According to the 2011 Census, the average Australian is a 37 year old woman, born in Australia and with both of her parents also born in Australia. She has English, Australian, Irish, or Scottish ancestry. She speaks only English at home and belongs to a Christian religion, most likely Catholic.

She is married, and lives with her husband and two children (a boy and a girl aged nine and six) in a separate house with three bedrooms and two cars in a suburb of one of Australia’s capital cities. They have lived in that house for at least five years, and have a mortgage where they pay $1800 a month.

She has a Certificate in Business and Management, and drives to her job as a sales assistant, where she works 32 hours a week. She also does unpaid work around the house for five or more hours a week

Via @PetaHopkins 

1. The provisions in the Digital Economy Act 2010 that extend PLR to audio books and loans of on-site e-books should be enacted.
2. Further legislative changes should be made to allow PLR to take account of remote e-loans.
3. The overall PLR pot should be increased to recognise the increase in rights holders.
4. A number of pilots in 2013 using established literary events should be set up to test business models and user behaviours, and provide a transparent evidence base: all major publishers and aggregators should participate in these pilots.
5. Public libraries should offer both on-site and remote E-Lending service to their users, free at point of use.
6. The interests of publishers and booksellers must be protected by building in frictions that set 21st-century versions of the limits to supply which are inherent in the physical loans market (and where possible, opportunities for purchase should be encouraged). These frictions include the lending of each digital copy to one reader at a time, that digital books could be securely removed after lending and that digital books would deteriorate after a number of loans. The exact nature of these frictions should evolve over time to accommodate changes in technology and the market.

It is good to see recommendations 1 through 5, but the sixth is really peculiar. The report seeks to propagate the known limitations of a physical book, one copy in one person’s hands, and more hands means the book deteriorates over time. The whole point of an ebook is we escape this physical tyranny. The Luddites have won again.

To regular readers of this blog please note that all posts tagged with the #h817open label are my work items submitted to the Open Education MOOC. Feel free to ignore these h817open posts.

My favourite quote:

Choosing and choosing well has always been a valuable literacy, but in the context of a world of knowledge abundance, choice is [has] slowly become the most important literacy.

In the end, and this is my bias showing, the community becomes the curriculum.

A full read of the post is strongly recommended.

My Sonos came with free beta access to the Songl music service which I started using in February 2012. Although still in beta the free trial just ended in the first weeks of August. Songl was a very good introduction but I found its selection of music, especially for a person in their 60s like myself, to be limited. I won’t be paying $12.99/month from September.

In the first quarter of 2012 I signed up for Rdio, the first major international streaming service available in Australia. Like most services with two tiers of subscription I needed the more expensive version to use with Sonos. Rdio is $12.90 per month. The music selection is extensive and it has the Pandora-like radio station model for playing music related to a named favourite artist. Except I find the Rdio artist stations very poor. Artist and album selection though are excellent. It is the interworking with Sonos that is critical for me.

When they arrived I also signed for trials for other services: JB HiFi Now $99/year ($8.25/month), Spotify $11.99/month, and MOG $11.99/month. I subsequently abandoned JB HiFi Now (poor music selection) but took up subscriptions for Spotify and MOG. So now I have three services that work well on my Sonos as well the my own 27 GB of ripped music collection on my central home file server. (Sonos plays all the world’s Internet radio as well using the built-in TuneIn app and podcasts with Stitcher.)

Off course all these music streaming services are accessible on iOS, Android, Windows and OSX with offline syncing on the mobile phones, so you can listen to music outside the house wherever there is 3G or Wi-Fi. It is the Sonos interface to MOG, Rdio and Spotify that is important to me. For comparison I show the top-level interface and an artist search, Enya of course. For each service Sonos provides a box for artist/album/track search.

MOG	Rdio	Spotify

For me MOG is winning hands down. At the top level MOG has more features like Editors picks, and top tracks/radio/albums lists. After an artist search MOG also is way ahead. A couple of popular albums, artist-only radio (for me the best feature of all), top tracks and related artists are all great, unmatched features. Also MOG is included in my Telstra bill and is unmetered via my Bigpond internet service.

