Imagine this scenario… you are suddenly diagnosed with a life threatening disease, something very dangerous but quite curable if you have the right information about how to do so.  Your doctor knows that there is an answer to your serious problem, but cannot recall what drug is required to treat it.  He remembers reading something about it a long time ago, but can no longer recall the exact name of the drug.

He reaches towards the mouse on his computer, and begins to click a link that will take him to the online medical directory where he will find the answer he needs to cure your condition.

“Stop!”, you declare.  “That’s cheating!  If you can’t remember the name of that drug without looking it up, then what sort of doctor are you?  I want you to just remember it without looking it up.”

Of course, I imagine that if this situation were real you would be only too happy for the doctor to do whatever was required to find the cure for your disease.  You wouldn’t think twice about whether it might be considered “cheating” to look up the information needed to save your life… in fact you’d better hope that you have a doctor who a) knows there is an answer out there somewhere, and b) knows how to find it quickly.

I pondered this scenario today because I went to a dinner party with about 40 other people and we were presented with a trivia quiz on the table, something to keep us busy and entertained between food courses.  Being a celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving, the questions were all about Canada.  Now, I actually know quite a bit about Canada… I lived there for a year, travelled quite extensively through the historic eastern provinces, read a few books about Canadian history, and I have a Canadian girlfriend.  So I did know the answer to quite a few of the questions.

Of course, there were also questions I didn’t know the answer to.  And being the curious type who likes a challenge and to always learn more, I reached for my Nokia N95, pointed it to Google, and started looking for the answers to the questions I didn’t know.  If you have reasonable information literacy skills and can come up with good search keywords, finding answers to simple recall-style questions with Google is pretty easy.  In fact, you can usually find the answers just from the Google search results page without even going to the websites they link to.  It was not long before I had the elusive answers… in fact, I actually stumbled across the exact quiz that the questions were lifted from. Whoever put the quiz together had not changed anything, just used it directly from this website.  I casually copied down all the unknown answers onto the sheet and waited until it needed to be submitted.

Of course, when the sheets were finally collected and tallied, there was general astonishment that someone could have actually gotten all the questions 100% correct! A few people who knew what I’d done bandied about words like “cheating” and “unfair”.

For the record, I did not accept the prize - a lovely bottle of red wine - because I willingly admitted I had some help from my friends Mr Google and Mr Wikipedia, and I figured it would not have been fair to accept the prize.  I guess I just like to be a bit of a stirrer sometimes in order to make a point, even if only to myself.

But seriously, why do we build entire education systems based on rewarding people who can respond with the correct answers to questions, but then assume that any use of a tool to help them do this is cheating?   Why would a doctor in the scenario above get applauded for doing whatever was necessary to find an answer to the problem, but a student who does the same thing is considered a cheat.

If basic recall of facts is all that matters, a tool like Google can make you the smartest person in the room.  Today’s trivia quiz proved that.  If finding answers anywhere at anytime is a valuable thing to be able to do, then a mobile phone should be a standard tool you carry everywhere.

What I think people were really saying was that, if I was allowed to use my phone to find answers and everyone else wasn’t, then that would give me an unfair advantage.  And that may be true if I was the only person with access to Google, but the fact is that I didn’t do anything that every other person in that room could have done if they’d have chosen to.  The fact is, I was the only one in the room who used a tool that we all potentially had access to, but because I used that tool it made me a “cheat”.

And here’s the real point… mostly we ban these tools in our classrooms.  And we generally consider any student that uses such tools to find answers to our narrow questions to be a cheat.  And we drill into kids that when we ask them questions, when we set up those “exam conditions”, they better not even think about being “enterprising” or “creative” or “problem solvers”… Just know the answers to the questions, and show all your working too, dammit.

And you’d better hope that if one of those students ever grows up to be your doctor, the rigid thinking we may have instilled in them about “knowing the answers” has been replaced with a far more flexible skill for “finding the answers”.   Let’s hope that our kids don’t have too much trouble unlearning all the bizarre thinking that schools spend so much time drilling into them.

What do you think?  At what point does the ability to find answers cross the line and become cheating?

Geocaching is a great way to combine a bit of fun technological geekery with some good old fashioned go-outside-and-get-some-fresh-air action.

