Cole W. Camplese

Moving Day

Tonight I decided to move one of my blogs from the Blogs at PSU that I have stopped using over here to my main space. The blog I wanted to move is my iPhone blog that I set up during our investigation of the iPhone. There are a couple reasons I wanted to move it -- getting the content in one location and to see how easy it is to leave the Blogs at Penn State.

I have been writing quite a bit about ePortfolio at the University and much of my thinking has centered on the Blogs at PSU as the primary tool for them. One of the questions I get asked a lot is how can students take their content with them when they leave. One of the things we talk about is that since the Blogs at PSU publish static pages into a directory the whole directory could be downloaded and burned to a CD. I haven't tested that and while I think it would work, I am guessing it would take some tweaks to get the paths right for media and for the CSS. That method would also keep someone from updating their portfolio.

There are a number of commercial blog hosting spaces out there -- Wordpress.com and Live Journal are two of them. I wanted to see what would happen if I took my MovableType powered blog and simply chose to export it and import into a WordPress blog. The long story short is that it just worked. In the Blogs at PSU dashboard I was able to select export and it kicked out a downloaded .txt file that had my posts and all the comments in it.

Then in WP I was able to jsut go to the Options > Import screen and browse for the file.

From there all I did was select a user name for the files to be imported under. At that point I could easily edit the posts, add categories to them, or anything. Everything was preserved. I also just tested it out over at the free wordpress.com and it worked perfectly! So we do have an easy to use solution to let people take it with them when it is time to go.

Managing Video

I just wrote a short piece about how to get the video files you want on the iPhone over at my other blog. If it is of interest, take a look.

Sync with Exchange 2003

This does nothing for me as I am a proud user of PSU IMAP mail, but I have heard people trying to make it happen. I didn't test it, just passing it along. If you need to sync with Exchange 2003, here is an option.

WP iPhone Plugin

Through the magic of del.icio.us I was handed a link by my friend D'Arcy Norman to allow WordPress blogs to auto detect the iPhone and simplify the intrface for use on Safari. I know it doesn't help us here in the Blogs at PSU, but if you are running WordPress the iWPhone plugin may be worth a try. My personal site, Learning & Innovation, is a WordPress powered blog and I have the plugin working over there. Take a peek with your iPhone and see the difference.

In general browsing the web on the iPhone is a good experience, but I am noticing how much better it is as more and more people start deploying iPhone friendly versions of their sites.

Developer Specifications

Apple has created a website that gives us the info we need to create the right kinds of web apps, but that is as far as they'll go with it. What kinds of apps should we be thinking about? One I could use would be a better view of my calendar.

Another Web App: Ta-Da List

In ETS we use 37 Signals' project management/tracking application, BaseCamp. It isn't perfect, but what app really is? What it gives us in an online hub for project tracking and communication. The other thing it gives us a great UI for working with.

37 Signals also has a free list manager called, Ta-Da List that helps people get things done -- since GTD is all the rage these days, having access to a very well designed list manager from the iPhone is good thing. I am going to experiment with how well it can handle my daily calendar -- again another step to manage, but until I can figure out (or more appropriately, someone who is smarter than I am) how to make our Oracle Calendar work more fluidly with iCal/iPhone I will continue to explore other options. 37 Signals has redesigned Ta-Da List so it is optimized for an iPhone browsing experience ... I think we are going to see more of this. Accounts are free, so if you have an iPhone give it a try.

Web Apps and an iPhone Site

At Apple's WWDC, Steve Jobs the crowd of developers that to build apps for the iPhone they could use standard web 2.0 technologies -- I understood a lot of people were disappointed, but as a former Treo user, I like the fact that I can't download a bunch of unstable applications to my perfectly running device. I am however very interested in seeing what apps are written that take advantage of the Safari browser on the iPhone. This morning I read of a new site Apple is offering to browse their extensive movie trailer site. I know it isn't really an app, but it is one of the first iPhone specifc site I have seen thus far. If you go there with your iPhone you get access to the same content on Apple's standard trailer site ... if you go there with a browser, you get bumped to the traditional URL. Apple's iPhone Movie Trailer Site: http://apple.com/trailers/iphone

PSU iPhone Del.icio.us Tag

I am using the tag "psuiphone" at del.icio.us to tag resources. You can see all resources tagged psuiphone here:

http://del.icio.us/tag/psuiphone

Podcasting on the Rise

Now that the Turkey Coma has worn off, I am back to reading a little bit. In my feeds this morning is a pointer to a new podcasting report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Instead of pulling it apart for you here, I'll link to it and quote the research brief's abstract ...

Some 12% of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast so they can listen to it or view it at a later time. However, few internet users are downloading podcasts with great frequency; just 1% report downloading a podcast on a typical day.

Even though 12% seems low, let's not forget that it was somewhere around 7% last year. As I am a part of the 12% I think it is a good thing as more and more good content hits the scene. One thing I am curious about is if I am in the 1% or not ... I don't listen to podcasts everyday, but my iTunes Podcast client certainly does. I wonder what that really means. I didn't see that question answered in the report.

On top of it all, the short report wraps up with a discussion of iPod or other MP3 ownership ...

While an iPod or MP3 player is not necessary to listen to or view podcasts, the proliferation of mobile media gadgets has helped fuel the demand for digital content that can be both time-shifted and place-shifted for listening and viewing on-the-go. According to our February-April 2006 survey, 20% of American adults and 26% of internet users report ownership of an iPod or MP3 player. Young adults, those with broadband access and parents are considerably more likely to have an iPod or MP3 player.

That last little bit there suggests to me that we are on the verge of a "perfect podcasting" storm of sorts ... with a huge percentage of our students showing up on campus with MP3 playing mobile devices the interest in ways to fill them will continue to rise. I don't care if it podcasting lecture materials or not, the fact of the matter is that the mobile education market may be one filled with opportunity for growth. The questions I have are around the types of content that will be delivered. When will audio versions of textbooks in chapter versions become common? I am wondering why more foreign language courses aren't taking advantage of the excellent podcasts that are freely available? I know there are other ways, but what are they and what will they mean to us? Now that the pieces are lining up I am excited to know many of us have built an infrastructure to support it. No idea what "it" will ultimately be, but it is exciting.

Controlling Time

Now this is a very interesting little secret ... Going through my feeds this morning and I ran into a pointer via Alan Levine to a feature of Odeo that I hadn't seen before ... the ability to link directly to a specific portion of an audio file. Think of those possibilities for faculty and students! If you need to focus attention on a specific portion of an audio clip now you can do it.

I took a podcast from the Podcasts at Penn State site and simply linked it into my Odeo account (I didn't upload it, I just pointed the player at the original file), published it as an Odeo podcast, grabbed the URL, and added the necessary components to tell the player where to being and end. The resulting Odeo link looks like this (with the stuff needed to play the quotes in bold):

http://odeo.com/audio/1583023/play/quote/4:10/4:50