I am now paying $36.88/month and it is time to rationalise, so from next week it is bye bye Rdio and Spotify. I’m sticking with MOG for the foreseeable future. The new music streaming era is for me. I now thank my lucky stars that I have spent less than $30 in total on buying AAC/MP3 music over the years so moving to streaming is a no brainer for me.

The 10 innovations are:

1. Assessment for learning
2. Badges to accredit learning
3. Learning analytics
4. MOOCs
5. New pedagogy for e-books
6. Personal inquiry learning
7. Publisher led mini-courses
8. Rebirth of academic publishing
9. Rhizomatic learning
10. Seamless learning

All the hot topics are here so happy reading and commenting.

The article gives a good summary of the open access publishing models:

• Gold model: authors charged a fee for secret review and publishing, papers available online for no charge. This approach is used by the Public Library of Science, PLoS.
• Green model: authors publish in traditional journals with secret review, but must make free open access available online within 12 months. This is used by the NIH-funded medical research.
• ArXiv model: authors upload their papers to a public archive funded by universities, papers are subject to a ‘ruthless process of open peer review’

Personally, I look forward to the introduction of the open access eLIFE later this year. eLIFE , supported by the Wellcome Trust, Max Planck Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, aims to challenge Nature. Good luck to them.

Some of the typical arguments put forward by the MOOC practitioners are reflected in these quote:

Thrun of Udacity:  ‘Less than 1% of U.S. college students attend Ivy League schools and these students don’t necessarily reflect the world’s brightest and most capable thought leaders, but rather the people who’ve been afforded the most opportunities to succeed’.

Bali of Udemy: ‘It’s the dying companies that value college degrees. You have to think beyond that piece of paper’.

We await the reaction of the employers. My guess is it will take a bold employer to dismiss MOOCs out of hand. The worth of a MOOC certificate in terms of a unit of one thousandth of a bachelors degree (millidegrees). My initial estimate from the two MOOC certificates I earned is that:

1 MOOC certificate equates to a range of 20-40 millidegrees

Reader, what is your estimate?

I owe a lot to Mike and will be happy to join the RideGC event in his honour on 24 June 2012 starting at Pizzey Park with proceeds going to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia. The 25 km Community Challenge will be enough for me.

As it happens I also taught Mike’s son Mark in a couple of information technology subjects. Mark is a Bond alumnus, and pictured to Mike’s right in the photo which is taken from the FIXIEGC blog.

Blog URL:
mrees.wordpress.com (but within last year created blogs at blog.cloudscholar.com and
michaelspaces.wordpress.com)

What do you blog about?
E-learning, cloud applications, electronic publications and open access, educational technology, social media tools, teaching programming and web technologies

Are you paid to blog?
No

What do you do professionally (other than blog)?
Associate Professor in Computer Science at Bond University, retired in December 2011

How long have you been blogging at this site?
6.5 years

Do you write in other platforms? (e.g. in a print magazine?)
Published academic conference and journal papers, some books and articles over 40 years as an academic

Can you remember why you started blogging?
Believed I should keep a searchable professional journal that could elicit occasional comments from peers. Since January 2006 I have insisted students in my classes keep blogs for this purpose. Their blogs count for up to 15% of their marks as well.

What keeps you blogging?
Blogs allow me to record my topics of interest, and my reactions and thoughts on technological developments as they apply to my personal and previously professional life.

Do you have any idea of the size or character if your audience? How?
My primary purpose in blogging has been for personal journaling but stats indicate my blog is accessed over 500 times per month over the 6 years or so. Some posts elicit useful comments.

What’s your attitude to/relationship with people who comment on your blog?
I note and respond to most comments. This has allowed me to build a wider community of interest in some of my topics.

Do you feel as if you fit into any particular community, network or genre of blogging? (e.g. schools, science, education, museums, technology)
Mainly for fellow academics who use technology in their teaching.

