Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I shared the following as a comment today on Kevin Gaugler’s post, “In which the second edition of the textbook might be an app.” Kevin wrote:

Before Apple’s big announcement today, I made a prediction that Apple’s device would disrupt the textbook industry and consequently education, particularly language education, as we know it. Apple has built its iPad on the same popular platform that runs both the iPod Touch and the iPhone and has added a bookstore to its iTunes application called iBooks. Perhaps the next edition of our textbooks, however, won’t necessarily be found in the iBooks section , but rather in the Apps section. The advent of the iPad could quite possibly cause us to re-envision our educational materials as ecosystems that seamlessly direct text, audio, video, social networking and gaming toward a singular set of learning outcomes rather than just an e-book. Remember that when the iPhone was first launched, it did not include an Apps store, so the amazing functionality of the device was not entirely realized until developers rethought previous assumptions about the phone. So, too, I predict, will we see new kinds of learning affordances over time via the iPad.

I responded by writing:

I hope you’re right about the iPad and Apple’s emerging role as disruptors of the textbook industry, and I’ve shared similar hopes/predictions on my blog too. I think Apple’s view of DRM is key to this question, however. Timothy Lee’s post yesterday, “The case against the iPad,” is a good read on this topic since he takes issue with Apple’s vision of sharing in our web 2.0 world. At this point, I don’t think we see Apple truly embracing the disruptive power of Open Educational Resources. I do acknowledge that Apple is a corporation naturally focused on quarterly profits, just like every other corporation, but as a company it has historically stood for values far bigger than “just” profits. I’d love to see Apple officially embrace technologies which support OER. I’m concerned that most the Apple advocacy I’ve seen in the past year for iTunesU is done because as a company Apple wants everyone to get an iTunes account with a credit card. That was something Steve Jobs mentioned in his presentation this week. That comment was significant, as well as the opening comments about how many billions a year Apple makes. I think Apple stands at an important crossroads when the textbook industry COULD be constructively disrupted, and OER could play a HUGE role in that process. Hopefully this will happen, but I think Apple will need to place emphasis on OER formally and not just promote the iBooks store.

I love your concept of instructional materials not “just” as an eBook but as an interactive app. I’ve been utilizing different tools this semester in my own course to create “learning portals,” and I would love it if every one of my students had a mobile device which could access our “course app.” It’s safe to say many of my students are overwhelmed with all the new tools and “places” to find content that we’re using this semester. I think an app could really focus and simplify this for them. This fall I learned about mobilAP, and would be intrigued to use it or something else like it to build an interactive mobile web app I could use with my classes. I particularly would like/need functionality where RSS feeds could be added to the app. Are you aware of other free tools/platforms like mobilAP, or other reasonably priced software tools which would support his kind of “classroom app building?”

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Before sharing more of my own speculations about Apple’s highly anticipated product announcement coming this Wednesday, I’ll echo those of John Siracusa in his New Year’s post, “Antacid tablet:”

I have no inside information. All of the predictions below are purely speculative. If you don’t want to read yet another blog post about what someone thinks the Apple tablet will be like based on nothing more than intuition and guesswork, click away now. No purchase required. Void where prohibited.

That post by John as well as Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s New Year’s post, “Tablet: Big iPhone or thin MacBook?” are two of the best I’ve read to date attempting to stare into the crystal ball of Apple’s computing future. I shared some of my ideas last fall in my Oct 1 post, “Apple iPad rumors, Netbooks, and Commodifcation,” my Christmas day post, “Get ready for an exciting year to read (and share) media,” and my Jan 5th post, “Access your notes even after your textbook subscription expires.” To those ideas, I’ll add the following conjectures.

1. iSlate Videoconferencing

Ever since I saw Steve Jobs demo the iPhone at MacWorld in January 2007, I’ve been dreaming of ubiquitous videoconferencing with a portable device MUCH smaller and lighter than a laptop. The iPhone has the camera on the wrong side for videoconferencing. I don’t think that will be the case with the iSlate. I predict we’ll see a built-in webcam, just like we do on Mac portables today, and it will have full support for videoconferencing with both iChat and Skype. I think the device will be sold with optional cellular service, but it won’t be a lock-in for AT&T only. More providers will be able to sell service on the device. Either way, with 3G or 4G cellular data connectivity or with Wifi, I predict the iSlate will revolutionize how we think about videoconferencing. This is a BIG deal, and I think it will be a revolution.

