Reposted from 100 Days with an iPad

Price: $1.19 (AUD)

App size = 9.1 MB

[Click here to download from iTunes]

One of the key strengths of the iPad is the ability to take a large collection of documents with you in one small device. I’ve installed a range of readers on the iPad and the one that’s surfacing as most useful is Goodreader.

Given that the majority of documents that come my way at work are either .pdf or .doc the issue I have is making sure I have the right documents with me in class, in meetings, in training sessions and generally when not at my desk. This is where Goodreader comes into its own.

Features:

Beyond simply displaying a document, Goodreader has the following functions:

  • Preview file
  • Find Files – search by file name; filter by name, date added, date read, or starred.
  • Manage files – copy, zip, protect/unprotect, mark read/unread, star/unstar, email, rename, link, add to PDF portfolio, open in another application… and more
  • Web downloads – this function is one of my favourites – it allows me to download a file into the application directly by entering a URL or web browsing.
  • Connect to Servers – really useful in an enterprise environment where shared folders are still used.

File transfer

You can load files in and out of GoodReader in a variety of ways. GoodReader can be launched from a document preview in Safari or Mail but also allows:

  • direct URL entry,
  • search the WWW,
  • WiFi File Transfer – a little tricky but there are good instructions on the vendor’s website – [Goodiware WiFi Transfer instructions]
  • USB File Transfer – via iTunes Apps interface – or using the GoodReaderUSB tool provided as a free download from the vendor website. [GoodReaderUSB download page]

From the website:

GoodReader supports massive PDF and TXT files, but it can also handle all of the most popular file types. Have a look for yourself:

  • MS Office – .doc, .ppt, .xls and more
  • iWork’08/’09
  • HTML and Safari webarchives
  • High resolution images
  • It even does audio and video! [http://www.goodreader.net/goodreader.html]

Ease of Use:

GoodReader has quite a few features that take a little time to discover. The more files you start accessing with GoodReader the more obvious the features become. It’s ready to use as a simple reader from the moment its installed, but GoodReader really does become something of a Swiss Army knife as you push it further. (At this point you also need to keep in mind the price point we’re talking about – GoodReader is $1.19 and does far more than the free readers that are often limited to proprietary site access and have poor file management features.)

Pros and Cons:

The only Con I’ve experienced is the text flow option seemed to lose its controls – but I suspect that was more related to the fact that my iPad hadn’t been restarted in more than a week. After a restart GoodReader has been working perfectly.

Potential uses in Higher Education:

GoodReader is proving very useful in a range of contexts. I’m teaching in a dance studio and I can have all my readings and course documents with me in the one device without worrying about losing or disrupting papers. I can search for the exact items I want to use at the instant I need them. Yesterday I was able to have my lesson plan open on the reader and refer to it as the class progressed. In a WiFi environment I can quickly distribute digital copies of documents to my students via email (or WiFi if they have iPod/iPad/iPhone).

I can quickly access documents shared by colleagues via local (or remote) servers. The ability to have all my minutes and action lists for meetings in one location is a boon. I’m often more than a kilometre from my desk and shifting from one colleague’s office to the next – so the portability of the iPad and reliability of this app is really appreciated.

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Yochai Benkler
Image via Wikipedia

I’ve just been re-reading Howard’s chapter in Freesouls…   And this section really resonates in relation to the use of Web 2.0 (or “participatory media” if you like) in teaching and learning… One thing it assumes is a proactive commitment from participants… Engagement…

This passage suggests to me a compelling rationale for the use of these opportunities in teaching and learning…

Participatory media include (but aren’t limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, digital storytelling, virtual communities, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs. These distinctly different media share three common, interrelated characteristics:

  • Many-to-many media now make it possible for every person connected to the network to broadcast as well as receive text, images, audio, video, software, data, discussions, transactions, computations, tags, or links to and from every other person. The asymmetry between broadcaster [teacher?] and audience [learner?] that was dictated by the structure of pre-digital technologies has changed radically. This is a technical- structural characteristic.
  • Participatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people. Value derives not just from the size of the audience, but from their power to link to each other, to form a public as well as a market. This is a psychological and social characteristic.
  • Social networks, when amplified by information and communication networks, enable broader, faster, and lower cost coordination of activities. This is an economic and political characteristic.

http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html

Then I glance at Yochai Benkler’s words…

Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more so than life was in the past; even the very near past. Life, of course, was never simple. But the fact that day-to-day behaviours in Shenzhen and Bangalore have direct and immediate effects on people from Wichita to Strasbourg, from Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, or that unscrupulous lenders and careless borrowers in the United States can upend economic expectations everywhere else in the world, no matter how carefully others have planned, means that there are many more moving parts that affect each other. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity emerges. New things too were ever under the sun; but the systematic application of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, innovation to innovation, and information to making more information has become pervasive; and with it the knowledge that next year will be very different than this. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old.

