Tag - iOS

Possible is not probable

June 22, 2007
John Koetsier
news

Every time I see something like this in the mainstream press I think: clueless.

There’s little question the iPhone pulls a lot of great wireless functions and applications into a very cool package. But most of those features aren’t exactly new. Google Maps for mobile? Practically any smartphone user can download the application to his or her device.

It’s not about: is it possible. It’s about: is it elegant, simple, natural, obvious, easy, beautiful, friendly. Most importantly: is it normal. Does it just feel normal to surf the web on your phone, locate and listen to music on your phone, to make make phone calls even.

(In case you’re wondering why Linux isn’t mainstream, that’s why. The answers are no.)

That’s Apple’s primary genius. Not always to be first – but almost always to make wizardry easy, even commonplace … while still being elegant and sexy.

The genius of the iPhone’s keyboard

June 13, 2007
John Koetsier
news

One of the most interesting parts of the Stevenote a couple of days ago was when the VP of something or other for the iPhone division messed up hand-typing something into his iPhone.

I don’t read a ton into that – I’d be a little nervous too, in front of 5000 people and, most particularly, my incredibly demanding, incredibly perfectionist, incredibly seuccessful boss.

But it did start an interesting chain reaction of thoughts in my brain: what if the iPhone keyboard is pure genius not for it’s ease of data entry … but for it’s difficulty?

Let me give some context:

  1. I hardly ever text people on my phone
  2. I egocentrically think that most over-25 people are like me
  3. But when I do, it’s amazingly tedious
  4. I’d like an easier way to do it
  5. But I don’t want a mostly-useless keyboard cluttering up my phone all the time

I think the iPhone will not be nearly as fast at text-entry as most hard-button smartphones. You won’t be able to type by feel – you’ll have to be looking all the time. Your fingers won’t develop nearly as much of a kinesthetic knowledge of the letter positioning. Your speed will be way down.

Whoa. Hold up. Not your speed … Jessica’s speed.

Jessica is 17. Jessica texts every hour of every day. Jessica has thumb calluses from texting. Jessica has 50 friends her age who all text. Jessica runs her social life through her phone’s little keys.

iPhone is not for Jessica.

However, if you’re like me … I’d like to do a little more texting, if the user interface didn’t suck big brass monkey balls. But the effort curve is too steep for the small amount of texting that I would do, to get good at it, to do it regularly. So I don’t text. And when I do, it takes forever. iPhone is going to radically speed up the limited amount of texting I do.

iPhone is for me – and for you. (If you’re like me.)

Why Apple sold PowerSchool

May 26, 2006
John Koetsier
news

The rumors had been around for some time: PowerSchool was on the auction block. Now it’s official.

But why? Why did Apple sell PowerSchool? It appears that the division was not profitable enough for Apple, and there were always rumors of issues around the development of new versions of PowerSchool.

But I think there are two key reasons.

One: Not selling more Macs
One is that PowerSchool did not actually help Apple sell more Macs.

When Apple bought the company, PowerSchool had about 10,000 school clients, if memory serves. (I did a research project on student information systems (SIS) for my company about 5-6 years ago.)

The theory was that with PowerSchool as the foot in the door, Apple would be able to sell more Macs to education. And the magic of bundling would also make selling PowerSchool easier in schools that already had a significant Mac prescence.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, unfortunately, there is.

Apple’s penetration in education has at best held even over the past 5-6 years. More likely, it’s trended down. In fact, PowerSchool didn’t help Apple sell more Macs.

In retrospect, it’s not too hard to see why.

First of all, schools make buying decisions on SIS systems maybe every 10 years. It’s like buying Oracle. You don’t switch to DB2 next year just because somebody gives you a 10% off coupon.

Secondly, they are purchases made with two significantly different audiences. The people making buying decisions on SIS systems are principals, districts, and states. On the other hand, classroom teachers often have significant input into instruction computer buying practices.

And third, it’s not a works-better-together scenario. Because it’s web-based, PowerSchool will work for anyone with any modern computers: Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it. Have web browser, will travel. Same thing for most of the other modern SIS systems on the market. That’s as it should be: back-office and front-office applications are de-coupled and independently upgradable.

