The Yankee Clock Peddler and his travelling companion start out on a sales tip in a rural area, and they stop for the night at a farmer’s house. In the morning before leaving to make sales call in neighbouring communities, the clock peddler asks the farmer if he’d store a clock for him for a couple of weeks, and that he’ll pick the clock up on his way back home. The farmer agreed to this, so the Peddler wound up the clock and placed it on the farmer’s wall before leaving (the farmer does not yet own a clock).  When out of ear shot, the traveling companion asks the clock peddler why he left the clock at the house. Didn’t he want to sell the clock on the trip?  To this the Yankee Clock Peddler replied, “don’t worry, by the time I come back in a couple of weeks, the clock will be sold… the farmer will happily buy it from me.”

The moral of the story is:  “We can do without any article of luxury we have never had, but when once obtained, it is not in human nature to surrender it voluntarily.”

Here are some of the ways my iPhone is an article of luxury that I could not easily do without anymore:

• I consume almost all my news on my iPhone and to a lesser extend on my iPad. I start my day reading the news in bed on my iPhone. This way I can be up to speed on the news before heading out for the day, and I don’t wake my wife before she needs to get up at the same time.  For reading new I use the built-in Safari web browser, Zite and Flipboard. Sports with ESPN sports.
• The other thing I do before getting out of bed (and at other times during the day) is skim through my email in the Gmail app, as well as my to-do list in GoTasks (GoTasks hooks into my Google Task list).
• As I get ready to leave for work in the morning I check out the built-in Weather app so see what I’m facing weather wise before getting on my bike.
• Before leaving campus around 5pm, I download the 6pm CBC news (from an earlier East coast broadcast) and then listen to it on the way home in the Downcast app at double speed.  Why at double speed to you ask?  Because my bike ride home only takes 15 minutes, so at double speed I can listen to the whole 30 minute news cast on my commute home.  I also listen to a lot of technology podcasts for news and continuing education.

My iPhone also comes in handy for:

• Settling bets.  If there is disagreement over any obscure facts over dinner or in a conversation, it’s nice to know that it can settle the argument in 30 seconds with my iPhone and Siri or Google.
• I frequently read books in bed, over lunch, or if I have some idle time. Kindle, iBooks are my favourite readers (Kindle ebooks tend to be less expensive in my experience). The place in the book you’re reading syncs nicely between iPads and iPhones, so you don’t have to keep track of where you are if you read on both devices. I love being able to easily change the font size to match how tired my eyes are at any given time. I think the changeable font size will be a big selling feature for older readers.
• Lastly, I love to be able to share photos with family and friends when I’m out and about, rather than take time to upload them to Facebook from my computer when I get home.

I’d argue that one modern-day incarnation of the Yankee Clock Pedder’s windup wall clock is the iPhone. Once you’ve had a chance to use used an iPhone for a while, you’ll probably end up wondering how you did without it. I’m confident that would be the case for the intrepid retired women I talked to last week.

The other aspect of goal keeping that felt very familiar to me was the diving after shots on net. I didn’t expect that to be something that would come easily to me, but once I was between the posts, and people started shooting at me, It reminded me an awful lot like defending against someone spiking a ball at you in a volleyball game. There are obvious differences, by much of the basic technique is similar. fortunately grabbing the ball or pushing it clear of the net is easier than trying to pop the ball up in the air for a volleyball setter.

In any case I’ll be happy to play in net as long as our regular goalie is out recuperating from an injury. Playing is net is less scary and a lot more fun than I thought it would be!

• Kindle & iBooks – The Kindle and iBooks readers are the only apps you’ll probably need for reading books, and PDF files that people email to you. Both Do are excellent eBook readers, but books typically cost less in the Kindle store. On the other hand, I’ve found it much easier to get PDF files into the iBooks reader, so you’ll want to have both installed on your device. Don’t waste your time on the Kobo reader.
• Zite & Flipboard - Zite is a free personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter every time you use it. Flipboard on the other hand had a little bit slicker interface than Zite, but it does not learn your likes and dislikes as you read over time, but stick with the sites and categories you’ve chosen to read. I’d try both out to see which you like better.
• Facebook & Path - Almost everyone is on Facebook now, and if you are, you should install the Facebook app. The user experience using the app is much more responsive and polished than the mobile web browser interface. You might also want to try out Path. Path allows you to post through to Facebook if you choose, or limit your posts to other Path users.  If you try it, I suspect you’ll like it.
• Evernote - An excellent tool for capturing, syncing data between your desktop and cell phone. I love the ability it gives me to take a picture of a white board, and then later do a key word search on the text that Evernote has OCR’ed for me. I like to call it my “external brain”.

• DropBox – DropBox, combined with Document to Go Premium is a great solution for those who want to be able to edit MS Office documents on their mobile device, and have those files automatically sync back to their desktop or laptop computer.  See my previous Blog post for more details.
• Documents To Go Premium ($17) – Open & edit Word, Excel & PowerPoint Documents from all the most popular cloud sources: Google Docs, DropBox, Box.net & SugarSync.
• Notability ($1) – An excellent tool for taking notes, that also allows you to record audio and sync it with your notes as you take them, as well as import and annotate PDF files.
• Gmail – If you use Gmail, you’re punishing yourself by not downloading the Gmail app for your iPhone and/or iPad. The Apple mail app is ok, but you’ll be much more comfortable in the native Gmail app.
• GoTasks – I use the task manager built into Gmail, so this free app has been very helpful in giving me a elegant app interface into those tasks.  I actually prefer GoTasks to the native Google interface.
• TripIt – “Tripit turns all your flight, hotel and rental car confirmation emails into simple, mobile travel itineraries just by hitting forward.”  Once you’ve used TripIt, you’ll never go back to managing your travel itineraries any other way.
• Google Translation & Google App – Google translate let’s you type or speak phrases and give’s you back a translation in the language of your choice. The Google search app allows you to take pictures and traslate the text into another language.  It can also take a picture of a business card and add it to your contacts on your iPhone.
• Flixster – Want to get quick reviews for movies, or find out what time a show is starting locally, Flixster comes to the rescue. Flixster’s critics and audience ratings are usually very helpful.
• Photosynth – A great free tool from Microsoft for taking panoramic photos with your iPhone.
• Downcast ($2) – If you are a podcast listener, I highly recommend you try out Downcast.  Why? 1. you can skip ahead 30 seconds or 2 minutes with a press of a button. 2. You can download your podcasts over the air and not have to plug into your main computer to update your podcasts. 3. You can start listening to a podcast as soon as it starts downloading rather than be forced to wait until it’s finished downloading. 4. Lastly, if you want to seed up your listening experience you have your choice of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2, 2.5 or 3 times faster than normal.
• AirVideo ($3) - If you already have a video on your desktop computer, but you don’t want to have to spend the time and effort into converting it into an iPad friendly format, Air Video allows you to simultaneously trans-code and stream the video to your iPad or iPhone over your wifi network.  This works wonderfully when you’re at home, but will not work when you’re on the road.  Even so, Air Video is a app I use on a weekly basis.
• Navionics ($15) - If you are a sailer or boater with an iPad 3G or iPhone, Navionics Marine software is a must buy! Not only does the software track your cruises, but gives you access to tide and current information.  Once your done on the water, you can upload your cruise track to Facebook, or email it to yourself or to your friends to view in Google Earth.
• ShipFinder - Ship Finder provides a near real time map show the location of commercial shipping in coastal waters. If you are interested in shipping, cruising or sailing in ports and locations across the world, this is an app that you’ll enjoy.
• Marine Conditions for Victoria BC – While this is more of a mobile web app than a true iPhone or iPad app, it is something I wrote myself. It allow you to view up to date weather, current and tide information for the Victoria, BC, Canada area on your mobile device. Enjoy!

