I love the facebook application that lets you see what your online friends are reading. Same goes for the sharing features in amazon.com. A friend (hi Judi!) put in her status message today that she’s prepping for class, which excites her because she’s teaching about Piaget today. How about ‘teachbook.com’ that lets you see what your academic friends are teaching that week? not courses at the semester scale, but topics…
So, usually I post potential solutions to problems. But this is a problem too juicy to pass up. http://www.43folders.com/forum/2008/01/27/teachers-productivity-hampered-technology-no-love describes a teacher who is reduced to using whiteout to fix worksheets because the district has the machines locked down with none of the needed software. Also note the ancient commercial software the school still runs. What to do? I’m guessing the solution might be a social hack more than a technical one…
So, yet again we had somebody suggest taking a digital photo of a whiteboard with their cell phone at the end of a meeting, rather than laboriously copying down the contents.Why not just invent a gizmo that is built into the room to do this task well? CCDs are so cheap now, and I have a few old, semi-broken digital cameras, how hard can it be to make a box that simply attaches to the ceiling in the room and is dedicated to allowing people to share/archive/print their whiteboards? In the old days, this kind of smartboard technology was really expensive, but given our ubiquitous wifi, it seems like a specialized version of a webcam that should be very cheap to produce.One challenge that seems solvable is the optics. Someone should be able to design a little plastic lens that corrects for the keystone effect if the camera is ceiling mounted. I would have to think through the design implications for how to get this to the right participants and only the right participants. Maybe it just has a certain web address that you go to, and it gives you a high-res slow speed pic of the board. If you’re security minded, how about just putting a little remote control next to the board, with a green button for “take a pic” and a red button for “erase”, and then only if you go to the correct web address before erasure would you get the digital board image. A console into which you type an email address might also work but would require more hardware. Oh, I know–how about you plug in a USB stick, and it simply dumps the image file directly on the stick when you press a button. No wifi required there, just a cable from the ceiling to the console. Better still–a device where the console is the camera, and sits on the table as an all in one. Final idea–what if you integrated this tabletop whiteboard snapper into the portable digital projector? So somebody’s infocus projector would also take snaps of the whiteboard for your USB stick. That would be neat.
I’ve always been impressed with home-grown technological solutions. This Streetuse website has some great ones. Note the different categories in the left hand menu. I remember seeing a TV episode on a design contest between MIT students and members of some Amazon village. They were given certain tasks to do, and provided certain scrap materials. The MIT kids were blown out of the water by the ingenuity and time to completion of the solutions.
It reminds me of my growing years in a little Arab village outside of Jerusalem. There was a blacksmith/scrapmetal guy at the the bottom of our hill who could make or repair anything we ever needed. Sorry Home Depot, your people have disappointed me over and over again when I come to them with a challenging task. Hint: The solution ain’t got a SKU number or RFID tag, and few employees (not all) can seem to think outside of even their assigned aisle or department.
-Joel G.
Can the web be used to improve the quality of ideas, or is it going to just be a world-wide shouting match of people not listening to one another? Read the rest of this entry »
Last night, I had the pleasure of seeing Penn State’s solar decathalon house. These guys are brilliant, not insofar as the solutions they propose are all that novel or even so well executed (I’m hoping their design is fully realized, i.e., done, a few short weeks away when the house gets carted off to the National Mall in Washington DC.) The thing that is great is Read the rest of this entry »
Today the power went out in four buildings on campus. Not my building. And almost instantly, people were poking their heads out of their offices and cubicles gopher hole style all over my building. Why? Because we are so dependent on a completely centralized functioning grid. Read the rest of this entry »
Apologies–I started this post almost two months ago, and now I finish it. But it works because I was just going to post something related anyhow.
Begin old post…
So, this week I was trying to do something about my household energy consumption.
As some may have read, the governor of Pennsylvania is currently locked in a budget stalemate with the legislature because he wants state support for reducing reliance on fossil fuels. But in general, there are no resources here to help those who want to reduce their energy consumption. Read the rest of this entry »
Well I thought that I should figure this thing out too. Can I use this as a blog or pensive?
I have started teaching now 
I teach introduction to computing and data structures and algorithms. Not much is drawn from my MS degree but I try to inculcate stuff I learned in the intro course.
Now that I am all rested and stable I need to do something apart from teaching that could be research, generation of design ideas for new tools, moulding old semester papers or thesis into papers or journal articles (so atleast I should have one publication ) . I need help in where to start.
Hope everyone is alive and kicking
Umber
I recently made a post on my blog about simple tools, and how they remove the technology from the picture for many users. I’m pleased to see so many web 2.0 tools headed that direction. I recently had the opportunity to “upgrade” my Microsoft Office suite–I didn’t. I don’t know what more it could need in that application. I’ve increasingly found myself using Google docs for my work. Admittedly, there are some ”Word” features that I wish it had, but overall, It has 80% of everything I ever use a word processor or spreadsheet for.
See my blog post for additional thoughts on blogging, Viddler and simple tools.
-Joel G.
http://edusign.blogspot.com
(photo: http://flickr.com/photos/sarahbaker/)