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bkozlek

Live@Edu grows, evolves into Office 365 for Education, leapfrogs Google Apps for Educat... - 3 views

www.zdnet.com/...4442

cloud office google microsoft

shared by bkozlek on 11 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • bkozlek on 11 Jan 11
     
    office 365 seems to be a new offering that bundles licenses for the desktop version of office along with the cloud-based versions. The author of the zdnet article seems to feel that bundling the desktop versions is a big plus, but I don't really see it. I think one of the pluses of google docs is that it is much more simple and easier to use than ms word. 
  • Cole Camplese on 12 Jan 11
     
    I agree on some levels. It seems it would be important to have the desktop version over the short term until a new group of students show up with no recollection of desktop services. I think we are living in a bit of space between with this issue. With that said I am dismayed to think we are planning for only that space. There are so many issues surrounding the future here.
Cole Camplese

News: The Invisible Computer Lab - Inside Higher Ed - 5 views

www.insidehighered.com/...rim_costs_and_grow_enrollments

shared by Cole Camplese on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Only 10 percent of colleges have begun phasing out their physical computer labs, even though the vast majority of students now own laptops, according to the Campus Computing Project. A full two-thirds of respondents to last fall’s survey said they had decided not to phase out their labs. Yet all of the technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed agreed that virtual computing labs are bound to emerge to supplement physical computer labs across higher education, and some even suggested that the rooms where students currently tap away on campus-owned computers will eventually yield to the virtual kind.
  • Well before the term entered the popular lexicon via a recent Microsoft advertising campaign, “the cloud” was transforming how college students interact with their coursework.
    • Cole Camplese
      Cole Camplese on 24 Jan 11
       
      I never thought of the power behind MS' "the cloud" advertising campaign ... even my own 9 year old now says that ... and we aren't Windows users.  I wonder if that commercial is enough to tip the scale on a student's understanding of cloud services.  Interesting.
  • In a virtual computing lab, students log in via a secured website and choose from a library of “images” — virtual desktops outfitted with different versions of various programs. The selected image then appears as a window on the student’s own computer desktop, at which point students can open a program and begin working. They can save or print their work just as though the program were running on their own hard drives.
    • Cole Camplese
      Cole Camplese on 24 Jan 11
       
      We will be releasing our own virtual lab infrastructure later this semester.  CLC is making that happen now.
    • Chris Millet
      Chris Millet on 24 Jan 11
       
      I know IST has been doing it for several years. They had a lot of technical problems, which I hope they have (and we can) overcome. It did give students access to a lot of high end software that they couldn't have otherwise. I'll be curious to see how CLC's solution affects lab usage patterns.
  • Chris Millet on 24 Jan 11
     
    Not sure how interesting this is other than example of approaches to computer lap alternatives
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Chris Long on 28 Jan 11
     
    I assume we would need a laptop or a netbook program at PSU to make this really work, but as you all know, I a big fan of the idea of phasing out physical computer labs.
  • Cole Camplese on 31 Jan 11
     
    I'm not sure we would need a laptop program. Our own survey numbers point to close to 100% ownership by students as it is. In the short term, remote application services would not be able to replace the labs. We would use this service at first for very specialized software that a relatively few use. The number of students using our labs is staggering ... I now have numbers broken down by College and the students in the Liberal Arts are the largest population. Something we should look more closely at.
  • Chris Millet on 31 Jan 11
     
    I'd love to see those numbers, and to start putting some meaning behind them. What are the patterns of usage in different disciplines/colleges? I think some of it comes down to software needs, but also instructional styles, how technology is utilized in a discipline, college culture, and how affordances of labs match up with those things. I'm not sure the answer is so much reducing computer lab seats as much as understanding what people are doing and building spaces with that knowledge.
  • Chris Long on 31 Jan 11
     
    If the CLA is the biggest user of the labs and much of what students are doing is printing, it would make sense for us to initiate a move toward paperless teaching and learning. If we are able to use the iPads for faculty after the pilot in ENGL, then perhaps we can fold that into a larger initiative.
Cole Camplese

Apple's iPad Officially Passes the Higher Education Test [Exclusive] | Fast Company - 2 views

www.fastcompany.com/...higher-eduction-test-exclusive

ipad education psutlt psuets

shared by Cole Camplese on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • After extensive student interviews throughout the Fall 2010 semester, "The bottom line feeling was that the Amazon Kindle DX was not adequate for use in a higher education curricular setting," Chief Technology Officer Martin Ringle tells Fast Company. "The bottom line for the iPad was exactly the opposite."
  • The silver-medal feature, with only a few strikes against its score, was the highlighting and annotation of text.
  • With the exception of scanned PDF files, the students found "highlighting was easier on th
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Apple’s new favorite child is not without its flaws. The virtual keyboard is a pain for composing anything beyond short notes. The nonexistent file system makes finding important documents difficult and sharing across applications nearly impossible. Finally, managing a large number of readings in PDF format becomes a major time-suck. Syncing PDFs via iTunes was found to be "needlessly complicated," emailing marked-up versions back to oneself was "prohibitively time-consuming," and even the cloud-based storage, Dropbox, "failed to work seamlessly with PDF reading/annotating applications."
  • Perhaps the most impactful discovery was that none of the iPad's strengths are unique to Apple. According to the report, “the new wave of Android-based tablets seems likely to provide an appealing alternative that will result in the coexistence of at least two competing tablet operating systems.”
  • Chris Millet on 18 Feb 11
     
    Annotation is a huge need with these devices, at least how they seem be typically used (as eBook readers). I use Papers to annotate and sync PDF's with my laptop, and the Diigo bookmarklet to annotate web pages, both of which work very well for me. When it comes to iPads, I'd like to see more discussion extending beyond eBook functionality though. This article is obviously comparing the iPad to the Kindle, and only briefly mentioned "more exciting possibilities". But it seems silly to say "iPad officially passes the higher education test" by just talking about documents and annotation.
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