OpenDNS allows you to filter web content and block adult websites on the internet by simply changing the DNS servers that your computer or router uses. While not full proof (no solution is), it quite works well. After you’ve setup an account, you can specify the kinds of web sites you want to block or allow. You can also specifically allow web sites that may be grouped in a category you have blocked. You have all the control that you could ask for. If you want you can install on one computer in your home to let OpenDNS know if your IP address changes, so that it can continue to filter based on the criteria you’ve set in their control panel.

If you want, you can also enable logging so that you can keep track of the websites computers in your house are visiting. This all happens transparently, without having to install any software on your computers, iPods or iPads.

The easiest way to protect  all the computers and internet devices in hour home is to manually change the DNS servers that your internet router uses to the two OpenDNS servers. If you want to change your DNS settings now just use the following:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

If you need help figuring out where to change the DNS settings for your router, OpenDNS has a great tutorial that shows you how on their website.

OpenDNS along with Dropbox and two services that every home should seriously consider using. OpenDNS is completely free, and Dropbox is free up to 2GB of data backed up. Enjoy!

1. Portability: Being able to take a dozen books with me when I go on trips is wonderful (and taking them without breaking my back).  Being able to have my book with me whenever I have my iPhone with me is great, especially when I’m stuck in a doctor’s office, or on a bus.
2. Ease of Purchase: No need to travel across town to go to the book store.  I can buy books on my iPhone or computer, and then have instant delivery to all my devices.
3. Instant Dictionary Access: With some books in particular, being able to simply click on a word and instantly get a dictionary definition has made a high difference in my reading comprehension and enjoyment. Last summer I read the 20 book Master and Commander series, and found the dictionary feature to be invaluable as I was introduced into all sorts of archaic English and old nautical terms.
4. Ability to see where other’s have highlighted parts of the book (in the Kindle app): This is a great flag to let me know when I should slow down and really pay attention when I’m reading.  This would be particularly helpful when reading text books.
5. Syncing bookmarks between devices. As a person with multiple reading devices (and iPad and iPhone) being able to switch back and forth between the two, and have them both keep track of where I am in the book is an extremely handy feature.
6. Lastly as a person who’s eyes are starting to grow older, I can envision a day when I will appreciate the ability to increase the font size of the books I’m reading, without have to purchase a large text book.

In summary, eBooks have a lot of great things going for them.  What is there not to like? Unfortunately a few things… Now for my list of complaints that turn my relationship with eBooks rocky from time to time:

1. DRM is Evil! Most of my complaints below would go away if Digital Rights Management (DRM) software was not used when publishing eBooks.
2. Cannot copy and past a paragraph into an email or to Facebook.
3. I cannot choose the eBook reader I want to read my eBooks in.  If I buy an eBook from Amazon, I have to read it in the Kindle reader. If I buy a eBook from Apple, I can only read it in the Apple iBook reader.  I should be able to choose which app I want to read my books in no matter what store I’ve purchased it in.
4. I can’t put my eBooks on my bookshelf at home to show off to visitors what books I’ve read, and what some of my interests are for (I guess that is what GoodReads.com is for).
5. Apocalypse protection:  If I’m away from civilization for some reason, and cannot charge me electronic devices, my beautiful eBook readers turn into pretty paper weights.
6. For some people the color screens on tablets are hard on their eyes.  For them, color eBook readers are a no go.

So yes, I do love my eBooks, but as in most relationships there is definitely room for growth and improvement.  While I’m waiting for eBook vendors to improve I’ll enjoy reading books on my iPad and iPhone and try to ignore the shortcomings.

Introduction to the Survey Results

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic Law students over the past nine years, we decided for the second year in a row to ask some extra questions about the mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with. This survey was completed by 139 incoming and transferring law students, which is a strong 90% plus response rate.

Executive Summary:

• 84% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up dramatically from 50% last year), with 42% of the total being iPhones, 13% Android and 27% Blackberry’s.
• 19% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers.
• 98% of students own laptops, and 16% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 50% of student laptops are Mac’s, up from 44% last year.
• The average laptop price stayed basically the same as last year at $1,186, which is down from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• The students’ average typing speed was was 60 wpm.
• 72% of all students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 55% of students use Gmail as their primary email account (up from 49% last year), 9% use UVic email and 22% Hotmail.
• 60% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing (down from 67%).  30% favor Google Docs (up from 27%) and 2% OpenOffice.
• 58% of students report backing up their primary computer on a regular basis. 60% of those backing up do so to an external hard drive and 25% to a cloud storage solution.
• 97% of students use Facebook (up from 91%) and 92% (up from 80%) would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar. 25% use Twitter, 21% use linked in, and 16% use Google+.

Smart Phone / Cell Phone Ownership

84% of students own “Smart Phones” or phones with built in web browsers that allow them to surf the internet on their cell phones.  That is up dramatically from 50% of smart phone owners last year.On the other end of the spectrum, 2% of students do not own a cell phone at all. This is significantly lower than the 11% of our sample of all law students who reported no cell phone in the spring of 2010. Just as laptop owner ship has been close to 100% since 2007, cell phone is now almost 100% as well.I suspect that over the next two or three years close to 100% of students will either own a smart phone, an iPod Touch, an iPad or Android tablet device.From the library’s perspective this is an important area to watch, as there are a number of interesting new technologies (like QR Codes) that could potentially enhance the library’s services that depend on library patrons having access to the internet on their cell phones along with a camera.

Tablet Device or Ebook Reader Ownership

For the first time we asked students about their tablet device and/or eBook reader ownership and found that most students do not have dedicated eBook readers. It will be interesting to see if a shift to digital reading of textbooks and other materials happens over time.  If text book makers lower the cost of digital books relative to paper books, we could see a rapid adoption of eBook readers.

Laptop Ownership

Laptop ownership has plateaued in the high ninty percent over the past five years (this year at 98%). Currently only three 1st year students arrived without a laptop this September. 50% of all incoming laptops are Mac’s (up from 39% last year), 1% are Linux, and the remaining 49% are running Windows (7% XP).The average price paid for student laptops has leveled out over the past two years at just under $1,200. In 2007 the average was $1400 and in 2004 $2,100. The increase in the number of higher priced Mac laptops is the probable cause of the leveling out of the purchase price of student laptops.Desktop computer ownership stands at 28%., down from last year.  All students have had access to high speed internet in their homes for two years now.

How often do students bring their laptops to school

One only has to look in Law Faculty class in session to realize that at least 72% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.  Does this open up pedagogical opportunities, or is it just a thorn in the side of faculty members?Interestingly, 3% of laptop owners never bring their laptops to school with them. That combined with the 2% that do not own laptops, reinforces the need to maintain a certain number of public access computers and loaner laptops available in the building, especially for exam writing.

Typing Speed

Of the 73% of students who were able to tell us how many words per minute (wpm) they could type, the average was 60 wpm.

MP3 Player Ownership (besides smart phones)

95% of students own an MP3 Player or smart phone of some kind.  Of those students owning MP3 players, 96% own Apple products (up from 93% last year). For any instructors wishing to do podcasts of their lectures, there is no need to hold back any longer as the 5% of students with out PM3 players can review class lecture podcasts on their laptops.  Campus Systems is considering setting up a UVic iTunes site (like other universiteshave done) which would make distributing the mp3′s of class lectures very simple to do.

Primary Email Account

Currently only 9% of students use their UVic email account as their primary email account. The rest – 91% – forward their UVic email to a 3rd party email provider.  55% use Gmail as their primary account, and 21% use Hotmail, and 9% use their previous university’s email.

Favorite Collaborative Document Editing Software

Microsoft Word continues to be the most popular tool for collaborative document editing at 61% (down from 67% last year).  Interestingly, Google Docs is preferred by 30% of students (up from 27%).

