William F. Garrity

EDUCAUSE's Learning Initiative publishes the latest in its "7 Things You Should Know About..." series

7 Things You Should Know About... Twitter

Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing?” Users have 140 characters for each posting (or “tweet”) to say whatever they care to say. Many tweets do answer the question of what the user is doing, but plenty of others are responses to other tweets, pointers to online resources that the user found interesting, musings, or questions. Similar to social networking sites like Facebook—which has itself evolved to include mini-updates—Twitter lets users create formal friendships, which collectively establish numerous and interconnected networks of users. In addition, Twitter works with cell phones and other SMS clients, making it an easy way for mobile users to stay in touch virtually anywhere.

EDUCAUSE is the association for higher education computing. 

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Here, in Ars Tecnica, is the one piece about Chrome OS you should read right now.

Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet

In 2009, it's better to be an Internet company that's taking slow, awkward first steps toward the PC, than a PC company that's still trying and failing to truly integrate with the Internet. Ars looks at what Chrome OS means for Google, Apple, Microsoft, the netbook, ARM, Intel, and the cloud. "Revolutionary" is a clichéd term, but Chrome OS is a good candidate for it.

By Jon Stokes | Last updated November 20, 2009 8:30 AM

"Users who buy a ChromeOS portable will have to buy it for what it is, a cloud client that's closer in many ways to a smartphone than it is to a netbook."

... in more concrete and less aesthetic terms, Apple and Microsoft began decades ago with "the PC," and they're currently involved in a slow and painful process of trying to stretch and push "the PC" out towards the Internet and towards a more useful and integrated relationship with the cloud as a new type of server. Google, on the other hand, began with the Internet, and it presumes the cloud in everything it does. With Chrome OS, the company is now trying to push and stretch the Internet back down onto "the PC" as just one of a growing range of cloud clients. Google acknowledged that it will eventually move Chrome OS to laptops and conventional PCs, so the Chrome OS portable is just Google's first battle in a long, ambitious campaign to thoroughly cloudify the entire computing experience.

In CNET News's Nanotech - The Circuits Blog, a techie comparison of the guts of the iPhone and Droid.

November 1, 2009

Inside the Motorola Droid, an iPhone likeness

Though the Motorola Droid and Apple iPhone have different chassis, their high-octane engines are similar.

The internal similarities begin with performance: both devices are fast. The iPhone 3GS is already distinguished for its speed. And the Droid is quickly garnering similar accolades. Motorola Droid (Android)

"The Droid makes a big leap in internal performance. Compared with its rather sluggish Android predecessors," CNET Reviews said, citing the speed at which the Droid opens applications and menus and scrolls through lists and switches display screens.

"We're really pumped to see all the industry excitement it's created," said Jeff Dougan, the OMAP 3 product marketing manager at Texas Instruments, which supplies the OMAP 3430 processor that powers the Droid. "This is the first handset that truly realizes the full potential of Android," he said, referring to Google's Android 2.0 operating system that runs on the Droid phone.

The TI processor, like the one in the iPhone, is based on an a new architecture called Cortex-A8 from U.K.-based chip design house ARM, whose wide variety of chips populate most of the world's cell phones. Dougan says most smartphones currently on the market use an older, lower-performance ARM architecture than the Cortex-A8--with the exception of the Palm Pre, which opted for the newer TI chip. The Cortex-A8 provides a "two to three times performance boost" over older architectures, according to Dougan.

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[Search "consumerization" for previous posts about this same topic--the capabilities of consumer IT way outperforming corporate IT .]

In today's The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required):

It's a Free Country...

...So why can't I pick the technology I use in the office?

By NICK WINGFIELD

Does this sound familiar?

At the office, you've got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company's internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You've got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don't always figure out exactly what you're looking for, they're practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

This is the double life many people lead: yesterday's technology for work, today's technology for everything else. The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace—Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter and so on—but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto.

Even more galling, especially to tech-savvy workers, is the nanny-state attitude of employers who block access to Web sites, lock down PCs so users can't install software and force employees to use clunky programs. Sure, IT departments had legitimate concerns in the past. Employees would blindly open emails from persons unknown or visit shady Web sites, bringing in malicious software that could crash the network. Then there were cost issues: It was a lot cheaper to get one-size-fits-all packages of middling hardware and software than to let people choose what they wanted.

