The 2010 University of Illinois study I refer to near the end of the presentation, shows final exam gains of between 10% and 18% after their largest physics course was flipped.

Here’s the outline:

“A flipped classroom is a reversed teaching model that delivers instruction at home through interactive, teacher-created videos and moves “homework” to the classroom. Moving lectures outside of the classroom allows teachers to spend more 1:1 time with each student. Students have the opportunity to ask questions and work through problems with the guidance of their teachers and the support of their peers – creating a collaborative learning environment.”

Benefits of the Flipped Classroom:

• Students can move through the materials at their own pace. They can revisit materials they have not mastered.
• Students learn through activity in the classroom instead of listening to a largely passive lecture.
• This frees up the lecturers time for more 1:1 time with students who need the most help. Peer tutoring facilitated.
• Can be implemented so that the instructor has a good idea who is prepared for class, along with which students are struggling and what concepts or tools they are struggling with.
• Students who have mastered the material can be paired up with students who are struggling. Difficult materials can be reviewed.

Drawbacks of the Flipped Classroom:

• Equity: all students need access to computers and internet (libraries can help with this).
• Students need to be motivated to get the pre-class work done. If not they will struggle to keep up in class (much like with doing class readings now).
• While flipping is a great pedagogical tool, it is not necessarily the best tool in all situations… But it is an excellent strategy for all teachers to have in their toolkits.

A Case Study: UVic Law Advanced Legal Research and Writing Class.

• Was guest lecturer for Knowledge Management Tool class for 3+ years… decided to flip the lecture in order to engage students more fully and give them hands on experience with.
• Show pre-class Zotero video from: http://richmccue.com/2012/12/13/a-flipped-class-knowledge-management-research-software/
• Show Intro Quiz – Gmail question
• Review Evernote Exercise – Install evernote on mobile device & desktop. Take picture of wite board with phone; sync to desktop; upload photo from desktop to Moodle (or Facebook if LMS not available)
• Back to Prezi: Review feedback from students. Only 10% preferred the traditional lecture over the flipped lecture. 80% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they were more confident with the KM tools after the in class exercises than they would have been with a traditional lecture.

University of Illinois Physics experience:

• Significantly better results on exams.
• A – level students viewing videos gaining 15%. non viewers staying the same. B – level students gaining 19%.  C – level students gaining 10%.
• Fewer students rating the course at very difficult.
• Great study by University of Illinois Physics department to check-out: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/details.asp?paperid=130
• Their method for large classes includes a multiple choice question or two after every video along with an open ended “why did you answer the way you did”, so the teachers can get a feel for why each student answered the question right or wrong.

Nexus 4 Pros:

• The larger 4.7” screen great for reading; it makes a huge difference. My iPhone 4S screen was 3.5” and the new iPhone 5 screen is 4”. I can get literally twice the amount of text on the screen of my Nexus 4 than I could on my iPhone 4S.
• The Android “Return” navigation button great for getting right back to original app after linking out to the browser or another app. It also returns you to the original tab in Chrome after a link opens a new tab for you.
• The Nexus 4 keyboard larger, haptic feedback is nice, and it suggests 3 different words as you type for auto completion
• Chrome password syncing & tabs from your desktop Chrome browsers.
• I really like Google Now. It does a good job of anticipating what info I’m going to need, and displays it on my “Start Page” for me.
• Notifications are much better with the swipe down and little icons on the top left bar.
• I like how the voice recognition works in real time rather than waiting until I’ve pressed the stop button.
• Apps running button nicer than iOS double press of home button.
• Better collaboration between apps, especially for sharing links.

Nexus 4 Cons:

• I haven’t been able to find a podcast client not as good as Downcast on iOS.
• Some apps are not quite as polished on Android than iOS. Facebook & Navionics for example.
• As a teaching tool in education I miss apple TV screen mirroring. I can always use my iPad for that.
• Scrolling seems slightly less responsive… Not a big deal, but its different. I might get used to it with time.
• I miss the physical mute switch, although I just found an app that asks you how long you’d like to put your phone in vibe mode when you use the volume buttons to mute.
• I miss being able to use the volume control on my Apple headphones, and haven’t been able to find android equivalent headphones with volume control.
• More tinkering with setting required to reign in apps that are using too much power.

Verdict:

I do miss some things from my iPhone, but the larger screen for reading, and the better browser experience in Chrome are the things that will keep me using an Android phone for the foreseeable future. That said, I’d probably still recommend and iPhone for my less tech savvy friends who have the money to spend on a more expensive device… at least the ones who I might end up doing tech support for

Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun wrote an excellent article, on why he made the switch from iOS to Android recently: http://www.techhive.com/article/2030042/why-i-switched-from-iphone-to-android.html

Ever since my high school aged son started using Khan Academy lessons to help him with the Physics class he was struggling with, I’ve been impressed with how helpful the web based lessons can be to helping students learn and master difficult mathematical concepts.  Some students and teachers use the Kahn Academy for more than just remedial tutoring, and instead replace in-class lectures with the lessons, and then spend the majority of class time working through problems and related projects.

This teaching method struck a chord with me, so much so that I’ve created “flipped” or “blended” versions of two of guest lectures that I give at my University. I’m happy to report that the observed learning outcomes and student feedback from the new blended format lectures has been excellent.

In One World Schoolhouse, Sal talks about how the tutoring of one of his nieces was the impetus for him to begin tutoring part time, while working as a hedge fund manager. This snowballed, and turned into his passion, as he tutored more and more relatives and family friends.  After a lot of positive feedback to both the lecture videos and online exercises, he took the plunge and started a one year experiment, to see if he could turn his passion into a career. After struggling for several months he, received one or two foundation grants to fund his little non-profit. With the publicity this garnered, he received several more large grants from the likes of Bill Gates and Google, and his organization was fully funded and in a position to hire some full time staff to help him.

With this additional help, the Academy was able to respond to collaboration requests from the Los Altos School District, to work with them on their math curriculum for two grade levels.  After the trial period was complete, the district adopted the Khan Academy model for several grades of math instruction.

