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This has pretty exciting possibilities for Webinar/virtual classroom applications. The demo this morning was Skype. Until now, if you weren’t running Skype in the foreground on your iPhone, you couldn’t receive calls, and if you left the Skype app during a call, the call would disconnect. Now even when the phone is locked, you will still be able to receive Skype calls. When the phone is asleep or when the user is running other apps, VoIP apps can receive calls. When you send Skype to the background, incoming call invites will appear as the standard iPhone/iPod notification. Clicking the answer button brings the Skype app back. One question in the backchat during the presentation was whether there might be a new iPhone coming with a front-facing camera for such calls, but this went unanswered.

The new OS, in the background, will use cell towers to detect the phone’s location, in order to minimize power demands. The primary use of this service will be for turn-by-turn navigation. The secondary use will be to support social networking apps, such as Loopt. The OS has privacy protection for this service. An indicator on the status bar lets the user know when an app is using his or her location. The user can enable and disable location use by individual apps. This service could be useful for “location-based learning.”

Users can read books on any device (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad). The books sync between devices, so that a user can stop reading a book on one device, then open it on another, and at the same place. This could be extremely handy for textbook use.

“We’re going to have to get used to the fact that you’re not speaking to a group now—you’re really leading a conversation,” Mr. Tally says. “And if you’re not listening to the other people who are participating in that conversation, it’s not going to have a good outcome for you.”

reading for learning is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, and so the question must be asked: Do these devices designed for the consumer book market match up against the rigors of academic reading?

Each school ran its pilot in courses that used texts without color graphs or complex illustrations, so that the known limitations of the devices’ E Ink grayscale electronic-paper display wouldn’t be a hindrance in the students’ learning.

There were qualities of both the Kindle DX and Sony Reader that the students felt showed promise, and that made them enthusiastic for the day when e-readers’ functionality as an academic tool becomes a reality. These features include the easy-to-read E Ink screen; the size, weight, and durability of the devices; and the long battery life. But students encountered limitations in the devices that made them inadequate for reading academic texts.

reading for learning is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, and so the question must be asked: Do these devices designed for the consumer book market match up against the rigors of academic reading?

“We all become our own news wire service, breaking stories and events instantly. Did [tweets from inside Wat Pathum] prevent a massacre? Maybe they did. Who knows?” wrote Andrew Spooner, a London-based journalist who waded deep into the Thailand story from afar, tweeting about events from a decidedly pro-Red Shirt perspective.

That partisanship was the ugly side of Twitter’s role in the Thai crisis. While the social networking site did perhaps save lives in a few specific instances, Twitter – and the opportunity it gives to instantly broadcast whatever is on your mind, often from behind a cloak of near-anonymity – also gave Thais and foreigners living here the chance to broadcast vitriolic, often hateful, thoughts to the world, raising the temperature inside this already volatile country and arguably helping nudge the situation toward its violent end.

“More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road,” I added a few minutes later, as my desperation grew. Within minutes, my pleas had indeed been retweeted hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in English, Thai and other languages. They were posted on the websites of Britain’s The Guardian newspaper and other international media. People I knew only through Twitter started calling me to check on our situation. More helpfully, others started calling embassies, hospitals and the Thai government. Eighty minutes later, I was carrying stretchers out to a row of waiting ambulances. “Twitter may just have done this,” was my next update.

First and foremost, schools want our kids to be knowers, not learners. You can see that in nearly every aspect of our system, which remains content-driven both in pedagogy and assessment.

Arguably, if you have the skills to do it, you could literally build your own education by creating your own curriculum, your own classroom, and your own assessments.

Being able to design your own education, however, isn’t easy by any stretch. In fact, it’s a highly complex intellectual and emotional task.