2. Redefining Textbooks with Interactive Multimedia

As I guessed in my Christmas day post, “Get ready for an exciting year to read (and share) media,” I think iTunes U is going to play a pivotal role in the new iSlate’s success. The tea leaves are pretty clear to see, if you have watched the rise of iTunes U functionality in the latest versions of iTunes. Every Apple rep I’ve heard at conferences has been touting iTunes U. This isn’t an accident, in my view, it’s part of Apple’s strategy to focus market attention on what WILL hopefully be a revolution in the textbook industry. I hopefully predict Apple will succeed in disintermediating the textbook publishing industry the way it has opened the door to digital music publishing and purchasing. I predict we’ll see multiple textbook publishers share the stage with Steve on Wednesday, announcing not JUST the availability of digitized eBooks on the iSlate (like the Kindle and Sony eReader offer, essentially) but truly MULTIMEDIA eTexts and INTERACTIVE books. I’m betting the iSlate will be an ideal publishing platform for the Technology 4 Teachers curriculum I’m continuing to write/develop this semester, based on the Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning framework I’m co-developing with Karen Montgomery. Lecturecasting portals like the one I’ve created this term for T4T are going to be ideal for the iTablet.

3. No iTunes Sync Required

Philip Elmer-DeWitt asked on New Year’s day, “Tablet: Big iPhone or thin MacBook?” My prediction is: Definitely a thin MacBook. One of the biggest limitations of the iPhone and iPod Touch currently is they have to be tethered to a desktop or laptop computer at some point. Although Apple has made great strides to permit media to be downloaded on mobile devices, and MANY more functionalities of both the iPhone and iPod Touch no longer require a desktop sync, that is still required for those devices. They are designed as additions-to an existing computer, not replacements for it. I predict the forthcoming iSlate will be a computer replacement. You won’t need to sync it. Of course it will be beautiful and fast. Sadly, it will also be pretty expensive. No commoditized netbook here. But it will be fundamentally differentiated from the iPod Touch and the iPhone in that it won’t require a sync. I predict it will backup to a desktop or laptop computer, but it will alternatively backup to an online service like Mozy or a Time Capsule WiFi base station.

So those are my predictions. Why have I titled this post, “Apple Gambling Big to Redefine Digital Literacy?” Because with the iSlate, Apple is poised to redefine how we think about computers. The iPhone IS a computer, but it is fundamentally still a tethered device. Computers are untethered. They don’t require docking or syncing. They are autonomous. After Wednesday’s presentation, I think we’re going to be looking at tablet devices in new ways, not as “mere” eBook readers, but rather as fully-functional computers. Why are you and I going to want an iTablet, even if we already have one or more laptop computers and portable devices? Because the iSlate will be a device with which we’ll interact in fundamentally different ways that we do now with either a smartphone or a laptop. We’ll pull it out to read the news, communicate with the world, and watch video, but we’ll also CREATE video and edit it just like we would on a desktop computer. The iSlate will replace our current computers, and that is why it will help redefine digital literacy.

Bottom line, of course: Everyone who sees us use an iSlate will think we are REALLY cool. Apple makes being a geek amazingly chic.

Time will tell, we just have 2 days to wait!

One more note. I love Apple, and I love the core values it has stood for historically. Want to know what those are in sixty seconds? This ten year old video of Steve Jobs talking about core values gives you the answer. Passionate, dedicated people CAN and DO change the world. That’s me, and that’s you. It’s us. Viva la revolucion!

H/T to Fake Steve Jobs.

P.S. By Chris Foresman agrees with my prediction on the multiple cellular players prediction, in his post yesterday for Ars Technica, “Days before iTablet-palooza, the rumor hits keep comin’.” I actually read it after penning this post.

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Almost all of the fifty undergraduate college students this semester enrolled in my Techology 4 Teachers class have cell phones with text messaging plans. Given this available technology, it makes sense to use SMS messaging as one of several communication tools to keep students updated about changes as well as reminders related to our class. This evening I created a five minute screencast to demonstrate how Textmarks can be used to send broadcast messages to students. (Note the flash version of this screencast embedded below is not currently viewable on an iPhone or iPod Touch, but the version on Screenr is.)

