New technologies in the classrooms

Kids these days are starting to use computers earlier and earlier. I remember when I was in school there were only few people in all class that had a computer at home. Kids these days learn to use computers as soon as ages 4 to 5. A common thing is to see kids teaching their parents "computer stuff".

It would be a waste not to use technologies we have ant those which are still in progress in classrooms. If a simple reading devise like kindle can replace a whole library why the same devise couldn't be used for storing all the books that school children has to carry every day. I remember when I had to carry 6-7 books and lot of notepapers every day as a child. And also carrying those books isn't good in any way for kids health and spines.

I had read a paper about experiments of using different electronic devises in classrooms for education purposes. Especially one used in seventh or eighth grade classroom. Every kid had a devise that was connected to teacher's computer and the displayer. Teacher gave kids a question and they could answer them anonymously and then the answers would be displayed on the board. That study showed that it greatly increased productivity in classroom. Kids who usually would ignore the assignments put a little more effort in the tasks and especially in voting tasks. Kids that were shy to speak in front of the class showed even greater Involvement in the class work.

Of course a bit more work has to be done to create perfect system and methodology for schools. There are lot of debates what sort of system it should be: or individual electronic desks or devise like kindle that could be brought home by student; whether it has to have color or not, if it has to have wifi or cable connections are better in this case, whether it has to be touch screens of traditional input ant control model is better for classrooms. For example touch screens may be more interesting for kids but it has more reliability problems, it is easier to break ant not necessarily faster and more efficiently that standard screen and keyboard.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation

Microsoft SharePoint is software product from Microsoft Corporation providing complex functionality for group work like sharing documents, web publishing, corporate blogging, creating wikis, indexing database data and so on. The version of this solution dedicated for small companies, or company's department is called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation is lightweight version of Microsoft SharePoint Server designed to simplify corporate web publishing. MS Foundation is integrated and secure product which includes templates of websites, which can be quickly edited and published, tools for indexing data from multiple databases for fast searching, functionality for blogging, writing wikis, content management system, discussion boards, file sharing etc.

MS SharePoint Foundation sites are accessed by web browser. That's one of reason, why is this solution popular. System administrators don't need to install, update or maintain client site software. Ordinary user can simply modify layout of site by self. By reason that sites are powered by Ajax components, user feels like he or she is working on desktop application.

SharePoint Foundation is free to download and install as an add-on of Microsoft Windows Server OS (2003 or 2008), there is also special version for Windows Vista.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is tool for rapid website development by combining predefined web parts (components). These web parts contains various bussiness functionality (graphs, workflows, calendars, contact lists..) and could be combined to the one page, related to needs of specific user.

Official Page
SharePoint Foundation on Wikipedia
Comparsion between free and server version

Usenet, an early groupware tool.

Last week I wrote about Nethack, an early collaborative software project undertaken by voluntary coders around the world. The project had (and has) an amazing longevity thanks to it's collaborative nature, remaining long since some the original creators have moved on or even passed away. Before that I touched on the coarse practice (or 'fine art', depending on who you ask) of Trolling, the act of baiting users into losing their cool in internet-based conversations. While seemingly completely unrelated, the concept of Trolling and the groupware nature of Nethack share a common aspect: their origin.

This week I'll look into the primary tool used in the Nethack project, as well as the source of the concept of "Trolling for Newbies"; Usenet, a worldwide internet discussion system that can be considered an early workgroup support system. While this may not be the original intention of the project, the Nethack example clearly shows it was successfully utilized as such.

History: Usenet was conceived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University in 1979 and publicly established in the following year. A decade before the world wide web even came to exist, Usenet facilitated group conversations in a manner that resembled standard email but was delivered into servers instead of individual recipients. The articles would be organized into 'newsgroups' which themselves contained their articles organized in hierarchical manner. Far from real-time conversations modern users have come to expect, Usenet's articles would be relayed in batches, from server to server, sometimes only once or twice a day. While largely overtaken by modern forums, blogs and mailing lists, usenet still remains in use to this day.

Layout of the system: As I mentioned before, the articles in Usenet functioned somewhat like emails directed at servers instead of individual users. The user would post his/her post on the original server used, which would then (sooner or later... usually) push it's posts forward to other servers, which would then do the same at their own time. The articles themselves would remain on the servers, organized in a hierarchical logic; for example, a newsgroup still in use containing Nethack-related information and stories is organized as rec.games.roguelike.nethack - meaning the articles are contained in the category of 'nethack', which belongs to the category of 'roguelikes' that itself is contained in the rather large cathegory of 'games'. The final category of 'rec' refers to very generic and large Usenet category that stands for 'recreational, making the logic in this organization very obvious.

Source and references:
A Piece of Internet History
Internet and Usenet Explained
Nethack, collaboratively developed project with vintage
Trolling!

Text Messaging – Changing the Way People Communicate

Mobile phones were the trend of the late 1990’s. I remember being in 5^th or 6^th grade, and a few of my friends already had a mobile phone. Back then, sending text messages seemed like a new way to communicate, and friends would often send each other messages even if they really had nothing smart to say. A few years later, at the start of the next decade, pretty much everyone was expected to own a mobile phone.

Studies show that a mobile phone is considered to be one of the most important belongings a person can have. Interestingly, nowadays text messages are more popular than voice calls. On average people send 3.6 text messages a day, but only make 2.8 voice calls a day. Among 18-24 year-olds, over half (51%) send or receive at least six text messages a day.

