This month I participated in an interview with Amrit Ahluwalia for The EvoLLLution considering current trends and what’s ahead for high-tech higher teaching and learning. Here’s an excerpt:

Amrit Ahluwalia: Do you think educator concerns would stem the flow of technology to actually becoming prevalent in the classroom in 10 years’ time?

Sidneyeve Matrix: We know that there’s a lot of instructors — a lot of profs, a lot of TAs — who are really technology-forward and they’re introducing innovations all the time. And they’re troubleshooting and they’re hacking into applications or tools that weren’t necessarily built for educators and they’re making them work. In my experience it’s been students who have taught me everything I know about where we need to go next in terms of technology. So, they’ll be the ones introducing me to the “latest greatest.” There are always going to be innovators and sometimes they’re the ones lecturing and sometimes they’re the ones who are note-taking. You know how technological adoption curves work: it mainstreams when you can really deliver proof of concept, and what matters most to professors is student engagement. If technology can deliver that, then more professors get interested in jumping on-board (they then have to scale a digital skills gap, but that’s another issue).

Click here to listen to the full interview or download a transcript.

Course Trailer:

Digital Media Trends FILM260 Trailer from Sidneyeve Matrix on Vimeo.

The Mobile Student from Sidneyeve Matrix on Vimeo.

Teaching with social and mobile media: Interview with Sidneyeve Matrix of Queen's University by Brody Hatch of Embee Creatives

Prezi

Fast becoming a popular presentation platform, this “cloud-based presentation software” has a cool “zoomable canvas” and some great templates for eye-catching and dynamic digital storytelling. You can work online or off, they are mobile-ready, and if you opt for the $5/month pro version, your presentations can be kept private and there’s no Prezi logo. Educator accounts available.

Sliderocket

This is my first choice for animated, slickly designed, easily-embeddable slide presentations. Ever since I read about their “presume” product I’ve been a sliderocket fan. The basic version is free, but for $25/month you can get analytics for your online presos, and also play them offline.

Haiku Deck

My favorite new discovery for my iPad, Haiku deck offers minimalist design templates and auto-searches Flickr’s Creative Commons photos to help you pick the right image for your text. The result is a beautiful online preso, simple, elegant, and easy to share on social networks. Very cool. Free too.

Google Slides

With Google Docs you can create, collaborate on, and share presentations online — and with Google Drive you can edit them offline without worrying that you’ll get versions mixed up because any changes you make while offline will automatically be updated when you reconnect. Free service.

Keynote for iPad

I’ve used this iOS app and I like it, though I will admit that I prefer to consume rather than create media on my tablet. But I use this app for demos or pitches at lunch and dinner meetings.

Thinking About: Great Design

You Suck At Powerpoint

For a fantastic (smart and beautiful) presentation about horrible presentations, don’t miss this one. Having attracted 1M views on Slideshare, this deck covers all the most common slide sins and includes clear ideas guaranteed to improve your design and delivery.

Resonate by Nancy Duarte

This is this a slide design must-read, my go-to resource for understanding layout, color, storytelling, and public speaking. I purchased it in paperback but then it came out as a slick iBook so I got a copy for my iPad and it didn’t disappoint. Duarte is the creative genius behind Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth data visualizations. Oh, and Nancy Duarte is on Twitter and totally human and nice. Lately she’s been putting out some fantastic work via Harvard Business Review, including an amazingly helpful article and webinar series.

Flickr

And by the way, if you routinely use Flickr Creative Commons licensed images in your presentations (as I do), you’ll be interested in this blog post by detailing what happened when a photographer decided to change the CC license on a photo from attribution-required to all-rights-reserved and requested that the blogger remove it from her slideshare deck. This happened to me too, which is when I started buying image licences. If your budget permits, consider a membership at Shutterstock, they have a great library. (hat tip to @hopkinsdavid for tweeting about this story!)

Why does it matter? We should care about delivering a great mobile-optimized website so “visitors have the best experience possible, without forcing them to adapt themselves,” to cite Josh Byers. That means “no more pinching and tapping” as users try to decipher microscopic fonts on your site and end up leaving in frustration, explains Kelton Reid.