As I mentioned in the screencast, PLEASE NOTE some of the advertisements Textmarks sends for free accounts are NOT appropriate for K-12 students. If you consider ads to “Chat w hot singles HERE” not appropriate for your K-12 students (which I’d argue they are NOT,) university students or other adult Textmark subscribers, I HIGHLY encourage you to pay for a commercial account with Textmarks so you can send ad-free messages. (Note: I am not affiliated in any way with Textmarks. More details about my affiliations are available on my blog disclosure policy.) The lowest priced plan ($10 a month) lets you send up to 100 ad-free Textmark messages to your subscribers with two different “keywords,” which function as “channels” to which people can subscribe.

I used a short Google Presentation on my iPhone to introduce this screencast.

I learned about Textmarks in 2007 from Liz Kolb’s outstanding K-12 Online Conference presentation, “Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools.”

Have you had experiences, good or bad, using Textmarks or another broadcast SMS solution with students? (If you are a vendor representative of a SMS messaging product, please do NOT leave a comment here. I won’t approve it.) I wish there was a way to setup a keyword/channel which would not include dating related ads.

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I am impressed with the ability of the iPhone / iPod Touch application Instapaper Free to create offline, mobile-friendly versions of any webpage. The following five minute screencast demonstrates how you can do this on an iPhone or iPod Touch. You’ll want to download the Instapaper Free application first and create a free Instapaper account.

I love how Instapaper formats webpages which are NOT “mobile-friendly” into very usable / readable versions, which are available offline (when you do not have connectivity to WiFi or cellular network data service) after you “refresh” your Instapaper application to sync up online. Instapaper also works with Google Documents, although they are in a “read-only” format when you make a copy of them with Instapaper. This is a GREAT, free application which certainly has MANY potential applications for 1:1 learning settings when all students have access to an iPod Touch, or when students are using iPod Touches on a mobile cart at school.

For more great suggestions for iPhone and iPod Touch applications, see Kern Kelley’s 2009 K-12 Online Conference Presentation, “The iPod Touch in the Classroom.”

I also have shared my iPhone application list via Appolicious.

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Thanks to some just-in-time Twitter assistance from Lucy Gray this evening, I was able to use the Appolicious App Library Builder to automatically build a sharable and ratable list of our family’s installed iPhone Applications for FREE. Previously I’ve taken screenshots within iTunes using Skitch and saved them to a Google Site, but Appolicious is MUCH better since it allows you to rate apps and makes recommendations, similar to the way NetFlix works. When you view someone’s App library on Appolicious, apps are sorted by how the user ranked them (5 bars is the best) and then alphabetically.

The real key to getting this working was finding my “iTunes App Library.” Per Lucy’s directions, I navigated in my iTunes library (path on a Mac: Users, Username, Music) and pointed to the folder “Mobile Applications,” as shown in the screenshot below.

The main problem with sharing this screenshot with you is now you’re probably wondering how I could have songs by Mr. Mister, Motley Crue, Michael W. Smith, and Myra, all in the same iTunes library! Well, our family’s eclectic music tastes will have to be the topic of another post…..

Give Appolicious a try, and if you do please share your apps with me so I can check out your picks!!

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This evening as I was updating our family iPhone / iPod Touch applications in iTunes, the following message was displayed:

This doesn’t pose as much of an age verification procedure!

No one in our family is sure which of our 182 shared applications is “age restricted.” My wife suggested it might be “Words With Friends Free” (a Scrabble game) but I have some doubts about that…..

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itunes, age, restricted

Our nonprofit Storychasers has hired a part-time administrative assistant, and we’re hunting for options now to replace the Skype online phone number we’ve used in the past which has forwarded to my phone. A Skype Out number costs $18 per month or $60 per year currently. Ever since Apple pulled the plug on all Google Voice applications for the iPhone last summer, I’ve wondered what product AT&T (via Apple) was going to try and steer potential customers to as an alternative to Google Voice. Today in researching phone options for Storychasers I learned one possible answer to this question: AT&T Virtual Receptionist.