You can’t put a hyper-link on a poster, sheet of paper or bookmark, but you can put on a QR Code. It is a much easier and more accurate way to link to a web page than to type a URL into your smart phone.

How can I use QR Codes?

Using a QR Code reader on your smart phone (like the Google App on an iPhone or Android phone) you simply take a picture of the QR Code and the reader redirects you to a mobile web page or some other resource on theinternet. Depending on what you download, you’ll be able to:

• Read a web page with text and pictures
• Watch a video
• Listen to an audio file
• Download an app
• Register for an event or buy tickets

QR Codes are commonly used on posters, in print ads, on bookmarks, on business cards and even on web pages.

My current favourite QR code reader for the iPhone is the Scan by QR Code City (search for “Scan” in the App store). For all other smart phones, I’d suggest trying the free Neo Reader.

Enjoy!

P.S. Here is handout with QR Code information. Here is a bookmark sheet to go along with the handout.

1. When collaborating with classmates on a group project, do you get tired of trying to figure out which of the versions that have been emailed to you is the most current?
2. Do you get discouraged when you are faced with the task of merging edits from 2 or more students into a single document near the end of the group project?
3. Do some of your edits get lost in the group collaboration email shuffle?

If you’ve said yes to any one of the questions above, then you should take a serious look at using either Google Docs or Microsoft Word Web App for your next group project.  That said, here are a few things to keep in mind as you being to collaboratively create and edit documents on the web:

• While the look and feel of Microsoft Word Web App is very similar to the desktop version of Word, you cannot add or edit footnotes, end notes, or tables of contents in the online version of Word. You can connect to the file from your desktop version of Word to add and edit those elements in your group document however (on a Mac you’ll need Mac Office 2011 to do this).
• Google Docs supports foot notes, end notes and tables of contents in the web browser, but the editing interface is not as rich as the desktop version of Word.  For some people this is not a problem. For others it is a show stopper.  You can decide for yourself.

My first reaction to the Our Choice app (for iPad and iPhone only at the moment) was that it reminded me a lot of CD Rom products from the 1990′s. Call me crazy, but I loved the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia because it not only included text and pictures, but added videos and interactive charts. I enjoyed the media rich CD Rom products that came of of the mid 1990 confluence of CD Roms, color monitors and speakers all shipping standard with PC’s.

So what is different this time around? For starters the form factor of the iPad make for a much more pleasant reading experience than sitting in front of a computer screen. In addition, the navigation interface that the iPad’s touch screen makes possible is intuitive and natural.  Push Pop Press is the company that wrote the software for the book, and from what they’ve said, they hope to make their tools available so that others can publish media rich tools. Watch the video below to see how the “book” works

It was a wonderful experience reading Our Choice. Not all books, especially novels, need videos and interactive charts, but for some books (like school text books in particular) these bells and whistles make a huge positive difference. I hope to see more book in a similar format in the near future.

The ebook creation process was so easy that during the session I download, installed the tools, and created an ebook of my conference notes before Elmer had finished his talk.  For anyone interest here is the process:

1. Download Sigil, the free and open source ebook editor for your operating system.
2. Install Sigil on your computer.
3. Open the word document that you’d like to turn into an Ebook.
4. Save the document as an html file by going to “File” -> “Save As” and then selecting “Web Page (htm)” in the drop down box. Then press the “Save” button.
5. Launch Sigil, and right mouse click on “Text” folder in the left hand column, and select “Add Existing Items…” Add the html file you just “Saved As” from word.
6. Now press the “Save” button on the Sigil tool bar, and you are done!

You might want to go to the Sigil “Tool” -> “Meta Data” menu to add a title and author to the book to make it look a little more professional looking, but other than that, you’ve created your first Ebook!  Congratulations! If your document is long enough, you can insert chapter breaks to make it easier to navigate.

You might be wondering how you get this ebook on to your iPad or iPhone.  All you need to do is either email the ebook to your self and then open it on your mobile device, or if you use Dropbox, move the ebook into Dropbox and then open it from Dropbox on your iPad or iPhone.  If you’re a kindle user, you should have an email address than you can send file to in order to add them to your Kindle device.

For your reading pleasure, here are my CALI 2011 Conference Notes in ePub, PDF and Google Doc formats. Happy reading!

Creating and using good passwords is the digital equivalent of flossing our teeth. We all know we should do it, but it’s time consuming and not easy to do. The good news is that it’s possible to create strong, but easy to remember passwords.

So, which of the following two passwords is stronger and more difficult to crack? Which is more difficult to Remember?

B!g1——————–
TisHw4k.%sQxWE,rUbnD<Ww

Believe it or not, the first password is both stronger, and for most people easier to remember.  It’s hard to see, but the first password is one character longer than the second, and because of the way hackers try to crack passwords, it is more secure than the second. The first tool that hackers use when trying to guess passwords is a dictionary attack. Because neither password is in a dictionary, that attack will fail. At that point a hacker will fall back to a brute force attack, where password length and character mix is important for making a password hard to crack.

So how should you choose your password?

1. Use a memorable word or phrase that has upper case, lower case, number(s), and symbol(s) in it.
2. Pad that with a character to make the password and then pad it with a random character so that the password length is about 25 characters long.
3. Another example of a strong password is: D0gsD!g………………..

Pivot tables are the quickest and easiest way to get useful information out of spreadsheets of data… especially large spreadsheets of data. Google Docs makes using pivot tables quite easy if you’re familiar with spreadsheets. Let’s say you have a spreadsheet of conference attendees with contact information along with the sessions they registered for, and the date that they registered.  Using a pivot table you could quickly find out if there is a correlation between the people who registered for the “how to get organized” workshop, and how early people registered.

You could also quickly determine how many people attending the conference are out of Province (or State).  I’ve just scratched the surface; it’s truly amazing the information you can glean for playing around with a pivot table and a data set. I first used pivot tables over 10 years ago while working at at Westech Building Products, a manufacturing company, and they were invaluable when analyzing production and sales data.

Take a look at the following 1.5 minute video for an excellent overview.  Happy spreadsheeting!

How to sync and edit documents from my desktop computer on my iPad is a question that I’ve had ever since I purchased my iPad in April of 2010.  The good new is that I finally have a good answer, and  ironically the apps that facilitate the editing and syncing are ones that I’ve used for years now, one of which has just recently come to the iPad and iPhone… or at least recently came to my attention.  Here’s the equation:

Dropbox + Documents To Go = iPad Document Nirvana!

Here is what you need to turn your iPad into a document editing & syncing machine:

Step 1: If you don’t have a free Dropbox account already, then now is your excuse to finally download and install it on your desktop computer(s).  Dropbox is a cloud service that synchronizes files between your computers, and keeps them up to date. It runs on Mac’s, Windows & Linux. For example, I have dropbox running on my Mac laptop and Windows desktop computer. So when I save a file to my Dropbox folder on my desktop computer, that file gets save to my account on the dropbox server on the internet. The next time I turn on my laptop, it checks to see if any files have changed, and then if they have, download the changed files to my laptop.  It is a wonderful service if you use more than one computer (or computer & iPad/iPhone).  The use of Dropbox is free for up to 2GB of data, and then $10 per month (for $99 per year) for 50GB of data.  I personally subscribe to the 50GB plan because I store all my family photos there along with all my documents, but I digress.

Step 2: Install the free Dropbox app on your iPad (or iPhone, or Blackberry, or Android phone if you have one) via the Apple App store. Enter the same user name and password that you setup your Dro

pbox account with on your desktop computer.

Step 3: Again via the Apple App store, and install Documents To Go Premium – Office Suite. Make sure you get the “Premium” version for $16.99, as the basic version does not sync files with Dropbox (or Google Docs). Once you’ve installed the app, press the “Online” button on the bottom nav bar, and then the app will ask you what type of account you want to synchronize with. Select Dropbox, enter your account information, and you set.

