When I graduated from college in December, a part of me thought that my time as a learner was over. I had this great consulting position in Seattle, with plans to make a move after the holidays, and was ready to leave the role of “student” behind. Yet, I am finding more and more that education is ongoing, especially when it comes to learning languages. Now that I am living so close to the Canadian border and have a little more time on my hands to dedicate to recreational learning, I intend to learn French through online tutoring and language courses.

Learning a Language for Travel

Why learn French? One reason is because I want to travel, especially since I live so close to Canada. One of my college buddies just recently hired the best movers Calgary had and packed his bags for Alberta. I plan on visiting him, especially now that I live within a day’s drive of him, and many of the communities around Calgary speak French. To make the most of my opportunities and to experience some of the local culture while I visit, I want to know conversational French.

E-Books in Multiple Languages

Now, with just a click of the mouse or push of a button, you can purchase a book in just about any language for your Kindle, Nook or other e-reader. While translations of popular international works are available, some of the essence of the work is lost when it’s translated.

I suspect I’m not the only one following this trend. In a study that ended December of 2011, around 43 percent of Americans age 16 and older indicated they had read something whether it be a book, magazine or newspaper, on a digital device. While not all of these individuals owned e-readers, and some were reading on a tablet, regular computer or even cell phone, this statistic shows a growing trend in the popularity of digital reading material.

I suspect that even more people are going to jump on board the e-book revolution as prices continue to decrease. Some may find that learning another language opens the door to even greater reading experiences.

Broadening Culinary Experiences

In addition to reading, I love to cook. I think that learning French will help me as I try to whip up dishes like Blanquette de Veau and Confit de Canard. Knowing French may not improve my culinary skills, but it will improve my pronunciation of these fabulous dishes.

These are my reasons for learning a new language. Yours might be different. Yet, I dare say that in today’s global world, you can, and should, consider adding a foreign language to your list of skills. It’s easier than ever with the rise of online learning options.

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img: Some rights reserved by Kristina Schuster

About the author: Henry Fitzgerald is a technology consultant located in Seattle. When he isn’t geeking out over the latest social media platforms and Apple gadgets, he enjoys spending his time sailing and attempting to cook. Follow him on Twitter or read more about the latest tech news at technected.com

While online learning is more and more becoming a part of our lives, the technology used to deliver online lessons is often lagging behind. Take the virtual classroom for example.

I’ve tried many (free) virtual classroom applications over the years, but none really convinced me.

What is a virtual classroom?

It’s an application (mostly run within a browser) that facilitates online conferences or conversations with streaming audio and video. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Apparently, even in the year 2012 running a stable audio/video conference or group session in a browser across a variety of different devices and operating systems proves to be rather difficult.

I’d like to talk a bit today about \options, problems, and possible solutions to the Virtual Classroom issue.

The Standard Setting

I first came into contact with Virtual Classrooms through online teaching platforms such as Myngle, EduFire or WiziQ. The way it works is that for listing your courses on their platforms you get to use their Virtual Classrooms during your lessons (for a commission).

In the three examples quoted above, the Virtual Classroom software is proprietary. It’s far from open, in other words. Edufire, for example, used Adobe Connect last time I checked. Myngle and WiziQ have something of their own. The software needs to be licensed. Whether teachers pay for the licensing directly or through teaching platform commissions, someone’s got to pay – which wouldn’t be that bad if the classrooms were actually worth paying for!

Everyone’s trying their best, I know, and I don’t want to go around blaming people, but sometimes it seems to me that although there are millions of students and teachers learning together online, we still don’t have a technology that makes group learning convenient and stable enough to take it seriously. In my own teaching practice I stopped using Virtual Classrooms altogether because of these shortcomings.

More Open Alternatives

Besides the aforementioned teaching platforms and their licensed Virtual Classrooms, there are other more open solutions. Here are two examples:

blueteach.com

vyew.com

Within a few seconds anyone can quickly start a classroom, connect webcam, microphone and invite people. As far as I’m concerned there are no commissions involved (although you can pay for premium features such as being able to hold larger classes, etc) and the applications are relatively stable.

If it weren’t for one thing…

Yes. Flash.

Flash, My Problem Child

The late Steve Jobs caused a sensation two years ago when he claimed that “Flash is no longer necessary”. Up to this day, many Apple devices still don’t support it.

Regardless of Jobs’ reasons, it’s a fact that all of the above mentioned classrooms will not run on an iPhone or iPad! Correct me if I’m wrong, but apart from Adobe Connect which was converted into an iOS app, all the others won’t work.

Now, even if we ignore Apple’s distate for Flash, it’s not much rosier for PC/Android users.

Why?

While Flash works well for running little animations, banners, games, etc. it’s a total catastrophe when it comes to running fullfledged applications like Virtual Classrooms within a browser. (By the way: If you want to find out if something is Flash-based, right-click on it. It will tell you, if it is.)

