Mobile Notebooks and Sketchbooks

On April 6, Ruben Puentedura and his concept of “The Lively Sketchbook,” was featured on the New Media Consortium’s Adobe Connect webinar series. The session, archived and available at http://www.nmc.org/connect/2010/april/16, offers an insightful discussion of how mobile devices can act as the equivalent of the sketchbooks (a la Da Vinci or Hemingway). The concept is that writers, researchers and artists often use physical notebooks to record ideas, sketches and concepts that later are the building blocks for their creative end-products. Puentedura suggests that mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android phones) can all be utilized to create digital notebooks or sketchbooks by students and faculty alike.

Apps that can be used to create a Lively Sketchbook (such as Awesome Note, EverNote, WordPress, Instaviz, MyWiki, Sketchbook Mobile, Storyrobe and many others) are listed on Ruben’s blog at http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/archives/000043.html. Three videos showing Ruben using mobile apps area available on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNakZDGlnK8, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNW-chAnwZU&feature=channel and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE-6_rBqV2k&feature=channel.

Share Your Expertise This Summer at SIDLIT

Colleague to Colleague (C2C), the sponsors of the 2010 Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology (SIDLIT), has extended the presentation proposal deadline until Friday, April 30, 2010. Proposals are submitted online at http://c2conline.org/node/add/sidlit-session.

SIDLIT is an opportunity for faculty and staff to share and discuss instructional technology ideas and techniques with your colleagues from the Midwest. Examples of 2009 SIDLIT sessions are displayed online at www.sidlit.org. Topics range from copyright issues, to Web 2.0 tools, to student and faculty support issues to best practices for online instruction.

Notification of successful proposals will be communicated by Friday, May 7, 2010.

Registration for SIDLIT is now open and can be completed online at http://c2conline.org/sidlit/sidlit-2010. SIDLIT will be held on Thursday and Friday, August 5 - 6, 2010 in the Regnier Center on the Johnson County Community College campus in Overland Park, KS. This is a free conference supported by numerous sponsors including: Articulate, Blackboard/ANGEL, the Ed Tech Center (Johnson County Community College), Epsilen, Hawkes Learning Systems, KCREACHE, MBS Direct, McGraw-Hill/ALEKS, Pearson/eCollege, Softchalk, Staff & Organizational Development (Johnson County Community College), and Tegrity.

Looking for a Helpful Guide to Buying a Digital Gadget?

Looking for an eBook reader, digital camera, high-definition TV, Netbook or Smartphone? Measly (at www.measy.com) “helps you find the perfect gadget.” You can find the site’s recommendation by taking a quiz or simply exploring. Either approach will walk you through important features and criteria for the device you seek.

If you want to view the reviews of a product you’re considering, you’ll find http://www.consumersearch.com a useful site too. Information is power, so use it or lose it.

If You’re Going to Buy from Amazon, Get Free Shipping

Have you ever placed an order with Amazon.com only to find you’re just a few cents away from free shipping? So you just add another CD or book, right? Wrong. To make up that 37 cent shortfall (or whatever amount), visit the Amazon Filler Finder site at http://www.filleritem.com/, enter the amount you need to increase your order by to quality for free shipping, and you’ll see a list of items costing that amount or more. Rather than pay over $5 in shipping, buy a Prestone 17400 V-Belt (or whatever item puts your order over the top) and then donate the item to Goodwill (if you don’t really need it). It’s a win-win situation.

By the way, to buy, just click on the link shown for the item on the Amazon Filler Finder site; you’ll jump to www.Amazon.com and the item will be visible. www.filleritem.com also has a similar tool for www.Buy.com, but it only checks bestselling books at that site.

In the Recycling Mood?

Hope Phones (http://hopephones.org/) accepts old cell phones (any phone, no matter the condition or age) to help healthcare workers and medical clinics in developing countries. The not-for-profit service “allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phones in for recycling. The phone’s value is then used to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for healthcare workers in various third world areas.”

“Every cell phone given to community health workers connects distant patients to a medical clinic. A $10 cell phone will provide 50 families with access to emergency medical care, health information, transport services, and clinic resources.”

Got an old phone? Visit the web site.