I spent an afternoon with another blogger using our GPSs, iPhones, Flip Videos and other techy toys and went geocaching around Sydney. If you’ve never tried it before, geocaching is essentially a treasure hunt where you go looking for a hidden treasure (more correctly known as a geocache) which someone plants and publishes on www.geocaching.com. It’s a simple enough concept… once you sign up on the site, you enter your current position and it will tell you what caches are hidden nearby. You then just pick one that sounds interesting, enter the cache coordinates into your GPS and navigate to the hidden treasure.

It sounds simple enough, but once you start to allow for the real-world factor it does start to get a shade more complicated. GPS devices will tell you where you are but they have limits as to how accurately they are able to do so. Under perfect conditions - clear sky, no obstructions from trees or buildings, no atmospheric interference, etc - a GPS ought to be able to pinpoint your location to within about 2 metres. I reality, the tracking is often far more vague and the accuracy level only gets you within 5-15 metres of the target. Both caches we found today were quite small and well hidden… as you might imagine, trying to find a small object within a 15 metre radius can be a little difficult, especially when you have no real idea what you’re actually looking for!

The first cache was at North Sydney, called Woof’s Water. It was easy enough to get to the general location, but much harder to locate the cache itself. The small park to which we were directed had several garden beds and landscaped shrubbery surrounding it but because it was nestled between the Sydney Harbour Bridge rail line and some tall buildings across the road, the view of the sky was a little narrow. This makes it hard for the satellites to triangulate accurately and usually gives somewhat dodgy results. This is where geocaching gets interesting. The GPS can get you close, but once you find the general spot you often need to start thinking laterally, asking yourself where might be a logical place to hide a cache around here… (”if it were me, where would I hide a cache?”) We agreed that the garden bed along the railway line would be a good place to start, and we spent a good 15 minutes peering our way through the long grassy plants. I was just about to give up when I heard the call of “found it!” Sure enough, it was pulled from the long grass and the log book filled in.

To make life easier before we chose our next cache, we dropped into the Sydney Apple Store to look at geocaching.com on one of their 24 inch iMacs. While we were there, we also logged the first cache on the website and worked out our next target.

For cache number two, we decided on one called Imax, named presumably because it would lead us to the Imax cinema at Darling Harbour. As we strolled down King Street and along the pedestrian walkway, it did indeed lead towards the Imax, but also to huge throngs of people in Darling Harbour.

Geocaching is a pretty simple concept really… after you punch in the cache coordinates, your GPS will draw a line between you and the cache. Just keep walking towards the target until the line disappears and you should, theoretically anyway, be standing right on top of the cache. As we approached the spot where the line was about the vanish, the GPS started doing some very odd things. The target coords started jumping all over the place and the GPS was going haywire. I looked up to see the Western Distributor overpass going directly overhead and started cursing whoever was silly enough to plant a GPS cache somewhere that did not have a clear view of the sky. Fancy hiding a cache in a spot which did not get a direct line of sight to the satellites! The freeway was right in the way…. the freeway was, oh wait, I get it!

This was a classic example of a cache not being where you first expected to find it, and having that “aha!” moment when you realise how clever the cache owner has actually been.

We used the iPhone to browse the geocaching.com website when we needed to look for clues or read the comments of other geocachers. We used Qik on my Nokia N95 to live stream video to my blogsite of our searching. We took footage on our Flip video cameras. We used Twinkle on the iPhone to tweet the results of our searching out to our PLN community, along with photos. It was a good day for gadgets and to play around with their ability to keep the blogosphere in the loop while we did it.

If you’ve never tried geocaching before, I recommend you give it a go. It’s a great outdoor activity, allowing you to get out in the fresh air while also satisfying your inner geek. It often causes you to think, gives you some exercise, makes you laugh a bit, and teaches you things about yourself, your city and your world, all at the same time.

PS: I’ve since discovered a very cool app for my Nokia N95 called Geocache Navigator. It enables you to enter geocache coordinates in your Nokia phone and a mapping app appears, directing you to your cache target. Because it uses the N95’s built in GPS and also integrates directly with geocaching.com, it can tell you where the nearest cache point is, and let you update your status once you find it. Nice work! That class geocaching project could perhaps be closer than you think!

Tags: geocaching, sydney, gps, darlingharbour

My daughter once performed at a large choral event where she sung a solo piece. It was the first time she had performed in front of a sizable audience and the first time I had any idea that she had real singing talent. As a father, it was a beautiful thing to see, and I was very proud of her.

Naturally, as a proud dad I was there with my video camcorder in hand and taped the entire performance. The event was over two evenings so I also went back the next night and taped it again, then took the two pieces of footage, dumped them into Sony Vegas and made a two-camera montage of the performance. It’s still on YouTube if you want a look.