That’s it!  You’ve now turned your iPad into a legitimate business machine so that you can word process & spreadsheet on the go, and sync everything back to your desktop computer.  Enjoy!

What are the top 4 Things you can do to save electricity in your office?

1. Turn your computer off at night if you aren’t already.
2. Even better, change the power settings on your computer so it goes to sleep after 15 minutes or 20 minutes.
3. Turn your lights off when ever you leave your office.
4. Next time you buy a computer, seriously consider purchasing a laptop (they use about 1/4 the power of a desktop computer).

Do you know how much electricity you use in your personal office or cubicle?  Do you know how much energy your desktop computer or laptop uses?  If you are like me, you probably don’t know.  Over the past year I’ve measured how much electricity the different electric and electronic devices use so that I can make better decisions as I try to reduced my personal energy foot print (I use a device call the Kill-A-Watt to measure the electrical draw of each item).

Below are the power draws of all the electrical devices in my office (here is spreadsheet with a longer list of home and work electronics & their power draws):

• Lights On: 64 watts
• 27″ iMac Computer in Use w/ 2nd 24″ monitor (both screens at 50% brightness): 142 watts
• 27″ iMac Computer idle (both screens asleep): 60 watts
• Computer speakers on: 6 watts
• MacBook Air (screen 50% brightness): 14 watts
• iPad charging: 10 watts

Now here are some different options I have when I leave my office for lunch or for a meeting:

1. Office occupied and in use: 236 watts
2. Rich just walks away: 132 watts
3. Rich turns off lights & walk away:  66 watts
4. Rich auto sleeps computer, laptop, and turns off lights: 8 watts
5. Rich sleeps computer, laptop, and turns off lights and power bar for computer speakers: 2 watts

Notice the dramatically different levels of electrical usage between me just walking out of my office (#2) and me changing the settings in my computer to hibernate and turning my lights off (#4).  Instead of just walking away from my office, I’ve now programmed my monitors to turn off after 2 minutes of inactivity, and my computers to sleep after 15 minutes on inactivity, and trying very had to remember to turn my lights off.  There are motion sensor switches you can purchase to turn lights off for you, but I just need to get into the habit of turning my lights off when I’m leaving my office. Changing my habits slightly translates into an 94% reduction in energy consumption.

Why is it important to know how much electricity each device uses?  Here’s a quick example from my home. It’s been ten years now since we converted all our lighting in our house to compact florescent bulbs (CFL’s).  We made the change believing that we’d reduce our electrical consumption… which it did.  Last year I started measuring the electrical usage of other appliances in our home and was shocked to discover that our electric hot water tank uses the majority of the electricity in our house. I was worrying about turning lights off, when it was shower length that I should have been worried about first. For example, reducing my personal daily shower from 20 minutes to 10 minutes is the same as turning off all the lights in our kitchen, living room and front entry way for 10 hours.

Should we have switched to CFL bulbs?  Of course, but we should also have been encouraging everyone in the house to limit their time in the shower. By doing both we would have reduced or energy consumption significantly more.

P.S. Here are some facts about other electronics in your office that might be interesting to you:

• Digital Projector: 150-300 watts (depending on the model)
• Kyocera 2020D printer printing: 820 watts
• Kyocera 2020D printer idle: 25 watts
• Kyocera 2020D printer off: 13 watts

P.P.S. I use the kill-a-watt device to measure the electrical draw of plugin electronics and appliances.  At home I use The Energy Detective to monitor in real time energy usage in my home.

Do YouTube and Facebook distract students?  Of course they do!  On the other hand, can YouTube and Facebook help students with their school work?  Until recently I wasn’t sure, but after my partner’s experience with a professor who wasn’t a good teacher, and seeing how YouTube and Facebook saved her and her classmates from poor grades, I’m convinced that these “digital distractions” can be, if used intelligently, excellent Learning Tools.

Being the father of two teenagers, the husband of a partner that has recently gone back to college, and Systems Administrator at a University Law Library, I have a front row seat  on how technology is used and abused in the service of homework, research and education in general.  When my partner found herself in a college class teaching challenged professor, I was amazed at how she, along with her classmates, used technology to compensate for the poor classroom instruction. Her learning process for each class was as follows:

• She would read the chapter(s) in preparation for class, and usually understand some, but not all of the concepts that she read.
• She and her classmates would go to class and listen to the professor read his power point slides, leaving the chapter’s concepts no clearer than the text book reading.
• Later that evening, my partner would check the facebook group for her class to see if anyone had figured out the main points of the lecture yet.  If no one had yet, she would start doing YouTube searches for the key topics in her readings, and would usually find one or more videos that visually explained the topics much more clearly than either the text book or her professor could.  For example, check out this explanation of Mitosis on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlN7K1-9QB0
• After finding a clear explanation, she would post a link to the video on her classes Facebook group.  At the same time she would typically find links to other topics from the reading and lecture that classmates had posted.
• She would watch all the videos and make notes from them for later review before exams.

This is how the whole semester went.  In the end, in spite of her ineffective teacher, she received an A- grade in the course.  Then again, maybe it is because of her teacher’s poor instruction that she and her classmates were forced to spend extra time to find quality materials on-line to explain and learn the concepts they needed to master. To sum up, there seem to be two important tools and trends that were very helpful to my partner and her class:

1. The availability of high quality learning resources on YouTube and other websites for college and high school students.
2. Facebook’s collaboration capabilities make it very easy for groups to share information (links to YouTube), and then discuss the quality and merits of each of the videos among themselves. All the students are Facebook users, so it is a natural virtual space for them to collaborate in while they work on homework from home or library.

Serious Tools

• Evernote – Cost: Free or $5 / month – An excellent tool for capturing, syncing data between your desktop and cell phone. I love the ability it gives me to take a picture of a white board, and then later do a key word search on the text that Evernote has OCR’ed for me. – http://evernote.com
• Google Mobile App – Free – The app’s easy-to-use voice or image search feature locates what you are looking for without typing. Try an image search with Book or DVD covers, bar codes or house hold items. Google Goggles is a useful and fun tool. – http://www.google.com/mobile/google-mobile-app/
• Dragon Dictation – Free – Speech to text app that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text content for everything from email messages, SMS, Facebook or blog posts – http://www.dragonmobileapps.com/
• Read it Later – Cost: Free – Allows you to bookmark interesting news stories on your desktop computer and then read those articles on your iPhone when you have a spare minute or two. It re-formats pages to make them easier to read on a small screen. – http://readitlaterlist.com
• myHomework – Free – Allows you to keep track of you homework, classes, projects and tests. If you need help staying organized this may be a useful tool for you. A great way to get your mom to stop nagging you about your homework. – http://myhomework.rigoneri.com/
• Wunderlist – Free – To Do list for iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac & Windows. An excellent generic GTD or Getting Things Done tool. iPhone/iPod Touch, Mac & Windows applications. – http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/
• Mind Maps – Cost: Free or $7 – Turns your iPhone into a brainstorming, idea collection and thought structuring device – http://simpleapps.eu/simplemind
• iBooks – Free – a free ebook reader from Apple that allows you to read PDF files, and free ePub files from the internet. You can also purchase popular copyrighted books from Apple. – http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.html
• YouTube – Free – Your teacher can’t explain something to you so that you can understand?  Try searching for the topic on YouTube and see if there is someone who can give you a good explanation. More often that not, you’ll find a master teacher that has taken the time to record a video for you. – http://youtube.com
• Google Docs – Free – Google Docshas real time collaboration capabilities, with built in version control, and all you need is a web browser.  If I was back in school, this would be the only tool I’d use for group projects. – http://docs.google.com

Fun & Useful Tools: They won’t necessarily help you with your school work, but they are cool none the less.

