Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • 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!

  • How to record touches and gestures for iOS screencasts

    Tonight I was playing around with Assistive Touch on my iPhone. In the Accessibility Settings, Assistive Touch places a “button” on the screen. This button gives the user access to certain capabilities, such as the ability to push a virtual home button. Playing around tonight I went into the Favorites area. This lets you record a gesture, with which you can play by pressing a button in this Favorites area.

    So in my playing around, I created my first gesture, which was just a tap. Once I added this saved gesture as a favorite I turned it on. Lo and behold, I had a blue circle on screen, which I could move around and when I released it showed tap. I then realized that one could turn this on when recording iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch screencasts and the taps would show up.

    To get started:

    Open up Settings, tap General and on the left, select Accessibility.

    Accessibility

    Under Physical and Motor, tab Assistive Touch.

    Assistive Touch

    Turn on Assistive Touch and then tab Create a new Gesture…. To create the touch gesture, just tap. To save the gesture, tap Save in the upper right corner. Name it Touch.

    Create New Gesture

    Save Gesture

    Now launch the app you want to record, tap the assistive touch button, select favorites and your newly created gesture, Touch. A blue circle will follow your figure around the screen, showing a tap when you release your finger.

    Unfortunately, no other gestures work other than the current one selected. You also probably will want to create some sliding gestures, which would allow you to show a slide in the screencast. If you are switching gestures, you will probably want to cut out the selection of the gesture in your favorite movie editing application.