Screen Magnifier

A faculty member recently asked if I knew of a free utility to magnify select portions of the computer screen. Thanks to Keith Krieger, I discovered a neat little tool at http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/. This is a freeware tool available for download but with the understanding that the software designer will not provide email or other support. Use at your own risk. It is simple to use, once installed and started (you can add a desktop icon when the app is installed), it appears on the Windows Taskbar and can be invoked with a simple click on the Taskbar icon and dismissed by pressing Esc.

Innovation Corner: iPad-Next Big Thing?

Mike Elgan of ComputerWorld wrote about Apple’s iPad on March 27, 2010 (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174239/The_iPad_Era_dawns?taxonomyId=165&pageNumber=1) stating, “I'm predicting that old people, toddlers, baby boomers, teenagers, twentysomethings -- OK, that all age groups will use the iPad in significant numbers. It will be the first consumer electronics product in recent decades to match the age demographic of the TV.”

Later in the article Elgan continues, “The combination of touch, rich media, third-party applications and a familiar (iPhone-like) user interface make it ideal for people who would never dream of buying most other categories of consumer electronics.”

After a discussion on how the iPad can revolutionize gaming (“I believe many people who have never embraced gaming will be converted into gamers by the iPad -- much like the Wii did, but on a much larger scale.”), Elgan discusses its impact on education.

“The iPad is ideal for education because it will be easy to develop for, cheap to buy, easy to carry and store (no cables, peripherals and so on), and come with seemingly infinite content and media. As with games, the network effect phenomenon will affect education. It won't take long for apps to emerge that pull together courseware with downloadable instruction and live lectures, events and so on. It will become a medium by which far-flung schools can help one another. But you can't get in on all this collaboration unless you're using the iPad. So schools will. Students will. Teachers will. The iPad will be very big in education.”

So what do you think?

SIDLIT Registration Now Open

Registration for the 11th Annual Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology ( SIDLIT ) is now open , the institute will be held on Thursday and Friday, August 5-6, 2010 at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. The conference is jointly sponsored by JCCC and Colleague to Colleague (C2C). If you are already a member of C2C, register by logging in at www.sidlit.org and then click the SIDLIT SIGNUP link. If you are not a member of C2C, go to http://c2conline.org/user/register and join C2C. If you signed up as a member on last year’s website you are still a member, if you forgot your password click the Request new password link.

The two-day institute includes presentations, topic-oriented special interest discussion groups, hands-on workshops, and demonstrations. There is no charge to attend, but registration is required.

This is also your invitation from C2C to submit a proposal for a 50 minute presentation on issues or topics related to distance learning and instructional technology. Proposals for hands-on training to be offered in a computer lab are also invited. Returning this year, we will be offering an improved Speed Geeking session (a take-off on speed dating) which offers 5 short, concise presentations during a one hour session. New this year we are presenting a Web 2.0 Sprints session where 4 presenters spend 10 minutes demonstrating/discussing their favorite new Web 2.0 tool.

To be a part of this year's SIDLIT 2010 submit a proposal at http://c2conline.org/sidlit/sessions-speakers and click the Submit a session link.
April 15th is the deadline for proposals.

The SIDLIT Planning Committee will review all proposals and presenters will be contacted prior to May 4, 2010.

What’s in Store for the Weather?

Are you too focused on your inbox to look out the window and see what the current weather is? Or tired of guessing about tomorrow’s weather? Check out a full screen view of weather in the Overland park, KS area at http://bit.ly/drr66t. Want to view the weather for a zip code other than 66210? Go to http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/.

Top 10 Passwords You Should Never Use

Reprinted from Uniblue Tip of the Month

According to a report, most users still haven't answered the call by security experts to implement more robust passwords. In fact, in a list of the most easy to hack passwords, simply typing '123456' took a truly forgettable top prize.

Security firm Imperva recently released its list of the passwords most likely to be hacked based on 32 million instances of successful hacking. Imperva named their report "Consumer Password Worst Practices," and some of the entries near the top are truly simple and could lead to theft or identity fraud.

TOP 10 WORST PASSWORDS

The following is a list of the most predictable passwords, and should not be used under any circumstances (Source: pcworld.com):

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

HOW TO STRENGTHEN YOUR PASSWORDS

Other key findings in the report: it seems that almost 1 in 3 users choose passwords comprised of six or fewer characters; more than half use passwords based on only alpha-numeric characters; and almost 50 per cent used variations on their name, popular slang terms, or simple strings of consecutive characters from the average QWERTY keyboard -- such as 'asdfg'.

