Blurts

I visited the Genius Bar at the Apple store today. I made an appointment last night so I would be certain of a time. I brought in two machines – my 11in Air and my iMac. Both needed repairs.

The Air was stepped on by one of my grandkids. It must have been one of the older ones because the screen was not only messed up – even the Apple Logo on the lid was cracked. I learned that the cost to fix the screen would be > $400. I decided to buy a new Air instead. The broken machine still works, but there is a band across the middle of the screen that will not display information. Perhaps I can use the machine to drive a separate screen of some type.

The iMac was my home work machine and was to be the machine to be used at the lake. It stopped working on the 27th and it turned out that the hard drive is toast. I use an online backup system so the data with the exception of the Christmas pictures are safe. This situation is actually better than I expected. However, I learned that Apple no longer stocks the drives for machines older than 5 years. This machine is five years old. They cannot fix my iMac at any cost. I still live in the old days of installing your own hardware and a terabyte drive would be less than $100. I understand that these are probably specialized drives and not the generic drives you can install in a PC. I will have to find an independent repair shop and see what they say. I know I could rig an external drive as bootable but this would be more an exercise in “see if you can do it” rather than the way I would prefer to work day to day. At $2500 or so, the iMacs are little bigger purchase than the Air. I miss the old days with swappable parts. I understand the need for small scale in a laptop, but the ultra-thin desktop is not really a requirement. It does look pretty.

Zite advertised itself as a “free, personalized (and intelligent!) magazine that understands what you like and gets smarter as you use it.” It was my preferred source for news on the topics I follow. I liked the idea of expanding my perspective by reviewing recommendations without the bias imposed by following individuals who see the world as I do (I did not attempt to make Zite grow smarter).

Now, Zite has been absorbed by FlipBoard. I guess this is the way of the digital world, but I think it is a shame.

I think I have identified a new educational tool category. By tool category I mean a service or set of inter-related services that all the user to act on content in a way that makes some learning task more efficient or more productive. So, while a tool likely has a limited purpose, the tool and the content are independent.

To my knowledge, this tool category has yet to be named, but I will attempt it identify it by example. Some might describe the processes involved as “deep reading”. In my own experience both as a college instructor and researcher, I would describe this tool as suited to study. I would also note that both reading and writing skills can be emphasized using these tools (as would be the case in text-based study activities).

If I were to propose a descriptive phrase, I would describe these as tools for “collaborative markup”.

Here is the general idea. The processing of a challenging document can be enhanced by external prompts and activities. These external resources can be provided by experts or be self generated. An author encourages a certain amount of the processing of the pure text with headings and text embellishments (bolded or italicized). When working with hard copy (old school), college students have long underlined, highlighted, and annotated. This was the general topic of some of my research. The idea of “expert” notes, highlights, etc. was a way researchers conceptualized the potential of offering students content “marked up” in a way that may encourage more effective processing.

The “collaborative markup tools” offer a digital way to markup text in different ways and share this augmented content (expert to student, peer to peer, etc.).

The following is a list you might explore. There are differences I have not explored (e.g., the service provides access to copyright content for markup, the cost per student, availability of templates for analysis, content can be added).