Initially the directions said to create a folder called eBooks/Import and drop the books into there (connect via USB and use the Finder to navigate). This didn’t work. I copied 10 books I knew worked perfectly, but Aldiko just searched for a second when I clicked “Import” and then said there were no books on my device.

Later when wracking my brain and searching for other ereader apps, I noticed that the file directory now had a new folder on my sdcard called ebooks/import. This was in a different place than the other directory path I created myself (which I placed under the Aldiko/ folder). On chance I moved my books into this new directory, went back into Aldiko and imported again. This time it took a few extra seconds and found the books! Presto!

So here are the directions:

1. Install Aldiko ereader app on your droid device.

*** do step 2 BEFORE step 3! You and I know there are no .epub books on the device… yet. The droid doesn’t.

3. Mount your sdcard on your computer. (Easiest way is via usb).

5. Go back to Aldiko. Repeat step 2. It’ll find the books this time, and then navigate to your Bookshelf and enjoy the books!

This began rockily as they didn’t think to use them for research, but we began using phrases like “Use your technology to…” or by modeling on my own mobile phone use. I would say safer several weeks the students began replying to problems that emerge in classes in new ways, and I suddenly realized these questions were coming from further online research by the students at their desks. I’d be discussing something and wouldn’t be able to answer a question, but then suddenly one of their peers would raise his or her hand and explain to the peer what they hoped to know. By doing so, he or she is now teaching others (which has a 90% retention of information rate).

I continued this exciting usage in class through out the fall semester. At the beginning of the spring semester I asked the students to procure a copy of Twelfth Night and mentioned the full text could be found online, and then I told them when the text was due. The next week when books were due, several people were sitting at their desks with just BlackBerries, iTouches or iPhones. I was disappointed that they did not bring their materials to class and began to call role and ask for their plays. When I hit the first students without a paper book in front of them and asked where his play was, he held up his mobile device: “right here, Mr. Adams”. He flashed his screen at me, and I quickly went over to his desk and there was Twelfth Night open on an ereader app on his device. Oooops. My fault.

This kids took what I’d been teaching them and flipped it to a need from their own, but I didn’t realize it because I hadn’t thought that way yet. As I went around they all had their play, and I would say more than 30% of them did not have any paper copy at all. Two students had laptops, one had a netbook, and the others had mobile devices. And not every device was expensive. Some people had basic phones where they could save “notes”. Here they had note #1 which was Act I. Note #2 was Act II. And so forth. (My question still revolves around annotating these files!)

Last week my students were finishing up this Twelfth Night unit and building a poster (yes, yes, paper and markers). Many students had out their mobile devices and frankly there were probably a few people responding to questions of when work will be over or when the peer groups for Mr. X’s class will be meeting. Looking over one girl’s shoulder, she was looking up the use of the literary device “place” in the play so she could use that on her poster.

While this activity was occurring, I was observed by a district evaluator. In part, the comments on the informal write up were “why are so many students texting during your class when they should be learning”?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Pylon

I felt the need to explain my pedagogical processes (especially since these evaluations are worth $6k+), so I wrote a response that I sent over to district. Hours later I was called to my administrator’s office. She had the email I’d sent to district in front of her and wanted to know what I was doing in my classes.

I explained about the pedagogical approach to mobile technologies in my classes, how the students synthesize the materials, teach each other supplementary information learned online, and present that information to the class and students. I discussed how there will always been people who abuse the situation and when it’s reflected in grades, that discussion is between me and the student separate from the classroom. She seemed relatively interested but hesitant; I then mentioned briefly that it was in my management planned approved last July. She relaxed a bit, turned, picked up my plan, and asked me to locate that section. I showed her the paragraph disclaimer that delineated my classroom objectives for mobile pedagogy. She smiled widely and, I think, was relieved it was there.

She said she was eager to hear what I find but even being called in and even getting the evaluation in the first place, really shows how far we need to go and change the philosophies of schools’ administrations.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jk5854

The Kindle’s form factor is thing and larger than the iTouch, and all it does is allow you to read, download text, and and annotate. Plus it is damn expensive and for the price, foughetaboutit! Not too mention it’s easier to break because of the fragility of the factor. For me, I enjoy several different sorts of applications for my iTouch. I use educational mobile apps, games, travel apps internet utility apps, obviously my eReaders, games and some other random things.

My daughter, Claire, spending an evening out with dad at an event, playing games on my iTouch.

