My most recent blog post to TBRmLibraries is about Joan Frye Williams’ observations on adapting to change in our libraries by keeping two priorities clear: hospitality and convenience.
I love my wife. She makes me stop and think about why I am passionate about the things that matter to me. Tonight at dinner I was telling her about Friday’s mobile learning mini-conference at Roane State. She shrugged and asked, “Why should you want faculty to teach mobile-ly? Isn’t it hard enough to teach already?”
After talking to dozens of people about what mobile learning needs to be and reading hundreds of articles, this was a fascinating way to phrase the question.
Obviously, tablets and smartphones should make teaching more powerful, not more difficult. The technology we use should help solve teachers’ problems and make teaching easier. I get inspired by the potential for responsive touchscreen graphics and animations to help make abstract concepts real to students and offer teachers ways to connect classroom learning to out-of-the-class learning. If students are only thinking about the course material while sitting in a lecture hall chair, they are not really learning.
But there is an even more basic element: access to course materials. Mobile learning is about helping faculty appreciate the ways our students expect their course materials to be available. Students expect to be able to access their course materials wherever they are, whenever they want. Students expect to be able to work toward class assignment deadlines on their own schedule and to connect in some way to their professor in between classes. Students want to always know how they are doing in the class and want to create things that are both challenging and personally meaningful.
They want to connect with others. They want to share stories. They want to be engaged.
Mobile learning isn’t about iPads, Androids or Kindles. Mobile learning isn’t really about technology at all.
Mobile learning is understanding how students expect to access and use the learning resources available to them. Once we have done that, we can help students expect much more of themselves. We can help them discover they are capable of being creative, interested and involved in their own learning.
I had the privilege of presenting yesterday afternoon at the Tennessee Library Association’s 2012 conference in Knoxville. The topic was “TBR Libraries on Any Screen: Creating Mobile Libraries”.
I co-presented with Sally Robertson from Nashville State Community College. The main focus of our presentation was that Tennessee Board of Regents Libraries should build an infrastructure to share progress and problems with our various, individual mobile library projects so that we can all build our pilots faster, learn from each other and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Two major elements of any presentation on mobile libraries: availability of wireless internet access and eBooks.
So here’s the irony part. The hotel conference wireless worked really well in every room except for the one room in which we were presenting. Sally discovered this the day before when her presentation was crippled a bit by the lack of internet access. Our work around for her was to find someone willing to let her tether the laptop to their phone wireless. It worked well. Object lesson: be creative and ask people for help.
He wouldn’t tell us exactly how much that particular act of kindness would cost him. We knew we couldn’t ask that same person to allow us to tether two days in a row.
Much of my yesterday morning was spent testing my laptop’s antenna, borrowing laptops from friends to test their access in the same room. It all came to nought. And then we had the fortune of meeting Rusty, who isn’t exactly the hotel IT guy since the hotel doesn’t exactly have an IT guy. Rusty is the friendly person at the hotel who helps set things up for conferences, knows where they keep the ethernet cables and is willing to help. If anybody needs to come up with a name for their next child, please consider Rusty.
Irony #1: we presented about the importance of strong, reliable wireless internet access in our libraries by using a laptop physically wired to the ethernet.
By the way, a side observation: despite all our fannish raving about the miraculous iPad as a teaching/learning device, you cannot plug an iPad directly into the ethernet cable. If we had been presenting with iPad only, as we considered doing, we would have been DOA.
Okay. So, no real problem. You roll with things and people help you figure them out.
Irony #2: We wanted an easy way to give attendees the URLs to our project website. Being good librarians, we created bookmarks. While handing them out, it occurred to me that anyone who reads primarily on an eReader has absolutely no use for a bookmark. We can keep giving them out, but at some point we might consider not calling them bookmarks and just call them long, skinny handouts and let the people who need a bookmark make the leap.
It was a fun presentation. I learned more from giving the presentation than people listening likely learned from me. That’s why I agree to present.
I had a peculiar experience today. A community patron called, asking if they could come to the Roane State Community College library to use our wireless to buy books for her 9 year old granddaughter’s Nook. She bought the Nook for her granddaughter because she loves to read, but the grandmother lacks the home internet access required to download eBooks.
She contacted a local public library and was informed that current policies do not allow community guests to access their wireless network with personally owned devices.
