Keyboards are still important!

An interesting interview with Walter Bender, the creator of the version of Linux that has been included in the One Laptop Per Child project, appears in this month’s Learning & Technology magazine. When asked whether Sugar, the Linux version developed, would be modified to support tablet PC’s and other keyboard-less devices, he responds:

But to me, the thing you want in elementary education is a tool that makes writing easy. So I am hoping that the idea of a keyboard isn’t totally abandoned. I think keyboards are the most efficient tools we have for entering text. On-screen keyboards and pen-based interfaces are nice romantic notions, but they are not very pragmatic.

I couldn’t agree more.  I’m often asked in relation to my proposed Citizen Professional Toolkit why my focus isn’t more on the new smartphone and similar moblie devices.  I must admit I’m very impressed with these devices and do see considerable merit in them.  Indeed, I am finding I depend on my Blackberry Curve for an increasing number of activities, allowing me to travel without my laptop a lot more.  But I still don’t use it to create much more than brief notes or short email messages — I can’t type 80-100 words per minute on it yet, nor doubt I’ll ever get to that speed.  I’m even slower on the new iPhone than on my Curve.  Worse still on pen-based devices.

Bender continues:

Now, there is something about using paper and pencil, rather than a computer, that is undoubtedly important, in terms of motor-skill development. It’s important to interact with the physical world and manipulate things. But I don’t see it as an either-or proposition; you can have kids be doing lots of things with the physical world and also be using a computer. The big danger is not whether they are using computers instead of paper and pencil, but whether they are using iPods instead of paper and pencil. With these little touch-screen devices, rather than being expressive and making things, are they just consuming information?

I appreciate Bender’s take on what’s important here.  While smartphones and other mobile devices are making great strides in becoming devices that allow creative expression, price plans, an emphasis on consuming multimedia hosted by the telecom site or their partners, and limited text input capabilities mean I can’t use my Blackberry to the extent I would prefer as a readily portable, always with me device.  Laptops and ultra-mobile PCs still seem to have an important role as bridge devices, if nothing else, until these truly mobile devices reach the needed functionality level to allow for real freedom to creatively express what we’re thinking and feeling.

Citizen Professional Toolkits

Chip Bruce speaks of exploration kits in a recent blog post

[Backpack-based exploration kits] would be available to individual youth, or to organizations such as community centers, after-school programs, boys and girls clubs, 4-H, and so on. They would allow youth to take tools into many different settings, thus promoting ubiquitous learning.

I have been obsessing on the technical components of such an exploration kit.  Is there a certain set of technologies that various professionals use in their daily work lives that could be included in such kits and made available to youth and other citizen professionals?

I’d like to propose a group brainstorming exercise to design such a toolkit, and invite comments on what others would see as the ideal components for such a kit.  To kick things off, here’s some components we’re beginning to play with for our first kits.  In choosing the specific items, I’ve tried to balance cost, ease-of-use, quality, and completeness of the kits.  As such, devices are sometimes chosen because they can serve multiple purposes, although it sometimes may sacrifice a bit on ease-of-use and/or quality.  At other times, components were chosen to improve quality even if it increased cost to some degree.

Base Kit

• MSI Wind 10″ ultra-mobile netbook PC (UMPC). Laptops are becoming the general computing device of choice over desktop computers.  The UMPC shows great promise of providing an increasingly mobile format that remains fully functional. The slightly larger screen and near full size keyboard of the MSI Wind are expected to serve well as a general purpose computer, while the under 3 pound weight and relatively small size maximize portability.  The specific model includes a 6-cell battery to provide over 5 hours of charge in the field, a 160 GB hard drive to allow storage of digital photos and video for editing, and bluetooth to connect to GPS and other wireless components.
• Sound Professionals ‘Super Stealth’ High Gain, High Sensitivity Omnidirectional USB Microphone. We’ve had great success using this external microphone to enhance Skype conference calls and to capture high quality archives of interviews and group discussions using Audacity software.
• Garmin 10x Bluetooth GPS receiver and Mobile PC software.  As geo-coding becomes integrated with a growing number of applications, it seems valuable to equip toolkits with a GPS receiver.  The Garmin 10x receiver was chosen because it works with any GIS-enabled software, for the flexibility of wandering with the receiver within 30 feet of the UMPC, and its quality of satellite reception.  The Mobile PC software provides driving directions and resource location within North America.
• Canon Powershot SD1100IS digital camera.  A highly reviewed sub-compact camera that provides good quality still images and potentially YouTube quality video.

