Week 3: Smartphones

Thing #6 Apps for Sharing

Some examples of mobile sharing apps are:

• Foursquare: http://www.foursquare.com. This app allows you to “check in” when you visit places around town, and after a certain number of check ins you can sometimes get coupons or other prizes. You can also become the “mayor” of locations you check into frequently – we have a mayor, for example, on our page: https://foursquare.com/v/marcellus-free-library/4e39505018a8d2fcc62a0c8f It used to be Mr. Mancciochi, but someone else has recently taken over the mayorship of Marcellus Free Library.
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com. With the Twitter app, you can “Tweet” about your favorite stuff, details of your day, or have Twitter conversations with other members. You can also Tweet pictures and videos, uploaded from your mobile phone or tablet. Even Barbra does it! https://twitter.com/BarbraStreisand
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com. This is an app for sharing photos. You can snap a picture with your phone, then edit it in all sorts of interesting ways and share it with other Instagram members. You can see some of the coolest Instagram shots here: http://mashable.com/2012/03/04/best-instagram-photos/. They have all been enhanced with Instagram’s editor in some way, so they are like art pieces as well as photographs.
• Go Try It On: http://www.gotryiton.com. This is an iPhone app that lets you take pictures of yourself in different outfits, then post the photos and get feedback. Lots of people use this to snap pictures in the dressing room and get comments on whether or not they should buy what they’re trying on.

Thing #7 Why share? For virtual badges, of course!

Remember when you were in Girl Scouts and you got that great sash (well, you paid a lot of money for it, actually) and then you could get all those badges that your mom diligently sewed on so you could display your accomplishments? I, for example, earned the Compass Badge and the Math Badge, yet oddly I have a terrible sense of direction and got a 36 on my Course III Regents. Hmm.

Anyway, badges are back in a big way, and for grownups too! But, like everything else, they’ve gone virtual. Many sharing websites like Facebook and Foursquare offer badges that you can earn and display on your page. For example, Foursquare gives you a badge when you check in a certain number of times at a location – the “Newbie” badge for the first time you check in anywhere, the “Porky” badge for people who love barbeque, and the “Don’t Stop Believin’” badge for all of you karaoke superstars out there.

Social media has had badges for several years, but now educational sites are getting in on the action. Badges have become little ways to show you’re dedicated to lifelong learning, and people are even putting them on resumes. This type of badge earning is less like the Foursquare “Check in” and more like a little report card, because you choose to complete the steps necessary to earn educational badges. For an idea of how this works, go to this site http://openbadges.org/  and click “get started” to earn your first educational badge (it won’t take more than 5 minutes – I promise!)

Educational badges are also going to be a part of our amped-up Summer Reading Program this year, called “Make Your Summer @ Your Library.” To see details of the program and the badges we’ve designed so far, check out our site: http://sites.google.com/site/ocplsummerprogram. This type of educational badge program is sometimes called Gamification, and works really well for mobile users who want to take their projects with them and learn whenever they have idle time. Badge earning with your mobile device basically makes your real life into a challenge or a game – which is also the point of our next thing, Augmented Reality.

Thing #8 Augmented Reality

Do you like living in your own little world? Well it turns out that everyone does! We’ve talked about Augmented Reality before, in the 23 Things for Learning Web2.0. But the difference now is that it isn’t a futuristic concept anymore. Basically, AR is a tool to make the real world more like the digital one. The future of augmented reality may make it possible for you to put on a pair of special gloves and use your fingers to “click” on objects or locations in the real world and display them on a device you wear around your neck, similarly to the way we click and move objects on a computer or smartphone. Currently, most AR apps are for directions, but there are also games, apps to help with color blindness, to see if there have been crimes committed around where you are, to find your car, and to help you pick out furniture! Click here to get an idea of what AR looks like and what it’s used for: http://www.iphoneness.com/iphone-apps/best-augmented-reality-iphone-applications/.

Week 2: E-Readers

Thing #3 The origins of e-reading

Let’s go back in time now, to the magical far-off year of 1998. Y2K was not yet a serious issue, but we were definitely worried about the dwindling popularity of the song “1999” by Prince once the millennium hit. Nineteen European nations agreed to forbid human cloning, the Unabomber was sentenced to life in prison, and a little-known movie called “Titanic” won the Academy Award.

Oh and one other thing: Rocket eBook introduced the first portable electronic book reader.

Okay, now many objections have been raised about the fact that good old-fashioned books are not only cozier, they also smell better than those read electronically. Without getting into all that, I will say that the invention of e-ink (which is an e-reader display that looks like a page in a regular book) revolutionized the game and made people flock to Amazon for their Kindles. Experts have suggested that e-books should never have been saddled with the term “book” at all, because it gives people false comparisons – regular books have limitations that e-reading doesn’t because e-books have the ability to incorporate digital content. For example, an e-book can contain a dictionary so you can look up any word in the book, or it might have links to web pages for further information, or it might contain games. With e-books, the research can be contained within the book itself; or if not, a person can read the book on a tablet with access to the Internet and do the research right there. E-books, in this way, make us smarter because we have to do less work to find information, therefore we cram more research and learning into our lifetimes.

