An Associated Press story today is a roundup on classroom clickers: At universities, is better learning a click away? One of the article’s themes is the variety of the devices in use, and whether smartphones will eventually take over as the standard clicking devices:

. . . CU-Boulder chose the device — which uses the same technology as a garage door opener and has five lettered buttons — because it’s simple and durable, Dubson said. One student’s stopped working when he spilled Coke on it. He cleaned it with soap and water and it worked fine. Students pay about $35 for them.

More sophisticated clickers run in the $60 to $70 range. Some have gaming features that appeal to the Wii generation and one can record the fastest responders.

Most, if not all, of the handful of major companies in the clicker business are marketing applications that use smart phones or Web browsers to accomplish many of the same functions.

At Central Michigan University, students in an introduction to teaching course use iPhones and iPod touches to answer poll questions and access discussion material on the Web. Students who don’t own either device can rent an iPod touch for $30 through the CMU Bookstore.

Several schools — including the University of Notre Dame, Virginia Tech and the University of Florida — have turned to a text-messaging product marketed as a cheaper alternative to clickers.

Derek Bruff, assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, said simple clickers are great at multiple choice questions. But he’s more excited about using smart phones, which allow students to ask questions of instructors, hold back-channel discussions with each other and respond in their own words. . . .

What is traditional “media” and should it be given more access than bloggers? An article in SEED Magazine outlines the many aspects of this question. The opening and closing paragraphs follow. Between the two paragraphs is SEED’s analysis, with an emphasis on implications for science conferences, of credentialing bloggers as “press” along with journalists:

A long awaited breakthrough may be about to occur on the streets of New York City. On Tuesday, The New York Law Department released a proposed revision to its press credentialing rules that decreed “online journalists will now be considered as 21st century journalists and be treated equally to print, television and radio journalists.” . . .

The breakdown of these walls forces us to face some uncomfortable juxtapositions. The social goods of reporting are increased by giving more people access to the tools necessary to do it, but lowering the barrier to entry means taking the bad with the good. At the end of the day, a press card hanging around ones neck doesn’t help us distinguish the two.

An O’Reilly radar article provides an in-depth look at a field study where a small sample of 150 kids were studied as they used cellphones for school work. The article addresses many of the usual points raised for the topic, and is worth reading in full if this interest you. Here are some of the main discoveries from the study:

So what’s so different about delivering problem sets on a cell phone instead of a textbook? The first obvious answer is that the cell phone version is multi-media. The Project K-Nect problem sets begin with a Flash video visually demonstrating the problem — you could theorize that this context prepares the student to understand the subsequent text-based problem better. You could also theorize that watching a Flash animation is more engaging (or just plain fun) and so more likely to keep students’ attention.

Another difference is that digital content is personalized. In this case, that just means that different students get the same problem (how long will it take a space ship to catch up with a space probe?) but with different numbers plugged in (the velocity might be given as 40,000 mph for one student and 37,500 mph for another). The result is that students can’t simply compare answers - they need to compare solutions. “How did you get that” replaces “what did you get?”

A third difference is that, unlike the traditional practice where each student works on textbook problems in isolation, the learning environment in Project K-Nect is participative. Students are asked to record their solutions on a shared blog and are encouraged to both post and comment. Over time, a learning community has emerged that crosses classrooms and schools and adds the kind of human interaction that an isolated, individual drill (be it textbook or digital) lacks and that a single teacher is unlikely to have the bandwidth to provide to each student.

A final observation is that having a digitally mediated component to the learning environment can be surprisingly inclusive. As teachers in Project K-Nect began to experiment with using the blogs and instant messaging for discussing math in the classroom, an unexpected (to us) dynamic emerged. It turns out that many kids who don’t like speaking up in class are completely comfortable speaking up online. . . .

H/T ARJWright

News is changing. How we get news, where we get news, how we react to news, what we do with news when we get it and on and on.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project published today a report that takes a look at this rapidly changing area of our lives and the impact it has.

Full Pew Survey report

via Frank Reed Marketing Pilgrim

In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices. The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.

Here are a few pieces of data to consider about news:

Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.

Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.

Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

The Rijksmuseum’s magnificent collection of art now displays on webpages and smartphones. Since the early days of the web, Amsterdam’s grand art museum has been at the forefront of the online museum sector for web design and for generously interfacing its collections. In the mobile era, Rijkswidget puts the art — in small size for the iPhone or large for webpages — an icon away:

The Rijksmuseum widget is now available at the iPhone App Store. This free iPhone application enables users to admire a different painting from the Rijksmuseum’s collection every day. One of the museum’s 1,000 masterpieces is displayed whenever you press the icon on the screen. You can then rotate or zoom in on the image. The application also offers links to the Rijksmuseum’s website for more information. Thanks to the widget and the iPhone, the public can now enjoy the Rijksmuseum’s collection anywhere and at any time.

In a recent comment to a Smartmobs posting of 2008 Lisa points to a 10-month research review of the The Environmental Working Group (EWG) to understand the risks of radiation exposures from your cell phone.

EWG found that phones do emit radiation and that the existing research on cell phone radiation is still muddled. EWG provides a free searchable database and some smart tips.

EWG ranked available phones from major carriers

Patrick Meier : “Add good media sources for #Chile to this Google Doc”

@USHAHIDI-Chile: Sources, Feeds, Twitter Lists, Images, Maps, Utilities, etc

Via @acarvin: OpenStreetMap has set up their wiki workspace for the quake: http://bit.ly/9MLWY6 #crisiscamp #osm #Chile

Hashtag #crisiscamp tracks tweets on the volunteer work happening in response to the quake

Google Person Finder Chile Earthquake

#Hawaii #Tsunami :Huffington Post(s) Live Updates

In a post on lynda.blog.com, a new iPhone app is announced that facilitates the Lynda.com Online Training Library for iPhone users. The app gives access to paid members for all videos. Everyone can participate by choosing from over 5,000 free videos.

Lynda Weinman has devoted her career to teaching digital design. She is a pioneer and innovator who is an outstanding role model — and business model — for 21st century education. Her step into the iPhone App world embraces the mobile tool of smart mobbing for learning.

The video shown above has been mobbed by 14,148 people on YouTube as I write this. It is #40 of 40 Photoshop features taught by Deke McClelland, created at Lynda.com — and now available on your iPhone.

The behavior exhibited in mobs with individuals equipped with mobile connectivity looks to be very, very old from a fascinating article in SEED Magazine. Here is a sample of slime mobs intelligence from the article:

In 2009, University of West England, Bristol researchers Andrew Adamatzky and Jeff Jones placed food on a damp coffee filter in a Petri dish in a pattern corresponding to the major cities of Great Britain. The filter paper itself was cut to match the shape of Great Britain’s island. Then they placed the [slime mold] P. Polychephalum on the food source corresponding to London, and observed the movements of the slime mold as it grew. The networks formed by the slime mold closely matched major roads of Britain. Their research was published in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.

This year, a team led by Atsushi Tero replicated those results, generating a slime-mold map of the Tokyo rail system. Does this mean slime molds are “intelligent?” Probably not; a likelier explanation is that they simply have evolved an efficient means to transport food, similar to the patterns intelligent humans create for their own transport. . . .

Nearly 4 millions viewers have seen this video on YouTube. But since it is so central to our subject matter here at SmartMobs, we want to make sure none of our community misses it. The video is an excellent overview of the remarkable versatility mobiles are beginning to offer.