The Anthropology of Mobile Phones

What are the top 3 most important items that people carry? Money, keys, and our cel phones. According to Chipchase, this is true across gender, cultures, and contexts.

This TED talk shares some interesting and surprising discoveries about how people in third world countries strive to connect over time and space - some 3 billion + have mobile phones worldwide. Street innovations - such as using the mobile phone as an ATM to send money to rural villages, and reverse engineering to meet the demand for fixing broken phones - exemplify how necessity is the mother of invention, as well as our impressive creative capacity when faced with few or limited resources.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/jan_chipchase_on_our_mobile_phones.html

Transcript: HERE

Trends in Mobile Device Acquisition 1975-2011

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We've all heard about the massive proliferation of mobile devices, the worldwide increase in the purchase of cellular phone. This image [does not include all mobile platforms] shows units of devices shipped from 1975-2011 and provide an interesting window on trends in the marketplace.

PCs on the downfall:

• iPad can no longer be considered a niched- volume of sales in its first 2 years places it within an order of magnitude of all PCs sold.
• iPhone, Android, iPad as the new entrants into personal computing have a combined volume that is higher that PCs sold in the same period [approx. 358 million vs. 336 million excluding Macs in 2011]

Three Phases or Eras

1975-1991: Emergence & rapid growth but also multiple standards and experiments

1991-2007: Microsoft Dominates

2008 - 2012: iPhone & Derivatives Dominate

Which Tablet Case...?

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As I prepared to loan out the half dozen iPads that I was able to pull together - from my Faculty Development Grant and loan from our Educational Tech Director Al Weiss - I was faced with the question of how best to protect the devices to ensure the longest shelf life. This turned out to be quite the challenge. First off, there are a gazillion varieties to choose from. What I'll share here are the 3 models we ended up going with. I did also buy one standard case sleeve model seen on the right here - those provide good basic protection and come in at various prices - but as those are fairly basic no further explanation is needed. 

I ended up buying 3 different models through Amazon, and between using them personally and getting feedback from my students have some thoughts about what one might want to consider when looking for a case:

Kensington - KeyFolio Pro 2 Removable Keyboard, Case and Stand For iPad 4 with Retina Display, New iPad (3rd Gen) and iPad 2 (K39512US) - approx $50 AMAZON

This case offers good protection so is a solid choice. To use the iPad alone, it is easy to remove the keypad, however, the bottom half of the case will hang loose and flap which may make using the iPad alone a bit awkward.

AboutMOOCs

https://groups.diigo.com/group/about_moocs
I created this Open Diigo group called AboutMOOCs. I've been linking in resources from the 'How To Teach Online' course, Google+ and #tomooc groups, as well as adding others related to MOOCs as I come across them. My thought is to create a central resource base that can be used to help my learning and future teaching, but also to take this opportunity to explore social bookmarking .

WK0: GETTING MYSELF PREPARED

1. What is your intention for this course (why are you here)? I'm here to learn about this approach to learning so that I can be more effective teaching online for my students. As I am by nature more constructivist leaning, the philosophical orientation of the cMOOC really resonates for me.
2. What issues do you think are important? Collaboration, community, personalization, self-directed learning, creativity, challenging paradigms
3. How will you contribute? Share any additional materials that I find, and, when I feel I have perspective to offer, share any thoughts that might contribute to the discussion. On a personal level, I am committed to making connections & documenting/reflecting on my experience through my blog.
4. How would you like to see community develop among participants? Not sure. I'm thinking it will evolve organically, but guess I would like to see respectful interactions, constructive feedback so that we all feel encouraged/comfortable enough to participate, as well as, concise thoughtful postings as there will be so much material to engage.
5. These types of courses are new for most people. In fact about 90% don’t even participate. How will you overcome the fear of learning in the open and the frustration of using new technology? How do you plan to courageously work through any setbacks, and not give up? I've been teaching technology for several years and so by now am fully used to the frustration it brings - I'm still here :0) I see this as a chance to play with some tools that I just havent had time to explore. My challenge is figuring out what tool or combination of tools work best for me in terms of capturing, organizing resources and documenting my learning process. I already feel that my fear of the open environment is subsiding - I just created an open public diigo group, About MOOCs, for this course. I'm challenged by the recognition of how stuck I am in a linear learning approach but open to confronting that. I'm intuitively drawn to the Chaotic domain, as described in Cormier's reference to Snowden's model, and agree this exploration of MOOCs fits best in this dimension, but am not yet used to working comfortably in it. 

First post TOMOOC course

Getting ready to sign up for my first cMOOC [just learned the difference between cMOOC and xMOOC]. Excited, and a bit nervous, but really looking forward to learning and making connections

“How To Teach Online” is a massive, open, online course (MOOC) that takes a broad view of teaching online. This five-week MOOC is for instructors of all experiences who teach online. Whether you are new to online teaching or want to improve your craft of teaching, “How To Teach Online” is a great place to share, connect, and learn from others around the world.

This is an open-access MOOC – no fees are required to join and participate. For this MOOC to be successful, we emphasize and are dependent upon, participant contributions and discussions as a means of exploring how to teach online. Your contributions are what makes the MOOC a success.

Topics:

Week 0: Get prepared! (Sept. 2-8)
Week 1: Start with the fundamentals. (Sept. 9-15)
Week 2: Connect with your learners. (Sept. 16-22)
Week 3: Connect learners with each other. (Sept. 23-29)
Week 4: Create a natural critical learning environment. (Sept. 30-Oct.6)
Week 5: Create activities and assessments. (Oct. 7-13)

Sign up here for “How To Teach Online”.

How to Teach Online cMOOC

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OK, so now I'm participating in my first MOOC, or to be more precise, cMOOC. Decided to create a separate blog to document the experience http://azb-howtoteachonline.blogspot.com/

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Posted September 12, 2012
I cant remember how I learned about Stanford’s AI course last fall, but as I was interested in both the content and instructional design of Thrun’s course I signed up. I only got about 4 or 5 lessons into the course but the experience was fascinating. I found myself wanting to get my hands on the technology that so easily allowed one to create a quick end of unit quiz. But as a social phenomenon, what was more interesting was that some 100,000 people from around the world were interested in taking a course for no credit.