• StarWalk – Cost: $3 – Tilt your iPhone towards the sky to and the image on your screen will correspond to the area of the sky you are pointing your phone towards. A very cool app. – http://vitotechnology.com/star-walk.html
• Urban Spoon – Cost: Free – One of the funnest ways to find restaurants in your home town or on the road. Check out the “scope” to see how we might be finding our way around unfamiliar locations: visiting a new city or unfamiliar shopping mall – http://urbanspoon.com
• Run keeper – Cost: Free or $10 – A great tool that maps your runs for you via GPS. The integration between the mobile app and their website is outstanding. – http://runkeeper.com

1. What mobile technologies they own.
2. What technologies they currently use for homework and research.
3. How frequently they use school or public libraries for homework and research.

The survey was conducted in December 2010 by 6 classes at Belmont Secondary School, consisting of 143 students in grades 10, 11 and 12. This sample represents about 10% of the student population. Some students owned multiple devices (here is a summary of the survey data).

For a technologist working in a university library, the results were very interesting.  Let’s start with the devices the students own.

First of all I should note that 92% of students own some sort of cell phone.  33% of all students own a smart phone like an iPhone or Blackberry, and 59% of all students own phones that do not have a data plan.  Data plans are still quite expensive in Canada, and typically cost $30 a month or more.  While I think more students will own smart phones in the future, the cost of data plans will need to come down significantly if we are going to see smart phone ownership catch up to iPod Touch ownership.  On the other hand, if free wi-fi was available to students in their schools, the research and pedagogical related utility of iPod Touch like devices would be much higher, and the desirability of a smart phone with a data plan would be lower. An iPod Touch like device without a connection to the internet is simply a music and gaming device.

69% of students own an iPod touch. With the introduction of cameras on iPod Touches this fall, the device becomes much more capable from academic and productivity perspectives.  The ability to take pictures enables users to more fully use apps and services like Evernote, Google Goggles & Facetime video conferencing. As well, QR Code reading becomes a possibility with device sporting a camera in free wi-fi areas.  Currently 48% of students either have a smart phone with a camera, or an iPod Touch with a camera.  This number will climb to over 80% in the next two years as iPod Touch like devices with cameras become more wide spread.

When asked whether they used a computer to do homework or research on a daily or weekly basis, 86% said yes. Only 5% said that they never used computers for home work or research.  43% of students reported using a smart phone or iPod Touch for doing home work or research on a daily or weekly basis.  20% never use mobile devices for home work or research.  Lastly 35% of students use libraries on a daily or weekly basis for home work or research.  31% report never using libraries, and another 17% use libraries on only a monthly basis. That’s at total of 48% of students who rarely or never use libraries for research.

Resources used for Research or Homework on a Daily or Weekly Basis

Given the convenience of accessing reference materials on the Internet, as well as the breadth of resources only a key word search away, it isn’t surprising that the majority of students use computers so often for research. Once these students reach university or college, many of them will need to be re-introduced to the library, and shown the wealth of high quality peer reviewed electronic resources that are only available via the university library website.

One related question which I should have included in the student  survey was how many students read eBooks as opposed to print books.  Based on a show of hands in a class of about 30 grade 10 students, I’d estimate that about 25% of them have read ebooks on devices ranging from a Kobo reader to iPod Touches.  Almost all of the books read had been purchased.  Libraries and vendors need to quickly settle on standards that will allow their patrons to read library licensed eBooks on their personal readers.  This should be relatively easy to do with iOS and Android based devices, but less so on Kindle and Kobo hardware for example.  This potential problem needs to be communicated to patrons so that they are not unpleasantly surprised when, as I suspect will happen in the next 1 or 2 years, they cannot use their Kindle or Kobo eBook readers that they purchased for Christmas to read library eBooks.

Enjoy this 1.5 minute video!

That said, here are my primary and secondary recommendations for collaborative tools, along with some rational for my selections:

1. For Audio, Video Conferencing, along with Computer Desktop Sharing, my first recommendation would be Skype.  In my experience, Skype works well in low bandwidth situations, and it’s desktop sharing feature can be very handy if you need to see what is happening on a colleague’s desktop (talking through last minute document edits for example). My second choice would be Google Talk. It supports built in Video and Audio conferencing, and integrates into Google Docs which can be handy if you’ve setup a custom Google Apps instance for your research project.
2. For collaborative document editing my first choice would be Google Docs (see this post about Google Docs for collaborative book writing). Google Docs has built in tools for version control (which is invaluable when collaboratively editing documents), and has footnoting capabilities that Office Live is currently lacking.  My second choice would be Office Live (office.live.com), because of it’s lack of footnoting.  SharePoint is another tool that is used for collaboration in larger organizations, but at least where I work (the University of Victoria), it is difficult to add people outside of our organization to a SharePoint group, and documents cannot be edited by to people at the same time.
3. If Google Doc’s or Office Live are too big a technological stretch for those involved in the project, I then suggest using Drop Box for synchronizing files between all the participants.  This will sync the word documents automatically between participants, but you aren’t able to have two people editing the same document at the same time like you can with Google Docs, or Office Live.
4. If threaded discussions are part of the project, Google Apps for Domains has a built in tool for doing this.  SharePoint also allows for threaded discussion to be easily setup.
5. As for Email, I think most like to use their current account rather than check multiple inboxes, and the same can be said for calendaring.  If a participant needs an email address & calendaring solution, I typically recommend Gmail, or Google Apps for Domains.

The products in this space are rapidly evolving, so what is top of the class today, could be different six months from now.  Let me know what the “ideal” tool set for your group would look like.

So what did I recommend that she do to backup her new laptop?  Follow the 3-2-1 Backup rule:

• Always have 3 copies of all your files…
• Stored in at least 2 different formats…
• With 1 of those formats being “off site” from where the computer is located.

How can you easily follow the 3-2-1 backup rule?

1. Buy an external hard drive for your computer. In spite of what happened to the law student, having a backup on an external hard drive is a good thing to have.  It provides you with a second copy of your important files. An external hard drive will cost you some where between $80 and $160, and most come bundled with backup software.  Be sure to buy an external hard drive that is at least as large as the hard drive in your computer.
2. Subscribe to an online backup service like Mozy.com, Carbonite.com or Dropbox.com.  Using any one of these services in combination with the external hard drive will give you your third copy of your files, and that copy will be off site, safely away from any fire, flood or natural disaster.  These services are free for up to 2GB, and then cost between $5 and $10 per month for unlimited backups.  If my student friend had been using one of these services (even just the free 2GB service for her current paper), she would have been back up and running in just a couple of days.

Here are the slides from a recent presentation I gave to the Peninsula Friends on backing up home computers.

The good news is that you can learn to be lucky!  Here are three sugestions from Mr. Wiseman than has helped other people maximise their good fortune.

Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. His book, The Luck Factor, is available for $12.92 at Amazon.com.

1. Along with creating very compact URL’s, Goo.gl also generates a QR code for every URL that you shorten. If you see a Goo.gl URL you want a QR code for, all you need to do is to add a “.qr” to the end of the URL, like magic a QR code will appear. If you are creating QR Code for a large number of web pages, this is going to be a real time saver.
2. With Google putting it’s weight behind it’s own URL shortener, I have a lot more confidence that it is going to be around 2 or 3 years from now.

Enjoy!