The service looks pretty good. It provides a toll-free (888) number for your organization, and like Google Voice it functions as an intermediary service for phone calls. When you want to dial using your virtual number, like Google Voice you dial from within the application and you are called BACK by the system. Then your call goes through. People you call see your “AT&T Virtual Receptionist” phone number on their caller ID instead of your personal iPhone number. Also like Google Voice, you can list multiple phone numbers that you want your “virtual number” to forward to. You can list up to three numbers. You can access your virtual voicemail online, but unlike Google Voice I don’t think this AT&T service provides voicemail transcription to text. When you receive a call, a recorded message from your “AT&T Virtual Receptionist” plays and asks if you want to take the call, send to voicemail, etc. This way you (or any designee who receives a phone call to your number) knows up front they are receiving an official organizational phone call, and not a personal call.

Of course the big kicker here is price. Google Voice is free to use, but it requires that you jailbreak your iPhone to use it. AT&T Virtual Receptionist can provide you with 60 “free minutes” per month, but there is not a “per minute” overage charge if you exceed 60 minutes. If you exceed 60 minutes, you have to go on “a plan” which starts at $5 for 100 minutes. The next step up is $14.99 per month for 500 minutes. Those fine print details are addressed in the service’s online FAQs.

With both Google Voice and AT&T Virtual Receptionist, every minute you talk counts as cell minutes on your existing phone data plan. AT&T is sort of double billing here with this service: You’ll be charged for cell minutes used on your data plan when you make a call using the “AT&T Virtual Receptionist” service, AND your AT&T Virtual Receptionist account will be charged minutes. So you end up paying more. With Google Voice, you’re just charged for cell phone minutes you use with your provider on your existing plan, there is not an “extra” charge for using Google Voice. Google Voice can provide you with a local phone number for most dialing areas, but unlike “AT&T Virtual Receptionist” it can’t (at present as far as I know) provide you with a toll-free number.

The main benefits I see to the AT&T Virtual Receptionist service over Google Voice is that you don’t need to jailbeak your phone to use it, and it provides a toll-free number for others to use who call. Even with the release of Black Rain as an alternative to the iPhone Dev Team’s jailbreak software, which Sarah Perez highlighted in October 2009 for Read Write Web, the iPhone jailbreaking process is reportedly still tricky and not for the faint of heart. That’s precisely what AT&T continues to bank on, I’d wager, in allegedly forcing Apple’s hand to keep Google Voice applications out of iTunes and off the formally sanctioned / approved iPhone applications list.

I’m not positive what we’re going to do with our available phone options for Storychasers, but it seems likely we may go with the AT&T Virtual Receptionist service. According to Yappler the iPhone app for AT&T Virtual Receptionist become available in October 2009.

I wish Apple was able to permit / allow Google Voice in iTunes for the iPhone. If it was available without a jailbreak, I’m sure we’d go with Google Voice instead based on the cost savings and transcription to text features which it provides.

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For at least six months I’ve used the WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in to provide visitors to my Wordpress blog, who use a mobile device like an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Blackberry, with a quick-loading mobile interface. This plug-in is a bit unusual, since it also requires a custom theme which must be uploaded into your wp-content/themes directory. The main problem with the plug-in, however, is that it is not compatible with “caching” plug-ins like wp-cache, which I’ve used now for several years. Caching plug-ins are beneficial for busy Wordpress blogs because they create static versions of webpages and thereby reduce the mySQL server request load for your web host. This can increase the speed / performance of your Wordpress blog for visitors, and in the extreme (a situation which has NOT happened to me, to date) can make your blog “DIGG proof.” This means if a post gets popular on a site like DIGG, Slashdot or reddit (which means your page/site is attracting thousands of hits) the server should be able to handle the load and not fail. When a mobile-theme plug-in is not cache-compatibile, sometimes mobile visitors are shown the “mobile version” of webpages, and sometimes they are not, depending on whether or not the full-browser version of the page has been previously cached. This defeats the purpose of using a mobile-accessible plug-in or theme, so it’s important to work around these issues.

I’m not sure the first time I saw it, but I’ve had “mobile-blog theme envy” ever since I first saw the WPtouch Wordpress plug-in / mobile theme in action on my iPhone. James Deaton runs it on his blog, Wandering Tech, and every time I’ve seen it in mobile form the past few months I’ve wanted to use it too. Like all the plug-ins and themes I use on my Wordpress blog, WPtouch is free… so not running it wasn’t a question of money, it was a question of time. I tried awhile back to activate it on my blog, but it was not compatible with wp-cache either. So, to get it to work I knew I’d have to do some research and tweaking. This evening, I decided to give it a try.

