About Three and Half Years to Appear

I wrote this post in April 2007 wondering if my cell phone could be connected to my bathroom scales so that I could easily monitor my weight. I happen to like to weigh in a lot.

http://leekraus.blogspot.com/2007/04/cell-phone-desires.html

Well, http://www.withings.com/en/ is now available.

So what else is now available from this list?

I want it to be the key to my car and home.
I want it to track my family members and tell me where they are.
I want it to be my wallet.
I want to watch the news on it.
I want it to translate different languages.
I want it to be a universal remote control.
I want it to monitor my heart rate and blood pressure and transmit the data to my doctor.
I want it to access my virtual worlds.
I want it to jam all personal communications of other people near me.
I want it to just be a phone.

I want it to link to my bathroom scales.
I want it to load all my podcasts, wirelessly. Functionality yes, practical no
I want it to always have my location on a google map. (We are close.)
I want it to alert me when I am within 10 miles of anything on "my interests" list like a Mountain Bike shop or a Ben and Jerry's.
I want it to capture my audio and email me transcripts.Thanks Jott
I want it to link to my car and tell me when and what maintenance to do. (Ford Synch, but not open)
I want it to have an awesome, high quality camera embedded. (Relatively speaking maybe)
I want it to project a full size light keyboard on any flat surface so I can type into it.
I want it to offer free data services.
I want it to be indestructible. (Ok, I've dropped mine a few times.)

A New Learning Tool: siftables

This MIT student is working on new human to computer interfaces. It is a great presentation.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc. - (37signals)

Major in learning

“It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.” Google’s advice to students

[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc. - (37signals)

Great quote via 37Signals blog.  Google knows that new employees need to know how to learn and not just know a single technology. This is true for everyone now.  I've seen this, employees clinging to the technology that they worked so hard to become really good at.  It can be hard to make the shift when it is time.  In high school I learned T-Maker a word processing system that required that you know tags to format the document. I would have 20 years experience in it now had they just not made a better word processor.  Learn to learn.

TechCrunch Tablet PC

TechCrunch

TechCrunch has pitched the idea to create an open source Internet tablet. This is a great idea. I really hope that they can get this to work out.  This would be an exciting tool for anyone, but the educational impact would be large.  There are rumors that Mac is creating a MacAirTouch.  That would be cool as well.  It is also a similar concept to the recently redesigned OLPC.

I'll be watching this.

Google Sites First Impression

I played around with Google Sites this evening really fast. I am a long time user of JotSpot and actually talked on the phone with the JotSpot development team when they first launched the tool. I exchanged a couple of emails with Joe Kraus as well. That was pretty cool.

While the tool is not JotSpot, it is a neat little wiki tool and I think it will become quiet popular quite quick. I recently had been using Zoho's wiki solution to manage a fairly complex project and so I just did a cut and paste of a couple of pages for comparison. Both are fairly quick and have easy editing. I am really enjoying the ease of use that Zoho has. Google sites seemed more responsive then my JotSpot site, I am guessing this is the Google Backend upgrade. It may also be due to the stripped down version of the application. There are many things that have been removed from the application since it was JotSpot.

The biggest thing that I hope they add back is the ability to have a blog within the wiki. Zoho doesn't offer this feature and I didn't see it in Google Sites. It is a great tool for an internal blog. The Zoho wiki has a 10mg limit on attachments. This is a significant barrier that causes you to come up with an alternative location to house your attachments and causes the need for another service. I haven't seen this limitation on Google Sites.

Another issue that surfaced quickly was when I tried to past an embed script from SlideShare, Google Sites stripped some of the code citing that it was unsafe. Zoho, on the other hand as an Embed HTML feature that allows me to easily embed SlideShare presentations.

So for the moment I will stay with Zoho, but continue to experiment with Google. I am really not sure I see a clear winner at this point.

2007 Blog Stats

I thought it was interesting that Tony posted his blog stats for 2007. So I thought I would post mine as well. As you can see, I haven't had quite the readership that Tony has. My guess is that it is because I write for myself more that I write for my audience. I reflected on this in 2006 here. Interestingly it is one of the top read posts on my site. I do have 186 subscribers to the site as measured by Feedburner, which I find amazing. Here are my stats.



I can see where I could probably make my blog a lot better. Tony called out these bloggers to post their stats. I wonder if they will.

Clive Shepard

Brent Shlenker

Mark Oehlert

George Siemens

Harold Jarche

Wendy Wickham

Jay Cross

Clark Quinn

Stephen Downes ~ Both OLDaily and Half an Hour

Andrew McAfee

Luis Suarez

Jane Knight

Karl Kapp

Jack Vinson

Nancy White

Bill Ives

Tom Kulhmann

Ray Sims

GMail Error #102

So my question is... is this only the 102 error that gmail has had or did my instance of Gmail encounter error 102?

