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Monday, July 15, 2002 |
Cell Phones Don't Contribute to Learning
"People are using cell phones everywhere, even in schools, leading some school systems to ban them during the academic day. 'Cell phones don't contribute to learning and are potentially a distraction,' says Thomas Sherman, Virginia Tech professor of education. 'There are already enough distractions; there's no need to add another.'
Sherman, who researches how children learn, explains that cell phones may inhibit younger children from learning the full range of communication.
'Cell phones mediate or 'stand between' people,' he says. The words are sent but the non-verbal information is not. Some consider the voice tone, facial expression, and physical gestures as important to the meaning of a message as the words. When communication is frequently mediated, it is possible children will not learn these subtle aspects of communicating well. Today much communication is mediated with telephones, computer e-mail, and video. It is appropriate to limit this mediated communication with young children....
'There are no good reasons for children to have cell phones,' he says. One of the reasons frequently given for youngsters to have cell phones is to allow them to be able to contact someone in an emergency. 'But schools are safe places so emergencies don't happen often,' Sherman says. 'Schools are good about recognizing emergencies and making the appropriate contacts. Besides, it is not good to give children the impression schools are unsafe - exactly the opposite of the truth....'
It also is not accurate for families to think that the cell phone is making it easier for daily planning. Sherman suggested that waiting until the last minute to make plans -thus necessitating a call to the child - is a poor model for children. It is a better model for children to be learning to plan and study with a longer perspective. Parents should keep children informed and within a well planned context." [EurekAlert - Technology & Engineering]
I understand turning cell phones off during the school day, but this guy just doesn't have a clue about how families use cell phones in this day and age. It has nothing to do with leaving every day's plans to the last minute. Clare's cell phone is her home phone and therefore, it's her major connection to the outside world (including her mother!!) whether she's at school or at home.
We don't give cell phones to Brent (6) and Kailee (8), but we will at some point in the future, specifically for safety and connected-ness.
11:52:19 PM Permanent link here
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Pop-up Ads Coming to A TV Near You
"Muddie writes 'The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that television execs and advertising agencies think product placement and the 30 second commercial spot are not getting the respect they deserves from us consumers, so in order to combat us ignoring them, there will be pop-up ads taking up the lower quarter of your screen during normal programming. Not only that, but the ads will run during relevant portions of the programming (see a guy shaving in the mirror, get a pop-up ad from a razor company). Do 'They' think we just don't see enough advertising in a day? If you aren't busy throwing things through your television yet, you can read the article over here (with no pop-up ads).' " [Slashdot]
Okay television executives - make up your minds! Is it a contract that programming is free and pure and commercials come in-between, or are you dropping the lawsuit against SonicBlue's ReplayTV digital video recorders because it can ignore commercials? You don't get to have it both ways.
Actually, I don't mind this kind of advertising on TV, mainly because I'm only paying partial attention anyway, and I'll learn to ignore them just like I do ads on web sites. After all, if I can ignore the ubiquitous flashing monkey, I can handle this. I'm all for them exploring alternative advertising models and moving forward.
11:33:07 PM Permanent link here
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Thanks going out to masukomi! She was kind enough to point out to me that O'Reilly has a mailing list aimed specifically at librarians in order to highlight new products, reviews, and conferences. Cool! (They also have one for professors/instructors.) I'll let you know how the content looks after I've been on it for a while.
11:17:36 PM Permanent link here
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The Day I Turned Uncool
"I recently found a little gem of a book while idly browsing at the Borders searching for something new and possibly amusing. The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-up sounded like something I would write so I bought it and have been recommending to everyone I know.
When growing up, we all think that we won't ever be as dull as our parents but, ever so slowly age catches up with us all and before we know it we're reluctantly becoming uncool. It's the little things at first, mowing the lawn, laundry on a Saturday night then one day the revelation comes that the world is no longer your oyster and it hits you; you have become your parents.
Each of the chapters are 'confessions'; "I played golf". "I take pride in my lawn", "I spend a great deal of time engaged in home-improvement projects", "My social circle has shriveled and shrunk", "I went to a wine tasting", "I am no fun anymore", "Caffeine has become my recreational drug of choice", and "I had a little midlife crisis". It's witty, sharp and hilarious prose mostly because you've been busted, you're uncool. :) " [Axis of Ævil]
For me, it was the realization that I had taught myself to floss daily and wear my seat belt (separate actions - I don't do them in tandem). They're both "good" things, but I'm definitely a grown up now. The final signpost - throwing out my back.
8:43:31 PM Permanent link here
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In the June issue of Computers in Libraries, Michael Schuyler writes about "The Next Big Thing: Super-PDAs Do It All." I like his description of where we're headed and I very much agree with it.
"The first issue is that cellphones and PDAs and wireless are mergining into a single digital appliance. At a certain point you will not be carrying around a PDA and a cellphone and a camera and an MP3 player, all with wireless Internet access. It will be one piece of equipment, very small, without even a keyboard. It won't need even a stylus because you will talk to it, and it will talk back. If you want to see what the first generation of one of these looks like, albeit still with a keyboard and without language skills, go to http://www.danger.com and look at the 'Hiptop.'
Hold that thought. Now walk into your local public library, wired for wireless with a hub in the ceiling. You'll have an instant online catalog on your PDA and instant high-speed Internet access. It will be like walking into a bubble of Internet and catalog access. Within the bubble you are automatically connected. No more waiting for a PC or scheduling your personal time slot. You just have to be within the 100-foot radius of the hub (indoors) or within 300 feet (outdoors), meaning the parking lot of the library will be an Internet hub 24 hours a day. This is the Starbucks approach. People in libraries keep saying we absolutely must become community centers. This is how to do it....
