Month: July 2006

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Gizmo + Asterisk = SIP Classcaster for All?

Now with new Asterisk support, Gizmo Project allows you to simultaneously log in to your Gizmo Project account, and another SIP-based server such as the popular Asterisk PBX, Switchvox, epygi, or others. You can then receive incoming calls or make outgoing calls through either service.

Gizmo – A free phone for your computer -Advanced Features – Dual Login

The theory here wuld be that you could use the Gizmo SIPphone to call Classcaster and record a podcast.  THis may provide an interesting angle to get some notice for Classcaster.

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Linux In Education: Advancing An Elementary School

Two parent volunteers at an Atlanta district school have revolutionized technology use there by replacing Windows workstations with Linux on thin clients, using K12LTSP.Click here!Daniel Howard and William Fragakis were spending too much time fixing “broken” computers at Brandon Elementary School. They were slow, frequently frozen, and “fraught with hardware, software, and malware issues. We would hear over and over again, ‘our computer doesn’t work anymore,'” Howard says, “and it takes hours to reinstall the operating system or figure out what driver got corrupted by what virus.” Students weren’t learning how to use the computers because frustrated teachers weren’t including computer work in their lesson plans. “What we discovered is that teachers were really using [the computers] only for browsing and office applications.” The school didn’t have enough money to upgrade Windows 98 or aging hardware, and Howard and Fragakis were working many hours just to keep the school’s technology afloat.

NewsForge | Brandon Elementary transformed by K12LTSP

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Rice University Press Gets Connexions

As money-strapped university presses shut down nationwide, Rice University is turning to technology to bring its press back to life as the first fully digital university press in the United States.Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia — audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images — to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing.

Rice University | News & Media

Rice will be staffing and operating this as a traditional press with an editorial board and peer review of submissions.  It breaks new ground in offering publications for free on web under Creative Commons licensing.  On demand print copies will be available for a fee.  No launch date has ben set.  The Connexions project grew up at Rice and is used by the University for distance learning programs.

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MediaCommons: Nice Theory…

if:book: introducing MediaCommons – The fun-loving folks over at the Institue for the Future of the Book launched another project today. Well, really it’s a blog post announcing the pending launch of another project. Sigh… Something beyond a blog post would be nice here. I notice that the boss wonders about Sophie (BTW, I’d link to the FOTB website and the Sophie project except that the page contains some sort of hideous java plugin banner at the top that crashes Firefox 1.5 and annoys IE6, also, there isn’t anything about Sophie there beyond a couple of PDFs outlining what it might be) an earlier FOTB project that has yet to see the light of day. It seems to me that these folks are long on ideas and short on applications, which is ok, I guess. I’d much rather see something concrete.

<rant> One of the things that does bug me about this is the amount of play it is getting across the web from the Chronicle of Higher Education to Ars Technica. It would be nice if something that actually exists and works, like Classcaster and the Legal Education Podcasting Project, got some mention.  As a developer of tools in the educational technology field I do get tired of hearing about all of these great things that get trumpeted across the web only to never see the light of day when the actual working tools I develop are rarley mentioned outside of the small world I work in.</rant>

Well, back to work on something interesting and useful.

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Itsy-bitsy Teeny-weeny Memory

While similar in some ways to RFID—radio frequency identification—chips, there are key differences in Memory Spot technology in data transfer rates, storage and security.The chip can transfer data at 10 megabits per second, 10 times faster than Bluetooth wireless technology, comparable to Wi-Fi rates and far faster than RFID. Also, HP has managed to store up to 4 megabits in working prototypes of the chip, far more than an RFID chip can store.

HP Labs Touts Tiny Wireless Chip for Broad Uses

The Memory Spot is about the size of a match head and is powered by inductive coupling. Data transfer requires a reader that touches or is within a millimeter of the spot.

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