But those arguments are getting weaker all the time. Companies now have an array of technologies at their disposal to give employees greater freedom without breaking the bank or laying out a welcome mat for hackers. "Virtual machine" software, for example, lets companies install a package of essential work software on a computer and wall it off from the rest of the system. So, employees can install personal programs on the machine with minimal interference with the work software.

Some forward-thinking companies are already giving employees more freedom to pick mobile phones, computers and applications for work—in some cases, they're even giving workers allowances to spend on outfitting themselves. The result, they've found, is more-productive employees. There's a reason professional chefs bring their own knives to work, rather than using a dull set of blades lying around the kitchen.

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Via USA Today, a brief (of course) piece on how doctors are using Twitter. 

Doctors: A Tweet a day keeps the patients informed

Modern medicine is taking to Twitter. In a report in  Telemedicine and e-Health, medical writer Mark Terry notes that doctors, hospitals and health agencies have started to deliver medicine via Tweet.

"It’s easy to dismiss Twitter because so much of the media attention focused on it looks at how movie stars and celebrities like Ashton Kutcher or Oprah are using it," Terry writes. But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitals such as the University of Maryland Medical System, and individual doctors have all taken to contacting patients through Twitter.

The journal report notes ten medical uses for Twitter recommended by clinical nurse Phil Baumann:

1. Disaster alerting and response
2. Diabetes management (blood glucose tracking
3. Drug safety alerts from the Food and Drug Administration
4. Biomedical device data capture and reporting
5. Shift-bidding for nurses and other healthcare professionals
6. Diagnostic brainstorming
7. Rare diseases tracking and resource connection
8. Providing smoking cessation assistance
9. Broadcasting infant care tips to new parents
10. Post-discharge patient consultations and follow-up care

Since March, a service called "TrialX" connect patients with clinical trials, using Twitter. "The company integrated with two online personal health record providers: Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault," notes the report.

“It’s a bit like having a group of people you can instantly send a blast fax or blast e-mail or a blast communication to because it’s real-time and because it was designed for mobility. Instead of being like texting my daughter, I might now text 30 people or 50 or 100 people, whatever the number is who are following you," the report quotes physician Joseph Kvedar of Partners Healthcare System in Boston as saying.

By Dan Vergano

Posted at 11:38 AM/ET, August 24, 2009

In Ars Technica, an article about several enhancements to Microsoft's Bing search engine, including especially integration with Wolfram | Alpha. 

The enhancements noted include

• Wolfram | Alpha integration: "expertly curated data"
• Bing Videos and integration with MSN Video
• Bing Travel; hundreds of cities with information about attractions, events and venues, points of interest, neighborhoods, slide shows, and other local data
• Search sharing
• better results for health information
• more detailed weather
• better maps

If you haven't tried Bing, I suggest using it as your default search engine for a while. 

In Ars Tecnica, about the smartphone market worldwide. 

I predict that the US market is eventually dominated by Apple (iPhone), RIM (BlackBerry), and Google (Android).  The first two are proprietary devices and the third is a more open platform. 

From the Webopedia ("The #1 online encyclopedia dedicated to computer technology"), a pretty basic Twitter dictionary. 

Here is the review of Verizon's Motorola Droid by Molly Wood, an executive editor at CNET TV.  I'm about 90% in agreement with her. 

The Droid: it’s like, not love

2009 November

Many of you know that I recently broke up with my iPhone due to the sad fact that AT&T didn’t seem to have coverage at my house, my office, or anywhere in between. Since then, I’ve been on a CNET-provided BlackBerry Curve, which I found perfectly serviceable, but I’ve been waiting for the perfect iPhone replacement to come along, hopefully on the rock-solid Verizon network. And lo, along came the Motorola Droid. Which I bought. So, I’ve spent a few days now with the Droid as my personal phone, and while it’s certainly a good rebound phone, it’s definitely not true love.