I’ve installed Evernote, which my friend Alan discusses at length HERE, as well as Shmoop LINK which is a mobile study guide system for history and English. Many of the games I have installed are for my daughter, but her favorite is Word Magic which allows her to learn to spell by giving her an image and a word with letters missing. She fills it in and wins virtual medals and ribbons. She can play this for hours. My travel apps were a huge deal last summer when I toured Europe, and these include Skype (which you can use easily with a miced ear piece), translators for the languages of the countries I visited, Google Maps, language dictionaries, and currency converters. Some of the coolest internet utilities I have include, obviously, Google Apps, Google Voice (before it’s ben embargoed by who knows whom), Tweetdeck, Yelp, Twitterific, Facebook, Remember the Milk, and Tumblr. My eReaders include Sony eReader Pro, which is absolute favorite because I can bookmark a page by “dog-earing” it, Stanza, which has a powerful file converter application for the computer side, and, of course, Kindle, which I actually find myself using infrequently.

I am a self-proclaimed bibliophile and was apprehensive to begin reading books electronically, but you know what? After reading a chapter, I was hooked. I could take as many books with me anywhere in the world, read in the dark (think LCD screen), and I completely forgot it wasn’t paper in front of me. No issue. I have now read about a dozen books in three months on my iTouch and haven’t look back.

Did I mention free wireless anywhere there’s a signal in the world? It’s like a mini-computer in my pocket!

After I finished talking to my colleague about that, her response was “Looks like I have a lot more research to do before settling for a Kindle.”

Hi, My name is Devon and I have a problem… No seriously though, I’ve been on Twitter for almost two years now, and yes, when I explain it to others, they look at me like I need a padded room and some Cialis. In part, Twitter began as a simple micro blog that answers “What are you doing right now?” but as simple as that sounds, it’s not anymore.

My timeline (that’s Twitter timeline for you noobs) has been popping off about the new Time article on Twitter: “How Twitter will change the way we live” from June 5, 2009, and as someone who is obsessed as most and about to begin to work on a workshop on Twitter, I have some responses.

As a Composition instructor, I find it interesting to be forced to maintain a response as brief as 140 characters. For high school students whose mentality is that instructors are interested in length (remember when we were in high school and padded pages with 12.5 font and/or 1.1″ margins? I do.), Twitter forces the practice on fighting verbosity in today’s composition. Moreover, Twitter also forces the author to be keenly aware of his or her audience.

Socially, yes, we can simply answer Twitter’s ubiquitous question that we’ve asked each other for decades anyway (how many of you have met up with someone or called and first asked “how’s it going?” before getting down to business?), but there are so many powerful ways to move beyond that “ambience awareness” of one’s day. How often have you been able to see photos (posted on TwitPicNeil Gaiman rolling around in the snow with his husky? Or read about Dave Navarro and his concert going experiences in Jane’s Addiction? Maybe you want to know what Lance Armstrong did today, or what Shaq’s been up to (figuratively).

Neil Gaiman enjoying time outside his home with his dog.

In April 2009, Oprah sent her first tweet from her show, and I ironically was wearing my Eat. Sleep. Tweet. shirt. People looked at me like I’d jumped on some bandwagon and I spent my day tweeting about my Twitter experiences over 18 months. Her publicity coupled with Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN.com caused an interesting situation to occur for me in the Twittersphere. Before April, I had probably two current high school students want to follow me on Twitter. Both were “cool kids” who I “trusted” with my Tweets, but after that Oprah show, more and more current students began to want to follow me. This really freaked me out because at that time my Twitter audience was not my high school students. (In contrast I made my Facebook profile FOR my students to follow me.) I haven’t really come to a conclusion on the whole student following me on Twitter situation, some I allow and some I don’t, and I ever blocked all updates for a few weeks until things simmered down, but as more and more people jump into Twitter, the more diffused the whole “teacher freak who Twitters with his students” thing becomes.

Posted as part of a Twitter presentation by Chad Richards.

With that said, let’s discuss some of the positives education wise that have emerged from this tool. As I mentioned above, there are “experts” in any field who you can find on Twitter every day. You can follow them (and occasionally they even follow you back!), and sometimes communication emerges that would not necessarily from an email inquiry. In my field, I consider people like Intellagirl and Michael Wesch experts (albeit both are specialized within my field), and I follow both and have actually spent time with both in real life, too. Without Twitter that relationship (virtually) would not have occurred.

