Thanks to TechRepublic who bring us a useful summary of the current Garner thinking on trends in technology having a significant impact on the enterprise over the next 3 years. The summary table says it all:
Key terms and takeaways for me are:
Context-aware computing (CAC) uses end user activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction …
App stores … an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs
Next-generation...
Several of my Twitter follows started using ScoopIt as a curation tool for web pages and presenting the link collections as a collage of adjacent tiles each of which shows a suitable image and a headline. ScoopIt is currently in beta but it did not take long to receive and invitation.
Immediately I liked the simple bookmarklet for capturing web pages and the effective integration with the major social networks. As is only to be expected you can share any collection you create under a suitable topic and explore other curation topics created by others. Anyone can suggest additional links for a curation topic, and for your own topic you can decide whether to add the suggestions or not. Key page links from other topics can be rescooped into your own topics which is a handy feature and another measure of popularity.
The stats feature gives you an indication of how popular your curation topics become. I initially chose four...
It is disappointing that so many otherwise competent writers on technology are publishing totally dismissive reports about Chromebooks.
I should start by admitting I don’t yet have a Chromebook to test, but I can’t wait to get one and use it productively. This post was triggered by a colleague sending me the post by Galen Gruman with the indicative title ‘Whatever You Do, Never Buy a Chromebook’. Yes, it was a totally negative review, negative piled on negative. The only ones I agree with are the lack of Bluetooth, Skype and convenient printing. Personally I see the ’primitive’ hardware and OS as huge positives. I have a great deal of my files already in the cloud and look forward to having more of them there. Better a Chromebook that a PC/Mac laptop costing up to 5 times as much.
I already have constant Wi-Fi/3G Internet connection on my iPhone/iPad devices where...
I believe the coming of the Chromebook is the nearest we will come in the next months to the so-called post-PC era. Many scoff at the Chromebook as being already superceded by the tablet, indeed we are seeing the term crapbook becoming popular, but I beg to differ.
Apple luddites keep up the mantra of the iPad leading us into a post-PC world. I love my iPad but it definitely is not a PC replacement but most certainly is a PC-extender and, for that matter, an iPhone-extender. My iPad is integrated into my daily life at times and places where neither a PC or phone are useful devices. But as I have noted before the iPad is not a laptop replacement, and is only a first step towards a post-PC era.
Most definitions of a post-PC era, like...
I was able to conduct my annual online survey of the computing and handheld devices used by my CORE114 Knowledge Society class over the last few days. The questions were adjusted to come in line with a similar survey conducted by colleagues with a new media class, so they are not quite directly comparable to my 2010 survey.
At the time of writing 116 students (63%) had replied out of a class of 184. Students are drawn approximately equally between our Business, Law and Humanities faculties, and for 40% of students it is there first semester. The computing devices results are:
...
While I was happy I could read email, tweets, blog posts and statuses on various social networks, I worried about generating the more lengthy, meaningful pieces in this spectrum of vital communication channels. As it happened going down with a heavy cold half a day before leaving, and headed for a cold part of Aus, Launceston, dampened my creative juices. Nevertheless I created this post to test the composition capability of iOS.
Amazon burst out of the blocks this week with the announcement of Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, aptly named cloud computing services. The more generic Cloud Drive gives a free 5GB of cloud storage (leverages the S3 service) intended to store your digital media but can also store any type of file. Cloud Drive can be used independently of Cloud Player which...
My colleagues and I were recently asked by our Associate Dean, Teaching & Learning, if anyone was using Prezi for presentations. He pointed us to a video claiming Prezi is a PowerPoint killer. I have been using Prezi on an off for more than a couple of years. My reply to him:
I have used Prezi for a couple of years or so but only for giving special talks. It is easy to use once you master the click and zoom approach and produces smoothly animated presentations in which you can embed media of various kinds. Here is a Prezi I did a couple of years ago:
Another summary talk about Twitter I gave for a lecturer in another Bond subject is at: http://prezi.com/kggkswvvxlnl/...
These are my tool choices to contribute to the top 100 tools for learning list for 2011. All bona fide teachers can contribute by following the rules on the contributions page. This year I am using the blog post contribution option so that I keep a record of my votes.
Chrome is now my browser of choice now that I am weaning myself off Zotero. Not all sites, even some Google sites, are Chrome compatible. For example the mapping page for Picasaweb albums in Chrome always fails for me. So I need to keep Firefox to hand for these cases.
Nevertheless I am surprised almost every day by the effectiveness in terms of productivity gain of the extensions and apps available via the Google Web Store. My favourite of the last couple of weeks is the Readbility extension that has been around for a while but is so useful in its new incarnation for Chrome. In blog posts, news articles and similar, Readability removes all the extraneous header, footer and sidebar contents and just shows you the text and links in the main page content using a readable font family and size.
As an example, the first paragraphs from this page fragment:
...