Here’s what I like about the Droid: it’s a nice, solid piece of hardware with an incredibly gorgeous screen. The touch-screen is responsive, the phone itself is really, really fast, and so far, I’ve been able to download pretty much all the apps I used with any regularity on the iPhone: Pandora, Facebook, Amazon, a Twitter app, a weather app, and a movies app, plus a handy little mobile version of Wikipedia. So far, the call quality is pretty good, the battery life seems to be surprisingly strong, I like the three customizable “home” screens, and the way it grabs and integrates contact information from across Facebook, Gmail, and Exchange is really nice. And I like the way new notifications of any sort appear at the top of the screen — calendar reminders, new emails, app updates, new texts, etc. It’s a great at-a-glance feature for push notifications.

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Here's a great article in today's The New York Times that deciphers--a little bit--mobile carriers' byzantine pricing plans.  It concludes they may make some sense.

Is There a Method in Cellphone Madness?

By SAUL HANSELL

HERE’S a consolation prize to the millions who recoil in bafflement from cellphone companies’ labyrinthine price plans, with their ever more intricate arrays of minutes, messages and megabytes: Economists don’t understand them, either.

“The whole pricing thing is weird,” said Barry Nalebuff, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management. “You pay $60 to make your first phone call. Your next 1,000 minutes are free. Then the minute after that costs 35 cents.”

To economists, it simply doesn’t make sense to make chatterboxes pay that penalty. After all, most businesses tend to give discounts to customers who buy more.

It would be easy to see the cellphone companies simply as avaricious oligopolists trying to gouge consumers for every penny they can. And in some senses they are aiming to maximize revenue, at least as much as the market will let them.

But understanding the psychological nuances of how a price plan affects customers’ behavior is at least as important to running a cellphone company today as knowing how radio waves spread over a city. Those high charges for going over your allotted minutes, for example, are designed to cause you enough pain that you will switch to a plan with a higher regular fee.

“You give people a really good bargain on this bucket of minutes,” explained Roger Entner, a senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen. “People are risk averse, so you have a relatively high overage charge, which gets people to overbuy. You also get really predictable revenue out of it, which Wall Street loves.”

Neither the cellphone companies nor their customers, as it turns out, always act in the rational way that economists might predict. Consumers often put immediate gratification and the avoidance of unpleasant surprises above their long-term interests. The companies, meanwhile, are trying to meet the sometimes irrational expectations of investors, who want growth without too much nasty volatility, even if their profits suffer.

Here are a few other examples of how the dance between cellphone companies and their customers is, to use Professor Nalebuff’s term, “weird”:

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In today's The New York Times, a plausible and repulsive vision of the future of advertising. 

Digital Domain

Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

By RANDALL STROSS

“SOME of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description.

But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics.

Filing a patent application, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the company plans to use the technology. But the application shows, at the least, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an “enforcement routine” that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.

The system also has a version for music players, inserting commercials that come with an audible prompt to press a particular button to verify the listener’s attentiveness.

The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads. If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device “ad free” on a temporary or permanent basis.

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Here is the iconoclastic review of the Verizon Motorola Droid in Gizmodo.

It's this simple: If you don't buy an iPhone, buy a Droid.

As always, read the comments at the bottom! 

I came across this in the web site/blog Speaking about Presenting.  The piece is about the most important part of your presentation: What is your core message? 

How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes

November 11, 2009 by Olivia Mitchell

A key message is the number one thing you want your audience to remember or do as a result of your presentation. Some experts call it “the big idea”, the core of your presentation or the proposition.

Start planning your presentation by deciding on your key message. It will make the rest of your planning easy and straightforward. Steve Bent, one of my readers, said in a comment on a previous post:

“…[T]hat’s when I had the Eureka moment of the key message for that particular presentation. Then all previous thoughts, notes and parts of the presentation were easy to classify in terms of how relevant they were, and which step they fell into (if any).”

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In the inestimably fine Gizmodo, a piece about how hardware can advance only so much, given our human characteristics. 

Gadget Singularity: Let's Ditch Our Buttons and Screens Forever

The past decade's march towards better gadgets shows a trend line pointing towards ultra powerful gadgets with UIs so seamless, they make Macs look like a punchcard computers. But if you think about it, we—not hardware—are the limitation.