Sal then goes on to outline what his ideal of education would look like (subject to change based on rigorous study and e

valuation over time).  Here are the highlights I pulled out in bullet form:

• Large K12 classrooms of 70-90 students in a range of grades & abilities. Have multiple teachers assigned to the class who have a variety of academic interests.
• Each student would develop a learning plan with one of their teachers. -> Differentiated Education.
• 1-2 hours a day would be spent working through material in a system like the Khan Academy for the kids to deeply master skills at their own pace… not in lockstep with their classmates.
  • learning units would be presented in 3 to 10 minute units.
  • learning units would be linked to each other in order to build on acquired knowledge and skills.
• The rest of the school day would be spent on project work where they would apply the skills they’re learning or have mastered.
• if they run into a problem, or need a skill in the course of the project, they’d be pointed in the direction of the resources they’d need to master the skill.
• There would be a number of projects suggested by the teachers that they could do, but would also be encouraged to.
• Tracking student’s progression through core concepts in an online tool allows a teacher to quickly identify who needs 1-1 attending. Student further along in an area could mentor and teach learning or struggling classmates.
• A portfolio of creative work is probably a better indicator of a student’s abilities and potential than how they perform on a standardized test.  Getting universities on board to evaluate a student’s portfolio rather than their transcripts will need to be addresses.
• Don’t be dogmatic about the use of pedagogy and technology.  Proceed based on available evidence, and the individual needs of students. Refine and test what we’re doing to make sure outcomes are improving.

Before I highlight some quotes from One World Schoolhouse that I found interesting, I should say that while I like many of the suggestions that Sal makes, like Sal, I believe that educators and universities should be conducting research studies and trials to determine how effective these pedagogies are across different academic disciplines and different age groups.  If they turn out to be as effective as some early trials indicate, then we can begin the hard work of training our teachers and giving them the tools they’d need to adopt  these new pedagogies.  If not, then we can all move along and look for other ways to improve on the way we teach.

That said, here are some quotes I found interesting:

• “When it comes to education, technology is not to be feared, but embraced; used wisely and sensitively, computer-based lessons actually allow teachers to do more teaching, and the classroom to become a workshop for mutual helping, rather than passive sitting.” -pg 34
• “In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept.” –  pg 39
• “In gradually developing my own approach to teaching, one of my central objectives was to reverse this balkanizing tendency. In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.” – pg 51
• “I’m not proposing that we shut down the schools and start over. What I am suggesting, however, is that we adopt a more questioning and skeptical stance toward the educational customs and assumptions we’ve inherited.”
• “Most students, rather than appreciating algebra as a keen and versatile tool for navigating through the world, see it as one more hurdle to be passed, a class rather than a gateway.”
• “There are two related points I’m driving at here. The first is that creativity in general tends to be egregiously underappreciated and often selected against in our schools. The second point – and in my view this is nothing short of tragic – is that many educators fail to see math, science, and engineering as “creative” fields at all.” – pg 98
• “This notion of ‘flipping the classroom’ was around before the Khan Academy existed and clearly wasn’t my idea. However, the popularity of the Khan Academy video library seems to have pushed it into mainstream thinking.” – pg 118
• “The promise of technology is to liberate teachers from those largely mechanical chores so that they have more time for human interactions.” – pg 123
• “If high school persuaded me of the crucial importance of independent study and self-paced learning, it took college to convince me of the incredible inefficiency, irrelevance, and even inhumanity of the standard broadcast lecture.” – pg 186
• “The school I envision would embrace technology not for its own sake, but as a means to improve deep conceptual understanding, to make quality, relevant education far more portable, and – somewhat counterintuitively – to humanize the classroom.” – pg 251

______________

In this class we’re going to cover the basics of audio recording and editing of interviews. While it may seem like recording an audio interview should be straightforward, there are a number of things you can do to make your interview easier or more difficult to listen to. There is nothing worse that trying to listen to an interview with a lot of background noise, or to an interview that was not recorded at a high enough input volume.

To help you record the best quality audio interview possible, we will cover the following areas:

• How to choose a good interview location.
• Where to borrow high quality audio recording equipment.
• Audio recorder setup options – when to use them and when not to.
• Settings for Interviews, Meetings and Music.
• How to effectively test audio quality immediately before the interview and why this is so important.

With all this under your belt you’ll be record a high quality audio interview. We’ll also cover the basics of audio editing in the Mac application Garageband, in case you need to splice together some audio, or trim the beginning or end of your audio files.

Lastly, in class you’ll be able to use all that you’ve learned by working through a short project with one or two of your classmates.If you run into problems, you can always ask for help at the Music and Multimedia counter in the library. Good Luck!

A. Introduction

B. Using the Audio Recorder

C. Editing with GarageBand

D. In Class Exercise

1. Outline of today’s class:
   1. We’re going to divide into groups of 2 or 3.
   2. You and your group will take an audio recorder and work through the recording exercise – can use provided script or make interview up on the fly.
   3. You and your group will use a Music and Multimedia iMac with GarageBand to edit and export your interview into an MP3 file. Please note that for your project if you’d like to try using the free, Open Source audio software package “Audacity”, feel free to download it and install it on your Windows PC (just google “aducity”).
2. So let’s split into groups of 2 or 3:
   1. Find out who has done audio or video editing before.
   2. See if anyone has garageband on their laptop.
   3. Depending on the ratio of students to available audio recorders we’ll make groups of 2 or 3, spreading out the experienced audio/video editors out.
   4. Hand out audio recording equipment along with the short how to manual.
   5. Provide each group with the optional Script to record.
3. Recording:
   1. One students should record the script with the different settings for consistency sake, so the different settings can be compared for quality in the two different locations.
      1. Record in CD quality WAV format.
      2. Try recording in a relatively quiet area, and then in a noisy area (eg. the Biblio Cafe).
      3. Try recording with High MIC gain, and another with Low MIC gain.
      4. Try recording with Low Cut on, and off.
4. After the recording is completed,use Garage band to edit the audio:
   1. if your group has a laptop with garage band, then use the laptop. If not then use one of the 3 Music and Video Mac’s we have reserved for class use).
   2. Import all the audio files.
   3. Trim the beginning and end of at least one audio track.
   4. Isolate and then delete a section of audio from at least one audio track.
   5. Export the audio in CD quality.
   6. Export the audio in High MP3 quality.
   7. Upload the MP3 file to the “In Class Exercise Fourm” for today’s lecture.

