iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

During my four weeks of teaching in January I’ve been teaching with a tablet: the Asus Transformer Prime. When I teach I almost always have a digital device (beyond the presentation tool) with me to reference my notes and do all the digital teaching elements like recording marks and interacting with students digitally.

So far I’ve found my laptop to do all I need it to, but laptops have a limited battery, they can be less than portable and have the visual barrier of a vertical screen. My phones, specifically my iPhone, is too small to refer to and interact with while teaching.

Here’s my reflections from teaching with a tablet:

• I like the form factor – back to when all I’d use was paper notes…. well someone else teaching a class would have.
• The portability does allow me to be more engaged with my students both with with my location in the classroom and the removal of the laptop/monitor barrier.
• I can’t take notes as fast, but the notes I do make just sound less jundgemental than the clicity clack of a keyboard

Here’s the strangest reflection:

• When I refer to my tablet for something I feel like Moses reading a decree from his tablet. I feel as though each fact should be prefaced with “thou shalt..”. Perhaps its the read-only or consumptive not creative nature of the whole tablet form factor that makes my notes read or feel like decrees?

Pearson and Google launched their open class platform this week. Its a Learning Management System (LMS) tied to Google Apps domins. Two subjects often covered by this blog.

My short take is that the service looks useful for recreating an isolated web space that respects the need for private on-line areas student privacy and publisher copyright suggest. It’s not as open as I had hoped, but it is more real-world collaborative than any other LMS I’ve used.

My quick assessment, with updates from Tuesday October 18, 2011 4:51 PM:
Positives:

• Private – both in web isolation and in student records
• Private but easy to add others
• Free to add to an Google Apps domain – good option to those already using Google Apps versus other LMSs
• Has document collaboration powered by Google Docs
• Easy to use
• Simple link to publisher content
• UI is polished, including maximize option for all content

Negatives:

• Standard Cloud control concerns
• Unless your institution is paying for a commercial LMS licence the migration costs will likely outweigh any transition costs
• Configuration of items is often done through a Moodle style view/modify (edit) metaphor – can’t say I’m a fan – but so many instructors want a “student view”
• Crude controls of public (rest of the web) versus private, biased to private
• It’s infrastructure, not an innovation
• The menu structure and/or list of tools appears to be extensively cached – is this the return of the turn of the millennium Perl based tools and I need to “publish” something somewhere? – kidding
• There’s no logout button?

Also, you can add other participants via their E-Mail address, but no E-Mails are sent and there otherwise seems to be no way for them to access the OpenClass without being part of the Google Apps domina?
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The BlackBerry Playbook coming out on April 19^th has some familiar plays in it – if you grew-up in Ontario:

1. RIM is a Waterloo-based company
2. RIM is/was known for their trackball
3. The device is running the QNX operating system, developed by Waterloo/Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems (which RIM just bought)
4. The screen and input device is are an all-in-one deisgn
5. The whole enterprise seems like a string of poor decisions to create something that will be expensive and will not be successful

Where have we seen these plays before?

The Unisys ICON! Wikipedia Article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON

The computer built specifically for use in Ontario schools commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Education.

(Thanks for the image, Old-Computers.com)

Unisys ICON computers were kicking around my public school when I was a kid. They didn’t do much beyond very basic word-processing and had a lot of games on them, thanks to the local board of education, and a few of my friends. They were all networked, and relatively reliable, save for the poor teacher/”computer lead” who gave admin access to some of the Grade 8 students.

The ICONs had a trackball (the PlayBook won’t, but the BlackBerry Pearl and others do), it had an all-in-one hardware design, and sat in the corner of our classroom, mostly unused.

The most relevant commonality is that the old ICONs were running the QNX operating system!

The ICON was ultimately deemed too expensive to keep in use or develop for and was cast-off in favour of Apple and others’ more user friendly products.

So now you know Ontario: when you think BlackBerry Playbook, think Unisys ICON.

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Update: Tuesday April 19, 2011

Apparently two more things they have in common is no E-Mail application and they both can’t connect to the internet on their own!
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My little hobby web site for tracking your luck with a large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion is back!

My previous attempt was Drupal-based, and required an account. I was never very happy with the account requirement, and played with it being a facebook App but ultimately took the site down (described in this blog post). This time there’s no need for an account as it’s Twitter-based. This also helps with the promotional side of things.

I had hoped to partner with the www.rimrollerapp.com – but that Twitter based iPhone App needed a technical update, and for other reasons, it’s now removed from the App Store. It’s too bad, but you don’t need anything beyond a Twitter account to enjoy RimCount.com.

Simply tweet with the tag #RollUpTheRim to have your tweet listed on RimCount.com. The site tracks results posted to Twitter in the format of wins/rims (and unofficially, a few other formats).

You can visit the main page for the latest, the scoreboard for the best and worst ratios rimcount.com/scoreboard. There’s also a rapidly growing list of Twitter users who have tweeted with the hashtag #RollUpTheRim rimcount.com/list

The site is no longer Drupal-based, but some of the PHP from the Drupal module I wrote and the MySQL data structure were migrated to the new site which is otherwise built from scratch.

As many developers have indicated, working with Twitter.com‘s non-standard API is quite a joy. I was able to get things rolling (pun intended) quite quickly based on the simple twitter searches through Twitter’s search service’s RSS feed and looking-up someone’s Twitter details via an XML call is easy too.
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I’ve assembled my list of things to look for when preparing content for the web with an eye to accessibility. I would like to add to this advice that I’ve always found that accessible web pages are the easiest way to create content that is well indexed by a search engine – as both serve the goal of helping a machine interpret the content better.

This list is written assuming that most modern tools that help construct content directly for the web help individuals create accessible content by default, and that this is the primary way content makes its way to the web. Tools like WordPress for blogs, or Learning Management Systems (LMSs).

Multimedia content is particularly challenging, as it can require the use multiple senses, and unless accommodations such as transcription or description are added, some individuals may not be able to access multimedia content.

Evan more than with most posts; I’d love to read your comments and suggestions about this list and these practices.

My Checklist for Preparing Accessible Content

This list was created by Matt Clare with resources from World Wide Web Consortium. ^[1] The W3C has a simular checklist document: www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/appendixB.html ^[2]

Simple Formatting

• Divide large blocks of information into smaller blocks when possible. This is both technical advice and advice for writing content that is likely to be skimmed by readers.
• Headings for documents, or sub-sections should use pre-defined heading options. They should not be regular text made larger, bolder, etc. The pre-defined headings help assistive software present content.
• When creating a table be sure to identify what cells are headers and what are actual data.
• Never use a table for layout purposes alone.
• Use the existing quotation mark-up for quotations if possible, Never use the blockquote option for layout purposes alone.
• When creating a list use the number of bulleted list options, DO NOT crete your own bullets. There are ways to insert your own bullets into a proper unordered list, or hide the bullets.
• Ensure that all information conveyed with colour is also available without color. For example by bolding coloured text as well.
• Make linked text meaningfull.
  • Example1: Option one would make much more sense when a screen reader were to read aloud all the links on a page rather than option two:
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