Imperva has made several obvious recommendations, suggesting most users adopt passwords with at least eight characters and to mix those characters between upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Passwords should be simple enough that they won't be too easily forgotten, but the idea is to make cracking the code virtually impossible for either an unknown or known hacker.

About this article: Dennis Faas is the CEO and Chief editor of Infopackets.com: a daily, digital publication dedicated to MS Windows, computing, technology trends and solutions to real life computing issues: all written in simple English. Subscription to Infopackets Windows Newsletter is free. Visit us today! http://www.infopackets.com/

Innovation Corner: More on Digital Textbooks, Connexions & DynamicBooks

Follow-up
As a follow-up to the eBook and digital textbook postings earlier (see http://bit.ly/aEdPwt), I heard from at least one assistant professor who wrote: “Thank you for reporting on ebooks. I was just telling [a book] rep today that unless they can lower their price and or provide a better digital learning option, I will be changing books and I already use Flat World Knowledge in one class with great success and will probably replace the [rep’s]book with Flat World. I love Flat World Knowledge and so do my students….”

Tracy Newman, JCCC Ed Tech Center Sr. Analyst also responded to the eBook report stating “Flat World Knowledge (where you can remix textbooks)… reminds me of a project I worked on for KU Med before I started working at JCCC. I worked for a professor in the field of photobiology, which is a difficult field to find textbooks for. He started what he called the Digital Photobiology Compendium (DPC). He offered stipends to various professors to write articles about their field of knowledge. We then organized the articles into a grid where professors could easily create an account, log in, and choose/assemble a “textbook” by picking and choosing which modules and in what order they wanted to use them. Students would then log in and have access to the modules their instructors chose – essentially a custom, online textbook!”

“There was a paper written in 2003 about it: http://bit.ly/bPgWC8

“It looks like they have discontinued the part of the project that allowed students and instructors to log in and create/use the custom textbooks, but the articles are still online and freely available.”

Connexions
A similar resource is available and offered for all college and university faculty through Rice University. It’s called Connexions (see http://cnx.org/). Connexions is self-described as “a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute: [including] authors [can] create and collaborate, instructors [can] rapidly build and share custom collections [and] learners [can] find and explore content.”

You can learn more about Connexions by listening to Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk, one of the founding faculty members. In this TED (Technology, Education, Design) Conference presentation, he explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRymi-lFHpE&feature=related.

Macmillians DynamicBooks
Of course textbook publishers are not standing by idling waiting for open source textbook repositories to grab their business. Macmillian Publishers has announced a system, called DynamicBooks, that “lets any professor make a customized version of one of the company's existing titles. That means that chemistry professors can take one of the company's chemistry textbooks, rewrite some parts, add their own papers or chapters, or embed videos or homework questions they've created. Any passage added or changed is clearly labeled as not part of the original book, so students know what is original and what is customized—a concession that was made to textbook authors.”

DynamicBooks also includes an incentive system where “Professors who customize a textbook have a chance to make some extra money. For each customized copy that a student buys, the professor who contributed the material gets a dollar. That could add up if a professor's retooled book becomes popular and is assigned by professors at other colleges.” For more information check out http://chronicle.com/article/Format-War-Heats-Up-Among/64323/.

Facebook: Guidelines and Challenges

How private are your frustrated, idle threats on Facebook? Ask the East Stroudsburg University associate professor who’s January 21, 2010 Facebook posting read: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's been that kind of day." She’s now suspended, see http://bit.ly/dsBptx. And what would a lawyer advise other lawyers as far as posting to Facebook? Check out “Saving Face: 5 Tips for a More Secure Facebook” at http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/saving_face. For more detail; read the article, but the short summary is:

1. Use a strong password and change it frequently.
2. Review carefully your privacy settings and change if needed.
3. Be discriminating in your use of Facebook.
4. Take control of what others can post to your page.
5. Consider using “friends lists.”