That said, here are my current crop of favourite iPad apps:

1. Kindle Reader (free) – Amazon’s eBook reader has the biggest selection of current books at the moment. I have read close to 10 books on my iPad and love it as an eBook reader. I appreciate the ability to re-size the font size, look-up words instantly with it’s built in dictionary, and sync my furthest read location to my iPhone.  That said, there are a number of books that I cannot buy in digital format (are you listening W.W. Norton & Co, publisher of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels?).
2. Flipboard (free) – “A personalized social magazine.”  It is the easiest and most user friendly way to browse your twitter feed (if you have one), or browse the online version of the Economist magazine for example.  In addition you can see the twitter comments that people have made about the articles.  This is a difficult app to explain, but once you’ve used it you’ll love it.
3. Air Video ($2.99) – If you already have a video on your desktop computer, but you don’t want to have to spend the time and effort into converting it into an iPad friendly format, Air Video allows you to simultaneously trans-code and stream the video to your iPad or iPhone over your wifi network.  This works wonderfully when you’re at home, but will not work when you’re on the road.  Even so, Air Video is a app I use on a weekly basis.
4. Read It Later (free) – Similar to Instapaper ($4.99), Read It Later allows you to bookmark articles that you’d like to read later while browsing news on your PC, Mac, iPad or iPhone, and then download those articles to read later on your iPad or iPhone. In the case of the iPhone, it re-formats the article so that it can be easily read on a small screen.
5. Kayak (free) – If you’re looking to travel, Kayak is a great tool to see what flights are available at what price.  It’s hard to explain how pleasant the software is to use.  I’ve found myself using Kayak at times even when I’m not traveling just to see how much it would cost to travel to Brazil, “just in case” I was able to go. In this case the iPad software is much nicer to use than the Kayak website. Even if you don’t end up purchasing your ticket through Kayak, it’s a nice place to start your travel plans.
6. Navionics Marine: Costal B.C. ($29.99) – If you are a sailer or boater with an iPad 3G or iPhone, Navionics Marine software is a must buy! The iPhone version of this charting application costs only $9.99, and it is well worth the money.  I wish I had the 3G version of the iPad with it’s built in GPS hardware so I could use this software on my iPad as well as my iPhone. Not only does the software track your cruises, but gives you access to tide and current information.  Once your done on the water, you can upload your cruise track to Facebook.
7. iBook (free) – Apple’s ebook reader is very similar to the Kindle software, except that the book selection for purchase is much smaller, but you do have the ability to view PDF documents and ePub books in iBook.  I use both the Kindle Reader and iBook depending on what I’m reading.
8. Adobe Ideas (free) – Want to draw a quick sketch or doodle? Adobe Ideas is the app for you.  Even if you can’t draw, you can always import a picture, and then trace it before exporting the drawing.  Fun and functional.
9. The Economist (free) – I love reading the economist, but having it on my iPad makes it much easier and convenient to read. It also allows me to listen to the stories if I don’t feel like reading them.

What are you favourite iPad apps?

• For manual jobs, more money = higher performance.
• For knowledge workers, once they have enough money not to worry about money anymore, more money = lower performance.
• So what motivates knowledge workers then? Autonomy (or self direction), Mastery (getting better at what you do) & Purpose (does what you’re doing make a difference?)

It’s a great video, I highly recommend watching it!

Not only does collaborative highlighting show you where you classmates are working, but it will also show you when they highlight blocks of text, so you can watch to see if the text get deleted or moved.  I wish I’d been able to use Google Docs when I was a Bachelor of Commerce student continually working on group projects!

Some of the other features that college students will appreciate are:

• Footnotes and Endnotes
• Table of Contents tool
• Inline Thesaurus and Dictionary lookups
• Add new words to a Custom Dictionary
• Auto save every few seconds

Enjoy!

http://library.law.uvic.ca

I did a training session at the UVic Law Library this morning on QR Codes in Libraries.  Here’s a link to my slides, and I’ll copy and paste my handout below.  Enjoy!

Put most simply, Wayfinding is a building map router, that uses jQuery and SVG to help individuals navigate from room to room in multi story buildings.  Ideal for libraries that are often a complicated maze of book stacks.  Enjoy!

I live in Canada, specifically in the Province of British Columbia, and our government passed a law several years ago requiring that publicly funded institutions store personal data on servers in Canada only.  This makes sense especially in light of the US Patriot act, which allows for American law enforcement agencies to look through private data without necessarily obtaining a search warrant, and without notifying the owner of the data that they have been snooping around.

So Google, when is the Google Apps for Canadian Governments going to be launched? I’m looking forward to the press conference!

Here are my thoughts on Microsoft Word Web App (live.office.com). Before you test drive it yourself, you’ll need an active hotmail.com or live.com account.

Word Web App Pros:

• The look and feel of the Word Web App is very similar to Word 2007.  Similar, but not as many features, which is to be expected at this point in it’s product development. If you use Word 2007 you have a very small learning curve.
• Sharing a document with others is easy to do.  Having the document on the internet makes collaboration simple… no more worrying about whether or not you have the most recent version in your email inbox or not.
• The built in version control looks solid.  It is now a trivial task to revert the document back to an earlier version if necessary, or see what was deleted by accident.
• 25GB of file storage is excellent. I’m not sure what the limit is in Google Docs to be honest.
• You can edit documents in any web browser, not just Internet Explorer.  I’ve been working in Google Chrome on a Mac, and the experience has been good.

Word Web App Cons:

• No footnotes, endnotes or Tables of Contents. For students this is a problem.  You can add footnotes, endnotes and Tables of Contents in the desktop version of Word, but you can’t edit them or even see them in the online version.  Hopefully this will change soon, as this is a big problem for students who need to cite their references.  Google Docs started out without footnotes, but added them in October of 2008.
• While you can edit documents just fine in any web browser, if you want to edit the file in your desktop version of Word you need to be on a Windows computer in Internet Explorer.  Not a huge deal, unless you need to add footnotes, or are on a Mac.

Whether you end up using Microsoft Office Web Apps, or Google Docs, we’re all going to benefit from Microsoft getting into this market.  Overall this is a good first effort from Microsoft.  Hopefully they’ll quickly add footnotes to their otherwise excellent product.

Here’s a short Google Apps video that shows how useful real time collaboration on a document can be… no more emailing a document back and forth between collaborators:

I think we all “fake it” on a fairly regular basis.  Not only that, but we’re taught do so from an early age.  Just think of when a parent “encourages” their child to apologize to their sibling or play mate.  Do we really think that the apologizing child feels sorry for what they’ve done?  Most of the time they don’t, but they are being taught how to get along, and perform socially acceptable acts that help make up the civilized portion of our society.  Most people would agree that this sort of “faking it” is a good thing in that it reduces tension in groups, and helps them function more smoothly.

There are other kinds of faking it of course.  John Edwards (the american politician) faked it at the end of the US presidencial campaign, pretending that things were going well in his life and marriage, until it came out that the woman he was having an affair with was close to giving birth to their child. I think that is the kind of faking it that most people cringe at.

Faking it goes on in religion as well.  One example of this is in the Mormon religion I was raised in. As a teenager I was taught that if I told others that I “knew” certain religious “truths” were true, even when I didn’t actually know they were true or false, that I would come to know for myself that they were true. This could be described as the “fake it until you make it” method of learning.  While this may be a useful tool for learning to do certain tasks, I don’t believe that it is effective in determining truth.

So the next time my wife asks me how I like the new dress she bought, should I “fake it” or be completely honest no matter what the consequences?

Very, very interesting!  Here are some good foods to start with:

Here is the 20 Minute TED Talk where Dr. Li talks about his findings:

We should be concerned about how Facebook is handling information that we assumed would be private when we signed up.  The problem isn’t so much that some of the information we put on Facebook is available to the public, it is that Facebook has repeatedly changed the default rules on what it makes public.  When I signed up on Facebook 2 or 3 years ago, virtually all the information I posted there was private by default.  That was one of the big selling points of the site: Connect with friends and share information in a private fourm.

