delivered and well thought-out. I loved booking in some of the PLN for interviews on IATEFL Online (so that if we didn’t speak too much at conference, I could at least catch up with them on video!), the plenaries were magic and so much more. And I enjoyed the time in the conference bar chatting, singing and (I suspect) making a nuisance of ourselves late into the night.

Wish I could have spent more time with people, with friends old and new, with the PLN, but it´s tricky when you’re combining a variety of jobs. Next time, if this conference is going to be like this in the future, I shall have to resolve to work less and play more, get to more sessions and just have more downtime. But until then, I think I shall simply smile at the thought that the geeks inherited the IATEFL earth this year, and all their base are belong to us . Hell, even Herbert Puchta was railroaded into signing up for Twitter. Result!

Hard Drive Fail

Gavin Dudeney — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:56:14 +0000

Just back from a six day trip to Turkey. My Macbook crashed on the plane on the way home and seems to be irreparable without a reformat and reinstall. Have lost five days of email due to my fixation with using Outlook in Parallels on the Mac. If you’ve mailed me since last Friday morning, please resend…

IATEFL Online

Gavin Dudeney — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:05:01 +0000

The British Council IATEFL Harrogate Online site is now open for business. Sign up free to join in with the discussions and watch live TV from the venue, as well as the usual mix of live plenaries, over forty recorded video sessions, the Pecha Kucha and more.

Twitter

Sign up for a Twitter.com account and start following the user iateflonline. When you update your status simply include the tag #iatefl and it will show up on Harrogate Online twitter page. Check out who is twittering about IATEFL and follow them, too! Watch out for for activity during the conference and join the discussion. Twitter works on your mobile phone, too (via text/sms).

Share your pictures:
Upload your pictures to Flickr.com. Tag them with iatefl2010 so we can find them. Others will, too.

Got a blog?
Simply include the phrase IATEFL conference 2010 in your blog posts and we will add this to our site. We use Google’s Blog Search and Technorati’s Search to find your postings – if they can see it, so will we.

Connect on Facebook
Become a fan of our Facebook page . Many members are already there.

On Banning Laptops

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:23:52 +0000

There’s a ridiculous posting over here in the Washington Post about college lecturers banning laptops in their classrooms. I haven’t got a lot of time to dissect the gross stupidity in this action, but here are a couple of points from the article:

Georgetown had only recently begun requiring that first-year law students own laptops, after painstakingly upgrading the campus for wireless Internet access.

So everyone’s obliged to buy one, but nobody’s allowed to use one… go figure, as I believe they say over there… Then there’s:

“This is like putting on every student’s desk, when you walk into class, five different magazines, several television shows, some shopping opportunities and a phone, and saying, ‘Look, if your mind wanders, feel free to pick any of these up and go with it,’ ” Cole said.

So we have the same old thing – obviously students are obliged to have a laptop, but college professors don’t know how to take advantage of them in their lessons, so the students use them for other purposes. And if the education they’re getting were actually stimulating and interesting, perhaps their ‘minds’ wouldn’t ‘wander’ so much. People have always been distracted in class – this is like blaming bullying on technology. New ways of doing old things. Perhaps if the professors were more engaging, this wouldn’t be happening. And maybe it’s natural selection, too – perhaps those who play around and browse YouTube will get worse marks, flunk out and do everyone a favour by not taking a job someone else deserves more.

Perhaps my favourite quote from this is the following:

One recent semester, Siebert tracked the grades of 17 student laptop addicts. At the end of the term, their average grade was 71 percent, “almost the same as the average for the students who didn’t come at all.”

So what we’re saying here is that the teaching materials are so interesting, stimulating and demanding that you can stay at home for the entire course and get 71%. What kind of thing are these people teaching? It beggars belief, it really does… Kind of all reminds me of this video:

My Kind(le) of Books

Gavin Dudeney — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:07:43 +0000

As noted elsewhere on this blog, I’m off for a long and busy trip around bits of Asia, and a trip that means I’m stuffed to the gills with hardware, cables, batteries and the usual clothes, etc. With that in mind, and having thought about it for quite some time (and even waited for the disappointing iPad), last week I went ahead and ordered a Kindle, which arrived whilst I was in Croatia over the weekend. In preparation I did some jiggery pokery and downloaded some books from Amazon to the PC desktop version of Kindle, ready to be transferred.