If so, what does that community give you?
Ideas on significant developments and trends in the topics that interest me.

What do you think are the advantages of blogging? What are its disadvantages/ limitations?

My blog has become my indispensible laboratory notebook with the power to search and recall my research and teaching interests. I feel there are virtually no disadvantages. Time limitations have restrained the number of posts which average 7.5/month whereas I had been hoping for 10-12 a month. Blogging has undoubtedly reduced my traditional academic publication record but I feel more enriched by the blogging experience.

Like many my blogging activity has been diminished by becoming a major user of Twitter. To try and compensate I started my Morsels blog (michaelspaces.wordpress.com) where I have tried to concentrate on mini blog posts of just a few tweets length. As well I am using Google+ as a mini blog, particularly for diagrams and my photos that represent the post topic.

Do you tell people you know offline that you’re a blogger? (e.g. your grandmother, your boss)
I proudly try and explain my blogging to all friends and neighbours who will listen. Those who run their own businesses I try and convert to blogging and social media in general.

Is there anything else you want to tell me about I haven’t asked?
Now retired I am trying to reinvent my blogging to support my new way of life.

"Technology has given us opportunities the people who taught me didn’t have." From Jonathan Rees (prize for worst home page, but raises his profile) A very key point for all current university teachers. The traditional ways of ‘quality’ interaction with students are being disrupted. Don’t fight change but transform your practice with the better parts of the new technology.

"Quantity has a quality all its own" Judging quality in the explosion of information is ever more difficult and becoming one of the most important skills students can be taught. Beware the ‘if we read/see it so often it must be true’ mentality of the popular media, ie the common wisdom should always be challenged.

“Things online are going to shape research going forward. If one archive is online and another is not, odds are most of the people working in that subject will favor the one online". Moral: you must be online to have your voice heard – hiding your thoughts on paper publications makes you invisible.

"It is easier to ask a question than type it” Yes, but it requires huge investment in time and money to be in a position to ask face-to-face in modern higher education. Technological alternatives must win out from an economic standpoint. In my experience typing a question and providing some context often leads the typers to answer for themselves. The extra time allows a second look and some reflection.

The effects of the the ‘flipped classrooms” seem promising but the data is not yet in.

On MOOCs: “Those who could otherwise never afford to attend a high-end university, or perhaps any university at all, can use companies like Coursera to garner an education they would otherwise have to do without.” This is hard argument to counter. As a Coursera student myself over the last few weeks, I have certainly augmented my education already.

"What happens if the tech doesn’t work?" This has the same answer to the question “what happens if the power fails?”.

I agree with Jeff McClurken:

"We can and should challenge the notion of the university as an isolated place," he said, "by reaching out and sharing the life of the mind."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Returning from battling the wind and the rain walking round Dove Lake in the Cradle Mountain National Park I did my usual Foursquare checkin that also finds its way to my Twitter stream. The unexpected tweeted reply from colleague Carolyn, @camcd, turned my thoughts to answering the question ‘If you were to open a new library, what would be your top priority?’. I assume a university library is intended.

As it happened just recently following my retirement I had been thinking of this very problem. I have come to think the functions of the traditional library should be present in every contact hour of teaching in every class. The Internet and web are where information is stored, accessed and curated, and so there is no need for dedicated physical ‘library’ spaces. Where librarians can still be effective is in the promotion and demonstration of innovative information discovery for the synthesis of new information in the learning and research processes.

In principle this ‘new’ library functionality can be exposed and operated online so no opening is involved as such. However the faculty and students in higher education have a strong tradition of being social so want naturally to come together in a physical space to exploit the new library functionality. In my own institution the students are well catered for in such spaces as the multimedia learning centre with its individual and group workstations, shared displays and collaborative technology.