If I signed up today, virtually all the information I post would be public by default.  Not only that, but if I clicked “OK” on the different “information dialog boxes” that appeared over the past year telling me how the Facebook’s default privacy setting were changing, virtually all my information would be public now as well.  That is very concerning.

To find out what you’re exposing to the public internet, go to: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

Skype makes my life easier once again, and does it for free!  Most people know that it is a great tool for making free voice and video call from computer to computer, and that it allow people to make very inexpensive calls to land lines and cell phone around the world.  What most people don’t know, and what I didn’t know until recently, is that Skype will also allow you to share the desktop of your computer with other people.  So why is this so great?  Let me explain.

As someone who ends up helping co-workers, family and friends with computer problems, there are few things more frustrating than trying to talk someone through a series of clicks and windows on a computer that you cannot see.   Not only that, but I am also typically relying on rather sketchy description of a problem that more often than not is hazy at best.  That is where Skype comes in.  The person I am helping shares their desktop with me, and I can see what they are doing that triggers the problem.  At that point I can tell the person exactly what to do to fix the problem, and then correct them if they make any mistakes.  A win-win and time saver for everyone.

Here are some other potential uses for Skype Screen Sharing:

• Demonstrating Software.
• Collaborative Editing of Documents (especially if you insist on using Microsoft Word instead of Google Docs).
• Desktop computer support (as we already discussed).

Enjoy!

For example, in looking at how societies portray the model of womanhood, there are probably a number of morally positive ways to do this in between the extremes of the Islamic Burka, and the overt sexuality on the covers of many western mens magazines.

Harris also addresses the issue of giving the same weight to all moral arguments, irregardless of their source.  He argues that some people are better at moral thinking that others, just like some people are better a physics than others, so why should we put the Dali Lama and Ted Bundy on the same footing when it comes to looking at moral arguments?

A thought provoking video even if you don’t agree with everything he says.

The same principle holds true when building or renovating a home.  I never would have guesses that carpeting is several orders of magnitude more energy intensive to manufacture and install than ceramic tiles or hard wood floors.  The 8 Minute TED Talk video below by Catherine Mohr provides some great non-intuitive examples from her home building project:

At the time of my diagnosis I was inundated with suggestions from friends about different supplements that I should try that would hopefully help my condition.  I’m happy to say that I’m still here to write this blog post!  I’m also here to tell you that I didn’t follow any of the suggestions.  It would have taken me a year or more to throughly research the dozens of “suggestions” I received (some of them plausible, and some outright crazy sounding – “wheat grass cures most cancers”?).  A visualization of supplements with an indication of the quality of the science backing up their claims, would have been an invaluable tool in helping to quickly sort out quackery from the truly helpful.

I am even more skeptical now than I was back then, so I would not accept this as the final word on any of the supplements they list, but would use it as a good starting point for doing some research if a particular supplement looked helpful.  One thing I really like is that they included a link to the underlying data was used to generate the visualization, including links to the studies they relied on, so you can do your own analysis if you wish.

Have fun researching!

Step 1: Open Firefox, and download the Video Download Helper plug-in.  This plugin will allow you to save Flash Files to your desktop.  If that is allow you want to do, then you should be able to view the video using a video player like VLC Player.  If you want to convert the flash video into something playable on your iPhone or iPod, then on to the next step.

Step 2: If you are running Windows and want to convert the flash video to an iPhone compatible format, or Windows media format, then I’d suggest you download and install Format Factory.  If you are running Mac OSX, then I’d download Handbrake, to do the conversion job.

DVD Conversion: If all you want to do convert some DVD’s to iPhone or iPod Touch format for the road trip, then install Handbrake on your computer and rip the DVD’s into MP4 files.  This will take a while to convert the videos (almost as long as it would take to watch the video itself), but can be worth while if everyone is able to keep their sanity on the trip.

Have fun converting YouTube videos for your kids iPods for that next long family road trip!

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic law students over the past seven years, we decided to ask some extra questions about the increasing important mobile technology that students are arriving at Law School equipped with.  One major change to the methodology of this survey compared to past years is that we sent the survey to all students at the law school, not just first year students.  The response rate was 25% this year rather than close to 100% in previous years.

[Note: if you have problems seeing any graphs on this page, please look at the underlying Google Doc's page for this blog post]

Executive Summary:

• 30% of students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 97% of students own laptops, and over 60% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 39% of student laptops are Mac’s.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,200 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• All students now report having high speed internet in their homes.
• 82% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 86% of students own MP3 players capable of listening to recorded lectures.
• 54% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 18% use UVic email and 15% Hotmail.
• 58% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing.  27% chose Google Docs, 5% OpenOffice Writer & 10% “Other”.
• 100% of students now have access to high speed internet at their homes.
• 86% of students use Facebook and 65% of those students would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar of events.

Smart Phone / Cell Phone Ownership

4. I do not own a cell phone  - 11%
3. Regular cell phone  -  59%
2. Smart phone - iPhone –  9%
1. Smart phone - Blackberry –  16%
0. Smart phone – Other  -  5%

30% of students own “Smart Phones” or phones with built in web browsers that allow them to surf the internet on their cell phones.

From the library’s perspective this will be an important area to watch, as there are a number of interesting new technologies (like QR Codes) that could potentially enhance the library’s services that depend on library patrons having access to the internet on their cell phones.

On the other end of the spectrum, surprisingly 11% of students do not own a cell phone at all.  Given how ubiquitous cell phones are becoming, I suspect that this number will drop over time. The high cost of cell phone plans in Canada relative to other countries probably contributes to the number of students with out cell phones.

Laptop Ownership

For the first time, all respondents to the survey report having either a laptop, a desktop computer, or both.

Laptop ownership has plateaued at 97% after years of steady increases. Currently 39% of all laptops are Mac’s, 3% are Linux, and the remaining 58% are running Windows.

The average price paid for student laptops has dropped again to just over $1,200 this year from $1400 in 2007, and $2,100 in 2004.

Desktop computer ownership has been increasing over the past two surveys, with over 60% of students owning both a laptop and a desktop computer.  All students now have access to high speed internet in their homes.

How often do students bring their laptops to school

Almost every day  -  82%
More than once a week  -  10%
Occasionally  -  8%
Never  -  0%

One only has to look in Law Faculty class in session to realize that at least 82% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.  Does this open up pedagogical opportunities, or is it just a thorn in the side of faculty members?

MP3 Player Ownership

4. No  -  14%
3. iPod (audio only)  -  61%
2. iPod Touch  -  21%
1. iPhone  -  8%
0. Other  -  10%

86% of students own an MP3 Player of some kind.  Of those students, 88% own Apple products. For any instructors wishing to do podcasts of their lectures, there is no need to hold back any longer as the 14% of students with out PM3 players can review class lecture podcasts on their laptops.  Campus Systems is considering setting up a UVic iTunes site (like other universites have done) which would make distributing the mp3′s of class lectures very simple to do.

Primary Email Account

7. UVic  -  18%
6. Previous University  -  3%
5. Hotmail  -  15%
4. Gmail  -  54%
3. Yahoo  -  4%
2. Shaw  -  6%
1. Telus  -  0%
0. Other  -  1%

Currently only 18% of students use their UVic email account as their primary email account.  The rest – 82% – forward their UVic email to a 3rd party email provider.  52% use Gmail as their primary account, and 15% use Hotmail.

Favorite Collaborative Document Editing Software

Microsoft Word  -  58%
WordPerfect  -  0%
OpenOffice Writer  -  5%
Google Docs  -  27%
Other  -  10%

Microsoft Word is currently the most popular tools for collaborative document editing at 58%.  Interestingly, Google Docs is preferred by 27% of students. The strong showing of Google Docs is probably due to it’s real time collaboration features that allow multiple authors to work on a document at the same time with built in version control.