Although I was present to see her perform twice, my strongest memory of that event is the video that documents it. I do recall sitting in the hall with the other people and thinking how awesome she sounded live, but what I see on the video has, over time, become the more pervasive memory.

Likewise, back in 2004 we did a 3 week trip through Central Australia with about 25 of my 4WD club friends. It was an amazing trip, taking detours into some of the most remote and beautiful country in Australia. We ventured up the Oodnadatta Track, swam in thermal pools, visited the remote East MacDonnell Ranges and took the back roads to Kings Canyon and Uluru. We had mechanical issues, lots of laughs and a great time. When we came back, I collected the hours of video footage and thousands of photos and produced a short video of the trip to show at a club meeting. Again, you can find that video on YouTube.

Just like the 4 minute video of Kate singing, the 9 minutes of video footage from our Central Australia Outback experience has come to be my primary recollection of the 21 day trip. I occasionally have to stop and remind myself that there was a lot more to that trip than just those 9 minutes.

While I totally understand the need to document our experiences with video and photographs and other media, I think we need to be aware that life still needs to be lived and not just experienced through a camera viewfinder. It’s a balancing act, because I know I have footage of events and experiences that I will want to look back on in years to come and be very glad I captured them. However, I’ve also become very aware that even as I capture events for posterity, I don’t lose sight of the actual experience of living the moment in which they occur.

I started pondering this as I watched the steady stream of Twitter messages coming out of NECC. As you would expect, the tweets are flowing fast and furious with so many edu-Twitterers all in one place. Twitter is an incredible networking tool for groups, and you can see it being used to connect, communicate and coordinate. Whether it is to arrange a place to meet for coffee, notify the start of a presentation or comment on what’s being said in a meeting, Twitter is an awesomely useful tool. As I read them, I just imagine that many these tweet messages are being created on mobile devices and I’m getting this mental picture of people wandering about with their cellphones in hand furiously tapping away on hard-to-use keyboards to create this flood of tweets to the outside world.

I could be completely wrong, and maybe some of the Twitterers will leave a comment about how they deal with the whole mobile tweeting thing, but I always find that in order to tweet about what I’m doing I have to mentally stop doing it. To me, it’s more than just multitasking, it’s about mental timeslicing and taking your attention off the here-and-now of what’s actually taking place around you in order to tell the Twitterverse about what’s going on around you. This is not meant to be a criticism, and I’m glad that people do it so that others who wish they were there can get an insight into what’s going on, but I hope that folks find the balancing point between actually living the event and spending all their energy helping the event “go live”.

I know that multitasking is an important skill, but sometimes I wonder if we push it too far and try to engage with (or create) so many sources of information that we miss some of the richness of the actual experience itself? Maybe we need to relearn how to just “be” in the moment and let that moment flow over us so that our experience of an event will be the pervasive memory and the digital documentation of the event will simply be a nice reminder later. How do we find that balance between capturing and sharing a moment and actually living it?

Image: ‘Tribute To Guitarist Pat Martino - Scan+03+07‘
www.flickr.com/photos/14813074@N00/374910126

Tags: twitter, life, balance, necc, mobile

Coming soon. This little girl. And millions more like her. Curious. Smart. And not afraid of technology.

Let me rephrase that… Not only is she just “not afraid” of technology, she will expect to grow up in a world where technology comes in the form of easy-to-use devices that just work seamlessly to let her do things. She represents a generation of children for whom access to such technology is as basic as access to air, food and water. Look at her as she plays with this device… she didn’t read an instruction manual, she isn’t waiting for a training session in how to use it. As she grows up she won’t necessarily know or care how these things works, only that they lets her do the things she wants to do. She interacts with technology but probably doesn’t even think of it as interacting with technology.

When this little girl gets to school in just a few short years will she walk into a classroom where technology devices like this are an accepted tool in the learning process, or a classroom where they are banned? Will she be working in an environment where technologies are used as seamless and transparent tools for learning, or an environment where she has to go to the computer lab for her one hour of computers each week? Will her teachers start teaching her about technology by getting her to “do a PowerPoint” or type a letter using Word, or will they give her tasks that can be solved using collaborative communication technologies in innovative and creative ways. Will school for this little girl be an interesting and vibrant place which she is excited to attend, or will she become a student for whom school is a boring and unavoidable interruption to her day?

Perhaps the bigger question is, will you be excited or intimidated to have this little girl in your class? Because she is coming whether we are ready for her or not…

Thanks to Kim Cofino for twittering about this video.

