Attention And Distraction

Educators and trainers face competition for attention from mobile devices and social networking services. Of course, prior to the development of these technologies, we faced a similar challenge of attention - but day dreaming is far hard to detect than someone posting comments on Facebook or Twitter.

Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention” is an interesting discussion of attention and distraction.

You may not agree with their core argument - that we need to choreograph technologies that are under the control of learners (such as back channels) in a manner similar to how we organize more traditional classroom components - but the approach of blocking software and banning mobiles/laptops in classrooms is simply not sustainable.

Image Credit: D’ Arcy Norman

Today’s reality of connectedness is dramatically different from what existed even ten years ago. Banning is at best a short term solution that will isolate and agitate the very group education is expected to serve.

The battle for control of information and interaction has already been won by “the individual”. Organizations, governments, and universities that have not yet recognized this may continue to limp along for a while… but their current stance is not tenable.

Laptops and wireless devices are increasingly present in academic settings. Rather than assuming that their presence “takes away” from an established order of attention, we are seeking to understand how they reconfigure that order in ways that might allow for new methods of engagement. In practice, with the introduction of networked technologies into the traditional academic setting, the attention of individual audience members is redirected from a single stream of speech to the presence of other audience members interacting with a global network of ideas.

Failing New Grading Approaches

This confuses me. Basically, a prof doesn’t have the funds available to hire teaching assistants to help with grading, so he adopts a peer-review model: learners grade each other. In this instance, the union representing teaching assistants disapproved, filed a challenge, and the prof has now been ordered to discontinue the practice. I guess they now return to the previous method:

“Before Prof. Joordens introduced his peer-marking system, all the assignments in the class were written on multiple choice sheets and marked by a machine.”

Students are the real losers in this process.

Language And Connectedness

Not only are we socially connected in our learning, but the concepts that form our understanding of a subject also reveal network attributes. Understanding is a certain constellation (pattern) of connections between concepts.

At a more basic level, think of an alphabet - the richness of language is derived from a small number of distinct letter/characters. Variations and different connections form words.

Connections create words, language, and conceptual understanding, all formed by social connectedness and continually adaptations fostered by feedback and interactions.

Opera Unite

Periodically, new software appears that has the feeling of a game changer. I had this feeling when I first tried Yahoo Pipes (even though the service still remains somewhat obscure) and Wolfram Alpha.

Today, I installed Opera Unite and had was left with a sense of “wow, this could change how I interact and share information with others”.

Whenever a system is created - school models, corporations, or browsers - ideologies of the age are embedded. As a result, when circumstances change, future generations struggle to overcome this ideological legacy.

Kuhn’s notion of ordinary and extraordinary science partly reflects this struggle, but focuses on mindsets within a discipline rather than the system that is created to perpetuate those mindsets.

Occasionally, a glimpse of “something different” emerges. But, if it’s too different from the current model, it likely fades quickly.

Most innovation in browsers - including Google Chrome - is tweaking an existing model. The ideological pull of “what a browser is” and “how we interact with each other and with information” places blinders on the innovation process.

Opera Unite is an experiment in rethinking the notion of a browser entirely. Opera Unite is described as “a web server on the web browser”. I’m sure we’ll hear of many technical limitations to the approach (including security concerns).

What I’m most interested in, however, is that Opera offers a different way to think about online activities - it calls into question the ideologies embedded in browsers developed decades ago.

Article written by George Siemens for elearnspace

Source: Jun 26th, 2009 George Siemens newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About The Author

George Siemens is a theorist on learning in a digitally-based society. He is the author of the article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book Knowing Knowledge - an exploration of the impact of the changed context and characteristics of knowledge.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org

Now, it is clear that blogging will make the next big leap into mobile. Everyday, there are a lot of people surfing in Internet on their iPhones or Blackberries. Mobile traffic is growing and now is at 20% for certain types of websites.

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have already created their own mobile versions of their sites so users can have a better experience with them.

Usually, blog’s don’t work well on mobile, for incompatible content, long load times, and difficult navigation. It can be frustrating to them. Thus, today, I want to point out a useful tool called “mobify.me” for bloggers want to create a free mobile blog, quickly.

How Does To Start A Mobile Blog With MOBIFY

Mobify turn your current full version of homepage into a small screen. The result is a page that take shortly time to load up, this because your mobile blog pages have only 25k vs. the 1.3MB of the full version.

With MOBIFY become very easy and quickly to create a mobile view of your website and blogs. While you keep your site structure, domain, and brand, MOBIFY allows you to show previews of each blog posts instead of just the headlines. In addition you are able to monitor your blog by adding AdMob and Google analytics, as well.

I’m very excited to know how many of my readers are reading my blog on their mobile devices. Creating your own mobile blog is very simple. All you need to do is to follow this three simple step:

1) Go on www.mobify.me, on your dashboard, type the url of your blog you want to use to create your mobile blog.