My own top priority would be a similar space for faculty, deliberately shared by all disciplines. This is a throwback to the old staff common room or club only with information sharing at its hub in a modern, technological context. I imagine this common room to support many of the functions of innovative collaborative work spaces envisaged by the Harvard Business Review post by Adam Richarson. He mentions some of the features of theStanford d.school — a large, open, collaborative design space. Adam also observes:

Most corporate buildings don’t do a good job of supporting collaboration, brainstorming, and innovative work methods. They tend to be dominated by cubicles or offices which are suited for individual work, or by hard-to-book conference rooms that teams can use but only for short periods of time. What’s needed is a more flexible space that better supports teams and inspires more open thinking.

Adam proposes spaces that are inspired by design thinking practices in creative companies.

Starting from the base of an Internet café with all-day coffee and individual workstations, I would add shared workstation tables set for standing height where up to four people could gather, either bringing there own Internet connected devices or making use of embedded tablets built into the horizontal surfaces of the tables not unlike Microsoft Surface tables. All devices/workstations should be able to connect to a number of large displays for shared viewing.

With individual faculty offices now downsized and limited to seating 3 people there is a great need for a space where groups of 4 to 8 staff can meet either for serendipitous or planned purposes. Bookable small meeting rooms are needed as well as the individual and group open-plan worktables.

So I propose a traditional staff common room but with modern technological accoutrements and with librarians on hand to offer advice and hands-on demos of innovative information discovery and synthesis techniques.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

PressBooks lets you and your team easily author and output books in multiple formats including: epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and inDesign-ready XML.

http://www.pressbooks.com

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The first MOOC is Introduction to Artificial Intelligence a course offered by Stanford University that is in its 5th week. At the cut-off for enrolments over 160,000 students had enrolled. After a general introduction the groundwork is being laid for algorithm design, probability and Bayesian networks. What I find interesting is the simple and effective use of videos both for presenting information in a whiteboard-style and for conducting and the giving the answers to quizzes.

Rather than actual whiteboards the videos are constructed with the two lecturers, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, writing out information on paper with coloured pens as they narrate the content. The otherwise lengthy time taken to write and draw all the content is compressed by editing the video to match the narration – a very effective technique. If only this were possible in a live class in a lecture theatre.

The quizzes in these classes are also impressive. After the lecturer has written/drawn a case study or problem, the video ends with a quiz form overlaid on the last video frame. This contains radio buttons, check boxes and text boxes for answers as required, and a Done button for the student to check their answers. If correct, the student clicks Next and moves to the next video. If incorrect, there is usually an option for the student to watch a video explaining the correct answer before moving on – again an impressive facility.

Homework is available approximately every two weeks and consists of the actual continuous assessment done by the Stanford-enrolled students. The guest students can attempt the homework but are not graded. Solutions are made available after the appropriate deadlines have passed to enable self-assessment of progress.

The second MOOC I am following is Change: Education, Learning, and Technology being facilitated by a trio of education technology experts Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Dave Cormier. This MOOC runs for 36 weeks with a 2-week holiday break from 12 Sept 2011 to 20 May 2012 with a different invited guest facilitator each week, all well-known in the edtech community. We are just starting week 7. The number of participants is varying as you can register at any time, and like me, duck in and out as the topics takes your interest. From last year’s experience the number exceeds 1,000 and this year activity seems to be much higher.

Again the tools used to support this course are interesting. The purpose built course wiki site directly supports tools like discussion threads, email/online daily newsletters and a blog, as well the content pages for each weekly topic. Each week includes a live webinar meeting of which recordings are available, although some technical difficulties are still being ironed out. The wiki is just the base template and all ‘students’ are encouraged to create other shared tool spaces for collaboration which can be linked from the wiki. Short communications use Twitter with the #change11 hashtag. Other tools the participants have so far created include Facebook groups, Diigo groups and a host of other blogs.

As I predicted the highlight for so far has been week 3 with Martin Weller talking about digital scholarship based around his new book, The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice, which is free to read in HTML format.

So the AI MOOC is highly structured and requires a few hours each week to keep up. The Change11 MOOC allows you to duck in an out on the topics that are attractive. Both have immense value and advance the state of the art in MOOC development.

