Part 1: Sparking Student Conversation with the iPhone and Blogger

In the Psychology major at ACU, we teach an upper-division class called History of Theories of Psychology (PSYC 493). One of the goals of this class is to get our students to fall back in love with psychology.

One of the great things about psychology is that people-watching classifies as a legitimate scholarly activity! And students often come to our major because they love to think about and analyze the human drama within and around them. But after moving through our undergraduate curriculum, some of our students have lost the joy that brought them into the major — a common enough complaint in most majors or in any activity that becomes “professionalized.”

So, how do we get students to fall back in love with their major? In PSYC 493 we try to help students connect the theories in psychology to everyday life. Every class, we try to put in front of the students some psychological insight — new or old — that immediately changes how they look at themselves and their social world.

Pedagogically, we’ve usually done this by having the students write a journal where they connect class content to their life. Although effective, these journal assignments are not very interactive. Further, the journal, as a “typed-up-and-turned-in” assignment, doesn’t take advantage of how our students are using other technological platforms to communicate and connect with their world.

So this year, as a part of the iPhone research team here at ACU, I wanted to replace the journal assignment in PSYC 493 with something that had the following features:

1. Allows for greater conversational interactivity.
2. Replaces the “typed-up-and-turned-in” format with a communication platform that our students would find more attractive.
3. Media richness. That is, a format that can include not just written but also audio and visual media.

My solution was to unite the iPhone with Blogger. (more…)

On the eve of the UK launch of the iPhone, Apple has released a new version of the iPhone OS that features increased international language support and updated firmware. The 1.1.2 update also appears to close the TIFF exploit that had allowed people to “jailbreak” their phones and install third-party apps, something that’s good to know if you want to keep using those nifty hacks (which are going bye-bye until the next inevitable software crack).

Though the update is not yet appearing automatically in iTunes (at least not as of 11:00 pm central), you can access the 160 Mb file here and do a manual software update, or you can wait until tomorrow morning when it should show up in iTunes should you decide to sync your iPhone.

Though there don’t seem to be any to-die-for new features in the latest software version, we have been pleased with the way previous updates have cleaned up earlier problems, and we’re especially hoping that the new update may take care of some of the battery issues introduced in version 1.1.1.

Update: Our friends over at MacNN have posted some handy pictures, including pictures of the new international keyboard options. The iPod touch version of the update finally appears to bring the “Add Event” option to the touch’s calendar.

As we all know, the iPhone has a limit on the number of SMS messages it can store at one time, and if this limit is exceeded, existing conversations must be deleted in order to make room for new messages. To remedy this potential inconvenience, Micromat has released Syphone, a free utility that provides SMS text message archiving from your iPhone onto your Mac. This application lets you view, save, and back up your SMS messages and installs on your Mac without altering the iPhone in any way.

The program allows you to view and/or save any conversation, including deleted messages. It uses the familiar iChat format to display archived SMS messages. Additionally, if you have multiple iPhones synced to your computer, Syphone allows you to view and archive messages from any of the iPhones.

Syphone is presently in beta and is a free download from Micromat.

The folks at iPhone Alley recently posted some nifty instructions on how to mount your iPhone’s filesystem directly onto your desktop with SSHFS, a MacFUSE extension, which uses SSH to mount your iPhone wirelessly to your Mac. Once mounted, the iPhone’s entire filesystem is available just like any other drive.

To accomplish this amazing feat, you first need to have SSH, which you can grab from Installer.app, installed on your iPhone. You should make sure that logging in via the Terminal actually works before using MacFUSE. The most common problem may be that your key has changed. Terminal will warn you of this when you attempt to log in. If that seems to be your problem, remove the “known_hosts” file from your /username/.ssh directory. Here are iPhone Alley’s explicit instructions.

How to:

• Grab the latest version of MacFUSE from Google Code.
• Get the SSHFS filesystem extension from Google Code as well.
• Install MacFUSE and reboot your Mac
• Move sshfs.app to a good spot, perhaps the Applications folder. It doesn’t matter.
• Launch sshfs.app and give it your iPhone’s IP address and log in using root. You will need to specify that the remote directory is / . If you don’t, things won’t work out.
• Enter the iPhone’s password. The default for versions 1.0.2 and earlier is dottie. Default for version 1.1.1 is alpine.

The other shoe finally dropped this afternoon: after months of rumor and secrecy, the good folks over at Google announced that they and a consortium of handset makers and tech companies (Apple is conspicuously absent) are releasing a new mobile handset OS called “Android.” The new mobile OS, which you’ve probably been hearing about as the “Gphone” for the past couple of months (unless you’ve been living under a stone), is Linux- and Java-based, and will feature an open SDK that’s set to be premiered on November 12… Hey, that’s next week!

One of the key features of the OS will be its agnostic treatment of core and 3rd-party apps: for Android, all apps are equal. What does that mean for the educational community? One clear implication is that the iPhone will see competition both in its deployment as an academic tool and in the development of learning- and university-based applications. And frankly, competition is almost never a bad idea when it comes to finding the best solutions.