Then in a shortened 40 minute class, I put the students together in groups of 2 or 3 and had them work on some exercises.  This allowed them to practice using the using the tools they learned about in situations approximating how they’d be used in legal research.

The feedback from the students on the new class format was very positive.  83% of students preferred the blended class style to a traditional lecture, and 75% said that they felt more confident using the tools covered in class than they would have with a traditional lecture. At the end of both classes, most of the students stayed behind after the class was dismissed to continue playing with the new software tools.

Below, exercises A to H are to be completed before the class. The in class exercises are at the bottom. These materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License to encourage their use and re-use. In plain english this means that anyone can modify the materials, as long as they share the modifications back to me, and the materials can be used for commercial purposes.

——————-

A. Introduction:

We’re going to look at 7 different tools that will help you develop a more efficient research work flow. It is not expected that you’ll use all the tools, but most students find that they’d have a hard time living without two or three of them once they see how the tools make their research lives easier.

• The tools we’ll look at are:

• Desktop Search,
• Zotero for citation management,
• Evernote for saving general notes, capturing web pages and pictures for future reference,
• JotNot Pro to take the place of a photocopier,
• Google Drive for collaborative document editing,
• Google+ Hangouts for online meetings and document co-editing, and lastly
• backup options so that your digital life is safe.

Before you move on, please make sure that you have a Gmail account, and have signed up for Google+, as you’ll need access to a Google account for the exercises in this module (and in the next class). If you don’t have an account, you can sign up here: http://gmail.com

B. Desktop Search

Exercise:

1. Using your desktop search tool, see if you can find a paper you wrote last year.
2. Also using your desktop search find all the emails you’ve received from a friend. How many were there? (if you don’t see any emails in your desktop search you’ll need to add your webmail account to your desktop email program).

C. Zotero – The Social Citation Manager

Exercise:

1. Install Zotero stand alone edition - http://www.zotero.org/download/
2. Install the Zotero browser plugin for your favourite web browser. http://www.zotero.org/download/
3. Open up a paper you are working on and lookup a couple of references in your web browser.
4. Save those references to Zotero.
5. Insert a new footnote & import reference from zotero. Do this for at least one other reference.
6. Create a bibliography using the zotero plugin for word.

D. Evernote – Capture anything, access it anywhere. 

Exercise:

1. Install Evernote on your laptop & smart phone (if you have one). http://evernote.com
2. Capture a couple of web pages about a topic that interests you, and tag them with “alrw test”
3. Take a picture of a white board or piece of paper that describes the topic of interest to you. Share the note that includes the picture, and post the shared URL to the moodle board for this lesson (the OCR can take up to an hour for free Evernote account, so don’t be worried if you can’t successfully do a full text search on your picture right away).

E. JotNot Pro – A photocopier / Scanner in your pocket

Exercise:

1.  If you have an iPhone or iPad, install the free or paid version of JotNot on your device.
2. “Scan” a two page document.
3. Email a PDF of the document to yourself.

F. Google Drive – Collaborative Document Editing  

Exercise:

1. If you haven’t already, create a Gmail account for your self (at Gmail.com) and then log on.  Press the “DRIVE” icon on the top menu.  or http://drive.google.com
2. Paste a couple of paragraphs from a paper you’ve written into the document.
3. Insert two footnotes & drag & drop references from Zotero.
4. Share the document with a classmate or friend.
5. Edit the document at the same time as them.

G. Google+ Hangouts: Group Video Conferencing & Collaboration

Exercise:

1. Log-on to Google+ at the same time one of your friends is online, and experience a Google+ hangout for yourself.  http://plus.google.com
2.  Open a Google Doc during your hangout and collaboratively edit a document together.
3.  Share your screen with your partner.

H. Backing Up Your Data

Exercise:

1. Do you have a 3-2-1 backup solution in place? Do you at least have a cloud backup of your important files? If you don’t, now would be a good time to install Google Drive, DropBox or SkyDrive.
2. Explain to a friend or family member why it’s important to backup important files.

——————-

In Class Activities (no longer than 50 minutes long):
Tools: Zotero, Google Drive & Google+ Hangouts.

1. Class Exercises:
   1. As a group, choose one member to create a Google document.
      • Copy and paste the “Polygamy in BC” text from Moodle into the document.
      • Share the document with others in the group using their Gmail addresses, plus rich@msys.ca.
      • Delete the last paragraph of the document.
      • At the top of the document, each member of their group should type their name and email address on separate lines.
   2. Set Up a Zotero group to put your research sources into (make membership “Private”).
      • All all members of your group to the Zotero group you just created, using their Zotero user names, or email addresses they signed up to Zotero with (invited group members need to accept the invite sent to their email address before they can see the Zotero group). Also add rmccue@uvic.ca to your group.
      • Spend 5 minutes putting citations into the team’s Zotero group library.
      • In Zotero, add a note to a citation from one of your colleagues.
   3. Each group member take one paragraph from the Google document and insert  citations into the footnotes you’ll create.
   4. Collaboratively write a paragraph at the end of the document (we’re looking for evidence that everyone contributed at least one sentence).
   5. Create bibliography in Zotero and paste it onto the end of the document on a new page. You do this by selecting all the items in your Zotero library, and then “Edit” -> “Copy Bibliography” and paste into your Google doc.
   6. Look at an earlier version of the document using “File” -> “See revision history”.
      • Find the version(s) where the summary paragraph was created and edited.
      • Copy the deleted paragraph, & then paste in into the current version of the document after you’ve exited out of “revision history” mode.
   7. Change the “Share” Permission for the Google Doc so that “Anyone with the link” can comment on the document.
      • Post the link to your document, along with the names of everyone in your group to the Moodle “In Class Exercise Fourm”.
   8. Save the document in DOCX format.
      • Upload the document, along with the names of everyone in your group  the Moodle “In Class Exercise Fourm”.
   9. Send one team member with their laptops to the student lounge (or the other side of the room).
      • All members of the group create a “Circle” in Google+ called ALRW and add all group members to the circle.
      • One member of the group, start a Google+ Hangout, and invite everyone into the hangout.
      • Discuss and make summary paragraph edits with both of them via a Google+ hangout.