MicroProjector by 3M: Way Cool

This is pretty cool. A micro-projector that you can hold in your hand.




I want one.

Learn more here.

Making Sense of New Technologies by George Siemens

Sense-Making of Technology and Media: a George Siemens Weekly Digest

George Siemens has written a post over at Robin Good's blog. It is a the first of a series that is designed to help use all the new technologies that are coming from everywhere these days. I am honored that he used a quote from this blog to include in his first piece. Thanks George.

I would recommend that you read both George's and Robin's blog. I have for years.

Managing Information Overload or Incremental Relevancy

I was asked the other day in an email how I manage information overload. I think it is a really important topic and one that I could probably improve a lot upon in my own activities, if I focused a little more on it.

When I think about information overload, I usually start thinking about the vast amounts of information that comes to me or I wade through on a daily basis that is basically "junk". That is not just the obvious junk mail or even vast amounts of trial and error that occurs when searching or researching on the web (i.e. Google or Yahoo), but the junk information that comes in the form of posts or comments within the groups that interest me, but aren't talking about things I care about today or in the precious minutes of my day when I have time to check out my email, RSS feeds, or social networks that I belong to.

Some talk about this as the signal to noise ratio. How much information do you have to weed through to get to the highly relevant content that you really want?

What I do to produce "incremental relevancy" which I hope leads to incremental productivity improvement is to try to tweak my daily (continual) information management practices through both automation and structure within these communication tools.

Email

Email is currently the default form of electronic communication in most organizations. Some believe and I tend to agree that email is broke and its associated actions tend to be rude, but because it has become the primary means of communication, you can't ignore it. So, I tend to try to make it as efficient as possible. I monitor two accounts, a work account (which I use Outlook 2003 or the Exchange Mail client) and a gmail account. With the Outlook/Exchange-based account I have been overloaded with spam because the account has been listed publicly on the web for years and I have about 9 years of email newsletters that I have joined. This listing range from elearning industry groups to technology groups, to marketing groups. So the "noise" is very high in this account. There is a very small percentage of email in the account that is useful, however, those that are useful, tend to be mission critical and cannot be overlooked or ignored.

My strategy here is to try to allow the mail filters in Outlook to catch most of the spam. It has been somewhat effective, but nothing like the gmail spam filter that is incredibly reliable. I try to delete those non-relevant emails that don't get filtered out, but this is a source of frustration. It takes too long to rid the inbox of these items.

RSS
The next tool that I use for information gathering is an RSS Reader. I use Google Reader because it is fast and functional and web-based, allowing access from anywhere on the web. I am fairly liberal with the Feeds that I add to the my Reader so I have 271 subscriptions generating just under 5000 posts a month. I can run into frustration with this level of content or flow. If I can't keep up, I can get behind on a couple thousand posts. At first glance this can be paralyzing.

Some strategies that can be used with this "river" of content is labels or folders. You can categorize feeds of information by topic or category. I have also noticed that there are different types of feeds and I tend to deal with them separately. There is the standard blog post feed that comes fairly regularly and typically contains some level of content. These are typically ones that I want to read, but take some time to get through. There is also search feed, these feeds are typically vanity searches or keyword searches that I use to monitor the web for topics of interest. They tend to have very high noise. Finally, I have some monitor feeds, these feeds typically alert me of an event. Someone updated a wiki, posted a comment, logged into an application, posted a resource to Del.icio.us. This type of feed typically just needs a quick scan to look for interesting resources then I can move on. However, event-based are extremely useful particularly in social situations to give you a near-realtime notice without the overhead of email.

A strategy to deal with information overload from RSS feeds is to categorize by topic and type of feed. That way if you have a series of blog posts that you know you want to take some time later and read, put them in a folder that you don't have to get to zero unread items. By putting monitor feeds in a single folder you can quickly review and click "Mark all read" with very little overhead. My understanding is that some tools are allowing you to subscribe to just the top 5% of a feed based on relevancy. If accurate this would be a very cool tool.

Social Networks
Another source of information on the web and a potential place for information overload is social networks. I am a member of several social networks and sub-groups within those networks. For me these include Facebook, LinkedIn, and TwoBrains. I have a few smaller networks that I try from time to time, but these are my primary sources. The value of the social network is the social interaction that you get from like minded people. However, you can spend considerable time monitoring the site.

To assist in monitoring social networks, use RSS whenever possible. Although I haven't figured out how to do this with Facebook. Maybe someone else has, let me know.