High Speed Internet

This is probably the last year that we will mention this question in the survey summary, because after coming close to 100% in previous years, this year, 100% of students responded that they now have access to high speed internet at their homes.

Facekook Usage

Currently 86% of students use Facebook. This is up marginally from 79% two years ago.  Of the Facebook users, 69% connected with other incoming students via Facebook, and another 3% did not, but would have liked to.

65% of Facebook users would like to see Law School events and activities published on Facebook as well as in the online Faculty calendar.

Some students voiced strong reservations about mixing their “business” and “personal” lives on Facebook.  It was also mentioned that many Law School and LSS events are already on Facebook via “organic” groups.  What might be interesting to pursue is to ask the LSS to post all Law Faculty events on their group, so that those who use Facebook can have the option of subscribing to a complete list of Law Faculty and LSS events with out Law Faculty or Staff being involved on Facebook. This would address the primary privacy concern of students.  We would also continue to provide our in house Calendar for those who do not use Facebook, or who do not want to use Facebook in this manner.

Student Comments:

• Beyond the issue of direct interactions with staff and professors, I have concerns about the encroachment of other law school activities into the Facebook world. How long will it be until law firms begin using the law school networks to interact with students? This would raise serious issues of personal information being revealed to a prospective employer which, by law, may not be released to them (marital status, sexual orientation, age, religion and other personal attributes are often easily ascertained when viewing a person’s profile).
• Many of the law school events are already published to facebook – i.e. LSS events, guest speakers brought in by clubs, etc. However, it would be helpful to have all events on Facebook, for example the LCO events.
• There is already a great deal of law school activity on facebook. I’m not sure if it would be worth it for the faculty to consider implimenting facebook into social networking as there is already a very organic and active network there. almost every student or club-organized.  event is already on facebook.  Don’t get too excited about it.
• Ban it from classrooms. just one thing i notice missing from the survey: lots of students have a powerful laptop that they keep at home for the most part, except maybe for exam writing at school. then they also have a netbook which they keep at school for note taking, web, email etc. this is a growing trend I think.
• Personally, I don’t like to receive multiple notifications of the same event via different media. Since everybody doesn’t have facebook, it probably wouldn’t make sense to use it as the primary communciation tool. However, having a calendar or other pages available to access as desired could potentially be helpful.
• Very invasive.
• Facebook is a social tool, not a professional one. For many people, embarrassing and awkward situations have arisen due to forgetting this distinction. I intentionally segregate my personal Facebook from my professional activities and formal acquaintances.
• For better or for worse, the Faculty of Law at UVic is a formal, professional acquaintance for students in the program.
• Let the Business students across Ring Road “network” and self-promote. As future lawyers, we have an obligation to professional and respectful dealings with each other. Please help maintain and perpetuate this atmosphere rather than moving law school activities onto Facebook and contributing to a downward slide into informality and familiarity.
  This is the second time the law school has asked this about facebook.
• I know you guys are old but please… use your head. Facebook = social tool. Law school = career tool. NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.
• Would the law school phone me at home to invite me to a social event? No. If they did I would be annoyed. Similarly, I don’t want Facebook invites from the law school inviting me to social events.
• I already get MEGA SPAMMED by the law school by email. This is irritating. I do not want Facebook spam too. If nobody comes to the events it’s not because nobody knows about them, it’s probably because they are boring.
• Sorry, but someone’s gotta say it.  Facebook is a social tool and is not professional enough to be used as a tool for official university messages. I have considered deleting my Facebook account because of concerns about future employers looking at personal social information out of context. There may be other social networking tools that the school could appropriately use, but I strongly believe that Facebook is not one of them.
  Facebook should not be used in relation to law school, especially in publishing law school events.
• set up a facebook block in the classrooms so students cannot access f/b during classes.
  I would like to see events made available via a general RSS feed. I would like those events to include student events.
• I dislike Facebook but joined because I found it was a necessary tool for staying in contact with other law students re study groups, etc.
• I hesitate to encourage widespread Facebook use. Many career-related CBA speakers have told us that in fact social networking can be detrimental to both privacy and career. It is also–from what I can see around me in class every day–a huge time-waster and almost an addiction.
• The more things that are put on facebook, the more it becomes close to compulsory in use, even to those of us who are consciously eschewing its use for good reasons.
• Facebook can be alienating for certain demographics. Using it is kinda like mandating gym class or sororities: i.e. it’s great for athletes and rich kids; less so for others.
• Facebook is a massive waste of time. It is also a huge distraction in class where classmates are constantly “facebooking” in front/beside us.
• Rarely use it, and not for organizing my schedule.
• I would prefer not to have law school events on facebook, but it just seems to be the only forum that connects most law students in a way that is efficient for informing students and promoting events for clubs. I sincerely hope that the faculty and administration doesn’t start using facebook…

This is just a trial to see what sort of uptake we get from students, and how helpful they find it. Some other possible uses for this technology in the library are:

• Study room availability and room booking as I already mentioned.
• Library tours – posters in different areas of the library with the bar codes so that students can access information relevant to that particular space. Audio tours can also be provided this way.
• Library Maps – Instead of just a map that has, Reference, Reserve, Computer Lab on it, put QR codes for each area that has a web page, so that the patron can go directly to that web page for more information.
• SMS reference service via a 2D bar code on the library web site.
• Library Reviews – if someone has done a review on a book or item, a bar code can be put on that item, linking to the review.
• Event Posters – if there is a web page associated with an event, a bar code linking to that web page can be put on the poster.
• Link to Phone number on a web page so people don’t have to dial the number on their phone.

While installing the bar code scanner app on an iPhone is quite easy, it remains to be seen how many students have a smart phone capable of reading the bar codes, and how many of those students will actually find this useful. I just sent a survey out to law students, asking in part what cell phone they use, so we should have some good data on the number of students who have a device that can read the 2D bar codes in a week or two.

I have also spoken briefly with Ben Naylor about how the LSS might find this technology useful in their communications with students.  If multiple organizations in the Fraser building begin to use it, and enough students have cell phones that can read the 2D bar codes, we can hopefully make all our lives a little bit easier.

If you want to create a 2D bar code, here is a link to a free QR Code Generator that anyone can use.  Let me know if you have any other ideas on how we could use this technology!

Yes, Google and the internet (specifically Wikipedia) have already put libraries out of the business of providing basic reference material.

No, Google and the internet will not put libraries out of the business of lending books in the short run.  More importantly, Libraries for the foreseeable future will the the primary conduit for most people to access high quality and expensive research databases like Pub Med and other walled off online journals.

One interesting factoid from the presentation: The Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 100,000 articles and costs over $1,000 for a set of books. Wikipedia has over 3,000,000 articles and is completely free.  Wikipedia is 30 times larger than Britannica, and is widening it’s lead on a daily basis.

For now the Goliath vs. David battle is a draw

Tagged: education, Google, libraries, OpenSource, publishing, research ]]> http://richmccue.com/2010/03/04/google-vs-the-library-goliath-vs-david/feed/ 2 48.483174 -123.319451 48.483174 -123.319451 richmccue Wikipedia http://richmccue.com/2010/02/19/greening-the-law-library-computer-lab/ http://richmccue.com/2010/02/19/greening-the-law-library-computer-lab/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:47:54 +0000 Rich McCue http://richmccue.com/?p=334 ]]> I just wanted to let everyone in the library know two things we have done recently to reduce the carbon foot print of our new Law Library Computer Lab:

To put the computer lab numbers into context, my home which uses a heat pump to keep it warm, an electric hot water tank to warm water, an electric dryer to dry our cloths and an electric stove to do our cooking, uses about 35 Kilowatt hours per day in the month of February (this will go down quite a bit in the summer months).  The computer lab was using 65 Kilowatt hours per day before these changes, and going forward will use about 23 Kilowatt hours per day!  A win for the environment and a win for the budget.