Having a mobile ready site is quickly changing from “nice to have” to mission critical, according to a new survey from Google, involving 1,088 US adult smartphone Internet users in July 2012. Those researchers found that public expectations surrounding mobile web design are rapidly rising, with three-quarters of respondents admitting a strong preference for sites suited for smartphones, and half reporting “feeling frustrated and annoyed when they get to a site that’s not mobile-friendly” even assuming that “if a site didn’t work well on their smartphones…the company didn’t care about their business.”

Tools You Can Use

If you’re using a WordPress self-hosted blog there are many solutions and I’ve tried a few of them. Some work and some break your blog and cause much digital pain (speaking from experience–which is why my newer sites are mobile-ready and legacy sites are not…yet). The following two responsive themes by Themify.me are free and worked like a charm for me. I have tried both themes on numerous sites and liked them so much I became a pro member (and as always on this blog, these are not affiliate links). Click thumbnails to go to download pages.

Here are some other great looking free mobile responsive themes I plan to try soon.

WordPress:	WordPress:
Tumblr:	WordPress:

Happy blogging for the small screen.

]]> http://cyberpopblog.com/mobile/how-to-optimize-your-blog-free-responsive-themes/feed/ 1 http://cyberpopblog.com/mobile/how-to-optimize-your-blog-free-responsive-themes/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Cyberpopblog/~3/JPaVSjp9xt8/ http://cyberpopblog.com/media-use/mobile-netiquette-how-hard-can-it-be/#comments Sun, 13 Jan 2013 11:06:46 +0000 sidney eve matrix http://cyberpopblog.com/?p=8835 Isn’t it amazing how many people fail to practice common sense courtesy when using a mobile phone? From yell hell to sms breakups, from drunk tweeting to the dreaded halfalogue – departures from mobile netiquette likely happen around you every day.

Likewise, texting-while-walking irritates drivers and puts users at risk. A recent study from University of Washington documented the dangers that distracted texting pedestrians face. Observing over 1,000 people in Seattle, researchers found that when compared with undistracted people, the texters “were almost four times more likely to disobey traffic lights, cross mid-intersection or fail to look both ways.”

Perhaps the height of mobile phone rudeness is using it at restaurants when dining with others. The constant irritation of distracted diners and loud talkers at the next table inspired the phonestack game: “After everyone orders, they place their phones in the center of the table, face down. They may even stack the gadgets, as the name suggests. Even as the phones buzz and ring throughout the meal, no one is allowed to grab his device. If someone is unable to resist his smartphone’s siren’s song, he’s responsible for picking up the check.”

Or should those phones stay completely out of sight? Researchers at the University of Essex found that just having a phone in the vicinity impacts how we feel about and respond to others. Consistently, study participants answering questions about thier interpersonal relationships responded with less empathy — if a phone was at hand on the table. Experts concluded that the study showed “cell phones may serve as a reminder of the wider network to which we could connect, inhibiting our ability to connect with the people right next to us.”

Sometimes those parents just want to talk about how complicated cyberparenting is. We discuss the risks and implications of social networking and the benefits of online exploration, experimentation and digital literacy. We often strategize about how to establish digital media use limits and co-create family codes of conduct specifying what is shareable and what should stay private (photos? real names? location? phone number?). We may talk about the importance of parents as mentors, modelling responsible media use — which necessitates that they become both aware of and actively involved in their child’s digital life.

For tweens that might mean parents routinely monitor browser and search history, set up web filters, enable restrictions on smartphones, change skype settings, record IM chats and text messaging, use one family iTunes account to manage downloads, and have the passwords for childrens’ online profiles and phones. For teens it’s more complicated, as a shoulder-surfing parent risks damaging trust relationships. Obviously teens’ need for privacy is keen, and boundary pushing happens in every generation. Agreeing as a family on basic rules may seem nearly impossible if a teen is determined not to let parents interfere. This is  especially difficult if parents feel technologically inept and don’t understand how to use social media, change privacy settings, or safeguard identity online. In those cases, if the lines of communication are open maybe a little reverse technomentoring is in order — with digitally savvy teens teaching parents how to navigate through social media and smartphone apps.