People tend to gravitate around certain topics of interest. Mine are “social media” and “instructional technology”. I also teach high school English and tweet about teaching Freshman Comp. I sometimes pick up followers just because of my work, or, other times, I join a new NING and people start following me on Twitter because they stumble over my profile there. A (virtual friend) and colleague Liz B Davis, who I’ve never actually met, aggregated a list of “Educators on Twitter” and as of today (June 6, 2009) there are 765 members. No, I don’t follow them all and they do not all follow me, but the contact data I have at my fingertips is powerful in it’s own right. Another person who I know better but I still consider him an “expert” to be mentioned here (although he is too humble to believe this) is Alan Levine from the New Media Consortium. Here’s a post of his on Twitter, and below is the life cycle of a Twitter addict that he adapted from Kathy Sierra. Very fun stuff.

Alan Levine's twitter life cycle.

What I would define as a collective intelligence that emerges from these “Twitter trees of experts” is what the Time article called “accumulation of authority”. No matter what we call it, our expert groups moved from the saloons of Dorothy Parker, to the list serves, and now to Twitter groups. Want information on anything at all? Ask on Twitter. Sometimes you get several responses within minutes. It’s like the silly old movies when someone asks for a pen or pencil and everyone in the scene shoves one at the simultaneously.

We are not all experts on all topics, but we have experiences and we have ways of collecting information. Sometimes that information includes links. Maybe we see something we want to share, so we post a link. Perhaps someone we follow on Twitter made a profound statement on the world of politics, a new musical, or a must read book. We “reTweet” these, which is a direct attribution and verbatim quote to the original poster (sometimes 2-3 people deep). Other times we don’t want to tell everyone what we have to say, so we send a Direct Message (d twitterid msg). (Sometimes people need to do this more often!) I’d like to point out what Steve Johnson already said about this in the Time article through his metaphor of the toaster oven and microwave. Neither Biz Stone nor Evan Williams, the founders of Twitter, (did you know they are friends with Will Wheaton?) came up with retweets, direct messages, or @ replies? As Johson said in the article, Ev & Biz gave the community the toaster and we made it into a microwave.

I’d like to talk at the idea of the @ sign for a moment here. In my tech circles, the @ID becomes users identity more and more. People don’t know who Sarah Robbins is as much as they know @intellagirl. Cropping up across the USA and into the UK are “Tweetups” where people gather corporeally outside of their meeting on Twitter. No longer do people introduce themselves as, for example, “hi, I am Heather Herr.” But now, when I met her, it clicked faster when she corrected herself, “On Twitter I am @msherr.” THAT person I KNEW! Her real name meant nothing, as for me, some people have no idea who Devon Adams is, but they have seen @nooccar on Twitter. A colleague, Shelley Rodrigo, (@rrodrigo for those of you playing at home), and I have signed entire presentations as devoncadams@gmail and shelleyrodrigo@gmail.com, rather than writing our names more traditionally. Guess what goes on our presentation IDS? You guessed it, just our @IDs. Companies like Tweetup Badges, will even make your group badges for when meeting in public and in person.

We all know the power of Google searches that has continued to gain momentum over the last decade, but have you searched Twitter? Johnson points out that the value of searching within your extended networks may “start to rival Google’s approach to the search”. Now, we will see if Twitter search can ever truly do that, and I am of the opinion that Google will eat Twitter before that happens, but two strong search examples Johnson points out is his article are worth mentioning. “If you’re looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you’re looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.”

The power of Twitter is that it’s real time. It’s the here and now. I heard about David Carradine’s and Heath Ledger’s death on Twitter within minutes of them being found. I remember when the plane went down in the Hudson River, TwitPic’s were posted of the ferry going to rescue people within minutes (can you even imagine what it would have been like if we had Twitter on April 20, 1999 or September 11, 2001?) According to Johnson, in May 2009 an “anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.” Also, Twitter is used by CDC like organizations to track flu and health epidemics in urban cities.

As end users, some of us build the better mouse trap by making Twitter more power. We find extraordinary uses for Twitter and many times those uses are by our ME Generation. The innovative ways in which user play and work with Twitter will continually change. The value of the tool mutates, and it’s less about this tool BEING TWITTER than about the key elements of the platform–follower structure (including the @ symbol which has bled out of Twitter into other social media sites), link-sharing and real-time searching. It is like Marc Prensky said at the National Council for Teachers of English keynote in November 2008 in San Antonio, it’s less the noun that matters than the verb. What are the concepts where, rather than the content. Beyond Twitter for the fun of tweeting and calling our followers and friends tweeple or, more courageously, twits, what is the true purpose? Yes, some times it’s cool to see who is doing what, other times you spend more time tweeting than checking your gmail. Even other times, you run across fun tools like “Historic tweets,” which essentially sends out fake tweets from famous situations.

