I am loving the new Apple Stuff from MacWorld

I cannot believe that folks are disappointed in the announcements at this week’s Macworld. This is clearly a situation where the expectations have gotten so high that simply being amazing is a disappointment for the market. What a bunch of knuckleheads.
I really like the fact that my iPhone just got better through a free upgrade. I was all prepared to pay another $400 to get GPS in my iPhone – and no, the current feature is *not* GPS – but it is close enough for 80% of what I want to do. The best application for this is saying “Where is the closest steakhouse?” or “Where is the closest Best Buy?” – this is like science fiction stuff. And I just downloaded it for free. It is somewhere between 500 feet and 1/2 mile in accuracy in my testing. It seems that my daughter’s iPhone purchased in December has better GPS accuracy than my phone which was purchased as soon as iPhones came out. In side by side testing her phone is better – kind of weird.
The even cooler thing is that my daughter upgraded her iPhone software without even talking to me and figured it all out herself. Got to like Apple’s ability to write software for consumers.
The new Apple Air Macbook is simply awesome – one again Apple challenges the other vendors to really know what folks need – no disk drive at all – great move. No Ethernet – great move. Solid-state disk as a way-too-expensive option – great move. Apple s god at taking future stuff and making it today stuff. This is making a portable portable – I kind of miss the really ultra-portables like the Vadem Clio and the Nec 800 – lets watch the Air morph into a 3Ghz 2GB 13 hour battery screamer in the next few years and then say “Steve missed the mark”. We must walk before we fly. The Apple Air is already ready to glide long distances – lets give it a while and see where it goes.
I personally credit Apple with straightening out the mess of multiple wireless specs when they picked one and introduced the Airport. They take advanced stuff and make it common place and then up the manufacturing and then reduce the price – and then the other vendors jump on and follow – further increasing the economies of scale for everyone including the folks who don’t buy Apple hardware.
I even am geeked about the gesture stuff in the Air – I really like gestures on my iPhone – yes I initially thought they were lame – but that was until I got good at gestures – now I love gestures and happily teach gestures to unsuspecting people at a dinner table. People (myself included) never appreciate the depth of an Apple design and second guess – until they live with it for a while and realize that Apple designers were right all along – it takes skill to do something that most people think is wrong – but then end up being right.
Here is the other coolest thing – the next time I get a laptop – I won’t get a compromise laptop like the one I have now (MacBook Pro) – which is a pretty fine desktop + laptop combo. It has the disk space and expansion of a desktop (sort of) and it is a bit heavier than 3lbs so it is light (sort of). When I next buy a computer I will get an absolutely bitching desktop with like 8 procesors and 2TB – then I can do a bunch of video editing. And I will have a laptop that is light and powerful capable of doing development and video editing – just not the heaviest editing. Think of the world going forward as a desktop plus a “shuttlecraft”. And the Shuttle craft is plenty powerful on its own. But the mother-ship can have a crew of hundreds.
Oh yeah and the last thing – did you notice that the new laptops from the side look just like the alien pods that came down the lightening bolts in War of the Worlds? Yeah – you are feeling me.
Oh yeah one last last thing – I wonder how many employees Dell sends to Macworld – how else will figure out what next years Dell’s are supposed to imitate.. Just when Dell got out their own shiny black imitation iMac – now they need a War of the Worlds shaped shuttlecraft portable laptop with curved edges…. Sucks to be a Dell industrial designer the week after MacWorld. I would love to be a fly on the wall at the Dell design meetings this Monday.
Ok – It is a Friday and I had fun today doing some video editing so I am in a good mood.