Two: Educational content on iPods
But the piece of the deal that’s most intriguing to me is the committment on the part of Pearson to bring their educational content to iPod.

There is no bigger company in educational technology than Pearson. They already have the leading SIS software in the market, SASI xp. But that’s not all they do.

Pearson is a quintessential international megacorp, with businesses all over the world. However, they’re biggest in publishing. In educational publishing, they make textbooks, they publish novels for age-targeted audiences, and more – particularly, curriculum-related products. As they so modestly state:

We are the leading pre K-12 curriculum, testing, and software company in the US, reaching every student and teacher in that country with one or more of our products and services. We offer a wide range of solutions that integrate our instructional, assessment, and reporting capabilities. These instructional offerings include basal and supplemental programmes, and technology-delivered adaptive learning solutions.

Well.

What if you were a company that had a strong historical presence in education with slightly declining market share, but also had an incredibly hot product in the general consumer market that can display text, play audio, and show movies?

You might try to make that incredibly hot product the basis for an educational trojan horse. If so, you’d probably be a well-known fruit-flavored company.

In fact, that’s just what I predicted three weeks ago. After, just for the heck of it, I put one of my company’s courses on my iPod, the lightbulb went on and it became clear to me that the iPod is a perfect vehicle for mobile, personalized course content delivery.

Not so good for interaction, necessarily. And not something that will take the place of discussion, teachers, and all the other needed accoutrements of school. But certainly an excellent way to distributed course text, images, audio, and video.

Education has been looking for e-books for some time now. Maybe the iPod … particularly a next-generation model with a larger screen … is precisely that, but we never realized it until now.

Hmmm. Starts some bells ringing, doesn’t it?

If you were Apple, wouldn’t that be something you wanted? You bet. And how would you get it? You might start by partnering with one of the largest education curriculum and supplemental materials producers out there.

You might start, in other words, with Pearson Education.

iTunes Education Store (and library) Coming Soon?

May 7, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This past Friday I spent some time publishing a course on my iPod. (Find out how you can, too).

It’s fairly simple to create a course to run on an iPod, but there’s one problem: installing.

Installing the course takes too many steps for the average person … dragging the audio content into iTunes, syncing, then putting the iPod into disk mode, and dragging the course’s text files into the Notes section of their iPod. (More info on installing.)

There has to be a better way – and there’s a couple of forms it could take. One is very simple and immediate. The other is long-term and strategic … and that’s the one that I think Apple will do.

One: iPod Markup Language, zipped course packages
Option A would be for Apple to extend the markup language that iPods already speak, making it just a little more sophisticated. In this scenario, Apple would invent some kind of configuration format that would tell iTunes just what to do with all the course components.

Example:

A course might consist of audio content, text content, some pictures, and perhaps a few videos. The configuration file would simply be used during installation – telling iTunes what’s included, where to put it, and how it’s all linked together.

Then content providers could zip up course packages and distribute them online. People who want to install the courses would just download the file and import it into iTunes. During the next sync with their iPod, iTunes would put the components in the right places on the iPod, and users would find the courses either in the Notes section of their iPod as they currently do, or, preferably, in a dedicated courses/learning section.

Two: iTunes Education Store (and library)
That’d be a great easy solution, but here’s what I think Apple will actually do.

Apple will do for iPod-based e-learning exactly what they did for podcasts: build in the ability for content providers (both professional and amateur) to register their content at the iTunes music store.

They’ve already done this for major universities, in a sense. Currently, it’s only for audio and maybe video content. But eventually, it will be for complex content that is a mix of text, audio, video, images, and even assessment.

Once that’s been done, then Apple will make it discoverable for people browsing the iTunes Music, err everything store. You’ll be able to can “subscribe” to it just like a podcast, and bango-wango, it’ll auto-magically appear on your iPods.

There’ll be a free option for free content (that’s the library part) and, you guessed it, a commercial model for courses people and companies want to sell.

(As an aside, this is why Microsoft is so worried about Apple’s iTunes/iPod empire. It’s not the music, it’s the ecosystem. What Apple has built is a media-delivery monster, and the only limit to what this pipe can carry is the rate at which people can absorb new uses for it without getting information overload and reacting against it.)

