First steps with the lab TV

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Chris

Last week saw the installation of a large LCD monitor in my teaching lab, and now that finals and grading are winding down and research is gearing up, it’s time to start tinkering with how best to use this beast. In the interest of sharing and recording the various approaches I try, I’ll be blogging it all right here using the “LCDelight” tag. Below is a recap of my first week with the setup, including a description of what has worked well and what has not.

LCD video monitor mounted in my teaching lab

The first issue came up while the guys were mounting the panel to the wall bracket. They had the bracket centered on the monitor such that it would hang at a good height, but this would not allow the VGA cable to fit because of a cross-support on the bracket. The guys made an adjustment and all was well – the monitor hangs just a bit lower, but still fine.

Once they hung it on the wall, I plugged in the AppleTV and… no joy, or at least no networking. It said something to the effect that the AppleTV does not support “enterprise security”, meaning it could not log on to our fancy campus wi-fi network. Big problem. So the short-term solution I’ve come up with is to plug in an old AirPort Express and create a rogue wireless network for the AppleTV and my iPad when I’m in the lab (shh, don’t tell Information Services). This works perfectly, but means I need to manually change wireless networks when I want to AirPlay to the TV – not a big deal, but not 100% ideal.

As far as AirPlay goes, it is all that and a bag of chips. Really. A simple flick in multi-tasking mode on the iPad and a tap to switch it on, and you’re suddenly sharing any app on your iPad to the big screen. This is one of those features that seems so natural and obvious once you use it, you wonder how you could have gone without it, or how you could go back to being tethered with a cable.

Even though I don’t imagine myself presenting a lot of slides in the lab, I wanted to try Keynote with the iPad and TV to see how it looks and works. There is a choice of presentation modes in a Keynote slide show, including a presenter mode that displays notes and the next slide on the iPad while keeping the output on the TV clean. I was surprised and disappointed that I can’t present a slide show with a resolution native to the TV (1920 x 1080). I tried to create one on my Mac and open it on the iPad, but Keynote on the iPad complains and resamples it to fit its own screen.

Next up, I want to find a way to cycle through a series of informational slides without needing to tether my iPad or a computer, so that when students are first coming in to the lab, they can see what to start working on. I’m thinking I might create a Flickr lab account for this, that is available on the AppleTV without the need for another device to drive it.

Download the Universe

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Chris

Download the Universe is an awesome new site focused on reviewing digital-only science “books”, by which they mean predominately ebooks or apps. Their editor list reads like a who’s who of current long-form science writing. Bookmarked and subscribed!

Planning for AppleTV in the Lab

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Chris

Ever since I heard that the next version of the Mac OS will feature support for AirPlay, I’ve been working on plans to use it in my teaching lab. Here’s what I have in process in terms of nuts and bolts:

a large flat panel monitor mounted in the front corner of the lab
an AppleTV connected to the monitor via HDMI cable
several Macs and iPads to serve as interfaces to drive the monitor

As of today I’m just waiting on our building support staff to mount the monitor and I’ll be off and experimenting. With four students in the lab for the summer, I’m sure it will get a proper break-in. I hope to convince them to try using it for research and not just streaming shows on Netflix, but we’ll see how that goes.

My plans for it include shooting and editing several short videos on common techniques we use in my lab. I could have these available for streaming on the monitor at the drop of a hat, so if a student asks how to make media or sterilize seeds or run a gel, they can refer to a video clip to refresh their memory. I also plan to have a collection of graphics that I can use for reference during pre-lab discussions. I expect to experiment with how best to store, organize, and stream these reference materials, as I’m not sure yet what will be easiest to use in the moment as well as for students to use on their own. I’m also eager to experiment with using apps live and projected on the big screen, but I’ll wait to discuss those until I’ve had a chance to play with my setup.

Canvas is a Delightful Departure

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Chris

As I’ve shared previously, I’m restless with the technology I use for teaching, especially the LMS. Rather than only complain about it, I choose to experiment with other tools in the hope that I’ll find a better fit for my style. This term I’m experimenting with Canvas, the latest darling of the educational tech scene, and I’ve found its excellent reputation to be mostly well-deserved.

For starters, the fact that I can use it to host an actual class is the result of the fact that Canvas is a cloud-based LMS that is free for individual faculty members. The only practical limitations that I’ve found include a cap on the storage space per class and the need to upload my own roster and ask students to create accounts. Neither of these have been big points of pain for me, but if you need to host many large presentation files you may run out of storage space or have to rotate files off throughout the semester.

In the big picture, these are low costs to pay for the chance to use an LMS with an elegant user interface and straightforward usability features. If you are of the opinion that “design” is just how something looks, I challenge you to compare Canvas to the other big LMS out there. You will conclude that design is how something works, it’s made that well.

That said, there are still unintuitive aspects to its design. For example, my class just completed peer reviews of a writing assignment. These reviews were a cinch to assign, and I assumed the students would see their assignment in their ‘Recent Activity’ stream. But to get their assignment, they had to go to the assignment page and look for it, something that never occurred to any of them. Thirteen email replies later and lots of links to the help section, the problem was solved, but still, it might be nice if they could add this to the activity stream.

