Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Four myths of using iOS devices

    First it starts as a tip or rumor, and then it blows up into an integral way you use or believe you can use you iPhone or iPad. Here are 5 such myths.

    • Force quitting apps saves power and makes the phone run faster.
    • IOS devices can’t multitask.
    • The onscreen keyboard is terrible. It never types correctly.
    • You can’t create on iOS devices.

    Force quitting apps saves power and makes the phone run faster

    When you double-tap the home button on an iOS device, it will show you the recently used apps. Just because the app is in the list doesn’t mean the app is running. Apple has all sorts of tricks to maximize battery life and speed of the device. For starters, except for certain types of apps (GPS and music apps), iOS will kill the app after 10 minutes no matter what. When you click on an app and it launches right where it was, it doesn’t mean the app was running the entire time. Have you noticed that the app isn’t responsive for the first few seconds? That’s because the app wasn’t running. iOS will tell an app when iOS is getting ready to kill the app. It is the app’s responsibility to save what was happening. One of the things saved is a screenshot of the app. This screenshot is what is shown when you re-launch the app.

    iOS devices can’t multitask

    Of course it multitasks! Apple put several restrictions on what apps can and cannot do in the background to maximize battery life and speed of the device. Apps do run in the background for 10 minutes, and other factors can start up an app in the background (for example geofencing apps or VOIP apps). Music apps are also allowed to play music in the background.

    The onscreen keyboard is terrible. It never types correctly.

    Stop trying to type correctly and let autocorrect do its thing. You may have to type proper names correctly a few times, but it learns pretty quickly these words. I’ve heard of people even turning off autocorrect! The autocorrect will usually get the words correct, even if you mangle them pretty badly. It will also correct previous words, for example when I type star wars iOS will autocorrect it with the proper capitalization of Star Wars. I miss autocorrect when I’m working on other computers!

    You can’t create on iOS devices.

    This myth has been dying out in the last year, but it still persists. You can create documents with Pages, Google Drive, or Comic Life; presentations with Keynote; ebooks with Book Creator or Creative Book Builder; mobile websites with TouchAppCreator; music with Garageband; programming with Codea or Pythonista; and graphics/pictures with Paper by Fifty-Three, Procreate, or Sketchbook Pro.

    It’s quite amazing what you can create now!

    Any myths I’ve missed?

  • AMC’s The Walking Dead as a free online course

    Online education… and zombies: AMC turns The Walking Dead into a free online course

    Ahead of the new season of its hit TV show The Walking Dead, cable network AMC has partnered with education technology company Instructure and the University of California at Irvine for an online course based on the popular television series.

    The eight-week course, titled “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead,’” will include content, video clips and examples from the show, as well as possible participation from the actors.

    I hope they discuss how the zombies still can be a threat two years later, wouldn’t they have decomposed by now?

  • Another vision of education in the future

    An Infographic on the future of education

    The future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally. Teaching and learning is going to be social. Schools of the future could have a traditional cohort of students, as well as online only students who live across the country or even the world. Things are already starting to move this way with the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

    For me, the future of technology in education is the cloud.

    The infographic is much better than the article linked in the post to the Guardian.

    In the near future, native apps are going to become more and more prevalent. That’s why Google is putting Native Client inside of Chrome. And the cloud will be less and less important until cellular companies loosen up the bandwidth.

    P.S. And interactive whiteboards end in 2012…

  • Looking at the classroom of tomorrow

    Technology Transforming the Classroom of the future

    Technology also allows “running before walking” — meaning kids can experiment with concepts way beyond their years, say using an application to design a roller coaster that could actually work. It makes learning subjects like math much more relevant.

    And no mention of interactive whiteboards…

  • “Fear based” testing regimes are hurting education

    Google Glass creator says ‘fear-based’ testing regimes block technology

    The scientist behind Google Glass wearable technology has criticised the use of restrictive and “fear-based” testing regimes in education, describing a lack of innovation in the system as a crisis.

  • Multiple email addresses with one Apple ID

    Apple IDs, the center of identification in the Apple universe, have the capability to attach multiple email addresses. By signing into appleid.apple.com you can verify additional email addresses. Once added you can use them with several Apple services, most notably, iMessages. Others can iMessage you with any of the verified email addresses.

  • Poverty can be like losing 13 IQ points

    In How Poverty Taxes the Brain researchers have found out in one particular study how much poverty affects the brain:

    In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

    It’s been discussed that standardized testing is just a way to show the socioeconomic status of school districts. As shown in these experiments, the cognitive ability of people under poverty is limited due to the processing of the hardships that go along with poverty. It’s not that the poor were of lower intelligence and that’s why they are in poverty, but that becoming poor means their brains have to put forth effort that it didn’t do before.

    via The Cognitive Cost of Poverty – Slashdot

  • Updating Twitter and Facebook with blog updates

    Now that I’ve switched from WordPress to Pelican I’m face with the dilemma on how to update Twitter and Facebook when I post to my blog. In WordPress I used the Social Plugin by MailChimp to automatically post, but plugins are not an option with a static website.

    But as I was working on a recipe in If This Then That – IFTTT this morning it hit me, I can use IFTTT to automatically post a link to my new blog posts in Twitter and Facebook. To create the recipe:

    1. Create an If This Then That account at IFTTT.
    2. Click Channels and add your Twitter account and Facebook page (or your Facebook account, depending on how you use Facebook).
    3. Click Create
    4. Use an RSS Feed for This and your Twitter account or Facebook account (or page) for That.

  • Let me look that up

    Back in June I road in the Great Ohio Bike Adventure (GOBA). It consists of a series of 45-6o mile bike rides over the course of a week. During our numerous downtimes, I was having a discussion with my uncle about robots and automated drivers. As we were talking, there was a point I wanted to make but I couldn’t quite remember the information I wanted to use so I told him I “had to look it up”. Of course, his reply was “What did you do before smartphones”. It was at this moment I realized that the smartphone wasn’t a crutch. If it wasn’t for the smartphone, I wouldn’t have know the information existed in the first place. I use my smartphone for making available to me the information that is available.

  • Group chats made easier with IRC

    It’s funny the cycles that tech goes through. When the Internet was in its infancy, everything was as open as it could be. The protocols were all based on open standards, and your machine could talk to any other machine. Then came the online services of the 80s. Compuserv, AOL, Delphi, Prodigy. Each service trying to keep you in their own little world. Messages did not pass between the services for the most part. In the 90s with the creation of the world wide web things became more open again. THe juggernaut of AOL/Compuserv collapsed while the other services faded into obscurity. This lasted until the middle 00s with the popularity of social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. We are now moving back to the 80s where everyone wants to keep you on their service. Alas, that is a rant for another day…

    Fortunately, there are technologies that have been around to help minimize some of these influences. Today I’m talking about Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Created in 1988, IRC is a simple chat protocol that supports channels (or rooms) and private messages.

    To help you get started, I’ve set up a chat room called #eduk8me on Freenode. To connect, you simply have to visit the Freenode web chat client. Create yourself a nickname, enter the captcha, and click Connect. The channel field will already be filled in.

    Freenode login

    Welcome to #eduk8me! Send me a private message saying hey! This will send me a notification.

    /msg mr_rcollins Hey!

    The simplicity of the protocol has some issues that we’re not used to dealing with. The first is that there are no accounts. You can reserve your nickname though, so others cannot use it unless they have the password. Freenode has a FAQ which deals with nickname registration. If you are just starting out you really don’t need to worry about it.

    Where this comes in handy is when you want to have a group chat. IRC doesn’t require yet another user account and can scale pretty well. There are ways to do moderated chats too.

    Check it out and tell me hi!