Week Three Post

iPhone Used by One Year Old

I own an iPhone and have been heard, on more than one occasion, saying that it is the best investment I’ve ever made. I’ve recently realized, however, that neither of my parents has ANY clue how to use it. My Dad asked to borrow my phone last weekend, and when I handed it to him, he gave it this bewildered look. He tried to figure it out, but ended up yelling at it instead, which obviously didn’t work (although they’re probably making an app for that). It just shows how huge the gap is between my parents’ generation and my generation. I then realize that when the baby in this video is 20 years old, he might hand me some device, and I will be able to do nothing but scream at it, probably in English, which it will not understand… I imagine Apple will have made Newspeak the official language by then.

Joking aside, I do see this as a shocking indicator of things to come. I am now a seasoned pro at the iPhone, but it took me a bit to figure out how to work it, yet in this video, we see an infant doing just that. At one point in the video, the mother asks the child, “Can you say iPhone?” (See, Apple didn’t even have to pay for that advertising.) It makes me wonder if, 20 years from now, instead of babies’ first words being “momma” or “dada,” we could be leaning over our infants at 5 months old saying, “Can you say dual-core processor?” only to have the child respond, “Oh, Father, please. Dual-core processers are SO last decade.”

Little Kids… Big Potential

I think it is incredible that Ms. Cassidy has her students on the web effectively at such a young age. They seem to be well ahead of the learning curve by the bits of interviews that we saw. They seem quite articulate for six year olds and they seem to have a basic understanding of how to navigate a web page. You can tell that this helps them in several ways. One thing that stood out to me was the boy who was talking about etiquette when commenting on someone else’s post. I think his lesson is one that should be taken to heart by every internet user. Too often people hide behind the anonymity of online posts to say cruel and hateful things that they would NEVER say anywhere else.

This boy suggested that we should keep those mean-spirited comments to ourselves. I think his advice leaves plenty of room for constructive criticism in your comments, but he seems to get the notion that rude posts are not only, well, rude, but they are also a waste of time. In teaching her students blog etiquette, she is teaching them manners as well as other very important skills for social development

Podcasts

The first Podcast I listened to was called “GeekSpeak” which was a link on the iLearn Technology page. The men on this podcast seem very laid back and comedic. They even describe themselves as slackers. These seem like guys I could hang out with on the weekend. They have a very relaxed approach as they talk about tech news involving Bill Gates’ blog and Youtube’s latest updates. This is an attractive approach to me as I am very much a fan of just relaxing and talking about things rather than doing a more formal approach. It really seems like a few nerds are just sitting around and someone just happened to have recorded it. I could see myself making a podcast quite like this one.

Another quite informal podcast was the “Two Tech Chicks” podcast. These two women really seem to be brainstorming while they are driving down the road, making jokes to one another in the cast and even making a sexual joke about an iPhone app. They go into telling us about social applications on the iPhone. These apps don’t appear to have very much educational value at first, but then they talk about apps that help with organization for high school and college students.

The Tekzilla blog was equally laid back, but had a touch more formality as it was a video blog. They stepped it up a notch, too, in the fact that they did interviews with people on the street. I thought this was a neat idea to get the thoughts of others on the technology they were presenting in their podcast. This almost made it seem like a news cast, but at the same time it was a bit less traditional. It reminded me a bit of Entertainment Tonight, only they were talking about tech stuff instead.

I could see myself doing any of these formats as they are very laid back and fit my personality quite well… Perhaps this is why I was drawn to check out the podcasts that looked a bit less formal…

Well, this concludes week 3’s post. As usual, I would like to humbly thank anyone who has read this and taken anything from it.

-Chris