Relevant books:

Analytics and visualizations experts = data scientists

Personal productivity www.rescuetime.com

Empower end-users by giving access to and means of interrogating data

Personal data reveals our sentiments, our attitudes, our social connections, our intentions and what we might do next.

Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their learning contexts, in order to understand and optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs.

Use learning analytics for: learner success, use of university services, predicting at-risk learners, understand help-seeking behavior, alerts, interventions, learner dashboard, path of concept development, real-time analytics

Not all analytics are learning analytics, these are not:

• Classroom optimization
• Staff allocation and performance
• Web analytics, time on page

Analytics are pervasive in their negative influence

Analytics need to rooted in learning sciences

Analytics produce patterns, not insight – only human have this

Open learning analytics architecture (see diagram below)

• Integrated 
• Modular
• Extensible

Society for Learning Analytics Research, SOLAR, www.solaresearch.org

Learning Analytics Open online course 23 Jan – 17 Mar 2012

LAK2012 Conference, Vancouver, 29 Apr-2 May 2012 http://lak12.sites.olt.ubc.ca

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Mark spoke on 7 major topics:

and by Getting Ready he means:

For me the main takeaways are:

Can you use information about me to help me?
How to make the human moments precious?
Tuned blended learning per student   
OER repositories – the junk draw
Be a rookie every year
Student pathways – from entry to endowment, find haemorrhage points
Courageous learning – the ability to continue to learn new things
Learners inherit the future, the learned are equipped to live in a world that no longer exists
CAVE people, colleagues against virtually everything – if you don’t know one, you may be …

This is highly recommended viewing, follow the talk link above then click on Resources to see the video link.

Key terms and takeaways for me are:

Context-aware computing (CAC) uses end user activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction …

App stores … an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs

Next-generation analytics … enabling use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time

In-memory application servers … results in improved transactional application performance

Low-energy servers … will remove virtualization and lessen the shared use of systems

Cloud computing …dropped from number one on the list for 2011 to number 10 for 2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Cengage published the etextbook using the VitalSource ebook publishing system. This allows the purchased etextbook to be accessed everywhere on the web from a wide range of browsers and downloaded to computers, smartphones and tablets for offline access at any time. Notes and annotations can be made and shared via the web on up to 2 desktops/laptops and 2 mobile devices per student.

Ebooks are one of the topics in the Knowledge and Society subject curriculum and I took the opportunity via a question in the mid-semester written exam to determine the students’ reaction to the personal use of an etextbook for learning. Students were asked to list advantages and disadvantages of using the etextbook when studying for the exam. From 164 scripts students mentioned 14 advantages and 15 disadvantages (my classifications) with 533 occurrences in total.

The advantages were:

Personally I always rate the ability to search within an ebook as the main advantage, so I was surprised to see reading on multiple devices and no extra weight to carry around coming out on top. Environmental responsibility is always up there. Being able to buy the ebook by the chapter is obviously a very minor consideration.

Against this the disadvantages seemed more numerous:

In the past eye strain has always been the top disadvantage so it is strange to see it eclipsed by the need to own and use a working device. The survey of the same students revealed they owned a plethora of devices so the attitude is doubly strange. It is still the case that 1 in 6 students simply prefer printed books. At least bemoaning that ebooks have no second hand value is in decline.

With 313 advantage occurrences as against 220 disadvantages I make the assumption that the class are split approximately 59% to 41% in favour of ebooks. This then allows comparison with similar ebook data from previous years reported in a past post:

From this data it is clear that ebooks have lost a little ground over the last 12 months at least in the minds of these students. This is obviously against the trend of the ebook industry as a whole. As an institution we have some more educating to do in convincing our students that ebooks are the way forward.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The central argument of Jaron Lanier’s intelligent and argumentative book, You Are Not a Gadget, is that technology wants us to become more like technology itself — and this is a bad thing. Jaron believes that as technology advances humans tend to make themselves more machine-like and less human. For instance, he claims that we tend to alter our behavior in a non-desirable way in order to use poorly designed computers, today’s internet, and many hi-tech gadgets. We start to think like a machine in order to use a machine. More worrisome, we may become dumber in order to use dumb machines. Maybe we speak slower, or use simpler language. Or maybe we restrict our emotions and freedoms so that a computer can read us. Perhaps we accept that we should produce things for free because the internet “wants” things to be free. Jaron sees this as a long slippery slope as we make ourselves into gadget-beings. But he warns, “you are not a gadget.”

via The Technium: You Are a Robot.

