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YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences. Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times. YouTube now hosts more than 500,000 educational videos, on a wide variety of topics. The new mobile-friendly iTunes U also offers 500,000 educational resources and says that 60% of its viewership comes from outside the United States. This global consuption of US-created online educational content may be the newest chapter in a radical transformation of global education over the past 50 years. Life in this world is not like it used to be just a few decades ago, and the availability of world-class education on-demand, at almost no cost, is likely to help things change all the more as this century unfolds.

A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills. Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

Why Develop for Android?Android is an open-source platform based on the Linux kernel, and is installed on thousands of devices from a wide range of manufacturers. Android exposes your application to all sorts of hardware that you’ll find in modern mobile devices — digital compasses, video cameras, GPS, orientation sensors, and more.

Android is an open-source platform based on the Linux kernel, and is installed on thousands of devices from a wide range of manufacturers.

Android’s free development tools make it possible for you to start writing software at little or no cost.

Stay connected, even when you are “hands-busy” Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking that allows you easily to speak and see your text or email messages on your iPad™, iPhone™ or iPod touch™ instantly. In fact, it’s up to five (5) times faster than typing on the keyboard. With Dragon Dictation, you can text or email your friends, update your Facebook status, send notes and reminders to yourself, or tweet to the world, all using your voice.

1) Flash CS5 – At the moment is probably the most complete solution.  The packager for iOS allows you to compile apps on the windows platform.  If you’ve been using flash you can rejoice in Apple’s latest policy, it performs well, but don’t expect highest performance games, and Papervision to run in here.  No mac required. 2) Airplay SDK – The airplay SDK allows you to create games, and sign your app on Windows PC’s.  I have not tested this solution, but apparently many apps have been created this way. Both these solutions can compile to code that is native to the iPhone right on your windows PC and many apps available in the app store have been created using them. 3) Unity 3D – Game development engine and editor that utilizes Boo and C# and the editor works on both Windows and Mac. 4) Stonetrip S3D – Game develop engine and editor utilizing LUA, the editor runs within Windows. These game engines allow you to develop your apps on Windows, but you’ll need a Mac to test/compile. 3) Appcelerator Titanium – This is a good solution, and has a very popular and vibrant community.  Apps are limited in performance because while they can be compiled as native apps and sent into the app store they are html/javascript based. 4) Genuitec MobiOne – This is an interface designer that uses the Phonegap framework to deliver native functionality.  It only runs on windows.  HTML/Javascript based. These solutions allow you to create apps using web technologies (HTML/CSS/Javascript) and then run them through an Objective-C framework that responds to actions within a UIWebView, thus allowing you to access native functionality on the iPhone.  These frameworks are free. 5)Dragonfire SDK – An interesting option that allows you to develop apps using their SDK on windows.  Then you send them your uncompiled source which they compile and you download the compiled iOS application file.  I’ve been asked if this means they get a copy of your uncompiled source code.. I couldn’t tell you that, I just know that you have to upload your code for compiliation to their website — but hey you wanted to develop iPhone apps on Windows.  Overall this is a wrapper, I like the syntax and it’s pretty popular so I’ll mention it.

Facebook has a great deal of content you are creating, uploading, posting, and sharing.  Why not license that as well so that your Flickr photos and your Facebook photos are both included. So that your blog posts and your status messages are both licensed.

Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true.

Flash is a closed system.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009

The major difference, then, is the database. SafeAssign's library will include a scan of the Internet and weekly updates of the ProQuest ABI/Inform database of 2.6 million articles, as well as student and faculty submissions made Blackboard's network of users.

Barrie said Turnitin has a far larger advantage of scale: the Turnitin database includes 40 million student papers from 9,000 academic institutions in 90 countries.

SafeAssign asks students for permission to store their papers each time they submit one via Blackboard, which may mean that the catalog grows more slowly than Turnitin's average of 100,000 new papers each day.

Twaining in Twitter, Terence Wing, Learning solutions magazine, 3 February 2011

Twitter in education, what next? presentation by Dave Hopkins, 11 September 2010

A framework for teaching with Twitter, Mark Sample, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 August 2010

In mobile browsers, you need to be especially careful about using timers because of the battery consumption. If you need to use many high-frequency timers at the same time, try to manage them using only one timer that will launch different behaviors from the same process.

The first question we need to ask ourselves is, what happens when our web page goes to the background because the user switches focus to another application (in multitasking operating systems) or opens or browses to another tab or window? Another problem is what happens when the phone goes to sleep (because of the user’s inactivity while the script is executing). The behavior of timers can be a little tricky in these situations.Yet another problem is that timers execute on the same thread as the main script. If our script is taking too much processor time (a normal situation with large scripts on low- and mid-end devices), our timers will be delayed until some spare execution time is found.If we use a low frequency for the timer (for example, 10 milliseconds), the timer will generally have problems meeting the timetable.Remember that the JavaScript execution time depends a lot on the device hardware and the browser’s engine. Even if they’re running the same operating system, like Android, execution times can differ: for example, an HTC G1 will be much slower than a Nexus One with a 1-Ghz processor.

As shown in Figure 4, the real times are very different on different devices. On low- and mid-end devices, if they work at all, the result is far from our 200 ms intention—some low-end devices don’t even accept timers with a frequency of less than 1 second.

For any type of theft, if someone knows where you are, they know where you are not and if you are alone. If someone is watching you over time, they can get a sense of your routine

This means the iPhone 3G and the second generation iPod Touch are now effectively retired

iTunes Home Sharing

AirPlay update

With a rising trend of teacher firings and suspensions due to inappropriate online behavior, school districts are now beginning to establish guidelines on what teachers can and can't do on social networking sites.