Blurts

The President was in North Dakota visiting reservations.

OneNote, the content collection and organization site popular among MicroSoft users, is now truly cross platform and free (up to 7 gigabytes). You can now generate and view content across devices (I guess web access was available, but a native app works better)

Microsoft suggests this app and service (the storage is online) is a competitor to Evernote. I will save you the trouble if you are a satisfied Evernet and Mac person. You will find OneNote is quite serviceable, but not yet the equivalent of Evernote. I admit that my conclusion may be based on my personal word style, familiarity with Evernote, and evaluation of OneNote using my ipad and Chromebook. I could get stuff to work, but given equivalent pricing for the free version (I do have a Premium Evernote Account $45 a year) OneNote is presently a curiosity for me. For others, more embedded in the MicroSoft culture or just starting with personal archiving, OneOne may be what you are looking for.

Just to be clear, these are products that allow the collection of multiple resources, allow commenting on these resources in various ways, and offer the organization of resources into collections (the label for this process will vary with product – NoteBook would be a good prototypical term for a collection).

I use this type of product when I want to collect resources and do not want to leave the browser to take notes, copy and paste, or save URLs. For example, I will use EverNote while I make my daily review of my RSS feed or scan of Twitter. A similar process is applied when working on larger, more long term projects. The first steps are similar, but I organize what I save into categories and sub-categories, and I may add a few sentences of text to each resource to highlight an idea I had for what the content might be valuable.

There are a couple of features that support these processes. Depending on the device and situation, I can move content to the second application by sending an email to a designated address (think of this as having an evernote or onenote (me@onenote.com) address stored in your contacts list). Browsers I use have a “share option” and the “sure fire option” is to send an email.

The second feature is some type of “clipper” plugin. This means I can copy portions or all of a source and then send the content for storage (note I am not intending to republish this content but use as background material for something I might write).

The image below shows a OneNote screen from my iPad. You see the content from on source in the large window and other available resources from a notebook listed in the window to the right.

I do feel that setting up the system for submitting content by email and installing a plugin for clipping are essential for productive use. I had difficulty locating the methods for doing both from my iPad and so I am including the URLs for the pages explaining each below.

Locate email settings page – http://www.winbeta.org/news/share-any-document-your-onenote-account-emailing-meonenotecom – I set up my Gmail account as the default. The way this works may be confusing if you think about it – do not think. Every users sends content to the same address – me@notebook.com. The system must use the return address to identify the account in which to store the content.

Web clipper – http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-clipper-clip-the-web-right-to-onenote/ – the system uses a bookmarklet and you should be abl Continue reading →

The government in vs. government out argument is clouding the discussion regarding net neutrality. The argument that government should stay out and allow market forces to apply makes some sense, but not when there are no actual forces (no real alternatives). FCC’s willingness to allow municipal broadband may offer an alternative. It is not clear when this would be practical.

The unfortunate reality is that most areas in the country still have only one option for high speed internet. If there are two broadband providers in your town, then consider yourself lucky. And frankly there are still a disturbingly high number of areas in the United States without access to broadband at all.

The recent data from the PEW foundation on political attitudes shows party positions becoming more divergent. The trend reminds me of social psych research on communication and attitudes. If you determine existing attitudes and then group individuals for discussion either with mixed or similar attitudes, you find the average position in groups with similar attitudes become more extreme. So, the PEW outcome would be produced by a pattern of information access selected to be consistent with existing positions. Consider your selection of a cable channel for news.

I am personally invested in learning from books because some of my professional time is investing in writing books. However, I think I have a logical position for advocating the learning benefits of a book in comparison to disconnected resources. I feel the need to describe this position in opposition to the notion of personal professional development that results from exposure to unconnected and brief online sources. Just to be clear – by book I do not require that the resource be the old style object with paper pages.

An important contribution made by the author of a book is a structure – a model of some sort – that organizes many ideas. A book generated by a small group of authors (not authors writing different chapters) requires many decisions about what goes where and this requires some guiding principles – translate this as a structure. One important insight from cognitive psychology is that the structure of our stored information adds learning and thinking advantages that extend beyond the quantity of stuff that has been stored. We do all form our own personal structures, but having something to use as a starting point provides a great advantage. There is a reason college professors use a textbook in introductory classes and primary source resources in graduate classes. Putting together your own structure will eventually be necessary, but generating the big picture when starting from scratch overwhelms most learners.

I started thinking about this perspective as I struggle to organize the various topics I have in my head but want to see appear on my computer screen. Alternate structures are typically possible, but for reasons of efficiency you have to commit to a particular way of communicating your ideas. For example, my writing about technology integration differentiates tactics for communicating from tactics for presenting. Ignore your own meanings for these terms for a moment and translate this as learning from interacting and learning from generating a product to inform an imagined audience. The first is a two-direction experience and the second is not. Both processes offer benefits in shaping the understanding of the learner who interacts or presents.

Given this distinction, how would you offer specific examples? Would you position Twitter within the section on communication? Would you position full-length blogs in the section on presentation? Practice is complex. One might suggest that a blog post offers an initial position and is the starting point for interaction by way of responses/comments. One might take this position, but, of course, there are actually very few responses to nearly all blog posts and this would be one of those hypothetical benefits that is seldom realized. My decision was that it is best to explain things in terms of what is most likely to happen.

Consider the structure I have just generated – I have identified major tactics that can be argued to generate important cognitive activities, I have identified tools specific to each tactic, and I have explained what behavior tends to look like in practice. This is a structure. You might generate a very different structure taking these elements in different directions, but that would also be interesting because our different structures could then be contrasted against actual descriptive data.

I am obviously a fan of writing and reading the long form.