1. Bonus Points:
   • Figure out how to digitally put on either a tiera or a clown mask in the Google+ Hangout video.
   • Put some of the citations from the paper you brought with you into your personal Zotero library, and re-insert them into your document so that you can use Zotero to build your bibliography for you once you’ve finished your paper.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

It’s never easy to make big shifts when technology opens up new opportunities. Looking back in time it seems obvious that big, successful railroad companies should have been able to make the transition (or diversify) into new modes of transportation, but generally speaking they did not. How come?

1. Change is difficult and scary at the same time. Bureaucratic inertia makes it difficult to change the direction of most large organizations, along with the fear of dislocation and not knowing how to do a new job.
2. Another major consideration is that the “new direction” that is obvious to us know, is generally not obvious at the time. Mistakes will be made in technological transitions. There will be ventures down dead ends, before the new best practices become well worn paths.
3. In the case of academic libraries, we are a service “department” inside of larger organizations. Out of necessity we support the direction of the University in the best way we can, and do not necessarily have the power to change the direction of the university no matter how certain that our version of the future is correct.
4. Lastly, larger, consensus based, democratic organizations (like Universities) generally change more slowly than smaller organizations that have strong central authority to dictate to their direction (like Corsera, et al.). This is a double edged sward. On one hand we are not as nimble as smaller start-ups. On the other hand we have resources and prestige that can allow us to be very competitive if we can create a consensus to move in the “right” direction in a timely fashion.

Trying to figure out what is the “right” direction is the tricky part, and what I think we’re headed towards in the Strategic Planning process at the library where I work. One point to remember is that railroad companies survive to this day, but they are much less important than they were a century ago, in large part because they were unable to recoginize the importance of new technologies, and integrate them into their businesses.

P.S. Here are two great articles on the future of libraries by Seth Godin & Clay Shirky as food for thought:

• http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-of-the-library.html
• http://mbanks.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/05/clay-shirky-at-mla-11-on-the-need-for-health-sciences-librarians-to-rock-the-boat.html

#1 As far as I can tell, there is currently no evidence that MOOC’s are as effective as traditional lecture based classes or hybrid classes.  The two positive things we know for sure about MOOC’s as they are currently being run, is that they are much less costly, and are more accessible to people who do not live close to universities.  My sense is that eventually studies will show that MOOC’s as they are currently run, are less effective at achieving learning outcomes than hybrid courses, and lecture based courses.

#2 Student interaction, socializing and networking are something that MOOC’s will have a hard time replicating.  Friendships and relationships formed in by students are they earn their degrees can be as important to the success of students in the long run as the degree itself.  In addition, while hard to quantify, I believe that a significant amount of learning at Universities happens between classes and in social settings on and off campus.

#3 Hybrid classes (or flipped classrooms), in at least some disciplines, are significantly more effective than traditional lecture based classes. From wikipedia: “Flip teaching [or a hybrid class] is a form of blended learning which encompasses any use of Internet technology to leverage the learning in a classroom, so a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing.” Hybrid classes are not only more effective, but in the long run will cost less for universities to run because of the lower use of classroom time. There will still be papers and assignments for professors and teaching assistants to mark for each student, but less time in classrooms mean that universities and colleges can serve more 50-100% more students without adding additional classroom space.  Hybrid classes are not yet common in higher education, so there is significant room for disciplines to take advantage of the cost savings and learning outcomes.

Universities in the US and Canada are currently under enormous pressure to reduce the cost of educating students. The extremely low long term costs associated with running MOOC’s must be tantalizing to university administrators.  While tantalising, they will not work as well as hybrid courses, or even lecture based courses in most disciplines, especially where lab time and experimentation are important.  There is also the issue of how universities can make money while running MOOC’s. One option is to offer the MOOC’s for free or low cost, and then charge fees for testing and credentialing to pay for the courses.

MOOC’s are currently being experimented with at major universities around the world, however I believe that they will only displace traditional lectures at institutions where cost constraints are so severe that they have no other choice. Fortunately most Canadian universities and colleges are not in that position. That is why I believe they will pursue the Hybrid or Flipped classroom model, as they offer the potential to reduce the cost of higher education (for governments at least), and improve learning outcomes for students.

Links:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/brooks-the-campus-tsunami.html
2. http://nation.time.com/2012/09/04/mooc-brigade-will-massive-open-online-courses-revolutionize-higher-education/
3. http://chronicle.com/article/How-Flipping-the-Classroom/130857/
4. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-flip-turning-a-classroom-upside-down/2012/06/03/gJQAYk55BV_print.html
5. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/06/got-a-computer-get-a-degree/the-promise-of-lower-costs-and-quality-education
6. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/interactive-learning-online-public-universities-evidence-randomized-trials
7. http://edcetera.rafter.com/the-hybrid-classroom-just-as-effective-as-in-person-lecturing/

In addition to the technology questions we’ve been asking UVic Law students over the past ten years, we decided for the first year to ask more detailed questions about student use of tablets and e-readers for academic use, along with questions about their usage of “cloud” services for file storage and collaboration. This survey was completed by 126 incoming and transferring law students, which is a strong 90% plus response rate.