Lincoln asks followers for speechwriting help

But other times, this matters. We, as users, are the, as MIT prof Eric von Hippel puts it, “end-user innovation” where we, as consumers, modify these social networking tools for our own needs. Twitter and the like mutate and change as we find ways to engage the tool to make meaning in our own lives, through our own needs, and within our education

In the past I’ve always had a no show policy for electronics in my high school English classrooms. This year that opinion has begun to shift. My syllabus clearly states that all mobile phones will be kept away and if I see them at all, then I will confiscate them; I’ve confiscated my fair share of cell phones & iPods over the years. After Christmas break when the gadgets came out, I didn’t say anything. I just waited to see what would happen, and you know what? They were respectful. Occasionally they’d look down, check something, fire off a message and move on. Then came a bigger test. When the questions came, instead of telling them I’d get back to them, looking it up myself, etc… I told them to check for themselves. I got confused looks, but then slowly, they got it. More and more kids got it. They pulled out their mobiles and did research in the classroom.

There are several Web 2.0 tools that I know students can use with mobile technology on their phones (e.g. Utterli, Twitter, Poll Everywhere, etc…) but even I still ask, why bother? What can they do with their phones that they can’t just do when they are there in my classes. I know there are reasons to use these things outside the classroom, but, for example, why text to Poll Everywhere when we’re all sitting in the class? Together? Utterli is cool for our Rhetoric Out on the Town Assignment, and I think I am going to try to use it for that, and it’s great for recording foreign language homework, but why do we use it IN THE CLASSROOM.

Ok so this is the big question, and I’ve not discounted it. I’ve embraced it. Two of my colleagues at the college are studying Mobile Pedagogies this summer, and since this has always been rolling around my interests/issues and I recently fell into an iPod (door prize, conference), I am not the proud owner of an iPod Touch. I do not have AT&T, nor do I have an iPhone, but an iPod Touch gets me everything but the voice and camera. I am going to research and play all summer. Watch for my fall syllabus policies.

I took the Treo home and thought I would hate they keyboard, but I got use to it surprisingly quick. The phone was a little clunky, but it was smaller than my old phone. The touch screen was smaller, too. The phone was fine. Nothing to write home about and it was solid. I did have a few problems here and there. For example one screen blew totally, and another time the plastic casing around the 2.5mm ear phone jack snapped off. The worse problem was when the speaker in the earpiece blew, and then on the next one, they keyboard started sticking. This was time to move on.

The wife was always complaining about my Google calendars and phone not syncing, and I wanted more control over my online mobile presence. Given my track record of replaced Treos, I figured I could make a pretty good argument for a new BlackBerry. Originally I thought the World Edition was pretty cool, but there was no video or camera, and I really only leave the USA once a year, if that. So next up was the Curve, which was smaller and sleeker. To be blunt, it was pretty damn sexy. Kinda like Tawny Kitaen on Coverdale’s car back in ’87.

Problem was Sprint didn’t have any. They promised me deal after deal, but I had to wait. Finally I got a $100 refund on my plan and $100 off the base price of the phone. So pretty much they paid me $20.00 to take the phone home. Finally by mid July, I was annoyed. The iPhone 3G was coming out, Sprint’s Insight had already dropped and sucked goat eggs, and I had my sticky key Treo. I wanted TwitPics! I wanted Google Mobile! I wanted the opalescent trackball that reminded me of old deodorant sticks! Then my day came.

I called the Retention Department, and, boys and girls at home, be wary of this next step. Tell ‘em you’re outta contract and you’re leaving. They listen up quickly then.

They promised my phone would ship that day through UPS, and it would take 3-5 business days to arrive on my door step. No one in any Sprint store had any idea this phone was back in stock, so I couldn’t just walk in and pick it up.

Six days later a box sat on my door step. It was here. Wow. I took it inside and just sat the box on the table, looking at it. I took a photo. Not of the phone, mind you. Of the cardboard box. I then cut open the box and took more pictures to commemorate the experience. I eventually got to the cool looking Sprint box, opened it safely, and found the phone. It is a greyish green and very pretty. As soon as I loaded the battery, it booted. I hadn’t activated it yet, but I was still too busy drooling.

Later, after it was charged, I called to activate it. They quickly activated it, told me the data and Internet would be on in four hours, and to have a nice evening. Playing with my Curve last night was like playing with my MacBook Pro for the first time. I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

I rolled it, I tried to push the screen (no touch screen, which bothered me for a whole two minutes), and I just tried to figure it all out. At one point I’d looked at the Motorola Q but hated the browser because you had to click through every link on the page to get where you wanted to be. This browser is more like a computer with a cursor and mouse. I still wish it had flash built it so I could enjoy videos (e.g., YouTube, Google Video, etc…).