Of course, the release of Android doesn’t quite tell the whole story… While the SDK will be available shortly, handsets based on the new OS aren’t planned for release until early 2008 — right around the time that Apple’s SDK is supposed to make its entrance. So your current choices are an SDK without a phone or a phone without an SDK. Hmmmm… We think, by the way, that the real loser here won’t be the iPhone, but Windows Mobile (which is looking increasingly like a, well, you know…) — though only time will tell.

Either way, it’s time to get serious about the ways that ubiquitous converged mobile media devices are going to transform our classrooms. And that’s something that looks to be not years off, but maybe just a few months. So friends, it’s time to put on those thinking caps and get busy! Yowzah!

Our friends at Open Culture have compiled a couple of very interesting top ten lists that present the most unexpected uses of iPods and the best university podcasts.

“10 Unexpected Uses of the iPod” charts some incredible, unforeseen applications of device, demonstrating how the iPod is employed to help individuals save lives, tour around great cities, throw meaner curveballs, and learn foreign languages.

Likewise, “10 Excellent University Podcasts” might serve as a valuable resource for those of you interested in tracking down some supplementary classroom material. The list summarizes and provides links to podcasts such as Pulitzer Prize winning author James MacPherson’s speech on Abraham Lincoln’s invention of presidential powers; a discussion on the importance of democracy from Cornell West; a graduation day speech from our friend Steve Jobs; and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s conversation about active liberty; among others.

It’s been almost a year since the iPhone was introduced at the Macworld Conference and Expo, and this year’s conference — which will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from January 14th through the 18th, 2008 — will feature 3 “supersessions” on the iPhone.

The three sessions (each has the same description) will focus on preparing media for use on the iPhone; organizing contacts, events, and bookmarks for optimal access; and installing 3rd party apps. Of course, we’re hoping for even more juicy announcements and info, but the Macworld sessions should still be pretty groovy.

In addition to the iPhone-specific sessions, this year’s Macworld will also feature a series of sessions dedicated to educators and education. These sessions will cover all sorts of topics, from working with iLife to produce podcasts to building a wireless campus, from RSS and social networking to setting up Leopard server. Wanna sign up? We say go for it. It’s gonna be the biggest party in town.

It’s possible that we spend a couple of minutes a week thinking about ways to use the iPhone and iPod Touch in higher education, and we were thus pretty excited recently when we learned about MyArtSpace. This software solution and service allows museums and other cultural sites to catalogue materials so that students can interact with them and gather information using mobile phones. Working in association with the SEA and other online organizations, MyArtSpace is featured in several UK museums.

While MyArtSpace provides easy-to-use solutions for member institutions, we’ve been thinking about the ways the iPhone (and to a lesser extent, the iPod Touch) might streamline off-campus and field research — without the need to set things up in advance. With its camera, text-input and access to the web (even when WiFi isn’t available), the iPhone allows students to record a wide variety of responses to the sites and items they’re discovering — and that makes for some provocative educational opportunities.

Imagine, for example, students in a sociology class recording images from a neighborhood they visit, pulling up demographic information from the web, and entering notes (and hopefully someday voice annotations), all of which can be mounted to a class website or used as the building blocks of a podcast or presentation. And if Apple gets its act together and makes access to iTunes U and podcasts possible through the WiFi Music Store, well, that’d be the cherry on top, letting teachers prepare advanced materials for use in the field and giving students a chance to tap into broad resources.

Wouldn’t it be great if educators could use their iPhones or iPod touches with grading programs like Easy Grade Pro? EGP’s Clipboard for Palm OS devices and Pocket EGP for Windows Mobile devices have been around for a while, letting educators use their PDAs and smart phones in class to enter grades and track attendance. By syncing their handhelds, teachers can import grades and attendance data into the full version of EGP on their computers. Since many schools use Easy Grade Pro, wouldn’t it be great if we could use our iPhones and iPod touches with it?

Now we can. Nearly, that is. At least we should be able to in a perfect world…

Right now, it’s nearly possible to record daily grades on an iPhone or iPod touch that can be imported into EGP — only one piece is missing, as I shall explain. Google, if you’re here, keep reading… (more…)

According to the online version of WSU’s Guardian independent student newspaper, the school is in the final stages of opening up a dedicated facility for creating podcasts.

Housed in WSU’s Dunbar Library and available to students and faculty, the podcasting facility is designed to give access to the equipment and software necessary to produce podcasts for a variety of academic and social purposes according to Sue Polanka, head of references and instruction. According to the October 31 story, the facility is also designed to make podcast production easier and more familiar. “By having our own separate room dedicated just to podcasting, we are able to give the students a nice place to come and try out the new software,” says Polanka. ”We wanted to bring what’s up-to-date, fun and common for today’s students to the library here at Wright State.”

As podcasting plays an increasingly large role in education — especially following the ease of access introduced by Apple’s iTunes U — we expect to see more colleges and universities follow in WSU’s footsteps, developing centralized facilities to encourage production and adoption of this technology. Other schools are pursuing more distributed models, offering checkout or access to equipment like BlueMic’s Snowball microphone that can be easily transported (even into field settings) and connected to a laptop to produce podcasts.

Either way, as more faculty and students discover the benefits of podcasting, we expect universities increasingly to support the creation and distribution of this and other new media.