Inside View from Ireland

Learning through Internet-Mediated Communications

OUR FOUR-YEAR OLD learns via internet-mediated communications and she hasn't started formal schooling yet. She's touching screens to learn more things this year than I ever imagined.

I'm amazed at how she experiments in her own pathways of discovery. She is drawn into differentiated interpenetrations by exploring on-screen activities ranging from clever iPad apps, science videos, multilingual YouTube clips, multilevel gaming, and usage-based approaches to learning the alphabet. As I watch her, I marvel at the leaps we have made with the interface between life activity, learning, and cognition. Then I consider her immediate future in the traditional school system and hope there's enough in the classrooms where she will sit to continue her interest in self-learning through information technologies. Mia still has not discovered the hours of dinosaurs and historical timelines that await her, just a simple tap away on her iPad or Android screen.

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Shot of Mia exploring the Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore.

edchatie

iPad Neck Strain

AFTER MONTHS OF HARD USE, the iPad has brought us neck pain and shoulder discomfort. But there's hope for the afflicted from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Harvard researchers could have viewed iPads in my Flickr photostream where my family is caught in full flow with the iPad, holding it in laps, in hands, on tables, and propped up to watch videos. Across all of these modes of use, Harvard researchers concluded that people run a "higher risk of neck and shoulder discomfort compared to normal laptop users" because of the poor posture when head and neck angles are strained.  

Nothing in the iPad sales literature points out that your head and neck require more forward flexion when using a tablet device. If you've a tablet and you want to avoid the strain, you should consider specific placement for your iPad.

My View of Apple's Education Initiatives

I USE APPLE products to learn. Apple and learning have been part of my life since 1984. But I'm not convinced the interactive Apple way is best in all cases.

 

You Can Tell the Creatives by Their Phones

"WHY DON'T YOU GUYS just get 4G phones?"

Watch the answer on YouTube.

apple

Watching Irish iPhone Sales Plateau

THE IRISH SMARTPHONE market has moved from Nokia dominance in 2007 to a market with Apple being the phone to beat. But if raw market share is any indicator, Apple has hit a plateau in the Irish market.

Five years ago, Nokia had 50% total market share in Ireland. Today, when looking just at operating systems in the smartphone sector, Nokia holds third place behind Android and iOS. But these kinds of numbers will dramatically switch in the next five years. The big reason for the change: Nokia can leverage a very capable Windows Phone offering that will attract Blackberry owners and entice enterprise IT managers running Exchange or Sharepoint services. At the personal level, if an iPhone owner still has a working Nokia N95, I believe the new Lumia series of phones will merit a second look from that specific customer. It you liked the N95, there's a lot to like about the Nokia Lumia.

Best iOS App for Christmas

WE ARE GIVING away several vouchers for iTunes and expect the gift money to convert into apps like Cut the Rope Experiments from Zeptolab UK Ltd, one of the most favourite apps used in the house at the moment.

You can see four-year-old Mia's reaction to the app as she plays it with her mom by clicking the character at left or looking at the embedded video below. We have spent big blocks of time trying to figure out ways to cut, blow and pop into the frog's mouth. Cut the Rope has always been a favourite on our iPad and "experiments" is one of those graceful iterations that proves the developers have a sense of humour and an awareness of physics. It's good clean fun and so impressive that we're being led into shops in search of a stuffed animal version of the icon. You can click on the icon to watch part of the game or scoot below the break for the embedded version.

HoursTracker Helps GTD

I AM A BIG FAN of HoursTracker, an iOS app that is helping me burrow through important tasks.

In fact, the $2.99 app (also available for free) is doing more to positively affect my daily workflow than any other speed drills or GTD regimen. Part of the reason is how I carry the iPod Touch with me everywhere so I always have the app to hand. Every time I adjust the iPod's earbuds I think about what's on the HoursTracker schedule. I'm recording tasks as religiously as a time-motion study researcher because I'm bribing myself with a monthly pay-off based on what the app calculates as my billables. I'm also relating the app to my old skool Moleskine notes. The combination of the two of these practises improves my time-on-tasks by reducing my tendency to drift out of focus.

Check back in another month to see if HoursTracker is working as well for me when the heat of the academic term subsides.

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GTD

Learning from the Shared Jobs Story

I GOT THREE COPIES of Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography and along with Neville Hobson I am watching how people share passages from this excellent book.

I didn't expect to get two hardcover books and one Kindle edition but I failed to empty a wishlist and just like that, people dropped me copies. I put the two 600-page tomes on the shelves of the LIT-Clonmel library where they should get ambitious circulation because extracts from the book feature in three different creative multimedia final exams this year. The electronic version is illuminating because of the fascinating nature of shared passages. When the book magically arrived on my Kindle, the most-read passage concerned religion after the book's first week on sale. In that passage, Jobs says, "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery."

But in subsequent weeks, the most-highlighted passage changed.

My Personal iTunes Hell

MORE THAN ANY other piece of software, iTunes is most likely to suck down 100 percent of my CPU and grind my work to a halt.

Yes, fanbois, iTunes sucks more of my W7 2.8 Ghz 8 GB RAM processor than the much-maligned Flash. And because I need my processor to work, not just run my laptop's fans as space heaters, I have taken charge of iTunes and started to aggressively figure out ways to minimise its use. This is a challenge for me because I've used iTunes as far back as I can remember with an iPod that I got for Christmas 2003 and with a dozen devices in between. Repeated syncs, multiple iTunes accounts, and disparate forms of digital media have often confused iTunes to the point where more than 500 tracks are unfound whenever I sync. The tracks are in the folder iTunes uses to keep my earbuds happy but iTunes cannot figure out the tracks.

And worse, iTunes won't recognise my iPod Touch so I couldn't upgrade it to iOS 5 until I did a few things below the break.

Apple, Steve and Me

AS APPLE SHARES PUSH above $400, I realise I've enjoyed riding the wave of disruption that Steve Jobs unleashed upon our culture.

My first colour screen computer was an Apple II GS in 1985. I paid to see Pixar's Toy Story 2 in 1999 and Finding Nemo in 2003. My second MP3 player was an iPod in 2004. I enjoyed poking around Apple's Fifth Avenue store in 2006, feeling empowered because I didn't buy anything on my walk-through. By 2010, we had an iPad and two iPod Touches in the house. And even though I've spent less money on those devices than I've spent using my Kindle, our three-year-old daughter is very happy to hold a TV (the iPad) in her lap as she watches videos wherever she wants in the house. That lovely empowerment from Apple is justification on its own for the new highs enjoyed by the shares.

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