Executive Summary:

• 89% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up from 84% last year and 50% two years ago), with 48% of the total being iPhones, 29% Android and 11% Blackberry (Blackberry usage down from 27% last year).
• 31% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers, up from 19% last year.
• When it comes to reading school related documents, students report reading those documents in bound books 46% of the time, on laptops 35% of the time, on laser printed pages 16% of the time, and on tablet devices 3% of the time.
• 99% of students own laptops.  49% of laptops are Mac’s, and 48% Windows.
• The students’ average typing speed is 49 wpm.
• 68% of all students bring their laptops to school most days.
• 75% of students use laptops to take class notes, 63% use pen and paper, 6% use tablets and 3% use their cell phones.
• 53% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 7% use UVic email and 20% Hotmail.
• 33% of students identified Google Drive as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing. 22% favor DropBox, 4% Apple iCloud and 3% Microsoft Sky Drive.
• 95% of students use Facebook (down from 97% last year, but up from 91% two years ago), 34% user Twitter, 21% Linked In, 10% Google+ and 4% no online social networks.

Smart Phone / Cell Phone Ownership

89% 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 significantly from 84% last year, and 50% of smart phone owners two years ago.  Blackberry ownership dropped significantly from 27% last year to 11% this year.

On the other end of the spectrum, 4% of students do not own a cell phone at all which is up from 2% last year. This is still 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.

From the library and faculty’s perspective this is an important area to watch, as there are a number of interesting new technologies (like QR Codes, NFC, Mobile websites and Adaptive websites) that could potentially enhance the services that depend on library patrons having access to the internet on their mobile devices.

Tablet Ownership & Reading Technology Usage
For the second time we asked students about their tablet device and/or eBook reader ownership and found that a growing number of students own these devices. This year 31% of students own ebook readers or tablets, up from 19% last year. If text book makers lower the cost of digital books relative to paper books, or if professors start to use more open access text books, we could see a rapid adoption of eBook readers and tablets.

When it comes to the technology currently used for reading school related documents, students read those documents in bound books 46% of the time, on laptops 35% of the time, on laser printed pages 16% of the time, and on tablet devices 3% of the time.  I expect that the amount of reading students do on tablets will grow as more tablets are purchased, and as more text books and documents are distributed in tablet friendly formats

Laptop Ownership & Internet Access from Home

Laptop ownership has plateaued in the high ninety percent over the past six years (this year at 99%). Currently only one first year student arrived without a laptop this September. 49% of all incoming laptops are Mac’s (down from 50% last year), 1% are Linux, and the remaining 48% are running Windows.

Desktop computer ownership stands at 17%, down from 28% last year.  2% of students do not have access to some form high speed internet in their homes. This is a change from the last two year when all student’s reported having high speed internet access from home.

How often do students bring their laptops & tablets to school
One only has to look in Law Faculty class in session to realize that at least 68% 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 1% that do not own laptops, reinforces the need to maintain a small number of public access computers and loaner laptops available in the building, especially for exam writing.

The tablet e-book reader story is much different with 72% of students bringing those devices to school occasionally or never.  There are probably two reasons for this:

1. Weight. If students have to bring their laptop for note taking plus a text book or two, the extra weight could be an issue.
2. If legal text books were widely available in eBook format, I suspect that tablet usage would increase dramatically so that students would not have to lug heavy text to school in their backpacks every day.

Typing Speed

Students this year report that they can type on average, 49 words per minute. The highest typing speed was 110 wpm, and the lowest 15 wpm.

Tools for Taking Class Notes
75% of students use laptops to take class notes at least some of the time.  63% use pen and paper, 6% use tablets and 3% use their cell phones.

Primary Email Account
Currently only 7% of students use their UVic email account as their primary email account (down from 9% last year). Most of he rest – 93% – forward their UVic email to a 3rd party email provider.  53% use Gmail as their primary account, and 20% use Hotmail, and 11% use their previous university’s email system.  96% of students check their email accounts one a day or more.

Favorite Tool for Collaborative Document Editing
This year 33% of students identified Google Drive as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing. 22% favor DropBox, 4% Apple iCloud and 3% Microsoft Sky Drive.

With more and more students using US based cloud service providers for collaborative document editing and backup, consideration should be given to providing students with a Canadian based alternative to minimize the effects of the Patriot act on students.

Social Media Usage

Currently 97% of students use Facebook. This is up from 91% last year.  Of the Facebook users, last year 70 % connected with other incoming students via Facebook, and another 7% did not, but would have liked to.

Student Comments and/or Suggestions:

Below are all of the comments from students at the end of the survey

• Love it all, bro.
• not sure of some answers (what tools I use in class, etc.) as I haven’t started yet!
• staring at a computer screen is not good for my eyes
• other nice cloud storage alternatives: Microsoft SkyDrive box.net
• More texts in ebook format.
• Thanks for the fun survey
• This survey would be more useful to you in a month or two.

For those interested, here is a link to the full survey results.

Tagged: collaboration, ebooks, education, Google, iPad, mobile, QR Codes, research, survey, Work ]]> http://richmccue.com/2012/09/28/uvic-law-student-technology-survey-2012/feed/ 2 48.466795 -123.317005 48.466795 -123.317005 richmccue http://richmccue.com/2012/06/19/google-hangouts-meetings-more-productive-than-face-to-face/ http://richmccue.com/2012/06/19/google-hangouts-meetings-more-productive-than-face-to-face/#comments Tue, 19 Jun 2012 23:27:35 +0000 Rich McCue http://richmccue.com/?p=985 Read More

I’ve used Google+ Hangouts for several meetings now out of the necessity of bringing together three other colleagues from across North America to collaborate on a day long seminar.  I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked, not only as a group video conferencing tool, but also as a document collaboration platform (using the embedded Google Docs functionality). For me these two features combined made it almost easier to conduct our meeting remotely from the four corners of North America than it would have had we all been in the same room.

 

In preparation for our meeting I initially assumed we’d be using Skype for the meeting, and wondered if anyone had a paid account so we’d be able to use the group video conferencing feature (person to person video is free on Skype, but multi-person video is only available if one of the participants is a paying customer).  When I realized that the main focus of the meeting would be to prepare the outline for our seminar, I remembered reading something about the collaborative document editing feature in Google+ Hangouts.