The Big Thing comes about as your PDA gains intelligence, going from a mere conduit to smart searching engines and advancing to being an assistant in every sense of the word. It will be your first line of defense in the world. It will have hooks to your bank account, your stock broker, your bookie, and your medical history. It will know your blood pressure, your heart rate, and whether or not you've taken your pill. It will make your dinner reservations or your airline reservations, and schedule any meetings in between. It will be capable of translating any of the world's major languages in real time. Its GPS (Global Positioning System) module will know where you are. It will call the cops if you need them, or tell you what to do if the cops stop you. Your lawyer, if it's not the PDA itself, could be there by the time the car stops rolling. It will nag you to get places on time, and you'll probably argue with it."
The article isn't online, but you can get a copy from your local public library. Volume 22, Number 6, pages 28-29.
5:56:13 PM Permanent link here
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" 'Can newspapers help make record companies obsolete?. - By Robin 'Roblimo' Miller - I just downloaded Internet Porn from The Washington Post's Web site. It's one of the quirkier songs available from MP3.washingtonpost.com, a section of the Post's site that allows local musicians to self-publish their work online for free. MP3 download sections are not yet common in daily newspapers, but if enough of them pick up on the idea, newspapers could become as strong a promotional force in the music ...' [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
'Wow. Way to completely sidestep the major labels for getting the word out. Since it's local news, the papers have an interest in promoting the bands, and the bands then have an in with a major media outlet in their area. Fantastic.' " [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
There's something incredibly cool about being able to say you downloaded "internet porn" from The Washington Post! This is a really interesting direction for such a major newspaper to take, and I'm glad to see it's working out for both the paper and the artists:
"Cliff Mays' band, Heydevils, is promoted almost entirely on the Internet and by word of mouth. They currently have three songs available for download through the Post's site, and, Cliff says, 'The Post has helped a lot with exposure. People go from the Post's site to our heydevils.com site, where there are more MP3s to download, and they can
Read the article and try to tell me Maria shouldn't be blogging!! Hey Andy R. - the software's open source, buddy!
Here's a question for the collective memory: did the Washington Post ever offer a service (around the hey day of MP3.com's My MP3 time) that let you bank your own music on their site? I could swear they were doing this, but I can't find a reference to this now so I'm wondering if I just confused it with the local music implementation. Anybody?
1:28:01 PM Permanent link here
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"Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, 'N') people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with TrackBack you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for 'comment notifications'.)" [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
"I agree. I think TrackBack is a very important technology. I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one. But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network. Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting. You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls. With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive." [Curiouser and curiouser!]
TrackBack is a fantastic idea, because I could never manually find all of the posts that might point to mine. So it goes out and harvests them for me, but the problem becomes time to review them. Depending on how popular your posts are, it might be useful to Trackback notifications into your news aggregator. Of course, this could pretty overwhelming for folks like Dave and Doc but then again, it might save them the type of finding the cites manually.
And could you build a master database of these things and organize them by category? Kind of make a Social Sciences Citation Index for your site? Something like that would be extremely useful within the Illinois libraries blogosphere I want to implement.
Addendum: David Gammel pushes back with some great thoughts about A TrackBack-Enabled Thesaurus.
8:32:07 AM Permanent link here
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E-Mail Storage Issues Facing North American Companies
"Osterman Research finds that 51% of North American companies using Microsoft Exchange message systems have e-mail retention policies in place and 84% say they enforce mailbox size quotas....
According to a recently-released whitepaper from Osterman Research, 31% of North American companies say the average size of an e-mail mailbox in their message system is between 26 and 50 megabytes (Mb). Additionally, 46% of these companies say that e-mail users in their system send up to 50 messages per day....
Message system administrators and users alike should easily relate to Osterman's findings regarding the extent to which users complain about mailbox size quotas. Osterman asked administrators to rate, on a scale of one to five in which five indicates "complain a great deal," the level of complaints in their company. Most respondents (30%) rated the level of complaining with a three, but 22% rated the level of complaining with a four and 14% said users complain a great deal." [eMarketer]
I'm getting to a point where I won't be able to take my email with me if I ever leave SLS - it's too freaking big!
There has to be a way for k-logging to help with this for at least a percentage of these people. Luckily, we don't have quotas in place at SLS or else my external email would be a real problem. Here I am with my own blog, I'm trying to move into k-logging, and I really haven't integrated email into that equation yet. How on earth am I going to get my staff to do this?
Are there any guidelines out there yet for how to integrate various information sources (web, email, chat, etc.) into a k-log, or is the format still too young?
8:13:05 AM Permanent link here
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Now, the Synchronized Family
"The current wave of families keeping group schedules owes much to the growing number of households with PC's and the rise in palmtop usage among mainstream consumers, who often use those devices' scheduling programs. The number of families with at least one PC and one palmtop computer grew from 900,000 in 2000 to 3.6 million this year, according to MetaFacts, a market research firm in San Diego." [New York Times: Technology] (Emphasis is mine.)
That is a pretty stunning statistic - one that further illustrates why libraries, newspapers, and other groups that traffic in information need to become portable and shift their services into the mobile (and wireless) market.
12:30:08 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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