With all the flash-based virtual classrooms that I mentioned above I experienced hiccups on different devices in different circumstances. All it takes is for the screen to freeze and the flash-plugin to crash. Ever seen this little fellow here?

I don’t want to bash Flash in general. It’s great for little apps. But as a productivity tool is rather … counter-productive.

The last thing a teacher needs is for his classroom to crash while in a lesson. A teacher needs to focus on communicating with people. If the screen freezes or he gets locked out of his own session (yes, that actually happens!) then there are serious issues that can’t be fixed by updating or adding more features on the mess which is already there.

Instead, I believe we need to wipe the slate before live online learning in a Virtual Classroom can be taken seriously. The novelty factor of e-learning has worn off. The fact that it work somehow is not enough.

As great as Flash is for other things, in the real of online learning we need something else, entirely!

The Virtual Classroom Of The Future

To better understand what needs to be done it can be helpful to look at the evolution of whiteboard technology.

They came in all shapes. The first ones were Java-Applets (rather unstable), then came the Flash variety (more stable) and now we have tools like Google Draw and Conceptboard, which use HTML-5 if I’m not mistaken. Even if this new generation is not perfect, either, it’s a lot better than what came before and as anyone who has ever used Google Docs before knows, it’s stable enough to be relied on as a working tool, plus they run on all mobile Apple devices, too.

Now, I ask: where is the Virtual Classroom of the Future that is not Flash-based? Is it even possible?

Conceptboard has just added live streaming video/audio to its features via tokbox, and while that too runs on Flash, at least it’s only the webcam/microphone component and if it crashes, the whiteboard continues.

I think this more modular approach is a step into the right direction. Instead of putting all your eggs into one basket (and making a mess when something goes wrong) having different (relatively independent) modules in a virtual classroom environment may just be the solution…

What are your experiences with Virtual Classrooms? Are they stable enough or not nearly so? I’d love to hear from you.

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 Some rights reserved by HikingArtist.com

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

To summarize, one of the major points that McLuhan seems to be making is that the invention of print is closely connected to a psychological development within man, namely his detribalization and the isolation of a particular way of looking at the world which could be classified as linear and systematical, in the sense of successively removing man from the world in the formation of a new sense of “objectivity”.

In order to understand this better, he takes us on a tour through medieval reading and writing culture which differed significantly from the 20th century outlook on literature but might be experiencing a revival today in the major shift occurring in publishing and reading, as I’d like to show in the following paragraphs.

1. From Isolation To Integration Of The Senses

“If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all of our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our eyes and ears and other senses remain the same.”

McLuhan argues that due to the invention and proliferation of print, the visual sense of man has been (over)stressed to an extent where i becomes isolated. This can be seen in an extreme in the example of speed reading courses where students are taught to disconnect the eyes scanning the text from the inner verbalization, thus speeding up the information intake.

Compared to most modern writing in books and newspapers, in medieval times the writing in manuscripts looked very different, almost as if it wasn’t meant to be read as much as meditated upon.

In addition to the very visceral style of the letters, these manuscripts were full of colorful illustrations and marginalia.

One could argue now that they seem far more visual than our modern blocks of immaculate black & white paragraphs, but it’s true only in a superficial sense. In fact, if we study the way people produced and read these manuscripts, we find that these works were not generated through isolation of the visual but portrayed an integration with all the other senses. These manuscripts were immersive in the truest sense of the word, inviting the reader to participate with heart, mind, body and soul, as it were.

The ebook and the way electronic texts are being published show signs of returning to a more holistic harmony of the senses, at least potentially:

• On an e-reader, the fonts, font-size, paragraph spacing are not “set in stone”. They can be adjusted fluidly to the mood and capacity of the reader in any given moment
• ebooks can contain not just illustrations which can be explored by tapping or clicking, they can also contain videos and sometimes have a “text-to-speech” function turning the written words into an electronic spoken performance.
• by linking and crossreferencing an ebook to the whole body of human knowledge in form of the Internet the isolation of traditional print has become malleable

2. Authorship

“[T]he Middle Ages for various reasons and from various causes did not possess the concept of ‘authorship’ in exactly the same significance as we have it now. Much of the prestige and glamour with which we moderns invest the term, and which makes us look upon an author who has succeeded in getting a book published as having progressed a stage nearer to becoming a great man, must be a recent accretion. The indifference of medieval scholars to the precise identity of the authors whose books they studied is undeniable. The writers themselves, on the other hand, did not always trouble to ‘quote’ what they took from other books or to indicate where they took it from; they were diffident about signing even what was clearly their own in an unambiguous and unmistakable manner.”

It seems that now in the 21st century we are returning to a state where the author no longer overshadows his work, but where, potentially, the content counts first.