I still don’t want to rely on an LMS completely, at least in part for philosophical reasons, I’ll admit. But Canvas has been great for what I’ve used it to do, and it’s made it dead simple to do paperless grading (their Speedgrader iPad app is excellent). I don’t feel like I have to feed it my whole course, to fill in all the spaces with content. It works for what I want it to do, and stays out of my face for the rest. That’s pretty good, I’d say.

iA Writer Feels Like the Future

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Chris

I tweeted earlier today that I was smitten with a new pair of apps, both called iA Writer. One is for the Mac and the other for iOS, and both are awesome on their own merits. They really shine, though, when used in parallel with iCloud.

special keyboard in iA Writer I’ve been doing significant writing on my iPad for the better part of a year and a half, and I’ve used a number of apps to do it. The first thing I noticed with the iOS version of Writer is the souped-up keyboard, which adds a single strip of keys and navigation buttons that makes writing and editing easier. The navigation keys include left and right arrows to move the cursor precisely and, on the iPad, keys that move the cursor one word at a time through your text. Both of these are huge time savers over the cursor placement loop. The other additional keys are for inserting commonly used punctuation, and having these on the primary keyboard is also a nice convenience.

The second feature that struck me is how seamless it is to work on a document across devices. To put it simply, you don’t have to understand or even think about file management, it just works. I can start writing something on the iPad and it’s just there on the Mac, where I can edit or add to it, and when I open it again on the iPad it’s all just there. Seamless. Behind the scenes the apps are both using my iCloud account to store the “master copy” of the file – what Steve Jobs meant when he said, “the truth is in the cloud.” There is no dragging the file in from the desktop, no pushing it out from the iOS app, it’s just there on both. This is awesome, and it demonstrates a different way to use “the cloud” from an approach like Google’s, where your documents are in the cloud and that’s where you interact with them. In the Apple cloud approach, I get to use a refined, custom, specific app to interact with my document, an app that is purpose-built for writing.

That brings me to my last observation, one that many others have commented on, which is the austerity of the editing experience in iA Writer. A lot of people wrote about the “focus mode” gimmick when these first shipped, but that’s not even the boldest design feature to my mind. These apps get out of my way and let me focus on writing like no others I have tried. I can’t tweak the fonts, the page size, the colors, anything. That’s a good thing – it is what it is, take it or leave it. Speaking of writing, it’s time I got back to work, but I just wanted to pass along how nice this pair of apps works together – feels like the future.

DRM on e-books should go

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Chris

This is seeming more and more like the only reasonable next move for publishers:

By foolishly insisting on DRM, and then selling to Amazon on a wholesale basis, the publishers handed Amazon a monopoly on their customers—and thereby empowered a predatory monopsony. [...] If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store.

Unfortunately, it will probably take a good five years for them to realize that the basis of power for Amazon is the closed format insisted upon by the publishers themselves. The other wonderful byproduct of eliminating DRM would be the ability to share an e-book with a friend, something that is not possible now.

Facebook’s targeting machine

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Chris

If you, like me, have doubted whether Facebook could live up to its valuation, you should read this:

So if you want to reach the 100 people on Facebook who live in California, are between 18 and 36 years old, like “space” and work at Apple or Google, you can. Amazing.

The specificity of targeting ads to users based on their self-revealed interests is staggering. When I read the example in the linked article, all the pieces fit together for me, and I agree with the article — Google should be worried.

Epidemiology and the Girl Scout Effect

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Chris

Chocolate & Red Meat Can Be Bad for Your Science:

Testing hypotheses ingeniously and severely is the single most important part of doing science.

The problem with observational studies like the ones from Harvard and UCSD that gave us the bad news about meat and the good news about chocolate, is that the researchers do little of this. The hard part of science is left out, and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their causal interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should probably all change our diets accordingly.

This post captures one of the most glaring weaknesses of studies that report correlations without backing them up with empirical evidence.

No Such Thing as Natural Foods

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Chris

I mentioned previously how much I was looking forward to the series of food posts on a Smithsonian blog called Design Decoded, and it did not disappoint. From the last post of the series:

While mandarins are natural, in the sense that they grow on trees planted in soil, the popular varieties sold in the supermarket are the product of decades of human intervention. In other words: they are heavily designed.

There is, I think, a fascinating tension in our understanding of food, and this quote gets at the heart of it. In part, it has to do with our use of the term ‘natural’ as an approximation for a whole bunch of intentions. When we call a food natural we probably also mean healthful and wholesome and pure, and on some level believe it could not hurt us. But almost nothing we eat is actually natural, in the sense that it exists in the same form in nature. All food, almost by definition, has co-evolved with humans for thousands of years, being chosen out of a wild population for some favored quality and selectively propagated through the generations. What the series of posts at Design Decoded points out is that now we have added marketability to the list of qualities under selection for a growing number of produce items, which is, I guess, the natural progression of things.

Publicly Owned Internet Service

Link

The Case for Publicly Owned Internet Service:

Right now, state legislatures – where the incumbents wield great power – are keeping towns and cities in the U.S. from making their own choices about their communications networks. Meanwhile, municipalities, cooperatives and small independent companies are practically the only entities building globally competitive networks these days. Both AT&T and Verizon have ceased the expansion of next-generation fiber installations across the U.S., and the cable companies’ services greatly favor downloads over uploads.

Such a shame there is almost no real competition in broadband service. I’ve often wondered if one solution to the lack of investment by the big players would be for communities to own their own networks. This column paints an ugly picture of the efforts these players will go to to keep that from happening.