The grandmother contacted us to ask if we had freely available wireless access for guests. We do. I told her we would be glad to help her connect and purchase eBooks for her Nook. However, if she just needed free wireless access, she might consider McDonald’s as another convenient option.
She’s coming to visit us, and I am glad. It was a peculiar feeling to suggest that the local McDonald’s might be more conducive place to obtain eBooks than her local public library.
This is not a criticism of our local public libraries. They are doing the best they can with the resources at hand. Just a bit disorienting to ponder this one as a hint of what 21st century librarianship has become.
Open access to wireless internet is no longer an optional add-on for quality library service. Easy, reliable wireless access has become the backbone of everything we do.
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Note: This entry is cross-posted at TBR Mobile Libraries, a new blogging project I am sharing with other Tennessee Board of Regents librarians. That blog is focused primarily on TBR efforts to establish mobile-friendly library collections and services. Occassionally, posts there intersect with concerns of Ubiquitous. Quotidian., which remains my own personal blog-child.
Interesting fact about me: I follow dozens of blogs about iPad, iOS and other Apple accouterments and yet remain relatively uninformed about the actual workplace conditions of the factory workers in China who assemble these miracle devices. There have been many recent stories, of varying credibility, about the work conditions in Apple’s Chinese manufacturing units.
I hear stories about dust explosions, blindness and suicide nets. And yet, somehow, I never can find my way to read the entire story. I hear a whisper of something ill afoot and my mind grays out.
I don’t have this problem when reading about the latest iOS upgrade features, the comparison points of new iPad vs. iPad2 or keeping track of the best new free apps.
This is called practiced avoidance. Some call it compassion fatigue. It is, undoubtedly, a kind of moral disconnect.
And yet, I feel oddly relieved to read that the recent “This American Life” story about the deplorable conditions at FoxConn were made up. As if, somehow, I can simultaneously credit myself for being more informed about the working conditions of the people who make iStuff and yet also feel absolved of some of my own complicity in the horror since this one story wasn’t properly fact-checked.
I think Erik Sherman has this one right:
Too many people will use This American’s retraction to smooth over their momentary discomfort at using products that require harsh working conditions to maintain cheaper prices and corporate margins. But the problems remain — not just for iPads and iPhones, but also for all those Android devices, many TV sets, radios, GPS units, just about every other electronic wonder of modern life. Daisey’s reporting may be phony, but when you look at the bigger picture of most consumer electronics manufacturing, he was right. The biggest shame will be if people use this episode as an excuse to go happily back to dreamland.
He’s right. I’m not throwing away my iStuff, but I’ve got to sit with this one for a while. Everything and everyone is interconnected. That’s a Noble Truth. Suffering is inescapable and happens to everyone. That’s another Noble Truth. Attachments (like to iStuff) create suffering. Yet another Noble Truth.
I’m going to continue using my iStuff knowing that the creation process harms others and probably harms the environment. Where’s the mindfulness in that?
Would the Buddha use an iPad? I don’t know. Probably not. But if he did, he wouldn’t let himself pretend that his iPad appeared magically on a lotus petal one morning. That iPhone came from somewhere. Somebody made it. Making it might have cost them something. It might have cost them a lot. It almost certainly cost them more to make it than it does for me to use it.
Sit with that. That’s mindfulness for you.
One of my major pet peeves: people who claim their first amendment rights are being denied when they get criticized for saying stupid things in public. What a joy to read John Scalzi’s open reply to Kirk Cameron who recently complained about the negative public outcry when he shared his ideas on the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality.
This post isn’t about homosexuality. It isn’t about naturalness or unnaturalness. It isn’t even really about Kirk Cameron. It is about the quality of public discourse.
To be fair, Cameron complains about his treatment in the media but does not directly claim that his first amendment rights have been denied. That would be silly for someone who just had the rather unnatural opportunity to speak on the Piers Morgan CNN talk show. If anything, Cameron has been afforded an abundance of opportunity to speak.
And that’s what I love about Scalzi’s post. He reminds us that the First Amendment wasn’t intended to prevent people from getting offended. Quite the opposite. Some people, maybe most people, need to be offended.