For the last few decades, books have been increasingly connected to their authors. Often, books were only published because their author was a public figure, however marginal. The interest in the person of the author came first, and the text itself was only read because of what it revealed about its author. The very essence of book marketing hinged on the person of the author, promoting the work through talkshows, book signings, etc.This is still very common today, but it seems the significance of authors has reached a climax and is challenged by new modes of electronic publishing

If people like a picture, a song, or an article on the Internet, it is often completely irrelevant who produced it, except for the fact that knowing the source will lead to more and similar works. The blogging platform Tumblr is a good example of this. Something gets reblogged, not necessarily because its author is well-known, but because the image/song/text speaks to the blogger and she wants to proliferate her own experience/opinion/feeling through the medium of the discovered artifact.

Also, in the field of independent book publishing we see a trend where authors need to become ever more creative and inventive to bring their works to a public who doesn’t know or care about the author while potentially being very interested in their works.

The growing disconnection between author and artifact leads to another important issue: copyrights. The burning debates at the moment, as I see them, are not so much about the morality of pirating but rather about the changing entitlement of authors and artists. In a way, it’s already to late for arguments. The fact that we are having these discussions only shows that author and artifact have already lost the cemented relation they enjoyed only a few decades ago.

3. Sharing

“To copy and circulate another man’s book might be regarded as a meritorious action in the age of manuscript; in the age of print, such action results in law suits and damages.”

Social Media seems to return us to this more tribal state where “pirating” (in a strict sense, even posting a picture on Facebook or Pinterest is piracy) is not viewn as a perpetration, but as a sign of respect.

It’s also said that if there’d been copyright laws as we have the today in the time of Gutenberg, the printing revolution would never have happened.

The current copyright wars can be understood from three different camps:

• artists (and their representatives) who have been popular pre-Internet and demand compensation for the unauthorized reproduction of their works online
• media consumers who refuse to pay for something that is also available for free
• artists that have grown in and through the Internet who realize that only because people circulate their works can they gain and maintain an audience.

We shall see in the following years whether the first group (which is also the older one) will be able to withstand the growing demand and insight of the second two.

But again, the fact that we’re discussing this at such a large scale at the moment only shows that the old mode isn’t working anymore.

While artists and their representatives turn into policemen, prosecuting consumers with the help of Internet providers and governments, a new global tribe is growing which is based on an economy of sharing, substituting the system of direct compensation with more indirect and subtle approaches that make for both an accelerated proliferation of works of art and encourage the production of more.

originally posted on andreklein.net

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

“The things people do out of sheer boredom! They study out of boredom; they pray out of boredom; they fall in love, get married and reproduce out of boredom; in the end they die out of boredom.”

It was the German author Georg Büchner who put these words into the mouth of his protagonist in the comedy Leonce and Lena written in 1836. And if we take it literally, the proposition of boredom as the prime motivating force in life (and death) seems like a bad joke.

But before we throw out the baby with the bathwater, let’s put the bias on hold for a second and reconsider the role of boredom in the 21st century.

A Brief Anatomy Of Boredom

The English word ‘boredom’ first appears in Dickens’ novel Bleak House in 1852 and perhaps it is no coincidence that it appeared at a time which also saw a rapid increase of steam-powered engines and mechanical contraptions. Was boredom a new privilege bestowed upon the masses by the rise of machine labor? Did pre-industrial man never get bored, or did he simply lack the vocabulary?

It remains to be seen whether boredom is a symptom of (technological) development or a fundamental part of our psychological furnishing. But at one point or another we all experienced that sensation described by psychologists as “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.”

Many philosophers have written about the topic, among them Martin Heidegger who has contributed lengthy treatises in which he argues that one should attune oneself to this seemingly negative mood rather than shrug it off in the ordinary understanding:

Isn’t that exactly the attitude we still have towards boredom today? The very idea of it seems to conflict with our notions of purpose and a “fulfilled life”. “Hard-working people don’t get bored,” we say. “They are too busy to get bored.”

Boredom In The Age Of Social Media

Clay Shirky recently said something in an interview (which I quoted before) that a lot of people (including myself) can relate to:

 I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

When was the last time you felt utterly bored sitting on a train, standing in line, staring out of your window on a grey afternoon? It just doesn’t happen that much anymore, does it? Nowadays people browse their Twitter feeds on their iPhones while standing in line, whack away at the keyboards of their laptops in trains and flood their eyeballs with a constant feed of “all you can eat” movie subscriptions à la Netflix at home.

And maybe what Sam Anderson said about playing games like “Angry Birds” is also true for many other activities now filling the time once occupied by boredom: “They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits.”

Is boredom dying out? Do we need to prescribe small dosages of boredom to escape the vicious cycle of inane activity? Can reading help bridge the states of non-doing and over-doing?

When I was a teenager and had prolonged access to computers for the first time in my life, I began to notice that it was possible to be bored in front of the computer, moving the cursor around my desktop and arranging files and folders in idle patterns. This was pre-Internet.

Later, I found out that it’s also possible to be bored online, mindlessly hopping from link to link, refreshing profiles, numbly scrolling through newsfeeds.