Shrink-O-Matic: Another Free Tool

A couple of week ago, we introduced Shrink-O-Matic at a JCCC Ed Tech Center’s Web 2.0 Wednesday session. It’s an Adobe AIR application that easily resizes (shrinks) one or more images (such as JPGs, GIFs and PNGs). If you need to quickly reduce the size of images, you can simply drag and drop the images into Shrink-O-Matic and they'll be resized as you specify! The web 2.0 app offers options so you can choose the output sizes, names and formats of the graphic files. Check it out at http://toki-woki.net/p/Shrink-O-Matic/. It’s a very simple application to use.

Just be aware, this tool is supported by the online developer. If you get stuck, review the Shrink-O-Matic blog at http://toki-woki.net/blog/p157-shrink-o-matic.

Innovation Corner: Will the 20 Pound Textbook Still EXist in 5 Years?

Some interesting developments are occurring in the eBook/publishing arena. The recent O'Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York (February 22-24, 2010) covered many topics including eBooks. As recorded on the Smashwords blog (Smashwords is an eBook publisher and distributor), Raymond Kurzweil, the man behind the new Blio ebook platform, spoke of “how most forward-thinking people consider technology progression as linear (steady predictable progress), when in fact some of the most important technical progressions are exponential (progress accelerates over time, catching everyone by surprise). Ebooks are likely an exponential phenomena. They're not a fad, and they may reshape the book market faster than any of us believe.”

The posting on Smashwords (http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/02/tools-of-change-conference-notes.html) includes some interesting stats (see the section on “Stats, Stats, Stats”) such as “Ebook customers would be willing to pay more for ebooks if they come with social-media-enabled tools that help them discuss and share the books with others.”

The posting continues, “[What are the] most popular devices for reading ebooks: This is interesting. You might guess, as I did, the Amazon Kindle. Wrong. The most popular device for 47% of customers is their computer screen. Kindle comes in at a close and impressive second place at 32%, followed by 11% for the iPhone, 10% for iPod Touch (note this adds up to 22%, pre-iPad), 9% each for the Blackberry and netbooks, and 8% each for the Barnes & Noble nook and the Sony Reader.”

The most interesting section of the post (“The Future of Digital Textbooks”) states “Whenever publishers create content for which there is great demand (such as textbooks), yet they make that content prohibitively expensive and inaccessible (textbooks), it causes customers to seek out alternative content options (piracy, used textbooks, etc.), all of which provide the publisher no economic benefit.”

“Digital textbooks offer potential relief to students and their parents. The challenge for college textbook publishers is to make the transition to lower cost digital products without putting themselves out of business. I think Flat World (see http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/) is well-positioned for the future of textbook publishing….”

If you want to know more about Flat World Knowledge, which offers “remixable textbooks by expert authors” check out the site (above) or the blog posting at http://blog.smashwords.com/2009/08/flat-world-offers-smarter-fairer-model.html.

Another potential eBook/textbook tool is Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/), “a place for writers to sell books they can't afford to publish and for people to discover others with similar reading interests” (see http://bit.ly/c8p5aW) which has a new send-to-mobile-devices feature that enables readers to select books on the Scribd site and send them to the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s The Nook, the iPhone or a mobile device using the Android operating system (such as the Motorola Droid, Samsung Beam, Nexus One, and HTC Hero). Scribd currently hosts over 10 million documents (growing by 10% each month) and unlike Amazon and Barnes & Noble, their emphasis in on the small self-published author. What does that mean? College instructors can author textbooks or chapters or papers and distribute to the student’s existing mobile device via Scribd.

So when textbooks skyrocket in price, faculty members can author or remix digital versions, and ebook readers, mobile devices and the computer screen are common and popular ways to access content…what do you think is the future of the hardcover or softcover textbook?

Class Videos and Copyright

The University of California at Los Angeles has stopped allowing faculty members to post copyrighted videos on their course Web sites after the Association for Information and Media Equipment (AIME), a group that protects the copyrights of education media companies, charged the university with violating copyright laws by posting the videos to the password-protected course Web pages without the proper permissions. For additional details, check out the Inside Higher Ed article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/26/copyright (be sure to check the very intriquing comments to the article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/26/copyright#Comments ).

A follow-up article is also available at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/04/copyrightredux .