These two features?the global scale of interdependence of human action, and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt, discuss, learn, and repeat…

The set of human systems necessary for action in this complex, unpredictable set of conditions, combining rationalization with human agency, learning and adaptation, is as different from managed systems and perfect markets as the new Toyota is from the old General Motors, or as the Internet now is from AT&T then. The hallmarks of these newer systems are: (a) location of authority and practical capacity to act at the edges of the system, where potentialities for sensing the environment, identifying opportunities and challenges to action and acting upon them, are located; (b) an emphasis on the human: on trust, cooperation, judgment and insight; (c) communication over the lifetime of the interaction; and (d) loosely-coupled systems: systems in which the regularities and dependencies among objects and processes are less strictly associated with each other; where actions and interactions can occur through multiple systems simultaneously, have room to fail, manoeuvre, and be reoriented to fit changing conditions and new learning, or shift from one system to another to achieve a solution…

To deal with the new complexity of contemporary life we need to re-introduce the human into the design of systems. We must put the soul back into the system. If years of work on artificial intelligence have taught us anything, it is that what makes for human insight is extremely difficult to replicate or systematize. At the center of these new systems, then, sits a human being who has a capacity to make judgments, experiment, learn and adapt. But enabling human agency also provides scope of action for human frailty. Although this idea is most alien to the mainstream of system design in the twentieth century, we must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality?our ability to think of others and their needs, and to choose for ourselves goals consistent with a broader social concern than merely our own self-interest. The challenge of the near future is to build systems that will allow us to be largely free to inquire, experiment, learn and communicate, that will encourage us to cooperate, and that will avoid the worst of what human beings are capable of, and elicit what is best. Free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the thousands of emerging human practices of productive social cooperation in the networked information economy give us real existence proofs that human-centric systems can not merely exist, but thrive, as can the human beings and social relations that make them.

http://freesouls.cc/essays/06-yochai-benkler-complexity-and-humanity.html

..and reflect on our discussion this week… And Isaac Mao comes into focus…and I am inspired by his vision of Sharism as a goal for education and life more generally…

With the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create? A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain…

The first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation, excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already, the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses…

The more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros” (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a system.

http://freesouls.cc/essays/07-isaac-mao-sharism.html

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An Oxford degree ceremony — the Pro-Vice-Chanc...
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Teaching College Math » Blog Archive » Technology Skills We Should Be Teaching in College

I thought this blog post developed a nice, albeit partial, set of technology competencies that would certainly set our staff well ahead in the drive to flexible and online learning. The list is also the result of a particular pedagogical view that has collaboration, active student participation and a

And its a given that the list will change regularly as new technologies and expectations arise.  Change must be seen as a constant.

Some of it relates directly to our own university-branded initiatives – but the skill set needs to be transferable and generic.  Those in Education may also see a need to propogate these ideas to their students.

The main challenge, as I see it, is that many academic teaching staff do not see these as basic competencies for educators.  The question still arises “Who will do it for me?” – it isn’t a workload issue – once you know how to do these things effectively your time is more readily deployed elsewhere.

As the author suggest – the list isn’t exhaustive…comments on the blog site extend the list…

How do we get academic teaching staff to demonstrate greater personal agency when it comes to technology use?    Do we start pushing lists like this as self-auditing tools?  I honestly don’t believe that more traditional PD is going to have much impact…. Do we need to find ways to ENGAGE the staff in the same ways that we’re asking staff to think about engaging students…make the engagement relevant to their daily lives, meaningful engagement, embedded learning… What if the academics workplace also became their personal learning space?

Why do we have a dichotomous Teaching and Learning approach – as distinct from a teaching is learning is teaching process?

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NMC Releases Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition | nmc

Hz09au-cover2As usual the Horizon report is fairly well grounded in the state of play.

The Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition (1.3 MB, 32 pp) is available now. The report is free, and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its use, easy duplication, and broad distribution.

