College courses: even "offline" classes are online now By John Timmer | Published: January 04, 2009 - 05:00PM CT

This week's edition of Science contains a series of perspectives on how computer technology is changing the education system. Some of them focus on the purely hypothetical, such as the use of MMOs for educational purposes or the development of immersive artificial environments for education purposes. Two of the papers, however, review a real trend in education: the growing access to everything from educational materials to entire degree programs via the Internet.

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The trend showed up throughout the articles. For example, the need to get educational material online was highlighted in the MMO article, which pointed out that the World of Warcraft subscriber base was over 20 times larger than the number of science, technology, engineering, and math degrees awarded annually in the US; even Lineage, which was released in 1999, still has a subscriber base that's more than twice as large.

Formal online education

If everyone's online anyway, it's no surprise that education is moving there as well. Many aspects of education are moving there formally, as a variety of online degree-granting programs have developed over the last decade. Some of these are commercial, online-only ventures, but those have been joined by programs developed by universities with a traditional, physical campus. For the most part, the online programs remain a fraction of the size of traditional student bodies, although, in some rare cases, schools are maintaining equal mixes of online and on-ground students.

The perspective that focuses on this topic suggests that the majority of those enrolled in online-only classes are doing so at the community college level, and that most take this route because they already have significant time commitments, like jobs. The same features that make online coursework appealing to these students—studying as other commitments allow, avoiding the time spent commuting to campus—appeal to the professors teaching these courses, as well. This, despite the fact that most find preparing for online classes to be more time-consuming than a standard lecture course.

The authors note that initial fears that online coursework would simply be dumped on adjunct professors appear to have been unfounded.

The heavy enrollment at the community college level and the role of commute time as a motivator may explain one of the odd demographic trends: aside from open universities in several countries, online-only education hasn't been big in Europe. Prestigious private universities in the US are also, with a few notable exceptions, staying on the sidelines for now.

Supplementing the classroom

But, even in schools without online classes, the authors note that almost every class has an online component now, even if it's nothing more than a site that hosts some reading material. Many students get access to far more than a reading list, as podcasts, video content, and discussion groups are being used to supplement the classroom experience. A second perspective highlights a number of efforts that have been made to provide catalogs of this material, including the Open Courseware Consortium pioneered by MIT and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative.

The value of this online material was highlighted by a study cited by the author of the second perspective, performed at Carnegie Mellon. Instead of lecturing on the material for a statistics course, professors created an online course for the material and held classroom discussions of it. Students in this hybrid online/offline class apparently completed the course in less time and ended up with equivalent scores on the final exam.

But the perspective notes that many institutions other than schools are starting to place educational material online. Groups like the National Academies of Science and government agencies are producing high-quality online educational material, as are many state educational authorities.

Although the author of the perspective is a huge fan of open access models like Creative Commons, the perspective (unintentionally) highlights many of the problems caused by the proliferation of online material. For starters, the licenses and access models (i.e., browser only, downloading allowed, etc.) for this material makes it difficult to find and integrate into a single online resource.

There are also few guidelines that would help any teacher find the material appropriate for a specific level of instruction, and little in the way of suggestions on how to create a coherent whole out of material initially made for a variety of different purposes.

If there is a coherent picture that can be drawn from this series of articles, it's that there really isn't any such thing as an offline class anymore; we simply have classes in which the online material comprises more or less of the learning experience. Right now, if anything, there may be an overabundance of material; what appears to be lacking is a set of coherent guidelines on how to find and use what's out there.

Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168874
Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168018

Build your own iPhone quick dialer By Erica Sadun | Published: December 31, 2008 - 01:39PM CT

Earlier today, Jeff Smykil wrote about a series of quick dialer programs that were hitting App Store. He wondered if I could write up a quick how-to showing Ars readers how to write their own. So, here you go. You'll need access to the iPhone Software Developer Kit, and you must have signed up for the $99/year developer license so you can deploy software to the iPhone.

Dialing from the SDK

Making an SDK application dial a phone number requires little more than providing a tel:// URL. Use NSURL's URLWithString function to build this with the phone number you supply:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"tel://2125551212"];

Once built, tell the iPhone to start the call using the UIApplication openURL: method.

[application openURL:url];

If you want the application to dial upon launch, add these two lines to your applicationDidFinishLaunching: method in your main application delegate. When the application loads, it will automatically redirect control to the dialer. Instantly, you've built a click-to-dial application. Add a nice icon, a unique app identifier, a person's name as the Bundle display name and you're set. Presto, instant dialer application.