I found the following video tutorial online, which explains how to configure the WP Super Cache plug-in for Wordpress to work with WPtouch.

This process required the following steps: I deleted my old wp-cache cached pages, deactivated the wp-cache plug-in along with Wordpress Mobile Edition, deleted both of them from my hosting account (with Cyberduck), as well as the previously required Carrington Mobile Wordpress theme, and then downloaded WP Super Cache. After uploading and activating it, I followed the instructions in the above video to configure it for WPtouch plug-in compatibility. To add information about Creative Commons licensing at the bottom of the mobile theme, I had to edit the “footer.php” file located in the wptouch / themes / default directory.

Whew! This took awhile, but it was worth it. I’m delighted with the results!

I spent some time customizing the mobile version’s background, colors and fonts, as well as the Wordpress “pages” which are displayed in the mobile menu. I like how WPtouch permits custom icon configuration for Wordpress pages as well.

I was interested to see the WPtouch categories menu button displays post categories in descending order by the number of posts in each.

By clicking on the “podcasts” category, my month of “podfading” (a term I heard from Dan Schmidt back in 2006) in December is revealed! I hope to post podcasts at least once every two weeks in 2010, so hopefully lapses like this won’t be common. K-12 Online took a lot of my time in December, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

Mobile web access is going to continue growing by leaps and bounds in the years ahead. Are your organizational and personal websites mobile-friendly? If you’re running Wordpress, WPtouch provides a clean, effective and free way to provide mobile accessibility.

I updated my Wordpress plug-in colophon on my about page, reflecting the changes to plug-ins I made tonight.

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access, accessibility, blackberry, blog, iphone, ipod, mobile, nexus, plugin, smartphone, theme, wordpress, wptouch

I submitted the following to iTunes tonight as a review of the free Fluent News iPhone app. Fluent News is also available as a mobile-optimized website.

I like Fluent News a lot as a news app. I wish it was integreated with Google Reader so I could share articles I read in Fluent News via Google Reader, but I am not sure if that integration is possible. In addition to Google Reader I now use Fluent News, the NPR iPhone app, and the CNN iPhone app to read news. Of the non-Google Reader based news apps I have tried on the iPhone, I like Fluent News the best. I like the fact that it pulls articles from multiple sources, and it has a very clean presentation. Great especially for a free app.

These are my notes from several K12Online09 presentation videos I watched this evening riding the Heartland Flyer Amtrak train from Fort Worth, Texas, back to Oklahoma City on my iPhone. This post was blogged on my netbook running Win7 using free Windows Live Writer software, downloadable from Microsoft as part of Windows Live Essentials. A Windows Live account/login is not required to download or use the software, if you have your own blogging site not hosted by Windows Live. I will share a separate post about configuring and using Windows Live Writer. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Angela Maiers: Engaging Our Youngest Minds

Angela makes the case for bringing passion into teaching and learning, and differentiating instruction for students based on their individual interests and passions using technology

Kern Kelly: The iPod Touch in the Classroom

Kern highlighted 12 different iPhone / iPod Touch applications
- Stanza
- Google Mobile
- Skype
- RSS Flash g
- DropBox
- Recorder
- DataCase
- StoryKit
- Air Mouse Pro
- Google Earth
- Dictionary! (free, downloads offline)
- Kindle for iPhone
- Memos provides a way to edit Google Docs offline on an iPhone or iPod Touch

Amazon now owns Stanza (I HADN’T REALIZED THIS PREVIOUSLY. I SURE HOPE AMAZON DOESN’T KILL STANZA, I REALLY LOVE IT, ESPECIALLY HOW IT PERMITS THE CREATION OF EBOOKS FROM DIFFERENT DOCUMENT TYPES.)