This will be completely revolutionary, because now you will not only have an easy way to create and publish courses, you’ve got a popular, common platform on which to do it. Who needs e-books? iPod is already here!

The content is easy to create – it took me about an hour to get from having no clue how to do it to successfully publishing my course on my iPod. And the reach of the platform is unparalleled, with probably 45 million iPods in the wild today.

It’s a content provider’s dream: fairly cheap, extremely portable, good battery life, flexible, easy to publish to, a built-in distribution model, and an ecosystem full of people used to paying for content.

Is this what Duke University had in mind when they did their iPod Duke Digital Initiative? Perhaps. I’m convinced it’s going to happen.

The only question is when.

How to publish a course on iPod

May 7, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Friday nights, Friday nights. Friday nights are supposed to be for fun. For long dinners and late movies, and then a little nightcap before going to bed.

Except for geeks.

I’m only a mini-geek, so I only spent about 3 hours fiddling with technology.

But this past week Friday I got my first course up and running on an iPod. And it’s unbelievably simple.

The course consists of a series of text components – which can be basically any text you want – and some audio tracks. You access the course via the Notes menu in your iPod, and when the audio tracks are referenced, you simply click the middle select button on your iPod to play them while you continue reading the note.

How to publish a course on iPod
iPod speaks a subset of HTML – a very small subset, as far as I know. (Oddly enough, the files you transfer to your iPod have to be simple text (.txt) files and not HTML (.html) files.)

The syntax will be very familiar to anyone who has any experience with HTML:

  • Page titles: <title>this is the title</title>
  • Links: <a href=”link.txt”>this text is a link</a>
  • Line breaks: the standard <br>
  • Paragraphs: the standard <p>
  • Song/audio links: <a href=”song=My Unique Song Name”>Link to song</a>

There’s a few more – check Make Magazine for details.

Here’s a critical one, though, if you want to link audio into your course but do not want users to leave the environment of your course. Use the song/audio link mentioned about, but add the following meta tag to the top of your page: <meta name=”NowPlaying” content=”false”>. That will make the song (or audio track with training content) play while the text content remains on the screen … which is what I wanted for my little app.

All-in-all, very simple, and very cool.

My kingdom for an installer
There is one shortfall, however: no installer app or standard installer procedure. Apple needs to build something in for automatic installation.

Right now, the install procedure is as follows:

  1. Drag song/audio tracks to iTunes
  2. Sync
  3. In iTunes preferences, enable Disk Mode
  4. Drag notes bundle into iPods Notes area

That probably involves connecting/disconnecting the iPod twice, not to mention futzing with preferences. Dragging the notes bundle into the iPod notes area is dead easy, but I’ve seen way too many dead easy procedures on a computer give … umm … inexperienced users fits to believe this this is not a problem. And I haven’t even listed the part about re-connecting your iPod and disabling Disk Mode so that you can sync your music again.

Realistically, I think Apple sees the potential of iPods as learning devices with both audio and video content. Hopefully that will impell them to create some sort of mechanism that is drag-n-drop friendly for users – for example, download a zipped course, drop it on iTunes, and based on some metadata, iTunes just knows what to do with it.

Probably, however, Apple will create some kind of solution based on the iTunes Music Store.

And this is how I think they’ll do it.

More, more, more
As far as I can find out, however, there is no way of affecting either the font or size of the text you publish on iPod.

That would be a very nice feature, since (as you can see in the screenshot above) the default iPod Notes text is rather thin and spidery. I’d like to be able to beef it up a bit … make it bold or something like that.

In terms of courses, adding assessment is always a nice feature – even if it’s just self-assessment for the learner.

Currently, the only way you can add assessment to an iPod course is via branching: asking a question with a number of answers, each of which is a link. By following the link of the selected answer, the user both selects an option and (by virtue of what you put at the linked file) finds out if he/she is right or wrong.

Summing up
Adding a course to an iPod is incredibly easy … and will probably get even easier.

It would be nice if Apple would publish some specs on what you can or can’t do with Notes (in terms of tags that are supported). I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that in the medium-term future.

But I can already see that iPod could become a very strong e-learning platform over the next 2-4 years.

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