In fact, e-books gained popularity with more technical things, like textbooks, because e-book versions are less bulky and cheaper to produce. It took longer to catch on for popular fiction, but it is now possible to search for, buy, and download a book in 60 or less, all while not even leaving your bathtub! So back in the olden days of 1998, Rocket eBook ambitiously tried to sell their reader and failed epically – but just a few years later, Amazon changed the game with their e-ink display and the rest is ancient history. RIP Rocket eBook L

Here’s the boring history stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book#History

Thing #4 Vow to become an expert on one type of e-reader!

The library isn’t just a house for books – it’s a house for knowledge. The staff are the best resource for literacy and learning, so for this week make a promise to yourself to become an expert on an e-reader. You can choose any device you want, and then read all the how-to instructions you can find until you feel you can rule the world! If you already own an e-reader, try picking a device with which you’re unfamiliar – then you’ll be an expert in at least two devices. Here are some places to start:

• Kindle user guides: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_kindle_nav_ts_guide?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200317150

• Nook user guides: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook/379003208 (click on a particular Nook model at the bottom of the page under “Nook Support” to read about that device)

• Kobo: http://www.kobo.com/ereaders

• Sony E-Reader: http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/select-system.pl?PRODTYPE=74

Thing #5 Take a look at different e-book formats

Okay, so you’re an e-reader expert, but what about e-book delivery systems? Not all e-reader makers also produce e-books. There are a couple of e-book formats we use for OverDrive library books: Kindle and Adobe EPUB. There is also an Open EPUB format, which allows readers to share books across different types of devices, and they don’t have any DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions, so they can sometimes be lent to multiple people at once. Kindle books are only compatible with devices that use the Kindle App, and EPUBs are compatible with all other devices, but Open EPUBs can be used across all devices and computers. All of these e-book producers are not necessarily publishers, but they make agreements with publishers to convert and manage their e-books. There are also formats for our downloadable audiobooks: MP3 is used with iTunes, and WMA is used on Windows computers and devices; Android operating systems can use either format.

Those are the bigs, but what about the smalls? There are other producers of e-content out there who offer Indie content and free content. Some examples are:

Google Books: http://books.google.com/bkshp?hl=en&tab=wp Much of the content on Google’s book site is free, and they also offer previews of books (you can see Google book previews attached to many of the items in our library catalog).

Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ Many of these books are classics which are out of copyright, but Project Gutenberg also helps contemporary authors self-publish e-books. And by the way, I did a truly awesome research paper on Johann Gutenberg in the eleventh grade, and he was a super cool guy!

Bartleby: http://www.bartleby.com/index.html This is a great source for free literature, but it is Internet-only so you can’t transfer it to your e-reader.

The Online Books Page: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ A pretty cool selection of literature, organized by theme and time period. This site also has links to banned books. These are Internet-only books, however, so you can’t transfer them to your e-reader.

In addition to the above options, tablet and e-reader producers also offer many classic and Indie titles for free through their sites. Many colleges and universities also have digital repositories, featuring e-texts written, published, and posted by faculty members. Even the U.S. Government publishes its own e-content through the National Archives: http://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/govt-docs.html. And of course, libraries have also become publishers, archiving their own records and even publishing books, mostly supported at the academic level by the Association of Research Libraries. In the digital age, anyone can run a small press!

Week 1: Introduction to Touchscreen

Thing #1 Watch a video introduction to mobile technology

Besides mobile homes and Mobile, Alabama, mobile technology is the most important “mobile” out there today! But what, exactly, constitutes mobile technology? Am I a form of mobile technology? Is my car? Is my Grandma in her scooter chair? The answer, technically, is yes to all of those – but wait, there’s more!

Check out this video to get started on your magical mobile journey . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bHVGev9UCU

Thing #2 Mobile technologies in education

There is a movement called “MLearning” which has to do with using mobile technology in education, but it can also be used in workplace environments, learning disguised as games, and even in the army (http://mobileben.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/what-the-army-is-doing-in-mobile-learning/).

It’s all about creating a 21^st-century learning environment that incorporates the technology everyone’s already using. Ideas can be as simple as using surveys during class to encourage “virtual” hand-raising, to as complicated as whole classes built on mobile apps that act as on-the-go classrooms. The great thing about MLearning is that it is, of course, mobile, so homework assignments can become more fun and interactive. Forget sitting down with a ditto sheet, now homework can involve going outside and snapping pictures of bugs for science class, or playing “Words With Friends” to enhance literacy skills (and get thrown off a plane). Or tablets can be used in schools to promote MLearning and digital literacy, while at the same time being platforms for students to turn in class work.

There are tons of sites out there that support learners and developers of MLearning content, such as:

• Learning2Go: https://www.wolverhampton-engage.net/sites/anonymous/Learning2Go/Pages/default.aspx

• MobLearn: http://moblearn.blogspot.com/

• Apple in Education: http://www.apple.com/education/resources/

I hate to break it to you, but “Digital Bombardment” is upon us, so we might as well get on board! (http://themobilelearner.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/some-thoughts-around-digital-bombardment/).