Use Headset with microphone to use Skype on an iPod Touch Thumbtack Mic works well with iPod Touch

Use recorder and put a provided IP address in a web browser connected to the same network

as the iPod Touch to download recorded audio

Kern’s site with all these links: tinyurl.com/itouchineducation

Cheaper to get Applecare warranty for an iPod Touch through Amazon than on the Apple store

Notes from Konrad Glagowski’s keynote address in the "Leading the Change" stand of K12Online09. (Self-driven and Classroom-based: Professional Development in the 21st Century)

We need to view our classrooms as sites for professional development

We need to know who we are as teachers, understand our context and our needs as teachers,

to have a good schema as background to understand things we can learn from a PLN

Health of our PLNs should be measured by our reflections and conversations which come about

as a result of our PLN and interactions with members of our PLN

should enage with 2 or 3 critical colleagues
- otherwise we will "learn from" not "learn with"

we need to listen to our classrooms first
- classrooms should be the first node we explore and connect to/with

Quotation from Claxton in 2002:

If the main thing we know about the future is that we do not know much about it, then the key responsibility of the educator is not to give young people tools that may be out of date before they have been fully mastered, but to help them become confident and competent designers and makers of their own tools as they go along.

The 21st century demands that we help our students become inquirers and critical thinkers. To do this as teachers, we must become inquirers, critical thinkers, and researchers ourselves. Our professional practice must be in a state of continual experimentation.

Relationships between students and teachers are critical for classroom-based professional development

- should see our classrooms as places for democratic engagement

Transformative practice begins with reflection

3 critical elements in reflection: describing, questioning, confronting

critical to articulate our context, discover limiting forces and practices behind our everyday practices which define and may limit who we are / what we do, work to effect change to move beyond our limitations

Definitions of reflection:

Dewey in 1933: “Active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends.”

When we reflect from a content perspective, we can focus on our:

• context
• instructional practices
• assumptions
• goals and values

Reflections on classroom practice are NOT just about solving problems, but primarily about identifying them first (Schon, 1983)

asking ourselves “what are my weaknesses” is one of the toughest things we can do as professionals

An essential question to address as a reflective practitioner is: “How do my beliefs and values affect my classroom and my students?

Our teaching does not have to consist of “immutable practices” (changing our practices depends on identifying what our current beliefs are, and where they come from)

Today we need to examine our classroom practices regularly

• we need to engage students regularly in inquiry and knowledge-building
• we should challenge our existing frames of reference and assumptions
• critiquing our daily practice on a regular basis is critical
• everyday contexts should be used for our PD focus

We can find our own voices as teachers through this reflective process

Quotation from Claxton in 2002:

What is needed now is “reconceptualization of education as the creation of cultures and contexts within which young people develop the epistemic mentalities and identities characteristic of lifelong learners.”

Schools need to become communities of learning, sites of inquiry

I TOTALLY AGREE WITH KONRAD’S POINTS HERE, BUT ESPECIALLY LIKE THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION

Quotation from Claxton in 2002:

Schools should become communities of practice where the predominant practice is ‘learning’ … and where, concomitantly, the ‘elders’ of the community are themselves exemplary learners and skilled coaches of the arts and crafts of learning.”

Our students do not need schools which see their role as providing pre-packaged knowledge

THESE WERE ALL GREAT SESSIONS. SUPER TO BE ABLE TO TAKE THESE IN AND REFLECT ON THEM IN THE TRAIN, SINCE I’D PREVIOUSLY SUBSCRIBED TO THE K12ONLINE09 VIDEO PODCAST CHANNEL AND DOWNLOADED ALL THE VIDEOS PRIOR TO OUR TRIP!

I tweeted about this recently but am so impressed with the iPhone app “MobileRSS – Free Google Reader” I’ve decided it warrants its own post.

I now read at least 95% of my news and blog updates on my iPhone, and most of those updates come through Google Reader. MobileRSS, also available as a $3 paid app without advertising, supports all the functionality of Google Reader and does many of those things even better than the official mobile web application version, like changing categories for different subscribed feeds. If you use Google Reader and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, give MobileRSS a try. I’m loving it.

All our family’s iPhone and iPod Touch applications are listed on my iPhone apps Google sites page / wiki page, updated as of 28 December 2009.

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google, iphone, ipod, news, reader, rss, touch, aggregator

This afternoon and evening, my son and I worked on “pruning” down our list of installed applications in our family’s iTunes library. In our family of five we now have four different iTunes accounts, but because we sync our iPhones and iPod Touches to the same Mac running iTunes, we are able to legally share all our songs and applications. Several iTunes gift cards were given and received this holiday in our family, so we’ve been purchasing some new songs and applications the last couple of days. With the amazing array of free as well as commercial applications now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, this shared list of installed applications has grown quickly and without periodic pruning can get a bit out of control.

