MasterCard is planning to release an API in coming months, allowing certified developers to create applications that interact with MasterCard.  PayPal is already paired up with Bump Technologies and  allowing people to make payments to one another by bumping their iPhones together, and Visa with Visa payWave to just pass their card in front of a sensor to make payments.

Could this help libraries?  We could make it easier for patrons to pay fines, or even make donations?

An open demo of Microsoft Surface has been arranged to be held at the Drexel Libraries Hagerty Library 1st floor on Monday, May 17th from 10-3, with demos by Microsoft representatives on the hour.

Surface is a”revolutionary multi-touch computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects, helping people interact with digital content in a simple and intuitive way” (from the Surface website).

Here’s a still I grabbed from one of the application videos:

A few months ago I watched this TED Talk [thanks John!] on Sixth Sense technology from Pranav Mistry from MIT.  When I first heard about Surface, I immediately thought of this talk.

The possibilities!

The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has this pretty dashboard where they display the statistics that are relevant to their library.   This includes database statistics, cataloging statistics, membership information, and so on.

Has anyone seen anything like this in use in an academic setting?  It seems like a nice way to package some numbers about the kinds of things we do, and usage information.

[Thanks Kate!]

Last week, several of us attended the IRT e-Learning 2.0 Conference, themed Technology Use in Teaching and Learning, held here at Drexel.  Gary Childs, Larry Milliken, Tim Siftar, Jay Bhatt and I gave a talk about using web-conferencing technologies to mitigate the distance for online and distance learning students.

There were several other interesting sessions, and here’s a few comments from Meg Finney and Gary Childs, who offered to share their thoughts with the rest of us.

I was really impressed by Christina Jenkins’ presentation, “Saturation Powerpoint.” She was definitely the anomaly at the conference and raised a bit of a scandal by dismissing Blackboard as an “inauthentic learning experience.” I thought she was fascinating.

Essentially, she posed this question: When does technology help educators and when does it inhibit them?

She was coming from a K-12 teaching environment, so it was an odd fit for the eLearning Conference, but she still had some great ideas. She identified four problem areas related to technology in the classroom:

1. Technology being used to replicate analog processes (resulting in redundancy, “tech for tech’s sake”)
2. Technology being used too much for “entertainment” or fluff rather than in more constructive ways
3. Notion of technology being inherently good/to be approached passively as an end-product
4. Over-reliance on the notion that “digital natives” (i.e., recent generations) really understand technology and/or appreciate it

Among her ideas to rectify those problem areas, she offered:

1. Crowdsourcing (building digital artifacts from the ground up, using the community)
– E.g., Christina used a social network/wiki to allow students to roleplay the Revolutionary War
2. Using games to educate like LittleBigPlanet, where you create your own levels/objectives
3. Encourage students to use the computer actively, with software such as those based on Logo
4. Teachers should consider what would change if they had to produce all their own materials, rather than simply re-distribute what has already been made. Try making teaching materials by hand.

Links to her page with Parsons, including her thesis on the subject:

————————————————–

The other session Meg took away some helpful info from was the IRT session on open-source alternatives to rich media software, titled “Building an Open-Source Rich Media Workbench.”

They presented three different pieces of software:

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
– Comparable to Photoshop, etc.
*Meg uses GIMP myself extensively, and thinks it is a great program.

Audacity (audio recording and editing)
– Comparable to Sony Soundforge, Adobe Soundbooth, etc.

AVIDemux (video editing)
– Comparable to iMovie, Windows Move Maker, Adobe Elements, etc.

All these programs are completely free, and are supported by robust communities. Complete user manuals in multiple languages as well as tutorials are available in some manifestation for all three.

These two applications were mentioned Paul Evangilista’s talk, Lowering the Bar: Simple Tools for Online Blended Courses.

Pixie
“Pixie is a utility made especially for webmasters and designers. It is a color picker with few extra goodies.
Run it, simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected color in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current coordinates of your mouse pointer. ”

Kuler was nice as well.  It suggests color themes.

The New Media Consortium’s 2010 Horizon Report features six technologies with a timeline for likely entrance into the mainstream for “teaching, learning or creative inquiry”.  Each technology is accompanied by an overview, potential relevance for teaching, learning or creative inquiry, and examples of these technologies in use.

The web version of the full report is here.

In the next 12 months:

Mobile Computing and Open Content

In the next 2-3 years:

Electronic Books and Simple Augmented Reality

In 4-5 years:

Gesture-Based Computing and Visual Data Analysis

I recently attended a one-hour webinar entitled Innovation starts with I from Project Play. Presented by Helene Blowers, creator of 23 Things, the webinar covered many ideas for inspiring change.

One of the ideas that I have adopted is the idea notebook.  This is basically a commitment to recording your ideas, uncensored, to allow them time and space to grow and take shape.

The recording of the webinar is free for you to watch, below.