Generalizing Dialing

When you want an application to provide single-click dialing with an end-user specifiable phone number, use a Settings bundle to coordinate the phone number with your application. A settings bundle is no more than a folder that's named Settings.bundle with a property list named Root.plist inside.

Here's a simple Root.plist file that stores a single text value named phone_number in the standard NSUserDefaults for your application.

 Title
 Quick Dialer
 StringsTable
 Root
 PreferenceSpecifiers
 
  
   Type
   PSGroupSpecifier
   Title
   Quick Call
  
  
   Type
   PSTextFieldSpecifier
   Title
   Phone Number
   Key
   phone_number
   DefaultValue
   
   IsSecure
   
   KeyboardType
   Number
   AutocapitalizationType
   None
   AutocorrectionType
   No
  
 

And here's what that
preferences screen looks like
in the Settings app.

If you choose to use a user-settable phone number, you'll need to check whether the number exists ([[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"phone_number]) and whether it conforms to some sort of test for being a valid number (i.e. 10 digits long, etc). Once it passes those test, you just paste the number onto a tel:// prefix using NSString's stringWithFormat: method, create the URL and open it as already seen above. It's really just that simple.

What about Webclips?

When Jeff first approached me, we chatted about creating telephone-based Web Clips. Webclips allow you to store URLs on Springboard as single-tap icons, and can be created from Safari. Unfortunately, the tel:// variations do not easily lend themselves to bookmarking or webclipping from the iPhone. You can do so (easily!), from jailbroken iPhones but for standard-issue App Store compliant units, you cannot.

I actually tried putting together a project (and spent a good deal of time doing so) that would build webclips from your address book contacts, but I found that the SDK sandbox did not permit me to read from or write to the ~mobile/Library/Webclips folder. So that turned out to be a dead end, at least from an official SDK viewpoint.

What about adding multiple contacts?

The final thing that Jeff and I discussed was in regard to adding multiple contact clips to your home screen. The answer is simple. So long as you give each clip a unique identifier (e.g. com.sadun.call-barbara, com.sadun.call-jacqui), you can add as many of these projects as you'd like. Make sure the bundle display name and icon for each project make it easy to distinguish who you're calling. Other than that, edit the two-line code shown above to place a call to the proper number and you're set.

Android On An Eee PC By John Mahoney, 10:00 AM on Fri Jan 2 2009

Making good on Google's continued pledge to not limit Android to just phones, two guys at VentureBeat got Android up an running on their Eee PC 1000H. But a question comes to mind: why?

Apparently it was a piece of cake to get Android to support everything you'd need for functional computing, including sound, graphics (at the Eee's native resolution) and wireless internet. And it's not the first time this has happened—a Google developer showed off his successful Eee 701 port a few weeks ago.

But why would you want to run Android on a Netbook, when in most cases, a more traditional flavor of Linux or even Windows works just fine? The opportunity opens the door for even less powerful (and cheaper) MIDs, like Nokia's Internet Tablets. Also, the potential for a fully web-delivered OS via Chrome (which is not yet a part of the Android project, but definitely within the realm of possibility) is kind of exciting; Chrome was built primarily for web applications, after all.

Apparently the port only took around four hours, and many references to MIDs and other non-phone applications can be found in Android's source code. So whether it makes sense on an Eee PC or not, this is definitely a direction for Android we'll see more fleshed out in 2009.

Google to Save Money by Getting Product Ideas From Users, Not Paying Them By Adam Frucci, 10:30 AM on Fri Jan 2 2009

Google has figured out that it can save money by getting product ideas from users rather than engineers. After all, you can't pay engineers in "shout outs" on their blogs like they're offering for users.

Yes, the tanking economy is hitting the mighty Google just as hard as every other company out there, and they're having to cut costs as a result. Gone is the 20% time that allowed engineers to dedicate one day a week to pet projects. And hell, why pay those engineers at all? Users can come up with ideas just as well as they can, and they don't even have to pay them.

That's the idea behind the new Google Product Ideas blog, a place for people to submit and vote on ideas for new Google products. And what if you come up with a genius idea that makes Google millions of dollars? "If you post an idea or suggestion and we put it into action, we may give you a shout out on our Product Ideas blog, but we won't be compensating users for their ideas." Don't be evil, indeed.