2) Once you created your look of your mobile phone you have to insert a piece of javascript code into the head tag of your header.php. However, if you have no knowledge of php, don’t worry there is a free Wordpress plugin that simplifies the work.

3) The third and last step requires you to add a DNS CNAME record to point to your mobile URL. When somone visits your blog with a mobile device, the MOBIFY plugin will detect the device and will display the mobile version to them.
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In my view, is an exellent idea to make a mobile version of your site. I’ve found this service more efficient then the WPtouch worpress plugin. Mobile blogging is the next big hit, I would also like to hear from you, about your experience with mobile blog.

Where do You Watch TV Today? How television is made? Is it an apparatus that allows you to watch shows?

Prior to satellite dishes and high cable bills, all television was free to air, everyone could to access and no one paid for broadcasts. The downside is that there were also very few channels available.

Today isn’t more a piece of harware that can show you a few canals. Today, digital TV allows you to enjoy of thousand of canals from the same device.

What Is Satellite TV For PC

The concept behind Satellite TV for PC is: Why pay over $90.00 a month for Cable or Satellite TV services when exist a software that allows anyone to get over 3000 stations on your pc or Laptop?

Order Your Satellite TV for PC And Save $50

Satellite TV for PC aims to replacing satellite dishes and high cable bills through an easy-to-use computer program that allows anyone has a pc computer in order to access thousands of television channels from all over the world.

To get a full sense of what you can see, the image below shows just some channels out of the thousands available to you:

The main reason why you should buy Satellite TV for PC are:

• 100% Legal
• Easy to use
• No extra hardware or TV card required. You need only of a pc computer and an internet connection.
• Watch TV anywhere in the world
• Pay only a one time. You pay a small setup fee
• No subscriptions or recurring charges..ever!
• No spyware
• Compatibility. Works with all versions of Windows
• Price. Only $99.95 $49.95.

Order Your Satellite TV for PC And Save $50

Special Offer, Save $50.00 

The3dtechnologies readers can get  Satellite TV for PC ™ at 50% discount. Through a special limited time offer pay only $99.95 $49.95.

If you haven’t ordered your copy it’s not too late, you can purchase Satellite TV for PC and you are still eligible for my bonus until this post is online.

Conclusion

From my own experience, I prefer to pay only a one time for a company that I know does quality work, and I can attest this, because I bought a copy and I’m using in my notebook.

But, I reccomend it especially for for those who live and work around the world, and want to be always updated on the latest news.

Order Your Satellite TV for PC And Save $50

If you are a short on cash, don’t spend your money on stuff, you don’t need, but give priorities on the things you really want.

How are you going to buy Windows Office if you forgot to pay the water bill?
Instead, Looking for an open-source. A very good alternative to a very expensive software as Windows Office is Open Office.

Also, don’t buy a commercial operating system, for instance, by purchasing a Windows Vista. Look for a good open source software as Ubuntu that integrates firefox as default browser as well.

There are constantly gadgets and new technology popping up every single day. I know Gadget Advisor and I found some really top extensions for Firefox. It’s one of my reference sites where I like spend several minutes surfing like a monkey from post to post to find gadget or tech news.

Gadget Advisor provide you with some of information to read and research that focuses on the products and news that can be significant useful for your job.

You can find reviews about Computer Hardware as Computer software, as well. I was reading an interesting article about Logitech universal remote, today.

I have talked many times in the past about how critical it is to regularly back up your computer data. Here are some excellent online backup service, to help you to back up, and be secure.

The one major thing I appreciate is that the navigation is immediately obvious, with a blog style. Visitors can quickly view the top gadgets and tech news. I reccomend you to make a jump. Usually, when I find one site that interesting, I take consider it and tell everyone I can about it.

Are you interested like me to have multiple Twitter and Gmail accounts? Well, this article could interest you and give all information on how manage multiple Twitter and Gmail account in two simply ways and completely free.

I think, I’m not the only person has signed multiple Gmail accounts, for different utility. The trouble when you switch from one Gmail account to another is that you lose time. This happens especially when you logging in to your account at short intervals.

So, if you are interested, to check different Gmail accounts togheter, to solve this problem, you can use Gmail manager add-on for Firefox.

Gmail Manager 0.5.5 allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays your account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.

That being said, if you going from one Gmail account to another, all you need to do is to right click on the Gmail icon in the Firefox taskbar, and choose your particular account to login. Once made it, you will automatically will be logged to your chosen Gmail account.

To help prevent some of the damage this plugin allows you to use secure connection for your accounts.

Do you have thought to have more categories for your Twitter posts? Ok, the first problem is that you can not do that in Twitter. Unfortunatly Twitter don’t allows you to create multiple categories for each account. It only allows to putting all your eggs in one basket.

The answer is that you can create multiple Twitter accounts for different topics that you want to tweet.

Step 1) Once you have multiple Twitter accounts, you find it troublesome to log into many twitter accounts.

Step 2) The Mattinator allows you to tweet to multiple Twitter accounts from one place.