Romance-related activities via text messages are also common. Over half, 57%, of all mobile phone-users aged 18-24 have either sent or received an invitation to a date by text. A bit surprisingly, as much as 20% of the 18-24 year old category have sent or received a text to end a relationship. Sending flirty text-messages is also a common act, and one fourth of all mobile phone users do not consider it a form of cheating.

One obvious aspect of text messages is the frequent use of acronyms and smileys. Acronyms are used to save time, as messages can be written quicker. They also lead to shorter messages, thus saving money, as one does not necessarily have to write multiple messages. Smileys are also used for obvious reasons: in a text message, there is no feedback about the other person’s facial expressions, body language or speaking tone. In other words, smileys are used to give feedback about the person’s mood and feelings. Of course, when used this way, they are also easy to use to “lie” about one’s mood. Furthermore, text messages and smileys are prone to misunderstandings.

Over the years, there has been a lot of talk about the youth’s degrading writing skills. Acronyms, smileys and whatnot are influencing their writing. Best examples can be seen in internet forums. It is common to see people write in a way where they do not care about capital letters, commas, dots and verbs, nor do they take the time to structure their text into paragraphs. This makes for a text that is, if easy to write, ultimately very hard and annoying to read. However, a multitude of studies show that the claim of degrading writing skills is not true at all. To be more specific, text messaging can be claimed to even boost one’s writing skills. It was reported that children, who actively sent text messages, were more comfortable writing any kinds of texts in school.

References

http://www.switched.com/2008/09/23/texting-trumps-talking-on-cell-phones-study-finds/

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/18461.php

http://mashable.com/2009/10/20/gen-y/

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051031/1836235.shtml

Playing for Change

Kristallinodasos has earlier shared his interesting ideas about creating music through groupware software in our blog and I thought I could share some of my thoughts concerning the subject.

I have recorded recorded my own music with my computer for about 15 years now. Creating a musical piece from scratch is a rewarding process, but making arrangements for different instruments can also be very exhausting and sometimes utterly frustrating. I have often thought that it would be great if there was some sort of a bank of independent musicians on the Internet. For example: If you need a violin player for your project, you could search for available violists, share people your backing tracks so they could freely jam on them. After playing people could send their freshly recorded instrument tracks back to you. All you then have to do is to select one of these tracks, import that track into your project and maybe write a positive review about all of those musicians who were kind enough to play for your project. I have myself shared my guitar and bass tracks on some internet forums, and based on that experience I know I would sign up for that kind of a service.

This daydreaming is in fact inspired by one specific case of collaborative creation of music, which points out how seamlessly people with different cultural backgrounds can create something that is purely genious. Playing For Change (http://www.playingforchange.com/) is a "multimedia movement created to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music". They believe that music has a special power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. I share their thoughts on that matter and I really do think that there is a demand for a service/software I described earlier. This project doesn't have a a musician database on the internet, they do their work in the streets and display creations on their site. I think this video will explain it better than I ever could:

Sources:

http://www.playingforchange.com

Chatroulette

Chatroulette had a great promise - use your webcam to talk to anybody in the world. It is a website that pairs random strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection. You could have cultural conversations, discuss about new movies or trends, or find new friends all around the globe.

The Chatroulette web site was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia. Ternovskiy says the concept arose from video chats he used to have with friends on Skype.

In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day.[3] One month later there were 50,000. In February 2010, there were about 35,000 people on Chatroulette at any given time. Around the beginning of March, it was estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users.

All sounded great but then come the negative part, internet culture kicked in. According to survey approximately 1 in 8 of feeds from Chatroulette involved 'R-rated' content. But in the peak of chatroulette the rate was much higher. You could not get any few minutes without seeing men flashing their exposed genitalia, racist backgrounds and slurp, sometimes even horrifying images. People found a bypass to transmit recorded videos instead of webcam video. It was used to show self caused injures, animal cruelty, and even suicides. There were cases of real suicides carried live on webcam.

After that there was created a lot of software to recognize and block inappropriate context, user were being banned for 10-40 minutes if got reported by three users within five minutes.

But it didn't came back to the peak of 2010 summer. There are still some users of chatroulette but not as much as was hyped for. All it's now being referred as Chatroulette: A Sad Tale of Blown Opportunity .

http://www.chatroulette.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatroulette

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is format used mainly by blogers and newspaper websites to inform periodic readers about new articles (or blogspots) published on these sites. RSS format is nothing else than simple XML document containing structure of RSS channel and text information about articles like title, short description, date of publishing, link to the article etc.

Published articles are added to RSS feed and readers can be easily informed about it. To receive information about new articles, readers have to use simple software called "RSS reader" or "RSS aggregator". There is plenty of  RSS readers, some are integrated in web browsers, others are stand alone applications, web applications or are integrated in desktop email clients. Reader can easily subscribe mostly by clicking to RSS icon on the webpage or icon in address bar of web browser.

The main advantage for readers is that they do not need to check each site they are interested in to find new articles, but they receive an announcement to their RSS reader. Each reader can chose blogs and newspapers (or just field which is interested in, for example Technologies section in wide-spectrum newspaper). In other words if I'm interested in ten blogs writing about technologies, I don't need to check all of them every day, but I will be announced by my RSS reader software when some new article is available.

http://www.feedreader.com - My favourite RSS reader

http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-GB/ - Email client with RSS reader

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/ - RSS format specification