Possible add-ons

• Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12.  This has been used very successfully by some of our community partners to enable youth to produce quality video presentations with minimal up front training.
• Tripod.  Something like the Canon mini-tripod 7 is highlight portable and provides a stable base for long exposure captures, for time-lapse photos, and for shots in which the photographer is included in the image.  A larger tripod, such as the Proline ST-400, while less portable, provides eye-level positioning of the camera and greater stability in windier conditions, among other advantages.
• Logitech Clearchat Comfort USB Headset provides the ability to listen to recordings live to confirm recording quality, and to also provide improved recording quality by an individual when doing things like voice overs or podcasts.
• Canon ZR930 Camcorder.  This DV-based camcorder provides higher quality video recordings, but just as importantly provides an external microphone input for improved audio recording in a consumer-level camcorder.  We’ve had many reports that the most problematic aspect of video capture has been the audio input when interviewing people in the field.  The tradeoff of using a higher quality, DV-based camcorder is that transfers to PC occur real-time (1 hour recording requires 1 hour to transfer) via firewire (which is not included as part of the MSI Wind and therefore must be performed on a separate device).
• Azden Cam-3 passive mixer, Audio-technica ATR-35S wired lavalier microphone, Audio-technical ATR288W wireless microphone system.  Combined, these provide a mechanism for a mix of lavalier and handheld microphone inputs via mini-phono plug that can be used with either the ZR930 camcorder or the MSI Wind laptop.  As pointed out above, audio recording quality has been a major issue during interviews.  There is considerable value in having a mixture of different microphones to best meet the recording needs under different environments.
• Garmen eTrex Legend.  This standalone GPS device has been field-tested in many different situations.  It remains to be seen whether the UMPC combined with the Garmin 10x bluetooth receiver can fully replace this tried-and-true method for collecting geo-coding data.

With each of the add-ons, a kit runs around $1600 USD including various incidentals. Certainly to make these widely available, a number of logistics would need to be worked out regarding maintenance and security.  But I’d like to focus this brainstorming session on components.

So what do others think?  When sending out citizen scientists, citizen planners, citizen journalists, and other citizen professionals, what technologies are most needed?  Is it possible to create one exploration kit to cover most or all citizen professional needs?  Is it possible to create one base unit and a mixture of add-ons to include as needed for specific purposes?

Equal Voices in a Digital World

I’ve been working on an exercise to develop a mission statement for my research.  I think I’m settling on the following.

Helping communities have an equal voice in a digital world.  To accomplish this mission, it is important to:

• inform communities on how emerging technologies and trends are opening up new possibilities for community action;
• enable communities through access to, and education on, appropriate technologies; and
• collaborate with communities, giving them an equal voice in my own research and helping them have an equal voice with others.

As technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, to fully participate in this digital world it is important to have the literacies needed to harness technology when appropriate, and to judge when technology is a hindrance instead of a help.  But while there is a significant economic and technical hurdle in achieving full digital inclusion for everyone, I think at the core this is a social problem.  Achieving an equal voice requires new understandings regarding the value and indeed necessity of diverse voices in all aspects of our society.

But too often we as researchers do not practice what we preach.  For in research many would argue that what we do is too specialized to engage citizens, or is contaminated through subject involvement.  I take an opposing view.  While it is helpful to regularly take a 10,000 foot view of communities, it is also critical to utilize a scholarship of engagement approach in which citizen scientists participate as equals with academic researchers.  In so doing, it becomes possible to gain unique, deep perspectives to important social issues.

