Some what-if futuristic scenarios from 1982:

The most interesting thing for me today about these images is that although we foresaw that people would be accessing information wirelessly (notice the little antenna on the device in the “tide pool” image, we completely missed the most important aspect of the network — that it was going to connect people to other people.

The Internet is that it is all about connecting people. If what you are doing is primarily using the web to connect people to pure, disembodied information then you are doing it wrong. Seems so obvious, but still I think there are industries and organizations struggling with this concept.

If your online education is about “resources” or “content”, then you are doing it wrong.

If your web presence is about a glossy on-line pamphlet, then you are doing it wrong.

You are using the new medium like it is the old medium.

In looking at low-barrier ways to take advantages of the affordances of mobile apps, I have played a little bit with shoutem. Shoutem lets you build an app with a simple web interface. It is kind of like a CMS for apps, if that analogy even makes any sense. At first I thought it would just make cheesy apps that are simply a wrapper for a web site but there are actually some decent features here. There are 16 building blocks that you can arrange and configure to create various types of apps. It is not just about displaying information in the hands of your users. You can configure some of the widgets to allow submissions from users. So for instance you could allow users of your apps to add locations to the same map, or share photos. Shoutem also allows you to send push notifications to your users and can provide analytics on how your users are interacting with your app.

I could see shoutem as super low-cost way to start experimenting with apps for classes that take advantage of the unique characteristics of mobile: location, photos, presence. While you are limited to the featured of the shoutem toolbox, the barrier to entry is so low I could envision custom apps for specific classes being rather feasible.

I came across another product in this category today. Cabana offers what seems like a much more advanced interface for creating apps compared to shoutem. The demo video shows the creator actually dragging UI elements around and hooking up views to various datasources around the internet (e.g. instsgram, twitter). Still a relatively low barrier to entry when compared with getting to know the iOS sdk, but not so simple as shoutem. Cabana produces html 5 apps, not native apps. Although I can’t figure out how they accessed the iphone’s camera in an html 5 app in their demo video. Cabana made some news today when they launched a product that will automatically turn a facebook fan page into an app.

I am a CMS Junkie. I don’t know how this happened.

There are three CMS’s that I am spending a lot of time thinking about lately.

WordPress, Self-Hosted Open source software

The big feature is the community. There are so many plugins and themes. Tons of support resources to find on your favorite search engine. If you want to get started developing, tons of resources for that as well. WordPress has a really mature feature set and user interface. As I was writing this, look what popped up in my twitter stream:

Chances are that if you want to do it, then there is a plugin for it.

The downside to running wordpress is that you will find yourself delving into some set up and maintenance tasks. Running stuff on your own means you need to worry about patching the system, backing up, security, etc. But if you want to run your own site and have total control and build whatever you imagine, then wordpress is a good place to start.

Squarespace

Instead of giving money to web hosting company where you run and manage your own CMS software, you can give your money to a CMS hosting company like squarespace and get a completely managed CMS environment. No worrying about security, software patches, setting up databases, configuration files, etc. No worry about ownership or strange monetization schemes like you would with a provider that is offering their product for free. And even though you are using this specific hosted CMS there are tons more opportunities to customize than I have been able to dive into. I am guessing someone willing to invest in really learning this system could do almost anything with it. I really think this is the future of CMS hosting – getting web site maintainers and designers higher up the stack. Don’t worry about sys admin or software developer tasks. Let that be abstracted out to a provider. Just as amazon and other cloud computing providers have removed physical infrastructure from the equation for web service providers, Squarespace is removing CMS installation and maintenance from the equation for web masters.

tumblr

I love tumblr because it provides a social network and completely friction free posting. I love that instead of having comments, tumblr instead pushes users to post a response on their own blogs. Being part of a network has advantages. A big part of tumblr culture is following other blogs and reblogging content from other blogs. Rather than just static site sitting there, don’t you want to create engagement through adding your content to a network where it will be seen and have an opportunity to travel and be talking about in a community – with no friction. If you are not trying to engage an audience, what is the point? I think I would want this kind of engagement for any website I might want to create.

TechCrunch reported that tumblr has seen dramatic growth over the last year:

The larger shift here that comScore is talking about is this: users are gravitating towards new ways of sharing the things they care about with anyone who shares the same interests as them. They’re still sharing private things like showing baby photos or party pics to real friends on Facebook. They’re just also falling in love with the new simple, public tools that these other companies offer.

