Grabs you and locks you in

Now do bear in mind that I come to Apple technology from the point of view of the Spectrum/Atari ST/Archimedes/WinTel models.  In other words my experience with computers has been very diverse and the closest thing to a single platform is that I have tended to teach on Windows machines for most of my teaching career - and therefore use them for personal computing.  A couple of years ago, having gone through hell and high-water to even attempt to get a ticket for a queue to buy an iPhone 4 in KL, I  turned on my heels and went to the nearest Maxis shop and bought an HTC Wildfire instead.  And I felt good about it because open source Android OS things are generally good in principle, and I felt like I was cocking a snoop to the Apple behemoth.  

Fast forward now, and having used iPads and subsequently a macbook and iMacs in teaching, I must say that I have gone over to the other side.  Apple devices just WORK better, FEEL better, ARE better than their PC or Android equivalent.  And much of this has to do with the ecosystem that envelopes you whenever you use an Apple device - an ecosystem that supports you and does crazy things like use iCloud across all devices, bouncing photos around photostream.  Not crazy now but the idea was two years ago.  It just works better.  Hence we now have a Macbook, an iPad 2 and 3 from work, an iPhone 4S for my Christmas present, which is so much better in so many ways than my Wildfire that I do not have the time to express how, and that gleaming white tease of an iPad mini for K.  The reason why the ecosystem is important in all of this is that it took me - Director of ICT - two full, intense, concentrated hours in the wee small hours to get my contacts off my old Android phone and onto my iPhone, involving convert address books into csv, then into vcf, then into iTunes, then up into the (google) cloud, then down onto the iPhone.  Eventually.  The process was like moving house and at one point I was seriously going to give up and manually enter them all, which of course is anathema to anybody who is in any way IT-savvy, but was an attractive proposition with three small children snapping at my heels.  So eventually I got it to work and I now realise that I never want to move house/ecosystems again.  I want to stay enveloped and secure.  As an aside, the iPad mini is just the most desirable piece of kit I think I have ever used - works absolutely perfectly, as light as the gossamer wing-tip of a silicon angel, and brings a smile to your face whenever you use it.  Apple are doing something right, aren't they?

Ownership in the cloud

An interesting read in the Guardian yesterday, concerning who exactly owns the content that users upload into cloud services such as Instagram.  This is a thorny old issue but is prompted by the changes to the Terms and Conditions of the use of Instagram, which kick in on January 13th.   From then on, the use of Instagram is conditional upon you being required to share your username, likeness and photos - and for them to be used for advertising purposes without you receiving any form of reimbursement.  This would certainly impact upon professional and semi-professional photographers, who might otherwise make some decent money from selling their photos online - if they now upload these photographs into Instagram then they could lose all rights to these.  To which one could counter - well, don't do it then.  Keep your own personal or commercial photographs - or any kind of data - away from such cloud services.  But that does not really address the issue, since a great many people are using cloud computing services and entrusting these services with potentially sensitive data.  My school has - in no small part because of me - committed to using google apps for all staff and students.  This includes gmail and google docs, plus google calendar.  There are now many hundreds of thousands of documents that we have entrusted to google to backup, restore and generally look after for us.  In google's case, they do not own the data that I have put into their services, but they do reserve the right to do whatever they like with it.  The lesson there being - if you want to use a free cloud service, be sure to know what you are signing up for.

Just who is the teacher here?

Reading all about third millennium learners and how they are that much more collaborative and social and independent in their approach to educational materials, visiting the likes of iTunes U and the Kahn Academy and taking learning into their own hands….and yes I teach in a school where I can imagine that happens a great deal.  But it was brought home to me on the evening of my ADE application when I was trying to overlay a soundtrack that I had made in Garageband into iMovie.  It is a bit of a bind if you are not familiar with sharing things via iTunes (as opposed to Save As on a Windows machine using something like Audacity).  Anyway I was searching for answers on youtube as one does, and I came across this video:

Now this exactly met my needs and it explained what I had to do perfectly.  And it was delivered by a schoolboy who is known as techkidhelp101 who could not surely have been any older than Year 9, and in fact may well be younger.  So here I am as Director of ICT in a major International School, with 13 years of teaching experience under my belt, being taught by an anonymous school child from somewheresville how to do something fairly technical.  AND notice that he has an entire channel that he posts instructional videos into.  Is he charging for this?  No.  Does he get some long term hidden benefit out of this?  Probably not.  Is he trying to monetize this as a service?  I doubt it.  He is simply sharing his knowledge across the web because he thinks it is a cool thing to do, spreading the word, and utterly empowering himself as a provider of knowledge - which is exactly what teachers used to do back when I started.  
Isn't that amazing really if you think about it?  What a modern world we are in, what a flipped world.  I know that there are plenty of children who are nowhere near anything like this level of communication and technical skill, and I don't want to make assumptions that everybody is doing this all the time.  But when I find people who do, then they become nuggets of gold in my teacher brain and it does make me think that the modern world is an amazing place, and that we as a profession need to adapt to it pretty quickly.

Pre-ADE jitters

So here I am on a Sunday afternoon, having just made Christmas paper chains with the kids and watching a battering tropical storm assault our balcony for the second time today - which even for KL, is a little unusual.

My head is swimming with items to complete for my ADE application, including tidying up a few links to my iTunes U courses, looking through transparency text boxes in wordpress for an idea I have for a parental portal for GIS, and, erm, shooting the actual video for the ADE application.  I have at least storyboarded it but when I read other ADE applicants who had posted online at just how much time it takes up, I did wonder whether it was them being a bit like a Fresher student, or whether or not it really did eat into you soul.  And my soul has been gorged upon like an, er,  half-bitten apple.  Or something.
The ultimate purpose of applying for ADE status has been self-improvement, and I know a huge amount more about iTunes U Course Manager, iMovie themes and transitions, iBooks author and Garageband as a result of going for this.  So I guess even if I fail to make the (gr)ADE then at least I can be satisfied that I have learned plenty of techie things that otherwise would have been placed in the file marked 'non essential so put them off awhile'.
Failing that I could try instead to create a Christmas decorations app and spread the decoration love over the festive season...nope too late...

A bygone era

In the midst of completing my iTunes U course about 3rd millennium technology I came across the following book that was buried in a dusty old box from our previous office.  I kept it for posterity because, well sometimes that's what you do with books.  Do people keep apps or iBooks for posterity? For purely sentimental reason because the smell and the feel and the patina of the artifact evokes something within you that takes you back to a bygone era?  This is the reason why I rescued this book from pulverization and I share a couple of pictures below:

It took an act of enormous self-discipline to stop myself from uploading another 20 pictures from this book, and equally to resist spending an hour looking up hardware from the era such as the Sinclair ZX-81 - referred to in the book if you look carefully as the Timex Sinclair 1000.
Sigh.