Besides processing power, price and battery life improvements, our preferences for gadgets and the direction of those desires point towards three things: Richer displays, more seamless inputs and smaller packages—the first two being in direct conflict with the last. Looking at where we've been and where we are, I don't think we can keep pursuing these goals without going gadget prosthetic.

Now here's a trip: For the first time, this decade, design choices are being made to limit resolution in screens to show mercy to the human eye. Apple's recent iMac revision increased the desktop monitor's pixels per inch rating to about 110. That's the equivalent of a laptop levels of density, but on a big 27-inch screen, and it was so sharp, it hurt. Any desk jockey can tell you that as displays get sharper, the strain goes up. On mobiles, which are already the most pixel dense of the gadget kingdom, designers are frequently bashing into conflicting goals of fitting lots of pixels onto pocketable devices. Resolution-independent operating systems (that rely on vector-based graphics) are important but if we don't take displays inside the human body, gadgets can't get much smaller—there's no way for them to become as pixel rich as desktops while continuing to get smaller than they already are

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This piece in ReadWriteWeb says the younger generations are starting to get more into Twitter than Facebook.  I'm not seeing that, myself, here at Dartmouth. 

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter

Written by Sarah Perez / November 5, 2009

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

As it turns out, Gen Y likes Twitter...Well, maybe not, but they are using it  

Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was "pointless" and "narcissistic."

Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33.

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In the Autumn 2009 issue of Intelligent Life, which is the "style" sibling of The Economist: 

FACTS, ERRORS AND THE KINDLE

By Anthony Gottlieb

Created 04/09/2009 - 04:42

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply. The combination of human fallibility with Gutenberg’s invention of  efficient printing in 1439 has, for all the revolutionary advantages of the latter, proved (in some respects) to be a toxic mixture. 

Periodicals publish corrections in subsequent issues and some successful books are (expensively) reissued in new, improved editions. But in a better world, the book, magazine or newspaper in your hands would itself be updated when mistakes are discovered by its publisher. Thanks to the advent of electronic reading gadgets, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, such magic is getting closer. Old-fashioned, uncorrectable books may never disappear. Only futurologists—that is, people who specialise in being wrong about the future instead of the present—would dare to predict their utter demise. Yet it is now possible that the tyranny of print will meet some powerful resistance, and that readers will benefit.   

How bad is the problem of printed errors? Well, start with newspapers. In 1936 a study of Minneapolis papers found that about half of all articles contained mistakes, and most studies since then have shown very similar res­ults—not just in Minneapolis. An analysis of such surveys, produced by the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association in 1980, concluded that half of all printed news stories included some sort of error.

Some of these mistakes will have been merely typographical or spelling errors (about 10% of them, one report suggests), and these account for a fair number of printed corrections, such as the following, cited from the Los Angeles Times in “Regret the Error”, a book about media mistakes by a Canadian journalist, Craig Silverman: “An article in Wednesday’s Calendar section about an English-language newspaper in Mexico City referred to the many American ex-patriots who live there. It should have said expatriates.” But more serious bloopers, it seems, are seldom corrected. A study of ten metropolitan daily newspapers in America, published in 2007 by Scott Maier, a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, found that less than 2% of factually flawed articles were the subject of corrections. Some papers try harder than others to set the record straight: the Guardian, in Britain, once mocked for its typos, is now renowned for its meticulous and witty corrections, and has even published a book of them.

It would be impossible to quantify the extent of error in books—indeed, unhinged even to try. Suffice it to say that “Unfortunately, the work is marred by several factual mistakes” is probably the most frequently used sentence in book reviews. Every scholar has a list of his favourite printed bloopers, and even fans of “Harry Potter” can find many websites listing narrative inconsistencies in the works of J.K. Rowling. In 2001 an analysis of the physical-science textbooks most commonly used in American middle-schools found that they were riddled with errors.

For a salutary reminder of how easy it is for well-known “facts” to be no such thing, even when they are often repeated in print, consider some of the entries in “They Never Said It”, a compendium of misquotations published in 1989. Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” (or anything like it). “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver” is a line from a play, not a quote from Hermann Goering. “Let them eat cake” began life in Rousseau’s “Confessions”, not the mouth of Marie-Antoinette. Voltaire never said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And there is no reason to think Abraham Lincoln ever said “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”—though it is evidently true that you can fool a lot of people for a long time with the aid of books. The quip “Too much checking on the facts has ruined many a good news story” has long been attributed to an American newspaper magnate, Roy Howard; needless to say, it appears to be an invention.