My suggestion to use Hangouts was agreed to, and the meeting was very productive.  The video and audio quality were excellent, and the ability to co-edit a our outline document, and see who is editing the document in real time, was extremely useful.  The ability to take and share our notes speeded up the meeting considerably, as once a point was typed out, if everyone agreed, we simply moved on. If there wasn’t agreement, we discussed further and the point was edited. No misunderstanding, no rehashing who agreed to what days later.  Here is a short video (with no audio) demonstrating the co-editing feature of Hangouts.

That said, I highly recommend you give Google+ Hangouts try for an upcoming meeting, even if the participants are local!  Here are the pros and cons of the software from my perspective:

Google+ Hangouts Pros:

• High quality video and audio for up to 10 users.
• Cross platform: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS.
• Collaborative document editing.
• Screen Sharing.
• Sketch pad capabilities.
• Hangouts on Air feature allows more than 10 users to view the meeting.

Google+ Hangouts Cons:

• Everyone has to use a google account to participate.

Tagged: collaboration, collaboration platform, education, Google, video conferencing tool, Work ]]>

If you’re a more visual person, please watch the video tutorial that goes along with this blog post on YouTube.

Step 1: Open “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.docx” file in Microsoft Word.

Step 2: In Word, “File” -> “Save As…” -> “Other Formats”. In the bottom drop down, select “Web Page Filtered” & save to your desktop.  Close Word.

Step 3: Launch Sigil & open the HTML document you just saved.

Step 4: Cut top 4 lines of the document (from “Canadian” to the end of “… March 29,1982”).

Step 5: Select, “Generate Inline HTML TOC” (located at the bottom right of the screen). A TOC.html file will be created.

Step 6: “Edit” -> “Paste” on a new line at the top of the TOC document.

Step 7: “Edit” -> “Meta Data Editor” and add Title and Author information. Select “OK”.

Step 8: “File” -> “Save” to save the ePub file to your desktop.

Step 9: Email the ePub file to yourself, and then open on your eBook reader.

This project started a couple of months ago when a coworker kindly suggested that I write a paper based on a presentation I give to classes of law students on software tools for research and collaboration: Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: Creating a Modern Memex. With that encouragement I started writing with my current favourite writing tool, Google Docs.

Related YouTube Video: eBook Publishing Made Easy

Step 1 Google Docs: Google Docs is particularly good for collaborative document editing but it is also capable enough for academic writing. This means that it supports footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, tables of contents, inline images, and style sheets among other things. For the purposes of this project, it also does a great job of exporting all of these features and formatting into a HTML document, which is exactly what we need for the next step of our project… creating an ePub file in Sigil.  If you use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice instead of Google Docs, you can still save your document as an HTML file and then import it into Sigil.  Note, you should not proceed to the next step until you have completed writing, editing and revising your document. This is because if there are any changes you need to make after this point, you’ll need to redo steps 2 and 3 every time you “edit” your document.

Step 2 Sigil: Once you’ve imported your HTML into Sigil, you should proofread the document to make sure that the formatting is acceptable to you (the fidelity coming from Google Doc’s has been excellent for me, even with complicated documents).  The other thing you’ll need to do is add title, author, and copyright information to the document by going to the “Edit” -> “Meta Editor” menu. If you neglect to do this, the title and author information will be incomplete when the eBook is opened in a reader which looks quite ugly, to be honest.  Once you’re happy with the look of your eBook in Sigil, you can save it as an ePub document by going to the “File” -> “Save As…” menu, and saving the book on your hard drive. To open your new ePub document on your iPhone or iPad, just email it to yourself and then open it on your device. On Nook & Kobo devices, you typically need connect your device to a computer via a USB cable and then copy the files to your reader. If you only need to read your book on iPad, iPhone, Nook & Kobo readers, then your done! The ePub format is readable on almost all devices, except for Kindle readers. To create a file for Kindle devices, you need to use another open source piece of software called Calibre.

Step 3 Calibre: Calibre can convert your ePub document to almost any other eBook format under the sun, which is to say it is a powerful tool but can be somewhat daunting at first. In order to make your ePub document readable on Kindle readers, you need to convert it into the MOBI format.  To do this, select on the menu, “Add Books” -> “Add books from a single directory”, then browse your hard drive to find the ePub version of your document, then select it. After a minute or two, your ePub document will show up in your Calibre “library”.  Once you see it in your library, select it with your mouse and click on the menu, “Convert books” -> “Convert individually”. A dialog box will appear and you need to click on the “Output format” dropbox in the top right of the window, and select “MOBI” as the format you want to convert your ePub document into. Then click “OK”.  The program will work for a minute or two. When it is done, click on “Path: Click to open” on the right side of the window, and it will open a file browser window with both the ePub and MOBI version of your eBook. Make sure you note where these files are as you’ll need to know where they’re located so that you can access them yourself, or share them with others. To transfer your MOBI file to your kindle device, you’ll need to email the document to a special email address that Amazon has setup for your Kindle account. That wasn’t too hard, was it?  Finally, if you’d like to sell your book, we have two more steps.

Step 4 Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing: If you want to publish your book in the Amazon Kindle store, you’ll need to create an Amazon Associate account. Then upload your MOBI eBook to the store for Amazon to offer for sale for you.  You’ll need to fill out a number of forms along the way but it is a straightforward though time consuming process.

Step 5 Lulu Print Publishing: Lastly, if you’d like give people the option to purchase a hard copy of your book, you can use a service like Lulu to print and sell the book for you. Just setup an account, upload a PDF version of your document (Google Docs will export documents to PDF format for you), and then create a custom book cover using the web based tool they provide you with.

You’re done!  If you’d like to see an example of a book that I recently published, check out all the different versions below. I’ve published it using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Enjoy!

Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: Creating a Modern Memex:

• eBook Formats:
  • ePub for iPad, iPhone, Nook & Kobo readers (free)
  • Mobi for Kindle readers (free)
  • iBooks for iPad only (free)
  • Kindle Store ($0.99)
• On the Web: Google Docs (free)
• PDF format: PDF (free)
• Paper Book (legacy format): Lulu Press ($7.99)

Related Downloads:

• Google Docs
• Sigil
• Calibre

As a personal learning project, I’ve made the book available in multiple formats, so that it is accessible to everyone who is interested in reading it. Feel free to send a link to this page to anyone who you think might find this short book helpful. I’ve published it using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you have an iPad, be sure to download the “iBooks for iPad only” version, as it is a multi-media edition, that includes embedded videos that unfortunately the other formats do not yet support.

Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, comments or suggestions for the book.  If you read a free version of the book, please leave a review in the Kindle Store, as I suspect this will help others discover the book.

• eBook Formats:
  • ePub for iPad, iPhone, Nook & Kobo readers (free)
  • Mobi for Kindle readers (free)
  • iBooks for iPad only (free)
  • Kindle Store ($0.99)
• On the Web: Google Docs (free)
• PDF format: PDF (free)
• Paper Book (legacy format): Lulu Press ($7.99)

Enjoy!

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!

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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.

Will becoming more attractive make you happier?  Nope… plastic surgery or weight loss will give you an initial boost, but you get used to your new looks pretty quickly, and in the long run you won’t be any happier.

Will better health make you happier?  Counter intuitively, no. Unless you’re at death’s door, you get used to your state of health, and being less or more healthy doen’t change your happiness level in the long run.

Will moving to a sunny warm city make you happer? Again, no. After the new car smell wears off, your level of happiness will move back to where it was when you were living in a cold northern city.

So, what are some things that make us happier?

1. Connect… with family, friend and neighbours is the most important thing you can do to contribute to your overall happiness. The good news is that this will cost you little or no money to do!
2. Be Active. Walk, run, bike, play games, play sports, dance yoga… these are all things that will improve your mood, especially if you’re in a bad one.
3. Take Notice of the beauty in nature and in life.
4. Keep Learning. Whether it’s new hobbies or a new skill at work. Be challenged and remember that most happiness comes in striving for goals, not in reaching them.
5. Give. Do something nice. Join a community. Be selfless.

If you’d like to read more on this topic, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt book, The Happiness Hypothesis, or if you’d like to read great eight page summary, you can read my brother Bob McCue’s book review and auto insurance guide,

Finally, here is Dan Gilbert’s entertaining TED Talk with his take on happiness. Enjoy!

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………………..

This is one use for my iPad that I definitely did not for see when I purchased it last year: Navigating my sailboat with it!  Compared to using a paper map, navigating with my iPad is a joy. I still take a paper map with me of course, just in case, but my iPad is my navigation tool of choice.  Last week I participated in the Swiftsure Race, which typically take about 16 hours to complete. This year because of light winds and adverse currents we crossed the finish line almost 30 hours after we started.

I had my iPad running the Navionics charting software the whole time, and I was able to keep track of where we were for the whole race on a single charge.  I turned the screen on and off as needed, but was still amazed at the battery life I saw during the race. The only problems I had with Navionics is that the program rebooted spontaneously three times during the voyage. I was able to quickly restart the program, but it typically “lost” some of the route that it had been tracking for me.

The water off Victoria where I sail as part of the Oak Bay Sailing Club, is very interesting and challenging (here is a day sail route from May 2011). Sometimes it can be difficult figuring out where you are given all the little islands and navigation buoys, but Navionics makes it much less stressful to navigate. There is also an iPhone version that I purchased. It works well, but the iPad’s larger screen is much nicer to view, and the battery life on the iPad is much better. I also purchased a water proof case to keep my iPad nice and dry.

If you want to use mapping software for sailing or driving, make sure you get the “3G” version of the iPad, as the wi-fi iPad does not come with a built in GPS. The price difference is about $100 between the two devices, but it is well worth the extra money if you end up using your iPad for navigation. The US & Canada version of Navionics for the iPad costs $50.

Pros: Easy to use. Relatively inexpensive. Excellent battery life. Great for day sails or longer cruises.

Cons: Software sometimes reboots after several hours of use. This is not a saftey concern, but did cause me to loose parts of the track from the 30 hour race I was in.
Tagged: iPad, iPhone, Smart Phones, software, sports, travel ]]> http://richmccue.com/2011/06/03/sailing-with-my-ipad-navionics/feed/ 6 48.483174 -123.319451 48.483174 -123.319451 richmccue Navionics for the iPad http://richmccue.com/2011/05/30/swiftsure-yacht-race-2011/ http://richmccue.com/2011/05/30/swiftsure-yacht-race-2011/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 04:12:30 +0000 Rich McCue http://richmccue.com/?p=761 Read More

For me Swiftsure began on the week before as I scrambled to get all the gear together for the race. A life jacket with a harness, a tether, as well as a water activated light attached to my life jacket. Lots of little things which all make lots of sense, but were unexpected when I excitedly signed up for the race the month before. With all my gear in my duffel bag, I boarded Big Ben the night before the race to avoid Tour de Victoria road closures that would make it difficult to get to the boat on time in the morning.  Captain Jim McLaughlin (of the Oak Bay Sailing School)and most of the other 6 members slept on board the 50’ Benetau Oceanis that night.

Everyone was up by 7am, and after a light breakfast we had a brief discussion about how we would start the race, and who would be responsible for which tasks. Jim II was charged with setting up a Helm and Navigation rotation for our crew of 8: one hour on navigation, followed by one hour on the helm.  This meant that everyone would be able to get some sleep during the night if the race went long.  With a forecast of winds of 10-20 knots, there was some talk of getting home for a late dinner that night, but when we motored out of the Victoria harbour at 8:30am, winds were light and stayed light as we arrived at the start line just off Clover Point.

The first groups of boats started their races beginning at 10am. Our “Juan de Fuca” race started a bit late at 11am.  Unfortunately when the cannon fired for our start, the wind died all together, and we were drifting backward with the flooding current of 4 knots.  For about half an hour we struggled with the sails, trying to move into a position with better wind, but we continued to drift backwards with five other boats.  The yachts with spinnakers held their own at Clover Point, and slowly started to make headway at the current slowed. Finally we decided we’d better drop anchor before we ran into Discovery Island.