This is an example of a rule or task as ifttt calls it. The ‘this’ part is a specified event on trigger channel, a typical activity on your chosen social network or channel. I chose a check-in with a photo in my task. For the ‘that’ part I chose to upload the photo on Foursquare to a chosen album on my Facebook account. It works extremely well and took only 30 seconds to establish.

ifttt comes with several default channels but it is very straightforward to add your own social networks. My list is on the left. I have used less than half of the social networks (channels) supported.

Each channel typically has two of more possible actions from which you choose. Some actions require parameters which are entered via simple forms. For example, I was able to define the message content that accompanies my photo when it finds its way into Facebook. You can see that my 17 channels allow 1485 different possible task combinations.

A simple ‘{{ … }}’ notation is used to transfer key information from the trigger to the action such as {{VenueMapImageURL}} from the Foursquare check-in in my example. ifttt checks for triggers every 15 minutes so the typical delay in the action being executed is half that time.

For me one of the key omissions at the moment is a Google+ channel, but of course we need the API to be extended from its current read-only capability before ifttt can make use of Google+ in a full-featured way. ifttt is free and easy to get an invite by leaving your email on their web site.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

ISBN: 9789264114203 Publication: 13/9/2011

(click on the image to download the publication)

Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators

Across OECD countries, governments are having to work with shrinking public budgets while designing policies to make education more effective and responsive to growing demand.

The 2011 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance. It provides a broad array of comparable indicators on education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.

The indicators show who participates in education, how much is spent on it, and how education systems operate. They also illustrate a wide range of educational outcomes, comparing, for example, student performance in key subjects and the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment.

The Excel™ spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts in this book are available via the StatLinks printed in this book.

via Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators.

–

Volume 27, Number 5

September/October 2011

Turning Digital Natives into Digital Citizens

By DAVE SALTMAN

Today’s K–12 students are commonly called “digital natives” because they have grown up with digital technology. But natives can run wild, using the Internet to (wittingly or unwittingly) plagiarize others’ work or bully peers using social media.

via Harvard Education Letter.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Knowing since the start of the year I was coming up to retirement at the end of August I set myself an ambitious weight loss target. Returning from holiday in Tasmania in February I joined Weight Watchers Online attracted by their new Propoints system. The daily calculation and recording of Propoints consumed provided the incentive to change my food intake substantially. Apart from completely giving up alcohol except for infrequent special occasions and very strict portion control my diet changed little. This made it easier to conform.

Sunday 28 August was the target date. This was the day before my retirement day and by coincidence my 65th birthday. An unexpected reverse in my weight decline occurred the week before and I only made it down to 89.3 kg just 300 g short! Pretty close.

The upturn blips are interesting. The first coincides with my last conference attendance in Sydney and the others visits and dinners with friends, all part of life’s tapestry. The major downturn blip followed significant periodontal surgery.

Overall I am thoroughly pleased and look forward to a fitter retirement.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My live mindmap is on Mindmeister. Peta put her slides on Slideshare.

As part of the Emerging Technology Committee I was able to join in a further hour of discussion following her talk and toss around many of her ideas at greater length. The two and a half hours away from marking not only was a pleasant break but a most stimulating one with many new ideas to pursue.

Immediately I liked the simple bookmarklet for capturing web pages and the effective integration with the major social networks. As is only to be expected you can share any collection you create under a suitable topic and explore other curation topics created by others. Anyone can suggest additional links for a curation topic, and for your own topic you can decide whether to add the suggestions or not. Key page links from other topics can be rescooped into your own topics which is a handy feature and another measure of popularity.