Book publishers mostly rely on their authors to ensure accuracy; dedicated fact-checking departments now rarely exist except at some magazines. The New Yorker’s checkers are justly renowned for their tenacious scepticism, but even they err sometimes. One reader was annoyed to find himself described as dead, and requested a correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, by the time the correction appeared, he really had died, thus compounding the error. This tale illustrates not only the drawbacks of printed media, but also the role that readers can play in overcoming them—even if things did not quite work out in this instance. Thanks to the internet, it is now easier than ever to “crowdsource” the business of fact-checking. Some book authors invite readers to e-mail them with details of any errors, and then publish corrections on their websites and in any future editions.

The paperback edition of Silverman’s book contains 12 corrections to the original hardback, and by the time this piece was written his website had one more which came in too late for the paperback. Most newspapers and magazines correct some of their articles online as errors emerge (though sometimes they merely “scrub” the original, so that no record of previous error exists). Correcting electronic books seems the logical next step.

Earlier this year Amazon caused an outcry by deleting electronic copies of some books from its customers’ Kindle reading devices when it emerged that the editions were illegal bootlegs. But would anyone object if electronic copies were replaced, by remote control, with corrected versions? Such updat­ing would be far less expensive than printing and distributing a new physical edition, though no publisher has yet announced plans to do any such thing. Craig Silverman points out that publishers might find it attractive to stay in touch with electronic-book purchasers by letting them sign up for e-mails with news of corrections. Buyers of books about Nietzsche might be interested to hear that his famous remark is taken out of context from notebooks that were not intended for publication, and that he certainly believed in the importance of facts.

As folks who follow http://twitter.com/williamgarrity know, I have just gotten the Motorola Droid, which runs Google's Android2.0 release smartphone operating system, on Verizon's awesome network.  It's a game-changing device. 

David Pogue is not enthusiastic enough: 

November 5, 2009

State of the Art

A Place to Put Your Apps

Last week, I reviewed not one, but three new phones. You’d think that would be enough for a while, but fall is peak season for new mobile devices, and another major release — Motorola’s Droid — is upon us this week. 

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In addition to

• getting the Droid, I
• at the same time migrated to a new computer--a Lenovo ThinkPad T400s, with 8 GB RAM, a 250 GB SSD, running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate--
• andconverted from BlitzMail and Oracle Calendar to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook 2007. 

Both devices--the laptop and the Droid--are synchronized with Exchange and with each other; whenever I change, add, or delete a contact or calendar entry on one, it's synchronized with the other.  It's all very interesting and wonderful (to me, at least); I'll write about it in a future post. 

IN The New York Times--

August 30, 2009

The Mediocre Multitasker

By RUTH PENNEBAKER

Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

You know what this means. This means that the people around you -- the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs -- are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

But, wait. Should it be breaking news that a single person can’t juggle knives and explain quantum physics while polishing off an artichoke?

Breaking news and a shock to the researchers themselves, as it turns out. Originally, the team of researchers, whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were trying to find out what unusual cognitive gifts multitaskers possessed that made them so successful at multitasking.

They’re still looking.

"Multitaskers were just lousy at everything," said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. "It was a complete and total shock to me."

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At the site Speaking about Presenting there is a pratically use article on how to make twittering an important part of your next presentation. 

The two best alternatives to Twitter as a presentation backchannel

October 28, 2009 by Olivia Mitchell

The advent of the backchannel is a tremendous opportunity for presenters. The backchannel is an online conversation that takes place at the same time as people are talking live. Audience participation didn’t use to scale easily beyond a small group. Now, the backchannel allows every audience member, whatever the size of the group, to be an active participant. However, if you plan to use a backchannel proactively in your presentation, it may be better to use a backchannel tool other than Twitter.

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From the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, here is a gold-mine list of over 190 Twitter applications useful for teaching and learning.