As an existing customer of 3, Australia’s first 3G mobile phone network, and an avid user of Skype, I was interested to see this new product just about to be released here in Australia. It’s a 3G/Wifi enabled phone that lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls over wireless LANs. Given that I spend all day at work, and all my time at home bathed in the radiant glow of wifi, the ability to make free calls is pretty attractive. I’m assuming that it reverts back to a standard GSM phone when you wander off the grid, and switches back to wifi when you get back into a wifi zone. I need to read the fine print of course, but it’s an intriguing idea.

While it’s not exactly an iPhone (far from it) it certainly looks interesting and suggests that the already competitive mobile phone business is about to get a whole lot more heated in the next 12 months. There’s been no word from Apple as to when the iPhone might land in Australia, so this push by Skype and 3 might be a positioning strategy to establish themselves as players in the developing VOIP mobile scene before Apple gets a chance to dominate it completely.

Either way, we live in interesting times!

Tags: skype, 3mobile, iphone

I mentioned in a previous post that the average cell phone these days can do SO much more than most people ever discover. This revelation struck me when I saw someone demonstrating a video clip they made from footage taken on their phone’s camera. What this person didn’t realise was that some phones can not only shoot the footage, but can also edit it as well. I won’t repeat the list of stuff that can be done - you can go read the other post if you really want to know more - but I was surprised at just how simple it is to throw a short clip together.

To put the theory to the test, I went to watch my kids play tennis today and took some footage with my phone. (Well, mainly of my daughter… my son kept telling me to go away. Fathers can be so embarrasing!) I shot 6 or 7 clips, then used the phone’s editing software, called VideoDJ, to trim each one, add titles and transitions, place the clips in order, and render a final movie. I could have added music in the background too, but I thought was going overboard a little. Total time taken to edit from start to finish was about 6 minutes - in fact I did it while standing in a shop waiting for a hamburger to be made for my lunch!

Of course, the quality is a bit ordinary, as this particular phone only shoots at 176×144 pixels at 10 fps, but still… I uploaded the finished video to YouTube, not so much as a video masterpiece but more as a proof of concept. For what it’s worth, here it is…

In the leadup to the release of Apple’s iPhone there was a great deal of talk about the device, mainly on MacBreak Weekly and the Apple Phone Show… both excellent podcasts that set a real benchmark for quality when it comes to the podcasting medium. There was tons of pontificating and prognosticating about the iPhone, and how it would change the cell phone market forever.

All that aside, one of the theories I heard over and over was that most people never actually tap into the full capabilities of their cell phone, with a huge majority of people using their phone just to make phone calls. Imagine that! The idea that most people never really explore their phone’s capabilities really hit home to me the other day at a conference when I saw a demonstration of a video made by a guy from footage he had very proudly taken with his phone. It was a few shots edited together with some music under it, and I asked the question at the end “Did you edit that on your phone?” He replied “No”, and then, after a pause, said “Can I do that?” Like I said, most people don’t ever explore the full features of their phone.

Being the geek that I am, I am not one of those people. I think I probably use nearly the full range of capabilities of my phone, so I thought it warranted a blog post to just talk about what exactly I do with my phone and some of the uses I have for it as a fairly fluent digital immigrant.

I don’t have an iPhone. I’d like one, but instead I own a very simple, very basic, very cheap, Sony Ericsson K610i. It was the cheapest 3G phone I could buy, but I’m amazed at what it is capable of, especially when combined with the 3G network service. Obviously, it can make phone calls and has all the usual features that a voice phone would have… address book, call register, and so on. It has a hands free mode, and can work as a speaker phone. It comes with a headset for in-car use and can also connect to a bluetooth handsfree kit for use while driving. It has a calendar for remembering appointments, a notepad for taking notes, a sound recorder, a task list, a stopwatch, a calculator and an alarm clock. I use all of these tools regularly, in fact I use the alarm clock to wake myself up every morning. I’ll concede that the standard text entry interface is not really optimal for some of these apps, but it’s good enough to be usable in small doses, which is all I ever really need it to be.

There are a ton of useful messaging options on the phone… SMS which I use a lot, and also email, MMS and voicemail. I can send pictures and videos, as well as text, through these different formats. I send and receive a quite lot of SMS, so I like the way it manages the messaging with the usual inbox, outbox, sent mail paradigm. There is also a templates mode, so messages that are sent often can be templated so you don’t have to type them from scratch all the time. That’s a useful feature.