If parents “get” the intricacies of social and mobile relationships and media use habits, it makes it easier to engage teens in conversations about complicated and controversial issues such as the permanence of photosharing and videochat, identity theft and malicious impersonation, dating in the age of Facebook and SMS, oversharing, cyberhazing and digital stalking. One way to start getting informed about the ever-evolving practice of good digital hygiene and the latest digital risks is to set up Google news alerts and stay aware as issues like sexting, cybershaming, and cyberhoxes unfold in the media — with experts weighing in.

Apps for the Digital Family

It makes sense that if digital parenting practices start early, there’s more time to ingrain responsible use habits. To that end I polled my university students on three digital apps designed to keep younger kids safe. In each case my  prompt was simple: is this app a good idea for cyberparents?

The first one was the Norton Family app. Among other features, it includes the ability to see which sites kids have visited, information they share or search for, and sends notifications when kids breach family digital use rules. No matter how much we discussed the fact that nothing shared online is actually private anyway, most students said this app went much too far — invading kids’ privacy. A  minority though it was a good idea however — especially for families with younger kids online. This app and related parental control software can track, block, filter, record online activity, and protect against viruses.

The next app reviewed was the Life360 Family Locator, a GPS-enabled tool that indicates family members’ locations. Students were more divided on this one, with a third of them giving it a thumbs up, a third undecided, and the rest giving it a thumbs down (tracking pets is okay, but tracking teens? not so much, they said). Maybe location is the most private information of all — but we are slowly warming to the benefits of LBS if used responsibly?

The last app we reviewed was the Panic Picture Button app by Feelsafe — a pretty amazing app developed by a concerned parent, and one that uses all the functions of a smartphone to help a kid who feels threatened. With the push of a button the phone can call for help, record audio, take 360-degree photos, emit a loud wail, and record a GPS location. It also supports remote lock and wipe for a lost phone. Half of the students thought this was a truly useful app, with the other half mostly undecided. Overall students commented that apps like the Panic Picture Button are valuable insofar as they might makes parents feel more secure — but it’s unclear if younger kids would think to use it in the moment.

Managing Life Online

Consulting my students as next gen experts on social media management is always enlightening. I’ve found that among the hundreds of teens I work with each year, their social media habits are highly individualized and for the most part, well thought out and certainly dynamic. Even so, many of the photos and status updates I see these teens and twentysomethings post online are risky in terms of reputation management. To that end, I teach a course online for students (and parents) about improving online impressions to do my part as a technomentor. But overall my students care about privacy especially in terms of what’s posted on Facebook, have developed fairly sophisticated sharing strategies they’re comfortable with. Their parents may not be quite as comfortable, but with limited profile access they’re likely unaware of what’s being shared in the first place.

But when it comes to project management, there are so many great apps to help create to-do lists and plan tasks. Here are three I’ve used recently:

Online project management with Trello lets you create public and private boards, share multimedia, and collaborate in realtime. This free app works nicely on desktops and mobile devices and the design is beautiful. One drawback (for me) is the inability to delete boards/projects once created.

If you want to create lists to work on with others, Catch is a free “mobile collaboration” app for smartphones. It’s useful for creating lists of tasks and ideas and sharing them with a group. Mark Wilson just reviewed this app for FastCompany and concluded, “it’s become one of the best collaborative apps around.”

If you’re an iOS/Mac user, then Wunderlist is really worth a look. Beyond the stunning design that makes lists painless to compile and very easy on the eyes, this app sends reminder notifications to you via email or in-app, and enables teams to collaborate via lists. And it’s also free.

New year, new projects, and an old challenge: keeping tasks tamed! I hope you find one of these tools helpful to manage your day.

Despite their love/hate relationship to Facebook, as Common Sense Media found when they polled more than 1,000 13-17 year-olds in 2012,  7 out of 10 are using the site. Likewise when Piper Jaffray polled 7,700 teenagers in the U.S., asking them about their social networking habits, once again Facebook came out on top as their most important social networking hangout.

But is Facebook loosing it’s cool factor? Rapidly, or so it would seem, for a variety of reasons. As a mammoth public company, and “technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy, it’s the Nickelback to Instagram’s Bon Iver,” writes CNN‘s John Sutter. Also a factor, the spectre of parents: ”Kids are spending less time on Facebook, as their Parents are also now on Facebook,” said Trip Chowdry cited in the HuffingtonPost.