Shift to the Future

Okay I got an iPad so what. Well I am pretty impressed so far. In fact I am writing this post on it right now. The onscreen keyboard is actually pretty decent. I am kind-of touch typing. I thought I would share my first impressions from my first weekend with it. I immediately got iTunes going, synced up my music. The listening experience is great. Works just like an iPod. Then I installed the Kindle Reader from Amazon and bought my first book: The Singularity written by Ray Kurzweil. Next I setup Activesync for the Mail app to connect to my Microsoft Exchange email. Worked great. I have used that exclusively this weekend to read and respond to email. I found and installed a Twitter app Twitterific, installed a Soduko app, Google Earth app, Language translator app, Wired Magazine app, and Sundry Notes. Reading with Kindle is very nice. A simple interface that doesn't get in the way. I love that I can highlight snippets of text and easily get back to it. I can also...

I was out shopping with my wife Shelley on Monday.  It was our 25th anniversary – wow, time flies.  Anyway, while she disappeared into the Coquitlam Centre mall, I decided to check out 3D TV ’s in Future Shop .  I am totally impressed with the 1st generation products, especially the amazingly thin LED versions.  Apparently you can hang them on the wall like a picture frame! So, I was wondering…  how might this technology evolve?  Where might it show up next?  And how can teachers and students use it for the enhancement, or transformation, of learning?  I wrote a post a few weeks back Welcome to your life in 2020 where I speculated about a learning holodeck / virtual reality experience and another Technology, People, and Learning where I wondered about applying Disney Imagineer’s magic to learning design.  Perhaps both posts are a little “out there” but I suggest that 3D TV technology will become mainstream within laptops, netbooks, tab...

Our School District (Coquitlam, BC, CA) has agreed to set a new direction in how it provides teachers with technology.  Have a quick look at this presentation recently delivered to introduce our principals to the teacher laptop initiative (TLI). 2010-2011 teacher laptop initiative in coquitlam school district View more presentations from Brian Kuhn . The TLI is designed as a District <—> School cost share:  35% District and 65% School.  Each year up to 1/3 of all teachers will receive a new laptop and after three years, the laptops will be given to students to use and those teachers will receive a new laptop.  In other words, every three years, teachers get a new laptop and students gain access to a set of three year old laptops. Coordinators from the District Staff Development department will design and coordinate various professional development (PD) opportunities for teachers and the implementation is based on an inquiry model (action research).  ...

My son Jesse, who’s 21, got us to re-watch a video today that Shelley (my wife) and I made way back in 1991 of a trip we made with some friends to Disneyland.  We used an 8mm mini-cam to record the Disney experience and edited using a VHS player that had a shuttle wheel.  Shelley wrote out the credits and introduction which we taped from a tri-pod facing the camera down to the paper “feed” while she slowly pulled it past the camera’s view.  We dubbed cassette tape music into the VHS player at key points to lay down some music tracks.  A two hour family movie was born.  It was a painful process with the technology available in 1991… While re-watching the video I was impressed once again with the technical wizardry Disney used even 20 years ago.  The way they synchronized the characters in the Pirates of th e Caribbean or the Bear Jamboree and made them come to life was quite remarkable. Video editing today is so much simpler than in 1991.  Even with...

I just read an article “ The web shatters focus, rewires brains ” in the latest Wired magazine (yes, the paper-based version, not on an ipad).  One writer, Nicholas Carr, makes the case that the barrage of information and interruptions in our lives “shatters our focus and rewires our brain”.  The article ( Wired June 2010 pp. 112-118 ) is adapted from his new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, to be published in June 2010.  He shares examples of research done to compare heavy to low Internet users where they fMRI’d their brain activity.  Heavy Internet users did have higher brain activity and that the brains of the low users after spending an hour a day online for a week then showed very similar brain use patterns.  Their brains were rewired!  This might sound promising whereby Internet use reroutes neural pathways but Carr argues that this is actually turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our b...

I don’t know about you but I often try to imagine what the world might look like in the future and what I might be doing in it.  2020 is a particularly interesting year for me.  It is the year of my retirement, I hope. “Retirement: entering a period in life where I don’t have to work to live but will choose to work at something, just because…” I wonder what changes I will experience, initiate, or resist… over the next 10 years?  Warning, wild (or mild?) speculation follows… Mobile communications devices : all landline phones are relics now – mobile devices are very small, thin, and foldable but are able to take on a rigid form when necessary.  They have a holographic image capability to project a 3D color image of live video calls, video media, virtual worlds, digital information, online applications, etc.  Multiparty communications present each party in the holographic image as if they were there.  Interactions and input with this digital world involve g...

I remember when I was growing up sneakily watching TV shows or listening to music my parents didn’t approve of - good thing my mom doesn’t use the Internet, she won’t see this, I’m safe :-).  That’s about as complicated “digital tools” were back in the day.  Fast forward to today and it’s a whole different world with the Internet, devices of all shapes, sizes, and capabilities, in the hands of most kids.  The opportunity for kids to misuse digital tools is huge.  Who’s going to guide them? I wrote a post back in March, Digital Natives Need Infrastructure , where I talked about one of our schools’ (Riverside Secondary) experiences with students using digital tools and the impact on the network.  When kids are bringing their personally owned devices (PODs) and you have a philosophy of openness (no blocking), things get interesting.  My post Learning with a class set of ipod touches tries to contemplate possible learning benefits and difficulties.  Dav...