In a sense, as much as I agree with Shirky that we’re experiencing less and less pure boredom, Social Media and the state of “always on, always connected” seems to put us into a condition where we are neither fully experiencing activity or boredom. It’s a hybrid-state of distraction and exhaustion.

And I remember the presenter of the popular German children TV series “Löwenzahn” addressing himself to the audience while the end-credits were rolling: “Now turn off the TV! Do something else!”

It’s not that we heeded his advice, mind you. On the contrary, we mocked him and continued on our inevitable trajectory of media consumption.

But at least it planted the idea in our heads hat there is, in fact, an alternative to electronic activity, one that we’re increasingly losing sight of in the age of microblogging and hypernetworking:

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img credit: chairs: Some rights reserved by limonada / candle: Some rights reserved by Simon Greig (xrrr)

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

I do, and then again, I don’t. Googling has become such an integral part of everyday existence that we aren’t really aware of it anymore. We take it for granted that when we type stuff into a search field we get results. And Google does deliver the goods. Rarely do we need to browse through pages 2-3-4, etc.

But apart from getting good results (and learning how to get there) there’s another side to Google, a company that is increasingly mining our lives for data.

Escape Being Tracked

Have you ever noticed that when you google for something a lot, you’ll see advertising for it all over the web?

Each time you do a search on Google, your queries are tracked and connected to advertisers.

It’s no secret that Google doesn’t even shy away from looking through personal emails, either, all in the name of presenting you with “custom tailored product offers”, in other words: ads, ads, ads.

Now, you could say: What do I care? I use an ad-blocker anyway, and never see any ads.

So do I. But, just like with Facebook, there’s a looming sense of never quite knowing anymore what kind of information this company has acquired about you over the years.

In other words, Google builds a profile about us consisting of our (gmail) emails, our searches, our friends (on G+), the videos we watch on YouTube and so on and so forth.

When Google Glass becomes a reality, there’s a chance that everything we see 24/7 will get logged and archived in HD, ready to be bombarded with ads, requested by state officials, nosy employees or rampant hackers. In that case, running against a lamp pole won’t be the biggest problem.

Breaking Out Of The Filter Bubble

The “Filter Bubble” is a concept referring to the phenomenon that when you google for certain things, you’ll get more of them and less of everything else.

Trying to satisfy searchers, Google’s search results are increasingly personalized. When two people google the same term, they can get radically different results:

Each person has his own Google, so to speak, his bubble. If you don’t log out, delete your cookies, etc, this bubble will influence everything you put into the search giant.

And sometimes you have to wonder whether’s that’s really helpful and enabling people to find what they’re looking for quicker or just  a trick to keep people clicking on more ads.

Personally, I use a lot of Google products, but recently, taking all of the above into consideration, I replaced my gateway drug into the Google universe with something else.

Yes, I’m talking about the Google search engine. There is an alternative!

Friendly Ducks Instead Of Bubbles And Advertisments

It was a few months ago that I first stumbled across duckduckgo, a search engine that promises to be everything that Google is not, while still delivering excellent search results.

It…

• doesn’t have advertising
• doesn’t save search queries
• doesn’t bubble its users

At first I was sceptical. I was so accustomed to Google that it seemed impossible to switch. But a few days ago I finally replaced my standard search engine with duckduckgo.

What seems like a silly name for a serious search engine is actually a lot of fun.

In a way it feels like re-discovering the Internet anew. And the technology? It delivers great results, and very quickly. This is no hastily pieced together geekatron engine. This thing has wings, and it soars.

And, best of all, using “The Duck” (as my wife and I like to call it) doesn’t bar you from using other engines, too. When you aren’t happy with its results, you can use still use Google or Bing as secondary choices.

But it’s a great feeling not to be dependent on Google. (Almost as good as quitting Facebook)

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img: bubble  Some rights reserved by JMMarkiewicz

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

I went straight from idea to application, to publication, all in just a few hours.

Am I saying that it’s dead simple to publish a bestseller? Certainly not. It’s still a lot of work.

But the playing field has been significantly leveled.

Perfect Is The Enemy Of Done

Did you ever meet someone who’s great at drawing, making music or anything and you said: “Wow, that’s great, why don’t you share this with a wider audience?” and then the person said: “Well, I just don’t think it’s good enough, yet.”

Now, this is not to say that there’s a sleeping Beethoven or Shakespeare in all of us. (If there is, he has to be coaxed out with some serious work or by the right environment.) Maybe some things really shouldn’t be published.

On the other hand, there is indeed lots of mediocre stuff out there. And much of it is by no means the product of people like you and me but backed by corporate capital. If you take any engineered pop starlet of the day and scratch the glossy surface, beneath there’s just mediocrity. Mediocrity all the way down.

They just slapped on so much make-belief make-up that we don’t bother to look twice.