What does this mean? In overly simplistic terms:

• Fair use only allows a portion of a work (video or otherwise) to be used by a not-for-profit educational institution in the classroom.
• The TEACH Act extends the classroom to include any online, password protected course space with access only by currently enrolled students, and access enabled only for a time period appropriate to presentation and discussion of the work.
• The use of the video must be related to specific course objectives (i.e., not just as a time filler).
• As a "general rule", the TEACH Act would only authorize portions of, not entire works. The exception might include showing an entire film in a media studies program, but other criteria must also be met.
• The work (including video) must be legally obtained (e.g., not a pirated copy).
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal (even if fair use might otherwise apply) to bypass the encryption on digital media (e.g., CSS encryption codes on region-encoded DVDs) in order to create a streaming media version. For example, if you digitize and bypass the encryption on a DVD to create a streaming video clip, the issue of fair use is moot.
• The TEACH Act does not extend fair use to works primarily produced or marketed for in-class use in the digital distance education market.

JCCC has licenses with several companies to provide video access for instructional purposes, including Ambrosia Video, Journal of Chemical Education (ACS) demonstrations, American History in Video (streaming video collection includes newsreels from 1929 through the 1960s plus hours of documentaries from the History Channel and more), Counseling and Therapy in Video, Dallas TeleLearning Digital Resource Repository, and the INTELECOM Online Resources Network.

Members of AIME, the group that has threatened UCLA with a copyright infringement suit) are listed online ( http://www.aime.org/corporate-directory.php ).

As background for this increasingly important area of media usage, check out “Video Use and Higher Education: Options for the Future” at http://library.nyu.edu/about/Video_Use_in_Higher_Education.pdf .

Word Tip: Converting a Graphic to Free-Floating

Have you ever added a graphic to a paragraph in Microsoft Word 2007 and found it locked to a specific paragraph when you wanted it to be a "Free-Floating" graphic? To change it from locked to free-floating, simply click the graphic to select it. A new tab labeled Picture Tools appears above the right-most tab. Click the new tab and in the Arrange group, near the right-side of the ribbon, click the down-arrow next to the right of the Text Wrapping text. From the drop-down menu, choose "Through". This releases the graphic from its paragraph anchor, and you can drag the picture anywhere in the document. If you need to have extra vertical space to position the graphic, simply press the Enter key until enough space is reached, and drag the picture to the new location.

Thanks to John R. Nicholson for this tip.

Free eBook Reader Coming?

Everyone’s releasing eBooks, from Apple’s iPad to Amazon’s Kindle to the Sony eBook Reader to Barnes & Noble’s The Nook. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Ray Kurzweil, creator of Kurzweil Educational Systems (technology pioneer and developer of a range of assistive technology products) announced the February release of Blio, a free eBook reader. According to eSchool News (see http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/01/31/blio-free-ereader-makes-impression/ ), “Perhaps the software’s most impressive feature is that it can support the original layout, font, and graphics of any book in full color, its creators say. It also can support embedded multimedia such as video and audio, and readers have the ability to highlight, annotate, and share information.”

“Blio isn’t yet available, but already it’s backed by Baker & Taylor, one of the world’s largest publishers, as well as Elsevier, Hachette, HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley. Blio users will have access to more than 1 million books altogether, its makers say—including a large selection of current bestselling titles.”

If interested in Blio, go to their web site ( http://www.blioreader.com/ ) and signup for an email alert when the app is available. Also check out http://www.blioreader.com/about.html for a feature comparison chart (bottom of the page) with other eBook readers.

Eyes on the Earth 3D

Instructors: What if you could enable your students to view Global Climate Change satellite data from NASA in 3D (based on over a dozen key satellites orbiting the Earth; such as AQUA, CloudSAT, OSTM, and so on)? Check out http://climate.nasa.gov/Eyes/ and be sure to watch the demonstration video first. It’ll explain the controls you have to selectively view data from one or more satellites. The site does require you to install the Unity Web Browser, but it’s pretty straight-forward to do.

Be sure to check out the planet’s vital signs on the right, including the long term summer average of Arctic Sea ice, parts per million of Carbon Dioxide, the rise or fall of the sea level since 1992, and the increase or decrease in the global temperature and the size of the ozone hole.

Gadgets I Didn't Get for Christmas

Just before the holiday break, we held a Technology Brown Bag session on "Electronic Gifts for the Season" (see video at http://video.jccc.edu/academicvid/BrownBags/Brownbag12-02-09.asx). I invited several staff at JCCC to participate and Keith Krieger (Technology Training Coordinator) was one of the invitees. Keith was unable to attend but sent me a list of interesting gadgets...none of which I received for Christmas. :-(

We ran out of time to share his information, so the least I can do is share these great gadgets with you. Here's Keith's note:

"Since I can’t be there, I thought I would share a few items I’ve seen.