My friend and colleague offered me a list of “Must Haves” that included installing PocketMac for syncing to my computer and Twitter Berry for mobile tweeting on the phone. I added a few of my own to the mix and was ready to roll.

Morning came and I went to get online. I couldn’t find the Browser. I also couldn’t find any File Manager where I could search for the Browser. I was annoyed so I called Sprint. The woman the night before had not initialized my data plan! This took mere minutes, and we were off. I began by setting up my Gmail through the BB app. Now this was a mistake because immediately all my filtered mail came through non-filtered. All my list servs (100+ emails a day) came rolling into my inbox. I immediately tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. I called Sprint back and it turned out I typed an “m” where I meant to type an “n”, so I wasn’t able to get back into the account. They did it for me. The emails stopped.

I immediately moved onto to Mobile Gmail, which was perfect because it maintained my filters, and everything. Love it! I also installed Google Sync for my calendars. I was told I could only sync my default calendar, but there was the option to pick any and all of them! Woohoo. I synced the calendars, and only ran into one small glitch when it duplicated everything! Fortunately, I only had 8 events; I just deleted the extras and moved on to getting rid of the nasty sig file. I didn’t want to preach that I was sending business emails from elsewhere than work, so why would I want to tell everyone I just sent an email from my BlackBerry? And with “Sprint Speed” no less. Nope. I called Sprint again. The nice lady told me immediately how to log into my webmail (who knew I had that!) and delete my signature file all together.

As the night wore on, I installed TwitterBerry, configured TwitPic, downloaded both Facebook and Flickr, and played a little with the built in GPS (?!) and News.

I finally got around to syncing it with Pocket Mac, and I immediately got an error. The computer said I could not connect to the Curve. I immediately copied the error into Google, as I do everything. After a nanosecond I was on the CrackBerry website (you know, it’s been a day only and my Curve’s already got me blogging a book at 12:01AM). I followed the directions the nice man left in a post, and Nada. So now my work wasn’t done, my dishes are crusty, the kid’s still away, and I am tired. I will call Sprint tomorrow (again) to complain about the PocketMac error and hope they can figure it out. But for now, me and the BlackBerry Curve are off to lala land.

asus900, originally uploaded by nooccar.

On May 12th the ASUS EeePC 900 hits the US Market. Now some people won’t give a damn, but there’s definitely a niche market who will. My friend Coop has one of these (an older model) and really loves it. It’s a bare bones midget machine that flies on Linux. It’s flash memory only and most of that is detachable, but I bet as SDHD becomes more readily available the storage will increase (does it even read that type?). This ultra-portable weights just over 2lbs and has a 9″ screen. I wonder what sort of ports it has. I understand that most people who want an ultra-portable won’t want to carry around a 2.5″ HDD, but I don’t mind doing so. I always carry a ton of stuff anyway.

We may go to Europe in Summer 2009 and my wife has been considering taking a computer like this with her. Her graduate degree is all online and she can’t go without working on it for 2 weeks. Such a machine is pretty much an internet computer. It’s like a cheaper MacBook Air with a lot less oomph. Yes, of course only a certain audience would appreciate this machine, and I would, of course, never ever get this with XP (go Linux!), and yes, people will complain about the price, but it’s still a cool little machine. Check out Endgadget for more info!

Page breaks – Google docs now let’s the user set his or her own page breaks, which really helps me break up really long documents.

Horizontal Rule Breaks - This is an old school formatting style that also helps break up sections, but you don’t see it that much anymore.

Label colors – just like in gmail labels, you can now color code your Google doc labels! Woohoo! For optimum use, color them the same as the gmail labels to which they correspond (e.g. all emails from English 101 people are labeled “Eng101″ and are red in color. all docs and spreadsheets from English 101 people are labeled “Eng101″ and  are read in color) Woot!

Attach doc – Now you can attach your currently opened Google doc directly to an outgoing Gmail.

Owner options – You can change ownership of docs, so if you are quitting an ongoing project, etc…

Text format Styles – You can now format text headers like Titles with H1, H2, H3, etc… which correlate nicely to word processing programs to create Table of Contents.

Now I think what I haven’t seen, but I’d like is the ability to select multiple files and archive them all into a zip file automatically. I have old class files I will probably never need again, and I’d like them off Google docs, but I don’t want to do download them one at a time. Ugh!

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