I also got the iPhone app, and did a little reading on that whilst away, but the small, bright screen means eye fatigue pretty quickly (and page turn fatigue even more quickly). On my return last night I charged the Kindle overnight and this morning everything was transferred and synched in minutes. The machine itself is thin, quite sturdy and feels good in the hand. I also invested in a decent leather case and, when closed and snug inside it looks like a thin paper notebook. I’ve been trying to resist trying it out today, preferring to wait for the plan tomorrow.

One of the features I do like is being able to do some reading on, say, the PC version of a novel in Kindle for PC and finding the book open on the same page I left off, on the Kindle itself. A small feature, but quite a good one (bye bye turned down pages, bookmarks and shopping receipts!). When I open the book on the iPhone whilst queuing to board, the book is there waiting for me to carry on reading. Nice touch.

I paid US$9.99 for each of the books I bought (currently EUR7.29 or GBP6.38), which strikes me as a pretty good price – that and the availability of books that I simply can’t get here in Barcelona. So far, so good. The six books I put on it means effectively I’m travelling with six books occupying roughly the same size and weight as half a normal paperback, which is most excellent!

I’ll let you know what it’s actually like when I get back at the end of the month.

IATEFL Online

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:32:21 +0000

Just a short post to say that things are coming together for the British Council / IATEFL Harrogate Online conference which aims to bring as much of the annual IATEFL conference to a wider audience via a free online community with video, photos, moderated forums, streamed plenaries and events and – this year – six hours of live TV per day. You can find more information here: http://bit.ly/9TYjbE .

We’re currently looking for moderators for the online forums (http://bit.ly/bSTlNt) – online work which can be done from home if you’re not coming to the physical conference but want to be involved, and we’ve also just launched a ‘Teaching’s Got Talent’ competition to find our final live TV presenter. The lucky winner of this competition will have an all expenses paid trip to the conference plus GBP 500 to spend at Betty’s tea room (or similar)! More information on that can be found here: http://bit.ly/9FvQA0

Looking forward to meeting you f2f or online in April…

February…

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:01:32 +0000

A corollary to the Padulike post below is I’m off on one of those mad trips where something like the Kindle would be a godsend. I don’t leave until next Tuesday 9th (Kindle delivery date is claimed to be sometime between the 4th and the 8th) but then I have six countries in twenty days – a return visit to do a follow-up consultancy on the British Council Access English project. Looking forward to re-visiting a few places, and discovering a couple of new ones (Malaysia and Taiwan), but sad that in the end I’m not going back to Vietnam, where I had the best clams I’ve ever had last year. Though it does save me a trip to Madrid to try to get a visa!

Got a bit of a clothes conundrum too: everywhere is nice and warm (mid-twenties and above) apart from Seoul, which today has a windchill-factored temperature of -17. Don’t want to drag a winter coat around the region just for those two days, but…

The route map looks like this:

For more on the Access English project, see here: http://bit.ly/dtAUVp

Padulike?

Gavin Dudeney — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:54:41 +0000

Excited though I was by the launch of the iPad last week, after a lot of thought I’ve decided that it really isn’t for me, at least in its prototype, beta version 1.0. The one thing that doesn’t bother me about the whole gadget is its name, since not once last week did I think it sounded like a modern, personalised sanitary towel… If that were the case, then I would have had a mind full of sanitary towels over the years (notepad – like a sanitary towel crossed with a Post-It…. launch pad – like a sanitary towel from which rockets are launched…. pad thai – a sort of noodle dish made out of sanitary towels…. Paddington Bear – a sort of Dington Bear made out of sanitary towels…) and I haven’t, so it’s a ridiculous snigger conclusion drawn by many. I don’t think that’s a purely male perspective, a close female friend DM-ed me on Twitter to say she found the whole name issue rather childish and schoolground titterish, and I agree.