We are forgetting our Enlightenment heritage. America’s genius is that we are a laboratory for ideas. America is a place where people from all walks of life rub up against each other, influence each other and challenge each other to make something new. We are strong when strong ideas are born. Strong ideas are born through opposition to lesser, weaker ideas. It is a kind of survival of the fittest. Don’t be afraid to put your opinion out there but be ready to get crushed by the force of other opinions.
Scalzi says it best: “If you want people to respect your ideas, get better ideas.”
This is going to be one of those posts where I gush a bit about how much I love my iPad and how it makes me better, faster and smarter. Actually, I just want to post a quick word about two of my most favorite iOS apps: Aweditorium and Vodio. Both have become my go-to apps to discover new music.
Aweditorium is a simple, straightforward indie music discovery app. The display is set up as an image grid. Each box is a interesting photo of a band I’ve never heard of. You tap somewhere on the screen and start listening. It’s a bit like Pop-Up Video on VH1. While the song is playing, factoid bubbles pop up with random info about the band, their sound and new projects. You can favorite the tracks you like and share to Facebook and Twitter. I tweet mine so I can have an iTunes shopping list outside the app. Hope this doesn’t get on people’s nerves.
Vodio is a more recent discovery. It is basically a curated collection of videos that I am likely to enjoy based on my Google, Facebook and Twitter feed profiles. Pretty much like Zite for video. Vodio offers more than just music — news, comedy, politics, tech updates. I pretty much just go in for the music. It is a good way to see the stuff I’m not watching on YouTube because I hate browsing video on YouTube. Like Zite, Vodio seems to get smarter about my tastes as I rate videos (thumbs up, thumbs down) along the way. Found this video by First Aid Kit on Vodio. Love it. Also discovered Die Antwoord on Vodio. Not sure I’m an actual fan but they get in my head and require listening.
There’s lots of other ways to find new music: podcasts; social radio stations; Pandora, Last.fm. I’ve got my ears wide open. Where do you find your new music?
Apple announced the new iPad (3rd generation) today. We are all very disappointed to learn that it does not cure cancer. Nor does it restore sight to the blind, heal the lame or help you detect rifts in the space-time continuum. Even worse, there’s no iOS6, which was rumored to be able to establish world peace and end world hunger.
What the iPad does bring is a better screen resolution, faster processor and a violation of the normal naming scheme.
Okay, everybody take breath. Sometimes change is revolutionary. Sometimes we just improve the window blinds. If everything Apple does feels revolutionary, then we are all doing something wrong.
Despite the mocking tone, I am happy to see the new iPad generation arrive. It gets us past March 7, 2012 so we can start looking forward to the March 2013 release of iPad4!
A minor epiphany while sitting in a meeting today. Educators are starting to throw the word “mobilization” around a lot. As in, we are going to “mobilize the college”, or “mobilize the classroom” or “mobilize higher ed”. The problem is nobody know what this means. It sounds very martial. Are we mobilizing now? Excellent. Shall I grab my boots? Will we be mobilizing long? Should I pack a lunch?
The trouble with the term “mobilization” is that it doesn’t convey anything. Mobilization is a process but does not say what is being mobilized and how and where and why. If mere mobilization is our goal, how will we recognize when we have done it? How will we know when to stop?
Much better, I think, for educators to talk about “mobile learning”. That’s learning on the go. That’s learning with mobile devices like smart phones, tablets and laptops. That’s ubiquitous, real life situation, student-centered learning. We can measure that. We can describe that. We can recognize when it has happened and, hopefully, we will know when to stop.
I talk a lot. I talk about things I understand, but sometimes I talk even more about things I don’t understand. Its how I learn.
People who don’t really know me can be forgiven for thinking me arrogant, a pretentious “know it all”. Sorry, folks. I can’t seem to shut up.
Talking aloud is how I make sense of things. Talking is how I sort out my thoughts and test out new theories. I like to explain things to people so I can see how well I understand them. Sometimes I explain things about which I have no clue just to find where my gaps are.
I used to think of this particular trait as a a kind of character flaw. I’m learning not to dwell so much on the idea of character flaws. Seth Godin’s post, “Stick to What You (Don’t) Know” helps a lot.
Required reading if you are like me and find yourself saying things before you realize you are thinking them.
To quote Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
Ubiquitous. Quotidian. 