When someone in our family installs a new application, it is always installed on everyone else’s mobile device by default unless that person deselects / unchecks the application for their device in iTunes before syncing. This makes it challenging to get rid of an application once and for all, for everyone. If an app has been deleted from the computer’s iTunes account, but remains on an iPhone or iPod Touch, the next time that device is synced iTunes asks if you want purchased applications or songs transferred over which are on the portable device but not the main iTunes account. We dealt with this today by first syncing all three of our devices, to transfer over songs and applications which had been purchased on the mobile devices and we wanted to keep, and THEN we deleted apps from the computer’s iTunes account. We got mom’s iPhone down to three screens, or 48 apps total, which was a big improvement for her. (She doesn’t want all the games Alexander uses and many of the programs I use.) I’m not sure how many apps Alexander has installed now on his iPod Touch, but I still have 10 screens worth, and together we have 164 applications (not counting the built-in / default apps like Clock, Calculator, etc.) I updated this list on my wiki page for iPhone applications, and am including the screenshots below in this post as well. These are screenshots I made from iTunes using Skitch.

I’ve tried to get Yappler’s iPhone app sync application to work several times to create a list of these applications, but can’t get it functioning for some reason.

In no particular order, these are the applications we deleted / scrapped from our shared iTunes library today:
- Color Lite Crossword
- Missiles
- Geared – Free
- Molecules
- Mission Mars
- Sleep Tracker
- Geocaching Toolkit iGCT
- Nambu
- Knights Onrush Free
- Ragdoll Blaster Lite
- Twitterific
- Dots Free
- Word War
- Flycast
- Knocking Live Video
- Touch Pets Dogs

Hopefully all these applications we scrapped were FREE apps and not ones we’d paid for! I wish iTunes had a graphical way to show which applications have been actually purchased from the iTunes Store and which are free / were downloaded free. That would make it less easy to unknowingly delete a paid app forever.

The iPhone Apps I’m using the most every week now are:
- HootSuite
- Kindle for iPhone
- Bible (YouVersion)
- Pano
- Echofon (I’ve been using this MUCH less lately in favor of Hootsuite, however)
- Evernote
- Facebook
- Plurk
- Pandora
- Wordpress 2

I also use the Google Reader Mobile web application/site almost every day. I’ve been using Fluent News Reader a bit, but still prefer Google Reader because of its sharing options.

Dropbox (h/t jed) is the newest iPhone and desktop application (to me, anyway) about which I’m most excited. The Discovery Channel’s iPhone App and Instapaper Free are in the running in this category as well.

Do you know of a straightforward way to share your iTunes application lists with others, other than Yappler’s app? It would be great if a developer made it easy to share app lists, similar to the way Netflix users can share their queues and other lists of watched / rated movies.

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The iPhone is configured by default, most likely because of a bandwidth-limiting agreement with AT&T, to NOT download podcasts, software or other files via iTunes which exceed 10 MB in size. A couple weeks ago I wanted to download the latest NPR Technology Podcast “on the road,” but the filesize was greater than 10 MB so I couldn’t get it over 3G.

Thankfully, I was able to drive up outside a coffee shop with free wifi and “borrow” their bandwidth for the quick download. The 13 MB file took about two minutes to download over their high-speed wifi connection.

While it was a slight inconvenience to not be able to download this podcast over the 3G network, it is WONDERFUL that awhile back Apple added the capability to download new podcast episodes like this without having to sync your iPhone or iPod Touch to your laptop or desktop computer using iTunes. Functionality like this makes the iPhone and iPod Touch even more “autonomous” / standalone devices than they have been previously. Syncing an iPhone or iPod Touch to another computer is still an essential part of the device’s functionality (and a great feature from a backup standpoint, in case it is lost or stolen) but I’m enjoying these enhanced opportunities to update content without syncing with a desktop version of iTunes.

One of the things I’ve learned the past few years, especially working with rural schools implementing 1:1 learning projects, is that it’s not necessary to provide “community-wide” wifi coverage for students to bridge the high-speed Internet “digital divide” locally. While ubiquitous wifi would certainly be great, it’s expensive and much more complicated to deploy than simply providing different “hot spots” in the community where students (and others) can “get connected” when needed.