Pedagogy: Teaching in a Semi-Public Manner

Since I am interested in Open Courseware and the long-term benefits of open materials to society, I am teaching my courses this semester in a semi-public manner – I am trying to think of my materials as “open first” or “public first”.
I will protect only those materials and information that I feel need protecting.
Using Sakai as my LMS system has been great because it has a lot of features that allow me to remix my own content in Sakai. Frankly over the past few years features and capabilities have been added from many of the Sakai developers that make this fun.
What is amazing to me is how much of this I can already do with Sakai – just knowing the ins and outs of Sakai’s features – of course it does not hurt that I was part of adding these features into Sakai over the past few years.
It also helps to have spent a bunch of time talking to folks at Cambridge, Oxford, and Leeds to understand the “more open” approach to teaching that is present in the UK. (Video)
If you are interested in taking a look at my semi-public site – go to www.si182.com
In the rest of the blog post, I outline some of the things I have done.

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A Quote from Noah Botimer

Noah just dropped this little gem in an E-Mail on a list – I figured I would grab it and keep it forever.

I suppose I’m also trying to mention that “Sakai” is at least four things to us:

  1. A collaboration / learning system

  2. A framework for building collaborative tools

  3. A community of schools, affiliates, and generally cool/brilliant people

  4. A foundation of visionaries to steward 1-3

So, when someone asks “what can I do with Sakai?”, the perspective is usually #1, but we shouldn’t forget 2-4.

Dallas Cowboys, A Class Move by Terrell Owens backing Tony Romo

Somehow this year I am more interested in football than usual. The playoff games are good and there are a lot of good teams who are on the brink of destiny. Also I work on lectures on my laptop during the games so it is not completely unproductive.
This morning there is a video clip of Terrel Owens crying a bit as he defends Tony Romo’s recent vacation to Mexico. Basically he says “back off my teammate – we lost as a team” and then he breaks up a bit in a tough manly way. He breaks up in a way that if you made fun of him – he would pound you into dust.
Here is my point – this is leadership. Terrell Owens is a veteran player – he knows what it is like to have the media ready to blame him for everything that went wrong.
Frankly for the Dallas Cowboys this has been a pretty good season – you don’t win the super bowl every year – and this year they did better than expected. For the media to define the season into a failure because of a close loss to a good team in the playoffs where Tony and the Cowboys played very well – but just game up on the slightly shorter end of the stick – would be a crime and not good for the Cowboys prospects next year.
So after the game, Terrell did what he knew he had to do. He did something that made sure that the attention was partially on Terrell and not exclusively on Tony for the next few days. As a veteran he stepped up and directed some of the media frenzy at himself to take some away from Tony. And it worked – CNN this morning talked more about Terrell than Tony.
And after a few days – no one will care. The media and fans will realize that this was a great season for the Cowboys and instead of looking for blame where there is none, they will get thinking about how to make next season better and supporting their quarterback. And Tony can learn from the loss and hopefully do better next year for the Cowboys and take them even further in the playoffs.
Class move Terrell.

Restoring Sound after iShowU / SoundFlower

I like to use iShowU to record my screen – sometimes I do record system audio. iShowU uses Sound Flower to do this. Most of the time – iShowU properly disables SoundFlower when it is done – but sometimes it does not. This is what you do when SoundFlower is stuck on (this is Mac OS/X 10.5)
Preferences -> Sound -> Output
Switch the output back to your built in speakers.
You know this has happened when you try to change the volume on your mac and the mac refuses to change the volume and you see the little “international not” symbol in the little volume display that pops up.
This fix is also described at the Soundflower page:
http://www.cycling74.com/products/soundflower

Spain Visit Notes

In my recent visit to Spain (15-Dec-2007 – 20-Dec-2007) my primary intention was to work technically with the multi-university Campus project building interoperability between Sakai and Moodle using OKI OSIDs and the Campus Project OKI bus. I am very excited about this project because as far as I know this is the first time an organization has decided *not* to choose between Sakai and Moodle – but instead – they decided to use both Sakai and Moodle.
This is a great challenge and there is a talented and well funded team in place making very good progress. As with any time you venture into uncharted technical waters – time becomes and issue. The teams are working under a lot of time pressure – so I wanted to come and visit as soon as classes were over to see how / if I could help. I scheduled five days in order to visit all of the Sakai universities in Cataelonia – Lleida, Valencia, and LaSalle in Barcelona. Previously I had only visited Lleida.

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