The Entertainment Industry’s Fear Of Risks

Maybe, Hollywood and Co. aren’t in a crisis because of the Internet. Maybe, it’s not piracy that keeps their sales down, but mediocrity. How often does a big label sign an unknown artist just based on his gut-feeling? How often is not a great idea but simply extensive marketing research the raison d’être for that next Blockbuster or thinly clad “diva”?

The entertainment industry, despite all of its apparent evil, is also “just human”. They don’t want to take big risks. If there are millions at stake it’s better to be on the safe side than to do something new and ground-breaking. So they’re just busy rehashing whatever worked the year before. The result: increasingly boring books, movies and music.

An Army Of Ideas: Just Pick One

On the other hand of this spectrum, there’s people like you and me. We don’t have access to expensive equipment or mountains of cash to dominate production facilities and distribution channels.

But we don’t have anything to lose. And our ideas are legion.

Shifting away from physical goods to digital goods, online production and distribution are just a click away and often free.

Whereas movies are still difficult to make without a lot of funding, making music has become available to almost anyone with a computer and a bit of recording gear. Writing and publishing books seems to least depend on the technology: Theoretically, anyone with access to a keyboard can write a bestseller. But in practice, it all depends on that one idea.

If you got one, go for it! If it succeeds, great. If not, get up and try again!

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img:  Some rights reserved by TangYauHoong

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

(As usual, what happened is rather inconclusive: laptop went to sleep and didn’t “wake up”. The nerds from the computer store told me motherboard is dead.)

It’s not that this is the first time I’ve seen a machine kick the bucket (I must have torn to a dozen machines in the last twenty years…) But it’s the first time I’m actually writing about it, which brings me to the first point…

1. If Your Machine Crashes, The Net Goes On

Ten years ago, when a system crashed and you slowly put the pieces back together or replaced it, you literally had to start out from zero, again. The core of the computing experience, as least as I experienced it back then, was nailed to the physical hardware.

Nowadays, when one system breaks, there’s a chance of just continuing seamlessly on another computer and still have access to all your files, contacts, etc in the time it takes to enter a username and password.

Obviously this largely refers to “light-weight” applications such as email and social networking but since Google Docs, even most of the sensitive data stuff like spreadsheets, letters, etc. can be stored in the cloud, so that even someone would go at your system with a hammer, you could just shrug off the broken hardware and continue working on another system as if nothing had happened.

By having my laptop run down the curtain and join the choir invisible, I became aware of how much of my daily user experience is already happening in the cloud. And while it’s a big part (I’d say 50+%) it’s  certainly not all of it.

Most of my creative work still happens offline. And this is where a crash can hurt!

2. Better BackUp Than Be Sorry

Before my laptop  shuffled off its mortal coil it was so kind to warn me by not waking up as usual. When it finally did came on again, I knew something was fishy so I did a backup immediately of all my manuscripts, pictures and whatnot. (I’m one of these people who know that theoretically backups are a good thing to do but never do them. Having become a bit paranoid after this episode, I found a neat little service called MozyBackup which automatically stores your stuff in the cloud. They give you 2GB for free. UPDATE: As Glenn recommended in the comments, there’s another service called SugaSync and they even give you 5GB for free.)

So when it was finally pushing up the daisies and its screen stayed black no matter how tenderly I pushed its power button, I had everything on a harddrive.

Everything that is, except the last 500 words of a yet unpublished short story I was writing shortly before it hopped off the twig.

(The geeks at the store managed to salvage the document, by the way,  and it’s now finished and awaiting proofreading – more info about this short story series here)

3. Planned Obsolence: It’s bound to break, anyway

Far from being a conspiracy it’s a simple fact that most electronics are built to break down quickly so you’ll have to buy another one, soon. There’s even a term for it: Planned Obsolescence.

And as my laptop (which had been dutifully carrying its load for about 2 years – they never last longer in my hands) finally bought the farm I jokingly said:

If the name Shenzhen doesn’t ring a bell, it’s a place in China where most (correction: all) of our electronics are produced. Despite the fact that Apple continues to make headlines with the problems at FoxConn, a factory in Shenzhen, virtually all major electronics companies produce their gadgets in Shenzhen. If you want to find out more about this, listen to this podcast episode here with the title: MR. DAISEY AND THE APPLE FACTORY.

One of my friends, a China specialist responded to the above tweet with the following:

If the name Ghana doesn’t ring a bell, either, this is the place where many electronics end up when they perish. Here’s a photo gallery of Ghana’s Global Graveyard for Dead Computers.

4. Digital Impermanence: Freeing the Message from The Medium

Interestingly, one day before my laptop dropped dead I was reading an article by Jonathan Franzen about why he thinks ebooks are bad. Like many others he argues that a book is better because it is made out of paper which is a more durable storage medium.

There’s something not quite entirely convincing about this. The ebook critics and digital storage sceptics are everywhere, arguing that in 10 years from now it’ll all be gone if we don’t start hoarding paper.