I’m also impressed that the phone has an RSS aggregator built in. I can subscribe to blog feeds on the phone and it will regularly check the web to see if there are updates. It works exactly as you’d expect… when the phone finds an updated feed it indicates it on the main screen. This is a super-useful feature, and one I use a fair bit.

Being a 3G service, the phone’s service provider offers an interesting range of sites within the walled garden of their network. Hit the browse button and I can access news, weather, sport, comedy, finance news and special features like mobile TV. This is all video based too, so I can watch it all with proper video. I don’t often watch the TV news, but I will sometimes reach for my phone before I get out of bed in the morning and catch the early news bulletin, check the weather or watch a bit of Family Guy before I start my day. Other things I can get from the network include music video clips, ring tones and wallpapers but I have never bought any of these… more on that later. Other useful services include the ability to check the cinema guide for my nominated local cinemas, and watch trailers for the latest films. I can check my horoscope, find out what’s on TV, look up a restaurant in the food guide, check what bands are playing, or see what’s on TV. I can look up a train or bus timetable, check my lottery numbers, get the racing results, and even browse through online services like eBay, realestate.com or RSVP. This really does start to make you realise how the information landscape has changed. Our kids carry these information appliances around in their pockets. Adults just make phone calls. We are so on different planets.

The phone is also a media center. Load it up with MP3 or M4A files and you have a reasonable music player. It’s not quite an iPod, but it’s not too bad. It takes removable memory cards so you can store as much as you have space for. Flip the phone over and there is a decent camera built in the phone. It’s not a fabulous camera, but it’s ok, and given a decent amount of light it will take a pretty acceptable image. Once you take a photo, you have the ability to send it to someone via SMS or email, and you can also Blog it directly from the phone. Yes, the phone is able to establish a direct connection to a nominated Blogger account and send photos directly from the phone to the web in three clicks. Very cool, and something I use ALL the time.

It also takes video. Not the greatest of quality, but good enough. And yes, built into the phone is software called VideoDJ which lets you edit your clips together, directly in the phone. Once you capture the footage, you can trim and edit each one, arrange them in order, add a soundtrack and text and transitions, include stills, add music… all within the phone itself. It really is quite an impressive app for something so lightweight. Once the edit is complete, you have an option to send it to another phone as an MMS message, or to export to a computer using Bluetooth. Very cool, and so easy to use. (Hmmm, I might have a film festival at school where all the films have to be made on the students’ mobile phones! Could be interesting.)

Since the phone can also run an Java based application, there are lots of possibilities there too… as well as the obvious games (which are generally pretty naff) you can also get a portable Java version of Google Maps (including the ability to find locations and to navigate from place to place), Gmail, MSN Messenger and Opera Browser. I’ve also added a thing called Salling Clicker, which lets me use the phone as a remote for my Mac and enables remote control of slideshow presentations, iTunes, iPhoto, and a bunch of other computer-based uses. Finally another app called Shozu is a digital upload centre for all your mobile media. From within Shozu you can upload any media file (photos, audio, video) to virtually any web service (blogs, YouTube, Flickr, etc). So photos that get taken on my cell camera can be pushed straight to Flickr on the spot where they will quickly appear on my blog thanks to the Flickr widget. It really is quite impressive. Using the inbuilt web browser (or Opera) I can browse the web, search Google, check Twitter… all from the phone. I realise that most people don’t do all this stuff with their phone - they just make phone calls - but look at what is possible.

Finally, I just love the simple Bluetooth connectivity to my Macs. With a couple of mouse clicks I can drag media to and from the phone using the Mac. I can use the Sync tool to wirelessly synchronise my phone’s address book to the Mac Address Book app. Seamlessly. Simply. In fact, the other big plus for the Bluetooth connectivity is how easy it makes it to add media to the phone for things like ringtones and screen wallpaper. I use Photoshop to trim my favourite photos to 176×220 pixels to fit the mobile’s screen, and I use Audacity to edit MP3 files into short grabs to use as ringtones… it’s easy to do, easy to transfer, and makes the phone a lot of fun to use.

Amazingly, all this is available on just a standard, garden-variety cell phone. Nothing fancy. Unlike a lot of users, I DO actually use most of this stuff quite a lot. Apart from the fact that I really do enjoy learning about this stuff, I also enjoy the idea that I am learning about and using the same technologies that the kids use, and on that basis alone I really hate hearing adults say “I just use my phone for making phone calls.”

That’s so last century!