Overtired and grousing at CIL2011

Warning: grousing ahead!

3 nights of not sleeping in a strange place, 4 days of the reality of geekiness not matching the image at all.

The image (everyone else or so it appears):You look fabulous, already have an iPad 2, it's always connected along with all your other beautiful iStuff. You seamlessly tweet, blog, post, check out websites as teh speakers mention them.  You can read 20 point type on PowerPoint at 100 feet.

The reality (me):  I look 54 years old and haven't slept a full night after an 8 hour train trip, then hobbling around from walking too much while having too much fun at the zoo. wireless comes and goes of its own accord.  I'm darn lucky to have the use of an iPad 1 with the older iOS and no decent note taking app.  Discover that you need iTunes to install certain apps, sorry, that's in Connecticut.  I mostly log in, log in, log in, type some gibberish, log in some more.  The Blackberry sometimes gets cell signal.  I'm lucky to have both. I can barely keep up taking notes much less get the good bits out to the social web.  There's always something in the hardware or software to fight with.  I always type teh.  My eyes are supposedly corrected to 20/20 and I can barely see half of what's on people's slides. 



Actually I'm probably not the only one at Computers In Libraries thinking it's time to give up and become a Luddite.  Really, this stuff isn't glamorous or easy, especially when it's brand new and in perpetual beta.  And we're not going to make it perfect for ourselves OR our users, but need to be honest about technology's fails to get them fixed in the future.  And get spell checkers to recognize that Teh also could mean The.  In spite of all my Frisbee threats (worse yet, I'm on a high floor with openable windows - the machines better behave themselves up here !)  this is a great conference, I'm learning a lot about people, technology,and the whole environment we're working within, meeting a lot of interesting people, and getting ideas. 

Cooliris Embedded

Dell Streak

Android on a Dell device, bigger than iPhone not huge, mostly unbreakable screen. I could like this!

Teaching math for quantitativve reasoning, not boredom

Dan Meyer talks about why students hate math, and how the hateful part does nothing to encourage quantitative reasoning.  Better yet, he shows an alternative with rich media leading to discussion, real-life problem definition, and then calculations.  Puts the emphasis on math for real life, not rote application of formulae and calculations for the sake of passing a course.

Watch TED on Blackberry Tour 9630

Finally got it to work - manually.

1. On a computer, subscribe to the TED (video) feed.
2. Download the MP4 files of the talks of interest to a folder on the computer.
3. Connect the Blackberry and say yes to the message about connecting it as a drive (you'd think I could find the text of the message in Bb support since I'm not on that computer!)  "Do you want to turn on Mass Storage Mode?"
4. Copy the mp4 files from the computer to the Video folder of the Blackberry
5. Open the media folder, select video, and watch!

Cooliris Express Test

Gartner's 10 Mobile technologies to watch

 http://snipurl.com/v6jin  Thanks to Sarah Houghton-Jan, Librarian in Black