Here's an interesting tidbit for students, scholars, historians, and folks who like purty pictures: DukeMobile, an app ostensibly designed for students of Duke University, just added a collection of nearly 32,000 historical images, all of them specially formatted for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
I could blather on about it (and, truly, I do love to blather), but I think you're better off watching this impressive demo video:
The images come from 20 collections that cover topics like women's history, early American sheet music, and vintage advertisements. Duke will add new collections regularly as they become available.
I'm a bit of a history buff, so I'm really loving these images. It's kind of like having a museum in my pocket.
Of course, as a Michigan State alum, I feel a little weird about carrying a Duke app on my iPhone--especially one that's so otherwise Duke-centric. But, like all MSU grads, I'm mature enough to handle it.
The attendance reporting app used by the Aoyama Gakuin university.
(Credit: SoftBank)If American school children have to resort to some special mosquito ringtone to use cell phones at school, a university in Japan is doing the opposite: giving cell phones to students. And not just any cell phone--the iPhone 3G.
According to Asiajin, about 550 students and staff members in the School of Social Informatics at Tokyo-based university Aoyama Gakuin received the iPhone 3G for free earlier this month as part of their study materials.
This is the result of a deal that Aoyama Gakuin signed with SoftBank, the exclusive vendor of the iPhone in Japan. The number of students using the iPhone is expected to reach about 1,000. This is the first time a particular cell phone has been used on such a huge scale at a Japanese university.
The gadget will work as a study tool for students, but as it also comes with GPS, which the university plans to use to check student attendance. Truancy is a big problem in Japan, where regular attendance is an important factor in determining a student's grade. Students often fake attendance by getting classmates to answer roll calls.
Now, with the iPhone 3G, the school plans to keep better tabs on its students. Students are allowed to use the phone for attendance reporting (but only if they are actually in the classroom, a fact that will be verifiable based on the phone's GPS), lecture podcasting, and online examinations. A student can't answer the roll call using the phone from any location other than the classroom.
Students can, of course, still cheat the new system by leaving their phones with fellow classmates, but this is not very likely to happen, as people tend to keep a lot of private information on their phones that they don't want to share with others.
As for calling and data plans, the university covers the basic fee. The the hardware itself is free, but students will have to pay when they exceed downloading limits.
University students face a certain challenge keeping their homework, class schedules, and research developments organized among paper documents and computers in their room, home, and the lab. When epiphany strikes, it's just as likely to be recorded on the back of a crumpled sandwich receipt as it is on a Word document or online briefcase--or was that just me?
That's exactly why Tom Whitson wrote Notely.
Developed in the Netvibes Ecosystem and translated into a number of languages, Notely is positioned to meet students' organizational needs by storing notes, important links, a calendar, a class schedule, grades, and a to-do list, and is accessible from anywhere a student logs on.
Notely racks up points for online document storage and data backup, and a word processor that supports links and images. It also has a language translator and can export and e-mail some of the stored data. Friends who jump on Notely's bandwagon can share information, such as class schedules or lecture notes.
You can add as many courses as you want into Notely, just not the lecture time.
While Notely has much to offer students, there are some snags. For starters, it's not clear how much storage Notely offers. Also, the calendar and scheduling sections deserve some attention and are the program's weakest sections. Despite assigning preferences for a 12-hour clock, I had to schedule my adviser meeting for 16:00. And while I could list my courses and the meeting room, Notely didn't note the class time. I also didn't like having to drag and drop classes into Notely's schedule. I'd much rather enter the time once and let the schedule populate itself. Many of these ills can be improved by emulating Google and Outlook calendars and offering greater flexibility for adding events directly into a schedule instead of one by one.
With a Mac dashboard widget, a Facebook app, and iPhone and mobile phone interfaces, Notely is also accessible to (technologically advantaged) students traveling between points who might otherwise reach for that degraded receipt.
Students solely interested in online note taking and collaboration should also consider Notesake, another free tool reviewed on Webware.com.
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