When my laptop gave up the ghost I became aware again of how flimsy the connection of an idea is to the material which carries it. There’s lots more to say about this, especially in the light of the current copyright disputes (and witch hunts), but I think we have to be careful not to confuse the content with the container.

5. Phantom Pain and Psychological Stress

Last but not least, it occured to me again how much we as humans are becoming fused with the tools we are using. They become part of us and we become part of them. While on the one hand this “extended nervous system” is a great thing, also our identity is stored and invested in these gadgets. The iPhone has almost replaced the car in terms of status symbols and Apple’s success may be largely attributed to the fact that they know how to capitalize on this soft spot of human-machine relationships which are far from neutral and unemotional.

Advertising campaigns are designed to make us feel that we are more with technology, that our gadgets will augment our life. And while I don’t want to lament this, I’m always keen to ask who we are without these “identity crutches”?

Are these things really always helping us to be “more connected” and “more productive” or do they actually increasingly shield us from relating to the world in a more direct and wholesome way?

Feel free to leave a comment below!

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img:  Some rights reserved by Josh Bozarth

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Despite the overused melody at the beginning (according to a youtube commenter it sounds like a bank commercial) and the overly glossy look, the mini-documentary features some interesting points.

• Technology is rapidly changing the world we live in
• We’re only at the beginning…
• Technology will eventually make the world a better place

Another youtube commenter pointed out that the film is just a “soft version” of the singularity, as portrayed by Kurzweil, in which we’ll all gloriously upload our brains to computers and live eternal lives of tech-augmented splendor.

The film doesn’t go quite that far – (it’s commissioned by Ericsson, after all, one of Sweden’s largest companies and as a viral video, this film is not supposed to alienate people) but it still strives to imply and fuel the increasingly popular assumption that, as the Internet (and technology in general) will get faster and more accessible, the world will somehow magically change for the better.

To me it always seems as if there’s a “leap of faith” inherent in these things. Faster Internet? Sure, gimme that. Better, cooler technology that allows me to work from anywhere and do whatever I want. Yes, sir!

But just how exactly is this going to transform the planet into heaven on earth? Technology drives behavioral change. This is a fact. But change is impartial to our preferences. It can be desirable or appaling.

Not this change technologists speak of! It’s a very specific, souped up concept of change.

As I’ve written many times before, our contemporary start-up culture has created a brand new narrative which glorifies technology as an almost divine force always in favor of the good.  (“If it’s bad, it’s just old and/or not upgraded, yet!”)

Partly, this narrative of “technology makes the world a better place” has grown out of the necessity to drive corporate structures and constantly create new markets and attract investors. (You don’t do a fund-raiser with a well balanced analysis but with praise and lopsided “proof”)

It’s a narrative that sells. It’s hyper-optimistic (“the future will always be better!”), Western-centric and capital-driven.

We can see this narrative exemplified in the way companies like Apple produce gadgets not just for their functionality but to be loved. (A similar shift happened in the auto-industry when the market began reaching saturation. Cars were not just a thing to get from A to B, anymore. They became cult-images embedded with the insignia of societal status)

In September 2011 even the White House jumped on the tech-bandwagon and launched a campaign called “The Digital Promise“, which is supposed to revolutionize American education, while at the same time American youth are revolting against the fundamentals their society is operating on. Will a handful of shiny gadgets really solve this?

Consumerism and Entertainment is the new Bread and Circuses. Technology covers both. Computers and cell-phones, fulfilling both business and leisure needs are consumer-devices, after all.

Ad after ad, keynote after keynote, we’re buying into the dream that technology will redeem us.

It’s like we are becoming a footnote in the viral video of our own lives, removed and alienated the actual (and very real) change that’s happening to us too commodified to question; the future claimed by marketing departments and sold back to us until we don’t want it anymore.

What if, always looking forward, we are becoming oblivious of our own technology-inflicted change? What if we’re wasting our lives, waiting for technology to get better and better? What if the Great Shift has already happened and it’s up to us to actually do something with it?

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

And within only 28 years it’s getting even more crowded: predictions speak of 9 billion human beings on the planet by 2040.

But it’s not just our population that’s changing.

The whole world is changing faster and faster.

Already now, we live in a flurry of technology, new gadgetry – but much of our fascination is very short-sighted (the next iPhone, the iPad “killer”, etc.)

Today I stumbled over an interesting infographic, or – actually, it’s more of a datasheet – by Michael Zappa @envisioningtech that dares to look a bit further ahead and neatly lists predicted technologies and their relative importance from now up to the year 2040.

Whatever we might say about this looking back, 28 years from now, one thing is for sure: The tech of today is outdated, tomorrow.

And the kids will laugh: “E-readers and smartphones aren’t cool.”

“You know what’s cool?”

“An exocortex!”

Click on the graphic below for higher resolution…

License: Attribution-ShareAlike via envisioningtech.com

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Like much else in the 21st Century, learning has taken to the Internet. For both teachers and students, education is becoming much more technologically focused.

