fresh + new(er)

One of the really wild things at Museums and the Web 2007 was a demonstration booth from the National Science Museum, Japan. At the booth were a series of paper pop up dinosaurs. By themselves the dinosaur popups were impressive but once a consumer grade webcam was pointed at the paper cutouts they came to [...]

It shouldn’t take much imagination to see the enormous potential afforded by this prototype project coming out of Germany via Japan - Enkin.
Built on Google’s Android mobile platform (for which, it should be pointed out, no commercially available devices exist), Enkin looks amazing, even as a prototype. David Bearman has written recently about the [...]

Some readers may know that I and several members of my team are hard at work on a range of location-centric cultural sector data applications. We have been combining data sources from across the sector and government and building new ways of traversing very diverse data sets. (If you are going to be at Museums [...]

I ordered an OLPC laptop under the ‘Give One Get One’ programme and via a friend in the US it arrived last week. My 3 year old has been having a great time playing with the TamTam Mini application, a very simple graphical sound triggering noise maker; the Paint application; a memory match game; and [...]

The first batch of papers for Museums & the Web have gone online.
Picking the first one to read at random, I chose Silvia Fillipini Fantoni’s paper on “Bookmarking in museums”.
I am interested in this area as we developed a prototype mobile phone object bookmarking application just over two years ago but never rolled it [...]

Given that I am in the market for a new phone I’ve been bitterly disappointed by the lack of truly ‘converged’ devices out here on the market. The most ‘feature rich’ have usability problems when it comes to making phone calls (touchscreen dialing! why?), and those that have really usable decent sized phone/numeric keypads force [...]

O’Reilly on the recent open source release of Racoon - a web server for the Nokia phones that run the S60 series o/s.
The potential applications are quite exciting - even the factory-included remote camera operation is pretty nifty.
Now I’m just waiting for my new phone to be ordered so we can start testing this out [...]

The Walker Art Center has a fantastic post on hacking the firmware and interface of the iPod to make them more usable in a museum setting.
Lending iPods out to patrons is much more involved than just the simple question of how you clean them, or avoiding theft (those items of business are handled by our [...]

From SMH today.
Mobile phones are the portals to friendships and social networks, the ultimate measure of social status and portable shrines to self-image, he says. And if no one’s calling, there’s little shame in programming your phone to ring you, checking for non-existent text messages or talking up a storm with an imaginary friend.
“Kids are [...]

Liberty Science Center has been working for several years on some m-learning pilots and it looks as if their first implementation of mobile phone based learning experiences will go live next year.
As you know, the Powerhouse Museum, has also been experimenting and our in-house working prototype Mob Mark takes a slightly different approach.
Bressler, from the [...]

Some interesting results from the Getty’s survey on handheld usage in their Rembrandt exhibition.
Comment cards and focus groups showed that few users were interested in the zoom or enlarge feature, but they did think that the images on the device helped them enjoy the art. The comment cards showed that text, image-based navigation, and zoom [...]

2006 education.au National Seminars - Transforming Learning through ICT
Seminar 1 - Delivering 21 st Century tools, learning and skills
This is the first in a series of two seminars for educational leaders involved in technology and learning through the use of the Internet.
Keynote speaker: Marc Prensky, the founder of Games2train, designer and builder of over [...]

Plays . . . . AND records !
The new Samsung YM-PD1
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The new video iPod is looking less and less exciting. Especially when compared to the PSP.
From the ilounge review
Is there any video bummer? Well, the big one on the hardware front is playback time. The 30GB iPod runs for only 2 hours, says Apple, when playing back video. And the 60GB iPod runs for 3. [...]

Check this.
4gb harddrive for the PSP that is powered off its own battery source
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There’s a lot of ‘cast’ in the title.
Here are a stack of videos from Duke University’s recent symposium on podcasting. Of particular relevance are the technical and podcasting in the classroom sessions.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Duke University Podcasting Symposium Webcast”, url: “http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2005/10/04/duke-university-podcasting-symposium-webcast/” });

been playing PSP ’till me hands cramp up… Its got that one thing all other small format mobile devices dont have - a truly KILLER screen. Crisp, Sharp, Wide and Bright. I think its possibilities as a platform for mobile micro cinema are huge.. version 2 of the firmware put in a quite capable browser [...]

It was in the SMH but here’s the full info on the $100 laptop for the developing world.
Check the photos/sketches.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “MIT $100 Laptop”, url: “http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2005/09/30/mit-100-laptop/” });

This makes me feel very very old.
Mobile phones meets myspace . . . . make your own media channel, share it, pour content into it from your camera phone, send GPS or triangulated position data from your phone cell.
Rabble is here.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “The kids are coming up from behind”, url: “http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2005/08/05/the-kids-are-coming-up-from-behind/” });

This pdf reports on a pilot project and makes recommendations regarding the use of mobile phones, text messaging, etc in a learning program for disadvantaged youth. It includes numerous links to further research.
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/projects/media/txt_me_recommendations.pdf
A little while back I was appalled whilst attending an Adobe product launch (for education priced premier elements and photoshop elements for [...]