The stats feature gives you an indication of how popular your curation topics become. I initially chose four topics to curate:

• Cloud Apps
• Chromebooks
• Education Gallimaufry
• Technology Gallimaufry

[I was hunting in the thesaurus for an interesting word for a collection and became hooked on gallimaufry as you can see.]

As of this writing my stats look like:

The blue columns show the page links I have added to one or more curation topics and the cumulative line graph shows accesses by others. Unsurprisingly Cloud Apps is my most popular curation topic.

Apparently my efforts have earned me the right to invite others to ScoopIt but I don’t come close to my favourite topic of all which is future school by Steve Wheeler – he’s well into the thousands for views.

I should start by admitting I don’t yet have a Chromebook to test, but I can’t wait to get one and use it productively. This post was triggered by a colleague sending me the post by Galen Gruman with the indicative title ‘Whatever You Do, Never Buy a Chromebook’. Yes, it was a totally negative review, negative piled on negative. The only ones I agree with are the lack of Bluetooth, Skype and convenient printing. Personally I see the ’primitive’ hardware and OS as huge positives. I have a great deal of my files already in the cloud and look forward to having more of them there.  Better a Chromebook that a PC/Mac laptop costing up to 5 times as much.

I already have constant Wi-Fi/3G Internet connection on my iPhone/iPad devices where perhaps less than 10% of my work/recreation/socializing can be done without the Internet. I stream everything where I can such as podcasts, music and video, and only ebook reading and game playing are done offline. Chromebooks have instant on from sleep just like iPhone/iPad and boot from cold in a quarter of the time. Laptop boot times are left in the dust.

A much more balanced and believable article is by Audrey Watters entitled ‘A Day Without Native Apps: My Chromebook Experiment’. She actually used her Chromebook for a day’s real work, and mentions the sometimes unexpected pros and predictable cons. After a day her conclusion ‘ at the end of the day, despite a lot of reservations, I think the Chromebook is very much doable for most folks’, grudging admission of some capability.

I think both authors missed out in considering the significant long-term benefits. Chromebooks automate or eliminate many common, time-intensive tasks like application distribution, deployment and installation, patching, and upgrades. No upgrading ever is huge, judging by the constant complaining of my friends and neighbours and their parents and kids. Even their iPhones/iPads languish with tiny numbers of apps and old versions of iOS. The constant need for upgrading is a killer. Although not an Android user my guess is the same applies to those smartphones. What use an app for everything if few know how to use native apps.

The tiny attack surface and lack of local storage are other major pluses for Chromebooks. There is no need to purchase licences for anti-virus, data encryption and data back-up software, all major problems for my not-so-tech-literate friends.

For those who think that Chromebooks are just an experiment that will eventually be swallowed by Android take a look at the post by Alex Chitu with the title ‘Google Makes Money from Chromebooks’. It would seem that many commentators on technology are selling Google short.

When I have a Chromebook in my hands I may be proved wrong but currently my confidence is high that everyday users, not computer-savvy tech writers, will see Chromebooks as an answer to their prayers. Here’s a mother-in-law who has even loves a CR-48!

Apple luddites keep up the mantra of the iPad leading us into a post-PC world. I love my iPad but it definitely is not a PC replacement but most certainly is a PC-extender and, for that matter, an iPhone-extender. My iPad is integrated into my daily life at times and places where neither a PC or phone are useful devices. But as I have noted before the iPad is not a laptop replacement, and is only a first step towards a post-PC era.

Most definitions of a post-PC era, like Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, point out strongly that we are not talking about PC replacement. She emphasises the obvious post-PC transitions; stationary to ubiquitous with anytime/anywhere computing; formal to casual with instant-on devices; arms-length to intimate with always-with-us devices; and, abstracted to physical with touch and gestures.