Honorable mention: Jekyll / Octopress

There is something about composing your posts with a text editor, and generating a static site from the collection of files that is just wonderful to me. I know it has no business for the mass of people, and the web had become so rich due to ease of posting. But for someone like me, I am so intrigued by cutting out all the complications of databases, scaling, using web-based editors. At the same time, I also like some dynamic components on my site – like comments.

via Teaching and Learning with Technology:

“A program that I mostly use for note taking is called called iAnnotate. It requires the lecture slides to be in a .pdf format, and then you download them into DropBox and upload them straight into the program on the iPad,” Rutledge said. “You go on it, click on the file name, just take your notes on there. It automatically saves it, no hassle, and very easy to do.”

The student calls it easy, but this sounds exactly like something Apple would want to tackle and make perfectly seamless.

Student’s classes were requiring so much printing, it costs a single student 15 dollars a week. That would 450 dollars after two semesters. The iPad doesn’t seem too expensive compared to that.

If the iPad is going to make new inroads in education, let alone transform it, I think it will be by way of specialized apps that take advantage of the many great capabilities of the iPad, not through an augmented-textbook model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.

via Apple for the Teacher – Kieran Healy.

Is an electronic book a contradiction in terms? Is it trying to shoehorn the media of the old, the book, into the electronic age? Seems like that to me. Apple’s iTunes U is more interesting to me – it constructs a learning experience by aggreagting specific resources and tool from across the web. Nothing new there, but it is a more modern approach. Of course the downside is that not all the resources one might want to use are in electronic format. That is where iBooks and iBooks Author come in. It is trying to close the gap. It is also possible to think that if iPads, iBooks, and iBooks author gain a certain level of adoption, a new form will emerge. Think of how the rise of the iPod led to podcasting.

Have you seen the the new iTunes U? It is now an app. Apple released three things at their education-focused event a few days ago: A new version of iBooks with support for interactive electronic textbooks, a tool to author interactive electronic textbooks, and a new version of iTunes U. While the announcements about the books and book authoring are getting tons of attention, I think the new version of iTunes U is just as important, maybe more so.

Here is what a course now looks like in iTunes U (which is now an app for iOS):

A course consists of the following areas:

• Info: In essence, this is the syllabus. It contains sections like “overview”, “about instructor”, “outline”. It looks like you may be able to add as many sections to this as you want. I have seen things like “requirements”, “required apps”, “assignments”.

• Posts: This is the course content – video, audio, weblinks, links to apps, chapters of interactive electronic extbooks, assignments with due dates. When an instructor makes a new “post”, students can opt in to get a push notification.

• Notes: free form notes and notes and annotations taken in ebooks all aggregated in one place.

• Materials: .I think this is the same resources from the “posts” section, but in a flat list, sorted by type, so you can be sure to download all the videos, apps, books, etc so you have them available when you need them.

This is really a barebones LMS. I don’t know what to make of that. Yes, It doesn’t have all the features of full-fledged LMS. There is no grade book, quizzes, discussion fora. But this is Apple’s first take. They are well known for releasing a minimalistic product that hits the most important features, then building upon that in further iterations. A 2009 survey of faculty and teaching assistants at Penn State found that “the items that were extremely important to the majority of individuals were: course mail (74.9%), syllabus (57.3%), drop boxes (56.2%) and grade books (54.7%).” iTunes U hits the first two features. I won’t be surprised if the next iteration of iTunes U has a way for students to turn in assignments. In fact the old iTunes U had a way to create a dropbox for students to add media to a course podcast. Don’t know if there is any way to do that in this new iTunes U.

Think of the first iPhone. It had no apps, multitasking, copy-and-paste. Not only was there no app store, but no one was even thinking that the iPhone needed an app store. Apps, yes, but the app store was not a popularized concept. Now the app store defines the iPhone and iPad experiences. Imagine where iTunes U could go in the coming years.

And even if Apple doesn’t move into feature X – iTunes U is all about aggregating stuff from the web, apps, and books. Social features perhaps could be provided by a third party app or web site. I wonder about this doubly so since apple has such a poor track record with social features.

I am very curious to see how iTunes U evolves in the coming several years. Think what will you will of Apple or proprietary solutions, but when a company this big and with such a track record of transforming industries starts pushing into the education space, you can’t ignore it.