We dragged our anchor for 10 minutes before pulling it up and lashing the rode from our spare anchor to our primary anchor. Our lashed up “extended” anchor solution worked, and we came to a stop about one kilometer north of Discovery Island.  There was still no wind, so we talked, drank a beer or two, and kept tabs on the Champions League final on our iPhones until about 3pm (yes, Barcelona did win).  With the wind rising, and the flood current slackening, we weighed anchor and started making our way back to the start line.  We passed the mouth of Victoria’s inner harbour a 5pm, which was slack tide, and got a close up look at the side of a very large freighter passing by.

We now we had the ebb current helping to push us the 75km towards Clallam Bay at the base of the Olympic Mountains in Washington State. The winds remained steady until about midnight. We were able to enjoy a completely clear night sky as we slowly beat our way up the median of the shipping channel with the 5k wind wafting directly down the strait.  The night sky was amazing bright without the city lights to obscure them.

I took my second shift at the helm and navigation station between 4am – 6am. Things were quiet and uneventful as we beat windward, zig zagging back and forth the median between the shipping lanes in the strait of Juan de Fuca.  My iPad with it’s Navionics software was great to have with us in the cockpit, so we could easily keep tabs on exactly where we were. Visibility was great for night time, and thankfully we didn’t see or come close to any freighters during the night. By 7am we were able to see Clallam Bay where we had to round the marker before heading home. The closer we got to the boat marking the turning point, the lighter the winds became. This is when the talk started about possibly not making it home until some time Monday morning.

As we rounded the marker boat, just 100 meters off the shore of Clallum Bay, the crew of the boat threw us a zip lock bag full of chocolate bars, to help us keep our energy up before eating breakfast.  Unfortunately with a headland blocking the wind, it took us over an hour to get out of the bay and into the strait where there was a bit more wind. As we were inching our way out of the bay I decided to go below and get a bit of sleep.

When I woke an hour later I could hear the diesel engine running and could tell that we were moving much more quickly through the water than we had been all night.  At first I thought that we had decided to motor home because of the light winds.  When I finally came to and asked what was going on, it turns out that we’d killed the house batteries using the lights and electronics during the previous 24 hours, and were running the engine in order to recharge them.

The good news was that we were now moving much more quickly, and were heading towards home on an almost direct broad reach rather than tracking back an forth into the wind as we had been doing on the way out. The forecast was now predicting winds of 25 to 35 knots in the late afternoon, so we were anxious to get home before things got too windy.

The wind did start to pick up as the afternoon progressed, so we progressively furled in our Genoa and main sail. By the time I took the helm at 3pm, the wind was blowing and, and Big Ben was twisting in the water as sizable swells from out of our rear starboard quarter pushed us towards home. It was hard work struggling with the helm, trying to keep Big Ben from looking like a drunken sailor.  I felt a little bit better to see Jim struggling with them when he took the helm after me.

We crossed the finish line at the entrance to Victoria’s inner harbour at about 4:30pm, after almost 30 hours of continuous sailing.  We would not have believed it before the start of the race that it would take us 22 hours to get out to Clallum bay, and then only 7 hours to make the return trip.

Our check-in with race officials. As one of our crew handed over the GPS tracking device the official asked why the GPS case was wet. We replied that we thought that they’d appreciate it if we washed the puke off the device before we returned it.  There was a nod of approval, and then they moved on to the last bit of official business before our race experience was officially over.

After we’d tied Big Ben up, the pizza and our spouses arrived, and we enjoyed some time in the cockpit eating pizza, drinking and telling stories about our 30 hour Swiftsure adventure. Swiftsure this year, and the Victoria Maui Race next year?

Tagged: iPad, Sailing, sports, travel ]]>

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.

The bottom line from Science Based Medicine:

“Rather than jumping on the low-carb bandwagon before his ideas are properly tested, the precautionary principle suggests that it might be more reasonable to follow a moderate diet like the Mediterranean diet (or to follow Michael Pollan‘s stunningly simple advice to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’), to limit ‘empty calories’from simple carbohydrates like sugar, to eat a variety of vegetables and fruits, to choose low calorie density foods that are more filling, to limit meat intake, to limit salt, and to keep looking for behavioral and environmental ways to change our calories-in/calories-out balance.”

Good advice that I’m going to try to follow… although some of those empty calories (especially in chocolate form) are so difficult not to give into every now and again!

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 with a 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.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 55 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 209 posts. There were 34 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was March 23rd with 115 views. The most popular post that day was Family Friendly Home Internet Setup – Redux.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, Google Reader, twitter.com, slaw.ca, and law.uvic.ca.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for rich mccue, smart phone bar code, web based visio, zotero iphone, and family friendly dns.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Family Friendly Home Internet Setup – Redux March 2010

Funky Bar Codes Make Smart Phones Smarter March 2010
3 comments

UVic Law Student Technology Survey – Fall 2010 September 2010
3 comments

Microsoft Word Web App – Good But Not Great for Students June 2010
4 comments

UVic Law Student Technology Survey 2010 March 2010
2 comments

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!

As David Pogue points out, this might be just what the doctor ordered for your tween, who wants a cell phone, but you’re not interested in signing a 2 or 3 year contract.

Another option in Canada is Koodo Mobility. Two of our teenage kids have no contract cell phones through Koodo, and the $20 monthly fee they each pay gives them unlimited texting and 50 talk minutes per month (we had to build our own plan to get the monthly fee down to $20).  Given that they almost exclusively text, this works just fine for them.

If I did not have a year left on my cell phone contract what I would personally do is buy an unlocked iPhone from the Apple Store for $660 (yes we can buy unlocked iPhone in Canada). Get the smallest Data and Voice Plan I can find from a local carrier (about $25 per month with Koodo including 100MB of data), and then use a service like Line2 for $15 per month.  My Monthly phone bill would drop to $40.  For 500MB of data the cost would rise to about $55 per month.  Lower cost, and unlimited voice in North America.

My first preference would be to use Google Voice, but as I mentioned it is not yet available in Canada yet. In any case this sort of competition should benefit all cell phone users as it will put pressure on them to lower their costs or risk loosing customers as their contracts expire.

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!