Rod Gammon's blog

At the Turkish Private Schools Association annual symposium in January 2012, I gave a presentation on coordinating mLearning with structured education.

Slides with Turkish translation (if you'd like to help finish translating the last slides, please do!):

Spent some time developing in iBooks author tonight and after having thought about and read about and discussed it all day, it seems right to jot down a few thoughts. Right now it isn't a revolution, but we live in the world of the fast update. I think it could very quickly become a revolution.

Today I went back to the very first episode of Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt's great Triangulations series. The opening episode was an interview with game industry legend Warren Spector. They never really leave the theme, but the first fifteen minutes or so capture a great conversation on games as an artistic medium. I love the eagerness to really think about new media as new, rather than simply a way to further existing publishing successes. In fact, it's not even eagerness but a sense of artistic integrity that seems to drive this view.

Over the summer I posted on "5 differences in publishing print and digital courses". That post was inspired by the 2011 mLearning conference and was really about how differences in print/digital product features affect the publishing process. In this post I'd like to consider how differences in the print/digital development processes affect the business model. However, it's not simply print vs. digital, it's traditional vs. new media-- the point is that more than just the products have changed, at least for the successful!

If I have to summarize, I would say the big difference is social.That includes "social networks" but I mean social more in the sense of "interactive" products and "interested" organizations.

Tonight I went to a forum on Digital First at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. @jxpaton and Justin Smith were interviewed by @jeffjarvis. (Jeff Jarvis wrote an essay in the Guardian earlier this year called Digital First.)

User's guide

Step 1: Collect Activities

The app is about keeping track of how you spend your time: Who was it done for, what was the project, what was done, when, and for how long. The first step is to simply take out your phone, start the app (tap 1) and then press the add button (tap 2).

When designing educational software, I make sure to consider how it will fit with the learner's life. There are at least two orientations for this sort of exercise. I refer to them as the student's schedule and study life cycles. For canonical points in each, I then consider the educational intent, student-teacher ratio, and person-technology ratio. This helps me plan course components, select their platforms, and design their interaction types.

I started this post yesterday. But with Steve Job's resignation, please note that his work exemplifies what this post promotes. Cliff Kuang wrote in Fast Company Design, "Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live..." A Jobsian focus on the user experience is an excellent aspiration for any software engineer.

An important aspect of any product's development is quality assurance. Essential to that is the reviewer's mindset. This is a cliché in macro approaches; of course a "quality mindset" should inform all product creation phases. But even in the micro of quality assurance as discrete phase, mindset matters.

Social software is not simply "tweeting" or "liking" professionally developed content. Social computing is a mode of human-technology interaction, a use case. We can identify at least three factors that affect "social" in software: the human usage intent, the software features that facilitate it, and the hardware form factors that embody it. Let's work backwards, starting with three hardware form factors often used in education: the desktop computer, the interactive whiteboard, and the mobile phone.