Tech-ed: Kids and Collective Phonecamblogs in School, in Paris

"Jean-Luc, a BoingBoing ami from Paris, shares news of a fun educational experiment with young students in France:

'Xeni, have you seen the collective moblog that children from 7 to 11 years old have created (with me) at the Plessis-Trevise city (closed to Paris) where I worked. The children have done a report of their (school's) sportive outdoor centre by moblogging themselves the pics during all the day (this wednesday) from 9.00 al to 5.00 pm. they have been equiped of Nokia 3650s and all the pics have been moblogged by the children and I have helped them to configure and use the phonecams. they had not any problem in term of usability to use the phonecams. it seems to be very natural for them and they have a great dexterity with using their thumbs. this was funny (imagine 3 phonecams in the hands of children that run in playing soccer for example, at the swimming pool, etc.) and they are gonna add some comments and legends to their pics in some days at the telecenter of the city and we will edit a written newspaper of all of this.'

URL of the collective moblog here, another snapshot of the kids here." [Boing Boing Blog]

Emphasis above is mine. And hey, did you know your office fits on your cell phone now?

Using your Nokia 3650 as a Portable Office

"Here's an overview of the apps and functionality you can tap into to use your Nokia 3650 as an on-the-go mobile office....

So, like I said, most of these apps are just for just keeping up, rather than having a full-on mobile office which might be more possible for PDA-type phones. And downloading a 4MB Word doc over GPRS isn't the funnest or cheapest thing to do. But these apps will just get better - once all the apps get to the level of quality as Wireless IRC, the Symbian/Series 60 phones will be a force to be reckoned with, if they aren't already." [Mobitopia]

A whole new world of telecommuting for NetGens! Something for me to propose at work....  ;-)

"Attorney General John Ashcroft today placed a phone call to American Library Association President Carla Hayden and told her that he would work to declassify the Justice Department report on Section 215 of the 'Patriot' Act, the section pertaining to government access to library and bookstore records. Ashcroft also said he was concerned that people misunderstood his commitment to civil liberties.

ALA issued a press release... in which Hayden said she 'welcomed' the Attorney General's call and particularly his commitment to declassify the report, which she said was an 'important first step' for effective public oversight of the Act.

It is a good sign that Ashcroft has made this gesture, particularly given the Bush administration's tendency to attempt to denigrate and isolate its critics. Whether this will result in any effective change remains to be seen. At the very least, however, the call suggests that the administration is perhaps realizing that it needs to address the concerns of librarians and other critics of the 'Patriot' Act in a different way.

Still, the call should be seen as what it is, damage control. That isn't entirely a bad thing. But we should be clear that the push for accountability and for the defense of civil liberties needs to continue." [commons-blog]

In the immortal words of Chris Berman, "back, back, back, back!" Personally, I'm still speechless.

Here at SLS we put on a lot of continuing education events, and we're always looking for new programs to help keep staff at our member libraries current and trained. To that end, we often track what types of events are happening at other library systems, other libraries, and on the web in general.

While Googling an old friend who used the interlibrary loan system to send me a hello, I came across the following requests for future CE programs. I think our members would greatly appreciate us pursuing these as topics!

"What other training topics might help you to do your job better?

• 'Now It’s Time To Say Goodbye…', how to convince supervisors to retire.
• 'Excuse Me, But You’ve Got a Smudge On Your Nose', how to deal with brown-nosers.
• 'Can You Hear Me Now?', what to do when co-workers refuse to wear hearing aids."

Hey, Kay - are you reading this?

ZAP!

"Digitally armed consumers can suddenly destroy business models that thrived for generations, as people in the battered music and photography industries can attest. Yet even comparisons to Napster undersell the potential economic upheaval and social impact of overturning the TV ad market. It has twice the combined revenues of the recorded-music and film-photography markets. Americans spend an average of four hours a day watching TV, an hour of that enduring ads. That adds up to an astounding 10% of total leisure time; at current rates, a typical viewer fritters away three years of his life getting bombarded with commercials....

And, year after year, the big networks imposed hefty price increases for ads, even as millions of viewers defected to cable, and early zapping technology--the remote control and the VCR--took hold. They have raised their per-viewer rates 110%in the last ten years, despite a 30% decline in their prime-time audience, more than making up for a 30% increase in the cost of living. Advertisers obligingly went along, buying on faith and lacking a way to precisely quantify how many viewers were not watching the ads.

Now all of that's changing. The threat posed by the fidgety remote control and the poky VCR pales in comparison with the digital threat. Eighty-five percent of TiVo homes skip most ads and can watch a half-hour sitcom in 23 minutes.

No problem, net execs say: While DVRs and other gear may proliferate, most viewers won't use the gadgets as ad-killers or pay for commercial-free programs. 'This is the big myth. The big majority of people are not commercial avoiders,' says David Poltrack, the head of CBS research and strategic planning, who has heard predictions of the networks' demise for 20 years. At worst, he figures, DVRs will erode audience by just under 3% a year. Alan Wurtzel, NBC's research head, says that networks can survive such losses, pointing to the huge checks that advertisers just wrote: 'Until you can find an alternative that's better, they really will have no choice.' " [Forbes]

He says, not realizing that DVRs are an alternative that's better. Because network execs already do so well at predicting what their viewers do. Because I don't ever skip ads, and VCR users never skip ads....

"Comcast, the biggest cabler, now has 6.7 million digital subscribers and says all will be able to get a DVR box by early next year."

Expect the television industry to lobby Congress and the courts to save commercials. Wait, they've already started, haven't they?

Steal this Column [Commentary]

"Unlike the RIAA, I have no interest in cultivating 60 million enemies in an industry in which platinum success is measured a million fans at a time....

Alienation may have merit on an artistic level, but it's certainly not a welcome trait for an industry that is banking on the disposable income of the masses....

If this desperate legal salvo is a last ditch effort to save the kingdom, they'd better dig those ditches deep. 'Cause they're going in....

However, the decline in music CD sales actually accelerated during the same period. The industry killed the pirate, but in so doing ripped out the soul of the once-ardent music fan inside. While the notion of 60 million people ripping off the industry was painful, at least they valued music as something worth pilfering." [The Motely Fool]