No, the problem with the iPad for me is not with the name, but with what it does, and what it doesn’t do. I already own an iPhone and that suits me fine – do I really need a huge iPhone that doesn’t make calls, and with a screen that’s begging to shatter… an iPhone that it takes two hands to hold (therefore making it tricky to use on the go)…. an iPhone that needs a flat surface in order to type (my eyesight and RSI are already bad enough, thanks), and then probably wobbles due to a slightly curved back surface… an iPhone promising the ‘best browsing experience ever’ but doesn’t feature Flash… an iPhone that makes all my apps much bigger (ooh!)? To be honest, I don’t think I do.

Thinking about where I’d use it, I thought I wouldn’t use it at home because I have much bigger and better screens for watching movies on, more elegant interfaces for dealing with email and web browsing. Just imagining the thought of having to finish an email before being able to go back to Twitter just doesn’t make sense. We put up with the lack of multitasking on the iPhone because it actually fits there. I can listen to my music and, say, use Twitter on the iPhone. When I’m on the go that suits me, but if I’m sitting at home on the sofa, then I probably do want multi-tasking… And if I’m browsing the web, I suspect I probably often want Flash.

It’s a missed opportunity for education, too. Having lunch with an ex-colleague yesterday I thought how good their English courses would have looked on the iPhone, if only it had Flash…

So, let’s see – about 90% of what the iPad does, I have covered already with an iPhone (albeit much smaller, but that’s fine). When I’m not using the iPhone, i.e when I’m sitting down at hoem or in a hotel, I tend to use a proper computer. Had Apple come out with that form factor, but running OSX I would have been queueing right now at an Apple Store, but they didn’t. The fake photo of Jobs holding up four iPhones taped together is pretty much what they came out with, and frankly, it’s just not good enough for me.

What I really want is a decent e-reader. Not a half-decent e-reader (backlit screens are generally agreed to be a bit pants for sustained book reading) that’s also a half-decent web browser. Many of the commentators may be right that most users are simpletons who just look at Facebook all day and therefore are happy with a locked down piece of kit that never goes wrong, but that’s not me – and it’s not a lot of people I know. So, having spent some time thinking about the iPad, I started thinking about the e-reader I wanted. At this juncture it’s worth pointing out that the ideal e-reader has yet to come, but anyway…

It has to have a good screen (large fonts if necessary, easy on the eyes – as close to the book experience as possible), good battery life. Ideally I’d like to hold it in one hand without needing to go weight training for a month in order to do so. It has to have access to a decent store of books online, at a decent price. Ideally I’d be able to search and bookmark… I’d like to be able to synch my books between machines: from the e-reader to the iPhone, the iPhone to my Mac, my Mac to my PC and read them where and when I want.

With that in mind, and having spent some time on Twitter and Google, I’ve decided to go for a second generation Kindle, albeit the small one. The small one for two reasons: easier to pack and also to hold in one hand, but also because it’s significantly cheaper than the larger one, and I reckon I’ll probably be upgrading or changing models in under a year’s time. The Kindle isn’t perfect, of course – DRM and lack of support for various formats is a bit of a bind. But at the moment I suspect it’s probably the best of the bunch. Had Barnes & Noble had the nous to sell their Nook to people outside the States, they may have got some custom from me. But they don’t. So they didn’t.

So, it’s on order. Between now and the end of April I have to travel to eleven different countries. In the past couple of years I’ve been buying trashy detective fiction during my travels… reading the books, discarding them at airports or hotels. It’s nice to leave a book lying around and know someone else will probably pick it up and read it. Must remember not to do that with the Kindle when it arrives!

I’ll be reporting back on my experiences once I’ve travelled with it for a few weeks. Like many others, I think this is the year ‘mobile’ finally takes off in terms of decent content provision, and also in terms of education. It’s going to be an interesting year for mobile devices, watch this space…