I’ve done this for the Center for Business for 4 Christmas seasons, and I like to have a bit of fun with the items. Please feel free to pass these along for anyone to review or point out."

Space Food Sampler from ThinkGeek:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/science/b264/ $20

For aging boomers who bought every Beatle album (not that I would know anything about that):

The Beatles: Rock Band

http://www.thebeatlesrockband.com/

For Trekkies (more aging boomers):

An entire set of iPhone applications devoted to Klingon: dictionary, conversational Klingon (“The engines are overheating, Captain!”), and phrasebook. $11.99 for the suite.

http://www.simonandschuster.com/w/klingonApps/content.html#klingon_language_suite

For WoW fans, you can now buy an in-game pet to accompany you:

http://us.blizzard.com/store/browse.xml?f=c:5,c:33

7 Cool and Easy Robot Projects (book):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0072226404/davejohnsonswebsA/

Free virtual robot software to use with the book, or buy expensive Lego Mindstorms kits for real robots!

Simplify charging your gadgets with PowerMat:

http://www.powermat.com/us/home/

Poor man’s network using a plug-in Ethernet crossover adaptor, from ThinkGeek:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/7470/

Tools of Innovation

In an earlier posting, we talked about the Technology Innovation Grant at JCCC and where ideas come from, see http://bit.ly/3vcJkp. The TIG funds are still available for JCCC faculty…and additionally, since innovation often just requires elbow grease (and no funds), we thought we’d share some resources with you.

JCCC is a member of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and they host a cool technologies site at http://www.nmc.org/cool. Check it out (and contribute, if you wish).

Tracy Newman, Ed Tech Center Sr. Analyst, brought to my attention an article about a 3D Video Projector. As the blurb states: “The automobile, moving pictures, personal computers, cell phones, and social networks—all of these technologies, once considered frivolous, have made such a huge impact on our culture that our daily lives would change dramatically without them. Could 3-D video be next?” Check out the article at http://tinyurl.com/yldyqn7. From page 3 of the report: “Sound Video Systems, maker of the AVRover brand of portable audio-visual systems, has partnered with BenQ to release the AVRover 3DSVS24, which the company says is the "first fully integrated 3-D Stereoscopic Educational System." The product is a portable and rugged 3-D AV system with all components securely mounted inside. It features a powder-coated, scratch-resistant steel console, as well as a 3-D projector from BenQ and sequentially numbered active-shutter glasses, storage, and sanitation for an entire class. It lists for $7,895.” Who at JCCC (or elsewhere) will be the first to find an important instructional use for a 3D video projector?

Also from Tracy, who would have thought $148 would buy students a chance to snap pictures of Earth from space? Check out http://tinyurl.com/mz54zs. Images are shown at http://space.1337arts.com/flight and at http://tinyurl.com/m5rrzs.

One of the current innovations currently offered by Google is the new Google Wave tool. From the NMC, comes word that a visitor to their web site shared a research paper on "A Study and Analysis of Google Wave and its Potential Impact on Education and Collaboration." The paper was written by Johanna Hane (johanna.hane@gmail.com) who gave permission to share with NMC Members. A PDF format copy is available at http://web.nmc.org/files/google-wave-revolutionary-tool.pdf

And while we’re talking about innovation, what will the classroom of the future (Classroom 3.0) look like. Check out the “Classroom 3.0: the brave new world of high-tech teaching” blog posting at http://tinyurl.com/yl25crx. As the article’s subhead indicates “iPhone apps, teachers on Twitter, downloadable lectures: Will a university education ever be the same?” What are you doing to include relevant technology in your courses?

Finally, Marziah Karch attended the Web 2.0 Expo in New York recently. The Expo keynote addresses are all available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A0D433518BDA7856. Got a few minutes? Check out topics ranging from “Radical Abundance: How We Get Past "Free" to “The O’Reilly Radar” to “There’s a #Hashtag for That” to “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media” and more.

Do you have innovative tools or sites you’d like to share? E-mail me at jbacon@jccc.edu.