And, even more prominent: the mobile revolution. Not only are we doing everything on the Internet now, but we also want to do it on the go with smartphones and tablets. The world of iPhone application development has an amazing growth rate and doesn’t show any signs of slowing when it comes to education apps.

But finding the right apps to suit your online teaching or learning needs could be the difference between academic success or failure in the 21st century. Here are some great teaching apps that can chart you on a course of success:

AudioBoo

Learning a foreign language online without the aid of hearing the language spoken in a classroom or used in discussion with classmates can be hard. Speaking and listening to a language are just as important as being able to write it correctly.

AudioBoo is a free app that lets you record and share audio with friends, classmates or teachers. You can create up to five minutes of audio and post it to your AudioBoo account or to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. This is a really great way to get online language students involved in speaking and listening to a foreign language, all while gaining useful interaction with classmates. The app can be used by both teachers and students for assignments, messages and feedback.

E-Clicker

Response is an important part of the learning process. Teachers can create polls during a lesson to gauge their students’ thoughts and interaction and then receive real-time results. The app is available at a low cost and requires only a wireless Internet connection and students with devices to access the online poll. The polls can go out to at least 64 students and the platform allows teachers to create questions and even add pictures before sending it out. Students with iPhones can participate right from their phones, but the polls are accessible from any internet-enabled device.

Polls could add an interesting spin to online discussions, forum topics and class assignments. Classroom interaction can sometimes be hard to come by for online students, and polls or surveys are a great way to get classmates chatting.

Sentence Spin

Learning apps can also be great for younger students. As kids continue to use computers more, they can easily operate computers and learn to use them for educational purposes with no difficulty.

Kids learn quickly and applications like Sentence Spin encourage two types of learning at once: grammatical and technological. The application challenges students to construct sentences, understand basic sentence elements, illustrate their understanding, create animations and then share their creations with teachers and classmates.

Students learn the basics of grammar, writing and how to communicate with their writing, all while becoming computer savvy.

Book Glutton

Designed specifically for laptops, tablets and smartphones, Book Glutton combines the experience of a literature discussion, a book club and the World Wide Web.

One of the best parts of literature is the discussion, and that can be a difficult aspect of online learning. With Book Glutton, students can read, annotate and discuss a text, all from online. Students and teachers alike can enjoy the ease of a literature discussion in an e-classroom.

Brain Honey

BrainHoney is a free app, primarily for teachers, that allows you to easily create an online curriculum, develop a syllabus, engage in lesson planning and manage your grade book online. The application also gives teachers the opportunity to interact with parents and students.

Learning Made Convenient

While the phrase ‘learning made easy’ can be controversial, most people can agree that learning could also be more convenient and accessible. The world of online education opens avenues for everyone to have a valuable classroom experience.

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img:  Some rights reserved by jonrawlinson

About the author: Henry Fitzgerald is a technology consultant located in Seattle. When he isn’t geeking out over the latest social media platforms and Apple gadgets, he enjoys spending his time sailing and attempting to cook. Follow him on Twitter or read more about the latest tech news at technected.com

Not really, no.

A windows fan-site? Nah. (Life is too short. And OSX is also just, er.. human.)

The reason for writing this post is simple: A few days ago I was working on a Windows 7 machine and stumbled onto a built-in solution for an every-day problem.

I was amazed that I hadn’t found out about this solution to something as obvious! I was shocked and relieved at the same time. This needed to be shared! (If it’s an old hat to you,  I salute you).  On top of it, I did some further research and found two other tricks that might also be helpful.

Here we go…

1. Parallel Windows

THE ISSUE: Did you ever have to review or edit two documents side by side?

It happens to me a lot when I implement reader feedback and improvements into my books.

On the left side I want to have the text with the comments, on the right without, so that I don’t have to switch windows all the time but can just transfer all the changes easily. See screenshot below:

For the past I-don’t-know-what years the only way to do this was to painfully drag the windows into the right size by tugging around at their corners. It was rather annoying so I didn’t use this parallel window mode as often as I really wanted to.

THE SOLUTION:

Windows 7 lets you arrange windows side by side easily. Here’s how it works:

Drag a window to either the left or right edge of your screen. The moment your cursors hits the border, you’ll see a grey outline covering the left or right half of your screen. Release the mouse button and your window snaps into place. Voilá.

If you’re on a Mac, there’s a little app called Cinch which does exactly the same.

No matter what system you’re using, though – having the option to display windows side by side can be a great advantage, not just while working with texts, even while in online broadcasts, lessons or any other situation where you want to have multiple things on your screen without having to jump between windows.

Especially if you have a wide-screen this is very effective.

2. Kill The Clutter

THE ISSUE: Too many windows open.

What you see below is a mild version of this problem. You open and click and open and click things until you find yourself with a gazillion of cluttered windows.

And while I trained myself to keep the number of open windows at an absolute minimum, there is another trick to deal with this problem in urgent moments.