A few of the elements that stand out for me (especially in the light of Mantz Yorke’s presentation earlier today)

  • “The ways we design learning experiences must reflect the growing importance of innovation and creativity as professional skills  [capabilities??/attributes??] if students are to succeed beyond the classroom”
  • “It provides virtual spaces where people who share interests can congregate; it facilitates serendipitous connections between people located in very different parts of the world…”
  • “Technology is increasingly a means for empowering student, a method for communication and socialising, and a ubiquitous, transparent part of their lives.” (Yet, some academics label it a disruptive force)
  • “..the learning environment is no longer limited to a physical space…institutions must reflect and support the transformation of the learning environment by embracing the means that make it possible…”

It also addresses some implications if these changes do occur:

  • Evaluation and assessment (as Mantz also suggested)
  • Physical infrastructure in learning institutions – aged facilities may not support contemporary practices.
  • new skills [attributes??] explicitly addressed in instructional strategies.
  • technology engagement must become vernacular in educational settings – no longer a novelty.

Technology barometer (Time-to-adoption)

  • Mobile Internet Devices (1 year or less to mainstream adoption)
  • Private Clouds (1 year or less to mainstream adoption)
  • Open Content (2-3 years to mainstream adoption)
  • Virtual, Augmented and Alternate Realities (2-3 years to mainstream adoption)
  • Location-based learning
  • Smart objects and devices (as simple as QR coding through to embedded chips) (4-5 years to mainstream adoption)

While we are making some inroads in to these areas, could it be argued that the timeframes for mainstream adoption are also running in advance of our staff development and resource provision?

The report contains links to really engaging examples of sites where changes are already occurring, as well as some useful links to more detailed information about the issues and technologies raised.

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Rene Magritte 1928-1929, Surrealism
Image via Wikipedia

In a recent discussion about online learning it was suggested that cross-posting, digression and double posting somehow foster confusion…

My response to that suggestion :

Confusion can also been seen as a natural state of humans when learning.  Let’s be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater… the ACT of having the discussion is where the key learning begins.  Plurality, division, uncertainty and ambiguity are all hallmarks of the postmodern condition – I suggest that in Education we embrace those qualities… and perhaps reducing confusion isn’t always a useful undertaking.

Digression is where the most interesting learning occurs and through digression students begin to develop their own capacity for self-motivated learning.

Crossposting can be seen as a form of interdisciplinary engagement… a way of bridging two communities – of invoking the liminal space that exists at the nexus of engagement in more than a single disciplinary approach… the hallmark of interdisciplinarity is tension.

I’m sure each of us can think of times we’ve been surprised and leapt in our understanding because the predictable linear route was circumvented by disruptive elements… and we ended up with a much richer understanding of our practice as a result.

Who can forget Rene Magritte?

(THIS IS NOT A  PIPE)

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The Old Silo Against the Elements
Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

This strikes me as something that Education needs to better understand…..

There is something simply wonderful about a directory of people. And then enabling people to make the directory social. You quickly find not only the people, but who they are, who knows who, and who is paying attention to who.  You can surface what people are working on. Groups that exist are made visible, and new groups form easily. http://www.socialtext.com/blog/2009/08/the-crm-iceberg-and-social-sof.html

Strikes me that this has a huge implication for eLearning…  And perhaps even new models for research collaboration… In an organisation where the directory is social and the activity is transparent there must be fantastic opportunities to bust out of silos!

What I do know is this, we spent the entire industrial revolution dehumanizing not only our employees, but customers in pursuit of ruthless efficiency and profit. We will rediscover the efficiency and profit lost by working together in ways we haven’t yet imagined.
http://www.socialtext.com/blog/2009/08/the-crm-iceberg-and-social-sof.html

If employees were TEACHERS and customers were STUDENTS – what were we pursuing and what will we rediscover?

What if this matrix were applied to Teaching and Learning??  Would the transformation make for more engaged/satisfying/meaningful learning?
Social Software Value Matrix


Social Media is a Culture, Not Just a Strategy ~ Samir Balwani (so is education)

http://jennylu.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/stephen-downes-learning-is-distributed

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UN announces world’s first tuition-free, online university http://ow.ly/hNzV | http://bit.ly/17KYyg | http://www.uopeople.org/

JD & Howard
Image by jdlasica via Flickr

Over at SocialMedia.biz, JD Lasica caught an impromptu interview with Howard Rheingold on his Flip Mino HD video recorder.

21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Meanwhile Howard has posted his own keynote from Reboot Britain on Blip.TV

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I’m a little sad to have missed the IDIERI event in Sydney.  I had hoped there would be a steady stream of updates via twitter and other channels but there seemed to be a dearth of activity in this arena.

One small exception was the good folk from C&T who managed to find time to post a few Tweets and upload some twitpics…

The book launch looks great – there’s a couple of faces missing from the contributors – me included.

Brad Haseman launching Drama & Technology book co-authored by... on TwitpicJohn Carroll and David Cameron reporting back on the drama & ... on TwitpicThe co-authors and editors of Drama Education & Technology in... on Twitpic

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