EDUCAUSE is running an interesting experiment — they’re holding a 5-day online event called the Mobile Computing 5-day Sprint.  It’s a collection of five days worth of webinars, including polls, interactive discussions and other features.  The live sessions are booked, but they promise to post recordings each day.

I’m especially interested in tomorrow’s theme: Teaching and Learning.

The full list of themes for each day, and details on the sprint format, are available.

Image from thewildernessdowntown.com

Most of the time the difference between one web standard and another isn’t obvious in day-to-day use, but HTML5 is different.  It’s currently supported on many browsers, and will enable several features that will make (y)our Internet experience much, much better.   Via CurrentCites, here’s the beginning of an article in Technology Review that goes over the details and explains what’s what.  Drexel Libraries has access Technology Review if you want to read the whole thing, which I’d recommend.

One example of HTML5 in action is the experimental interactive video The Wilderness Downtown by Arcade Fire.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out.  It combines the video with information you provide, making it a custom video.

Some features pointed out in the Technology Review article:

You’ll be able to drag and drop images from web pages to email, and so on.  GMail allows this now, but this will be ubiquitous with HTML5.

Video and audio will be easily embedded into web pages, eliminating the need for Flash.

There will be increased browser storage. This means that interactions with web sites will be much faster because your browser will have less constant back-and-forth with the server.  This also means that more information will be stored in your browser, so even if you’re not connected to the internet, you’ll be able to send emails, or change your fantasy football roster and your browser will sync it up when you reconnect.

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) just released their 2010 Study on Undergraduates and IT.

Some highlights:

• Over 40% of undergraduates are “power users” of internet-capable handheld devices, compared with only 25% in 2009.
• 95% of respondents ages 18-24 use social networking sites, as do 58% of those 50 and older.  96% of these use Facebook.
• Most students are accessing course information via a Course Management System (CMS), such as Blackboard, but the number of participants who “feel positive” about their CMS has dropped to 51% from 77% in 2007.

The full report, and key findings, are available for download.

Here’s a great tip from Ian about setting strong passwords for your (many!) logins.

Passwords are still where the rubber meets the road for the foreseeable future, but as computing power increases every year, they are more easily broken, so you are faced with increasingly complex password requirements.  I thought this strategy from DUCOM’s IRT department in their weekly monitor was a good example of how to start with something normal that you can remember, and increase its strength as a password:

1) Start with something easy to remember. Then stretch it, if need be, to more than six characters: Passwords gain considerable strength if they are more than six characters long.

2) Add some “flair”: Throw in a couple of characters to further strengthen your password. You don’t have to use obscure characters; instead, trying putting parentheses around part of your password. Take it a step further with capitalization. Upper-casing letters is another way to add strength.

Here is an example of the evolution of a strong password:

OK password: jackbauerforcongress

Better password: JBFC2010

Excellent password: JBfc(2010)

And here’s another useful tip from Chris.

Come up with ONE good, complex and not especially long password, like “fR0%$” and then just substitute that password for, say, the second character in a common word which you change whenever you want to change your password. I’ve seen this suggested with shared passwords, like admin passwords. In this case, you could post whatever new password is needed on the wall of the systems dept and it would still be secure, as each staff member would know to replace the second letter with the real password.

So “Yellow” would be “YfR0%$llow”, “Blue” would be “BfR0%$ue”, etc.

Last week’s issue of The Economist discussed the challenges of data, data management and the importance of relevancy and good metadata.  There are several interesting articles, including one mentioning librarians as information managers.

EDUCAUSE recently published the ECAR Study of Undergraduates and IT.  Among their findings in this annual publication, they saw a significant increase in the use of social networking sites (like Facebook):

Key Findings, p. 6 (Click image to enlarge)

and a move toward more mobile technology:

“About half of the respondents (51.2%) indicated they own an Internet-capable handheld device, and another 11.8% said they plan to purchase one in the next 12 months” (Key Findings, p. 9).

although they still prefer learning in a face to face environment:

“No matter how extensively the mobile revolution – or any other technology-based disruption for that matter-impacts higher education, respondents to our survey consistently tell us that they want to see the use of IT balanced with the human touch in their academic environment.  In their responses to the final open-ended question of our survey, students wrote explicitly about a preference for “real books and people” and said that “shiny new tech is still no substitute for well-trained, passionate instructors.” (Key Findings, p. 12).

The full report, and a shorter (13 p.) key findings document are both available online.

A couple months ago, there was a short thread on the LITA listserv that caught my eye.  A library school student was asking for suggestions on “tech trends” to investigate.   There were several responses, and I’ve distilled some of the feedback below.

There were several practical skills suggested, but others suggested adjusting one’s approach toward newer ideas and skills — “becoming a lifelong learner” and getting familiar with ways to apply trends to the library setting.  I think this is an essential skill for successful librarians, and for successful libraries.

The overview:

• XML
• XSLT
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services
• Cloud and super computing
• Relational databases and Indexing
• eInk and eReaders
• Digital preservation
• Copyright management
• Techniques in distance education technologies (i.e., Wimba, CMS, etc.)
• Assimilating new technologies into your work life
• Writing about your experiences
• Become familiar with how you learn technology and skills — becoming a lifelong learner

There were also links to two Library Journal articles by Roy Tennant that get at this point.

ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) just released their 2008 study on Undergrads and IT.  I haven’t read all 122 pages, but I did read the 11 page PDF summary of key findings.  Here’s a few highlights that caught my attention:

• 80% of incoming freshmen own a laptop [p. 2]
• Respondents spend an average of 19.6 hours online each week [ p. 3]
• 79.5% think they are able to “use the Internet effectively and efficiently to search for information”, with a third considering themselves as “experts” [p. 5]
• While half of respondents use social networking sites to communicate with classmates about schoolwork, only 5.5% extend their use of these sites to communication with instructors. Focus groups showed mixed feedback on whether instructors should be in the “student realm” of social networking sites [p. 10]

The summary is definitely worth taking a look at, it can help inform not only the decisions we make, but also helps us “older folks” understand where the incoming students are coming from.  If you are looking for something even shorter, the study authors kindly produced a 4 page “roadmap” (PDF) providing an even more concise summary and some observations relevant to those of us in higher education.