While it is important to inform the community regarding the possibilities of harnessing new technologies, and to also enable them to utilize those technologies effectively, the cycle isn’t complete until there is also meaningful collaboration.  We must practice what we preach lest we live our professional lives as blind men who only percieve the full shape of an elephant through the touch of its trunk alone.

Big Broadband and Citizen Professionals

I’ve followed with passing interest the development of fiber to the home (FTTH) that is occuring in a few areas around our country and much more extensively overseas.  Along with others, I have wondered just how valuable that much speed really is for most people.  Still, it seems somewhat disconcerting to think that we’ve gone from being a leader in national Internet access to 15th in the world for broadband access.  Further, our definition of broadband is slower than in many of those countries that are ahead of us.  Other countries find it important to bring very high speed Internet access to the home.  The question is what are we missing?

At a presentation Tuesday regarding support for broadband infrastructure development found in the recently signed stimulus package, a consultant utilized an interesting tool developed in the Netherlands that demonstrates the value of Big Broadband (Internet access speeds that are 10-100 times faster than current DSL/Cable speeds in the United States for downloads AND as importantly offer the same very high speeds for uploads as for downloads).  The tool is a simple Windows program, called fiberspeed, that can be accessed at: http://www.mxi.nl/projecten/index1.asp?ph_id=38&pr_id=9

What really caught my attention was just how handicapped people in the United States are compared to other parts of the world when it comes to uploading multimedia files.  For personal use, examples used in the fiberspeed application include personal photos or family videos.  For societal use, examples include instructional videos or even x-ray photos.  For those with high speed DSL or cable, downloads can occur in minutes for large files, but uploads can take hours.

One person attending the meeting asked why the rush to implement Big Broadband since the killer application to demand such high speeds did not yet exist.  I believe this question was well intentioned and reflects the thoughts of many in our consumer-oriented society.  But I also believe the lesson from the fiberspeed example is that the killer application does indeed exist.  It comes in the form of citizen production of multimedia presentations.  Most rural areas, and many low-income urban areas simply do not have access to affordable high speed bandwidth to tell their stories online as citizen journalists using digital images let alone digital video.  And the ability to quickly upload high definition video is only available in very limited places anywhere in the Unitied States.  Nor is access to high grade video conferencing available to most homes in the United States, a valuable tool to allow citizen professionals to work from their homes at a range of collaborative tasks.

But let’s say for a moment that these examples still do not represent the true killer application that demands such high speed Internet be brought to the home.  I would argue that the question also represents a very top-down conceptualization of application development.  It is framed in the idea that Big Broadband isn’t needed until a University or Big Business researcher develops the application that justifies such bandwidth.

What if we started with a bottom-up conceptualization of application development.  What if we conceived of a Big Broadband infrastructure that was open, where people could shop for the best services available from around the world to meet their needs.  And what if we conceived of a development model in which these services used open standards that allowed for anyone to enhance, build upon, and uniquely combine those services to create new ways of doing things.  What if citizen scientists were encouraged to become an active part of the development process, and micro-businesses were encouraged to form to market and support such new services. What if the whole process were opened up to everyone and anyone, bringing together the best and brightest regardless of location, economic status, culture, precisely because they have insights into community needs and goals that only those intimate with their community could bring?

This is not a far fetched dream.  All the pieces are being put in place in Europe and Asia.  It is clear the driving forces for change will come more and more from citizens and not from big business and big universities.  The one thing that is not clear is whether the citizens of the United States will get to play an active role along with their European and Asian counterparts.

References:

Local groups to pursue stimulus money for broadband network (http://www.news-gazette.com/news/technology/2009/02/17/local_groups_to_pursue_stimulus_money_for_broadband_network)

Fiberspeed Application (http://www.mxi.nl/projecten/index1.asp?ph_id=38&pr_id=9)

U.S. Lags Behind in Broadband Infrastructure (http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20080423/)