This past October after I helped facilitate a videoconference during the opening session of the Oklahoma Academy’s fall Town Hall, I visited with a participant who told me about some exciting work being done in some Oklahoma communities by tribal governments deploying wifi. I’m eager to learn more about these initiatives, because those communities would certainly be well positioned to help students in the community benefit from a 1:1 learning initiative.

I’m eager to give the new Nexus One smartphone from Google a try, and see how its functionality compares to the iPhone. The Nexus One is rumored to be coming soon, in early 2010. Since it will be sold unlocked, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to use the SIM card in my existing iPhone and simply plug it into a Nexus One to start using it. Wouldn’t it be great if mobile technology could be that easy? It will be interesting to see what bandwidth download limits (if any) are imposed by default on Google’s smartphone answer to the iPhone.

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Earlier this month I shared a presentation both face-to-face and online via Ustream giving an overview of the Storychaser’s Mobile Learning Collaborative. Instead of using Keynote (which I generally prefer for presentations) or PowerPoint, I created the presentation for this session using a Google Presentation. I was delighted to realize every Google Presentation is automatically formatted to be mobile-ready, displaying well on an iPhone or iPod Touch. I haven’t tried or seen one on another type of Smartphone, but am guessing they’ll format well on other mobile platforms as well. This is a screenshot of my preso on my iPhone.

There is great value in composing and sharing ideas in the cloud. This is the first presentation I’ve created entirely on a netbook, using Ubuntu Netbook Remix as my operating system. It’s fantastic to be able to create and share presentations as Google Presentations which are immediately accessible and available on a variety of operating systems and platforms, including mobile phones. In the years ahead, it will become even more important to share content which is mobile-phone friendly.

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My 12 year old son recently discovered the website FanFiction.net, and today we had a discussion about eBooks which got me thinking about the possibility of creating eBooks from online FanFiction books. It turns out this is possible and free to do, using the programs Fanfiction Downloader and Stanza. Stanza is distributed as a cross-platform application. FanFiction Downloader is distributed as a Windows-executable file, but can also run on Macintosh as well as Linux computers thanks to Wine. I used WineBottler to successfully run Fanfiction Downloader and create a .mobi formatted eBook which I was able to transfer to my iPhone for reading using the eBook reader Stanza. Note that remarkably, I did NOT have to use a Windows-emulator program like Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion to do this, or own a licensed copy of Windows. Wine software rocks!

After launching Fanfiction Downloader, you will need to paste the URL of the FanFiction book you want to download. Click continue. In step 2, click CONTINUE to check the downloadability of all the available chapters. In step 3, click the radio button to “Save as a Mobipocket eBook” and click DOWNLOAD. If you use Wine to run Fanfiction Downloader, the program should save your converted eBook in the following directory:

Your home directory / Wine Files / drive_c

Transfer the converted .mobi book to your iPhone using these steps, which involve opening the eBook on the desktop version of Stanza, enabling “sharing” from the “Tools” menu, and then browsing for shared books on the iPhone / iPod Touch version of Stanza and clicking the download link. Note the iPhone/iPod Touch needs to be on the same wifi network as the laptop or desktop computer running Stanza for this ebook sharing functionality to work.

The biggest disadvantage of this method is for “books in progress,” all steps must be repeated when new chapter(s) of a book become available. Perhaps someone will write a native iPhone / iPod Touch application which will do this in a cleaner, more straightforward way. It’s super that this CAN be done at all, however, using FREE software tools than run on ANY platform. Thanks to Wine, as a Mac user I don’t have to wring my hands and say, “Gee I wish someone would port that program over to Macintosh!” That’s quite a beautiful thing.

Note the free Stanza desktop application can convert just about any text file into an eBook which can be read on mobile devices like iPhones and iPod Touches. Gary Stager boldly challenges educators and students engaged in 1:1 laptop learning programs to write novels with their technology devices. Now you know how to take those novels and share them with each other via free eBook Reader applications.

Now go and write them, and empower others to write them! Our children and students need to be PUBLISHING on websites like fanfiction, not simply reading and consuming the stories there!

H/T to a MobileRead forum post thread from last month for the reference to FanFiction Downloader.

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