My final comment is that I become much more productive once I got my mobile phone that allowed me to engage these tools during any available down time. I try to do a lot of filtering via my Treo while I am in line at the store, waiting for an oil change, or waiting for a meeting to start. This allows me to focus a lot of my time at a computer on engaging in the content I am interested in and not just filtering information.

I'll bet there are a lot better ideas out there then mine. Do any of these activities resonate with you?

The Fiber has been cut

I spent the day without Internet access, well most of it anyway. Starting a new business without access to the network is no fun. I spent the first hour and a half thinking it was something local. Then I finally called the company and the rep told me "The Fiber had been cut and the entire 304 area code was out of service."

The good news. We are back. And my home network is a little tidier where I cleaned up the wires while I was testing each connection.

Supporting Incremental Relevancy

Interestingly, there are companies that are zeroing in on this exact problem. Mahalo, Jason Calacanis' new, people-powered search and KnowNow, who is focused on RSS for the enterprise. These companies are talking about and pushing solutions to improve the signal to noise ratio on the web. These two particular companies are approaching it in different ways.

One Mahalo is using a "humans as aggregators" approach. This means that they are actually creating search result pages that they feel best address the search term or topic. Early results seem to be pretty well done.

KnowNow is "RSS-ifing" as much data as possible, allowing for very sophisticated filtering options. This approach should allow corporations to continually create new mash-ups that combine existing and new data sources and deliver them through RSS to a host of devices.

Both of these approaches address the support of incremental relevancy, that is continually improving the relevance of the information that you are engaging in or giving your attention to...

There may be some links to Pattern Recognition Theory. Stephen Downes is discussing this at his blog. Do we learn be recognizing the connections in the information? I think so...

Shopping Amazon by Voice Command on Jott

and





I've been using Jott for quite some time to leave messages for myself, especially when I am on the road. The service will email you the message as a audio file and a transcript of the message. They have now integrated the service with Amazon.com to allow you to have product information emailed to yourself or a friend.

Wouldn't it be pretty interesting if I could send you an elearning module via voice command on a cell phone? What if I was a support representative that covered a three state area. Once onsite I realized that a particular module would be particularly helpful for your situation. Instead of waiting until I got back to the office or the hotel, I just called my LMS and emailed the module information and link with a simple voice command.

Might be pretty cool.

Blog Readability

I saw some bloggers using this tool to analyze readability. Personally, I'm thinking it mistakenly thought my misspelled words and typos were something highly intelligent.

It has been a long time sense I studied the facts that go into readability. What would be cool is a tool that would allow me to translate my blog to a 6th grade level and I could start my own USAToday (ok, maybe it is at a 10th grade level).

Anthony Salcito on Innovative Schools

Anthony Salcito, the General Manager of US Education for Microsoft is presenting on innovative schools. I am just going to blog my notes as he goes.

Series of slides...
Students today can't prepare bark 1703
Students depend too much on paper 1815
Students depend too much on ink 1907
Students depend too much on store-bought ink 1928
Students depend too much on ball point pens 1950

This generation...
6 apps running on pc
4-5 email addresses
26% use foreign news service
fastest growing segment is 5 to 7 year olds
....

Transformation in Skills
Agrarian
Industrial
....

Trends in the Workplace
Companies like Microsoft hire based on your ability to change

Global

25% of population of China with highest IQ is great then population of North America

China has labor surplus and is number one English speaking country soon.

Top 10 jobs in demand today didn't exist in 2004.

Our Collective Challenge

produce highly educated and technologically capable people

US Workforce Crisis

300,000 skilled IT jobs have gone unfilled

Education is Everything

(all slide material is available)

Technology is not the issue

"Still in the acquisition-age in technology" - I like this one.
We have to take it off the table. Ask questions first. How do you want to engage students on new content? How do you want to use assessment to drive a real learning experience? Typically the answer is allow the technology to support that process.

School of the Future
Initially was that is was going to look like a "classroom" of the future, but then they changed the conversation. District built the building and Microsoft only guided the process.

SOF Project Principles
Learning first, technology later
Language is Paramount...
Lack of process impedes success...
Be comfortable not knowing...
Identify the questions and answers will come...

Success factors.... (5 total)

It was built on a public park.

Thinking of schools as assets for economic development. School buildings as community hubs. School becomes a destination.

Showing a video. The facility is awesome.

Class start at 9:30am but the kids show up early, application to college is a requirement for graduation.

Use competency wheel for everyone. Administrators, Teachers, Parents, and Students.













We don't embrace how to scale innovation of education. They have a tool for how to scale innovation.

Many of the kids were at a 3rd or 4th grade level and their "seriousness of purpose" has changed.

Question from audience... when will you invest in WV? Microsoft did not fund the building. Many examples take the best of the best, this project used existing teachers and the cost was less then refurbishment of other schools. MS invested in human capital and technology. Their are many ways to move forward.

