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My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.

Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology

In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.

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.

Powell’s experiment, however, demonstrates the current limitations of Abilene Christian’s mobile learning study. Because the experiment took place on such a small scale, the margins of error were sometimes as high as 13 points, making it impossible to render statistically significant findings.

Although the university plans to saturate the 4,000-student campus with iPhones and iPod Touches by the fourth year of the study (giving them out to each incoming class), even then it will be difficult to extract good data, said Perkins, the lead researcher. “We could do this study for 10 years, and then maybe we could talk about statistical significance,” he said. “That’s just simply a function of the sample size.” In order to generate data that would comment widely on the uses and effectiveness of mobile technology on campuses, Perkins added, the study would have to partner with other institutions.

Since not all the students could necessarily afford AT&T service plans for their iPhones, and U.S. tax law would not permit the university to subsidize service plans for its students, Abilene Christian offered students the alternative of an iPod Touch — a device that shares many of the iPhone’s functions, but requires a wireless network to support Web-surfing.

Mr. Gagnon is the lead developer of a software tool called ARIS, or Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling. ARIS lets designers link text, images, video, or audio to a physical location, making the real world into a map of virtual characters and objects that people can navigate with iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touches.

The open-source tool,

Does your IEP include the student's assessment of their own strengths, needs, issues, desires? If it does not, it can not possibly be a "good IEP." The IEP is not a tool for the school's convenience. It is a plan designed to help the student become the best, most successful, most independent human that student can possibly be. And if does not begin with the student speaking for him or herself, it will fail to do that.

The "Individualized Education Program [Plan]," is the central "paperwork" component of American "Special Education" - and, in other forms, not uncommon in other nations. Unfortunately, it is typically (almost always) a deficit-model statement, listing all that is "wrong" with the student

The very idea of 'behind'-ness is what's under attack here, A. When you standardize what it means to be an educated child, you create a line in the sand that defines some kids as 'ahead' and some kids as 'behind.' As anyone with a learning disability knows, these sorts of lines are increasingly arbitrary the more you examine them. They shut you out for all manner of reason. They create a situation where those who are 'ahead' get a free bonus happy career, and those who are 'behind' get either the short stick or the sanctimony. Or both.

In the developed world, mobile computing has become an indispensable part of day-to-day life in the workforce, and a key driver is the increasing ease and speed with which it is possible to access the Internet from virtually anywhere in the world via the ever-expanding cellular network.

The mobile market today has nearly 4 billion subscribers, more than two-thirds of whom live in developing countries.

These mobile computing tools have become accepted aids in daily life, giving us on-the-go access to tools for business, video/audio capture and basic editing, sensing and measurement, geolocation, social networking, personal productivity, references, just-in-time learning — indeed, virtually anything that can be done on a desktop.

Handheld computers are a way to have a computer for each student. Some handhelds can be outfitted with an add-on keyboards for text entry, making them even more useful. Instead of taking up valuable time in the computer lab, handheld-using students can word process right at their desks, freeing the lab computers for more complex uses. Likewise, instead of using large, expensive computers to practice math facts, elementary students can cozy up in the corner of the classroom with a handheld and practice their multiplication tables. Handhelds tend to be simple to operate, allowing students to focus on their tasks, not the technology.