THE SOLUTION:

Simply press the Windows key together with the “Home” key on your keyboard and all other windows will minimize, leaving you with only one in focus. Then, if you miss the clutter, you can press the same combination again and the chaos returns.

I can think of situations where a person might have hundreds of windows open, engaging in a variety of unhealthy multitasking activities while suddenly the boss calls on Skype and wants a specific piece of information.

Now the cubicle drone can take a deep breath and hit Windows+Home, minimizing both the windows and the danger of having the boss linger at his ear for any second longer than absolutely necessary.

3. Same Same But Different

THE ISSUE: Sometimes you are browsing through your files and folders and one of these windows is not enough.

Maybe you want to compare two directories.

Clicking once on the libraries icon, for example, will open your library.

But when you click on the icon another time you don’t get a new window with your precious files. Not, it closes!

THE SOLUTION:

Click on the icon with the third mouse button. That’s the mousewheel by the way. Just push it down over any shortcut and you’ll get another instance.

Note: It only works with programs that allow multiple instances, of course. Example: When Skype is open you can’t open it another time. But you can have endless instances of Chrome or Mozilla windows, explorers or whatnot

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Allegedly, the blackboard or chalkboard was invented by the Scotsman James Pillans (1778–1864) who according to his book Physical and Classical Geography (1854) taught Geography with it in Edinburgh.

Since 1801 George Baron is supposed to have used a blackboard in his maths lessons at West Point.

Although many schools have begun to replace blackboards with whiteboards, this 200 year old technology is still far from dying out…

When I was working in school, I came home everyday with the traces of my profession: chalk dust – on my sleeves and in my lungs.

The blackboard was my closest ally. It was the primary medium. It was a canvas for abstract visualizations, a message board, a playing field for the 3rd graders eagerly awaiting that five minutes of hang-man.

Over time, I developed a host of successive drawings for each grammatical issue and orthographic aberration, all filed in my brain and ready to be reproduced for new students at any given moment.

Going Digital

When I began to teach online, I experimented with various Virtual Classrooms.

Most of them came with a digital whiteboard and while they mostly served the purpose, I ditched the VCs for other reasons in my personal teaching practice.

Either they were overly complex, buggy or both. I didn’t want to waste time at the beginning of each session to explain new-comers how to get that annoying flash-based microphone input working, etc.

So, as I describe here, I went for something more pragmatic: Using Skype.

Everyone already has it installed. Everyone knows how to use it.

It comes with screen-sharing, which is great.

What about Whiteboards? There are tons of Skype add-ons but … surprise surprise… both parties need to have an add-on installed for it to do its magic.

Experience has shown that when push comes to shove, the Skype add-on system is too complicated and confusing and ultimately time-wasting if you just want to quickly jot down and/or visualize something.

So, as nice as the many third-party extensions may be, they have proven to be rather useless in practice.

What to do?

I’ve experimented with other java-based whiteboards but either they were buggy or incompatible with some devices.

Did I give up on visualizing in online teaching? Of course not.

For the most part, I have been using Google Docs Draw.

It’s HTML5, it’s stable and most of the time it just works. Voilá.

But there have been three things that I missed:

• there’s no free-hand drawing tool! (sometimes you just want to get in there and make some quick scrawls…)
• if you want to draw or add text on top of a worksheet or image, there’s no way to lock or fix the background layer. In practice that’s like trying to write on a super-slippery surface. Very annoying!
• Sometimes Google Docs asks people to log-in even when you got a doc set on “no login required” which makes it basically useless for people who don’t have a Google Account (yes, they do exist!)

Conceptboard: The Perfect Whiteboard?

Kay Alexander recently published a post on edukwest about the German start-up Conceptboard rolling out an integration for Google+.

This led me to look into the core of  Conceptboard a bit deeper.

And it might just become a perfect alternative to Google Docs Drawing.

Its features are very simple and powerful and you can see almost all of them in the screenshot, below:

Here’s what’s interesting about Conceptboard from an Online Teaching perspective:

• the upload button allows to integrate drawings and whole PDFs with many pages that then can be drawn, scribbled or written upon without the danger of having these background layers slip and slide.
• to invite participants, just copy the URL and share them with students and collaborators: There is no need to sign up or log-in for them. Conceptboard asks participants to pick a name they want to be identified with on the board but that’s it.
• Presenter-Mode: Have people follow your cursor across the board and focus what you focus on.

An important factor of these online tools is simplicity, stability and velocity.
So far, Conceptboard has passed all my tests. With the help of a quick Chrome app you can create a new board and share it within 2 to 3 clicks from the get-go. So, within just a few seconds everyone is on the same map.

It remains to be seen over time whether Conceptboard is robust enough to weather all the different scenarios of online teaching. I’m especially looking forward to use it in lessons with my younger students.

If it doesn’t break then, then it’s really stable!

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 img:  Some rights reserved by kharied

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.