Question... can this work without a new facility. Yes... the reality is that all text are online and teachers use a virtual teaching assistant. SOF used feedback all throughout the class (student response from group) the tool created an individualized lesson plan. Used it for a year and pulled it out. Now MS is going to release it as a product soon.

Question... competency wheel. MS hires on capacity to learn... trying to introduce competency-based learning, success is more broad. The wheel is the same for everyone, just have different levels. Idea is that by reinforcing this creates more agile learning. That's the hope. There are a lot of educational resources that support this model, but they are very open to failure. Look at the tools and adjust them to what you most need.

Thank you.

Quote from a Times Article

The poor schoolmarm or master, required to provide a certain amount of value for your child’s entertainment dollar, now must compete with texting, instant-messaging, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Addictinggames.com and other poxes on pedagogy.

New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology - New York Times

Blogging from Flock

So I kind of got away from using Flock's embedded blogging tool. The reason is that it used to create some crazy code and Blogger would freak out on my when I tried to edit the post. This is important to me because I almost always have to go back and edit the post.


So I am going to use this post to try again.

Why do I use Flock you might ask? 

Well I use it because they are working head to make changes and try an improve it's usefulness.  That might scare some away, but I like to see what they have done, how the changed to interface, and what new features they have added.

UPDATE: It worked!

Blogged with Flock

Lookabee Teaching Support on Facebook

High School teachers can now use Facebook to keep in touch with students. Mashable posted about the site here. Very interesting. Leveraging the social platform will allow students to keep in touch, use other services like Box.net. I think that it might be a little difficult because most schools ban Facebook and don't encourage students to use social networks. Of course you have to be careful about building services on a "closed" platform, but still this adds value to the end user.

If my high school teachers would have been willing to work with me through Facebook, I know I would have done better. There were so many times I wanted to ask questions and clarify assignments, but there was no way I was going to do it front of the whole class, who was just about to explode if they didn't get out of the room. For me, high school was so boring and terribly inefficient anything like this would have been so helpful.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Flickr's Decision on Video. Good or Bad?

I have had a couple of conversations both online and offline around Flickr's possible addition of video to their service. Mostly, those I talk to want to tell me what an awful idea this is and how it will ruin the photo sharing service that has become quite popular. Now, let me say up front I don't know if Flickr's implementation of video will be a success or a failure or even if they are actually doing it. Providing web-based services is a very complex and challenging game. But I imagine if it fails those who said it was a bad idea will argue they tried to do too much and should have left it alone. However, the idea that Flickr shouldn't try new ideas such as video is just crazy to me. In fact, I suggest not doing it could be the death of the service.

If you know a little about how Flickr became the poster child of web2.o and social networking then you might know that they actually started as a online game developer. They had created an online game and were building a fairly passionate user base. However, they noticed that it was not generating enough revenue to sustain their employees for the long term. At some point they decided that they would use the remainder of their capital to develop a photo sharing site. However, it was not looked upon favorable by everyone and they actually had to take a vote on changing the direction of the company. (Please note, I listened to a podcast where one of the Flickr founders discussed these events and if any of the specific details are wrong, I am sorry, but generally this is how the story went.)

I'll bet those who think Flickr should stay away from video would have completely advised them against developing an online photography sharing site. They would have voted no and decided to keep things the same. "We've been doing games for a long time and that is what we do." They would say, "I don't think we should try something new at this point."

But as history has shown the Flickr team made the change, understanding that they knew how to engage users, executed the new plan, and made history.

Now, as part of Yahoo, they may be considering how to leverage that understanding of providing engaging and useful tools to people who want to share video on the web. Thus increasing their reach and providing a much needed service to a market desperate to get better online tools.

Now that said, if you as a user/person can't get excited about video and really can't stand the idea of an icon or button one your flickr page that says video or having to search images only to filter out the videos. Then yeah, it might be awful or ruined and as with all software, using it is a personal preference and you will have to make a decision on whether you want to use it or not.

I've got to believe that if Flickr implements a solution for video that is as useful and easy as their solution for photos it will be a huge success. I also wonder, if they don't innovate, continue to push the envelope, change directions, and continue to prove their value in the market, then someone else would come along, create a new awesome service that allows me to manage all my media online and I would start looking into how to transfer my 8000 images from Flickr to this new service that already houses my 400 videos. But that's just me ;)

Content for your Mood

I ran across this post in the reader about a music service. Musicovery is an interesting interface that lets you browse music by mood and genre, and then listen to it. It struck me interesting because I remember a podcast from a couple of years ago where Wayne Hodgins talked about individualizing content. He indicated that his music preference should be based on mood because he might be having a bad day and we needed a service that would individualize content that way.... well here it is.