Laptops and/or desktops will continue to be our motherships with sales over the next few years still predicted to continue at present levels although rate of increase will almost certainly decline. But what Google are now sensibly calling Chromebooks are the nearest I’ve seen yet to a viable, genuine PC replacement, provided we are willing to work only with cloud-based apps and data.

My earliest post about working online was over 3 years ago. Since then I have been lobbying for working in the cloud to become the norm as more and more viable cloud services become available to replace native apps on desktops/laptops. Even native smartphone apps that allow us to be creative must use a cloud backend to store the objects of creation in order to be useful.

You can read the persuasive overview of Chromebooks from Google but for working effectively post-PC the key features for me are:

1. laptop form factor with productive keyboard and mouse editing; on smartphones/tablets swipe scroll and pinch zoom are great for navigation but poor for editing large bodies of text; even tapping for selection needs finger-sized buttons/links
2. Chromebook independence; access your private app, documents and settings from literally any Chromebook; allows secure sharing of physical laptops
3. forever fresh; this Google slogan is my favourite; Chrome OS, browser and apps are always the latest version – no tethering to update a myriad apps; no old versions to become a security risk
4. potentially improved security; browsers bring the advantage of a security sandbox in any case; this now extends to the whole machine
5. USB and SD device support and limited but recognisable local filestore; starts to match expectations we have for PCs

Chromebooks match tablets with Wi-Fi/3G support for being always connected, with the same battery life, and with an 8-second boot time and instant resume.

One of the first questions people ask is ‘can I turn my existing laptop/netbook into a Chromebook?’ I would answer no since points 2 through 4 above are not supported on existing hardware. Chromebooks are definitely a new class of device although on the surface they look like compact laptops or large netbooks.

Of course I admit I haven’t handled or used a Chromebook, and in Australia it looks like I have still a few months to wait beyond the 15 June release in the US and major European countries. I comment here on the concepts only. Provided Chromebooks perform as expected I suggest they will soon become devices of choice for individuals, businesses and educational institutions.

[As an aside I used Scrible for the first time to collect and assemble material for this post and have been impressed by my increase in productivity.]

At the time of writing 116 students (63%) had replied out of a class of 184. Students are drawn approximately equally between our Business, Law and Humanities faculties, and for 40% of students it is there first semester. The computing devices results are:

Approximating doubling from last year 52% use Macs. Counting netbooks as well 72% use Windows machines. In one year tablet use, presumably almost all iPads, has grown from nothing to 14%. My first surprise was the low usage of ereader devices at just 2%.

All students surveyed owned a mobile phone of which 91% are Internet-enabled. The breakdown of mobile phone manufacturers shows the dominance of Apple iPhones at 59%. All but one of the Other category are HTC phones which puts them on a par with Blackberry and Samsung.

Again all students surveyed used online sites for their communications of various types with Facebook dominating at 92%. The only near competitor is the 83% use of online email. Twitter use is about the average for the population as a whole. The only disappointment is the low use of LinkedIn. At 8% this will need to grow as the students’ future employers are relying heavily on LinkedIn information to decide on who they will recruit. Blog use again, at 14%, is about the norm, and hopefully will increase as they become familiar with their weekly blogging task in the early weeks of the subject.

Overall these numbers confirm the increasing use of Macs and the near universality of Facebook. At only 3% I found Foursquare use disappointingly low especially as it may be a useful tool in tracking students within the university context.

Scientific research has an enormous impact on our world and the lives of citizens. It is therefore important that science is not, and is not seen to be, a private enterprise, conducted behind the closed doors of laboratories, but a public enterprise to understand better the world we live in and our place in it. Effective dialogue about the priorities and insights of science and its relation to public values is vital. Scientists can no longer assume an unquestioning public trust. Ubiquitous digital media offer a powerful means for the public to interrogate, question and re-analyse scientific priorities, evidence and conclusions. While some such interventions can distort debates involving science, others generate tough and illuminating questions, and expose important errors and omissions. Though it has difficulties, such public dialogue is something to which the scientific enterprise must adapt.

We have until 5 August 2011 to submit ideas.