Category Archives: technology

Where is speech recognition going?

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I saw this article on Mashable and thought it was worth comment:

Speech recognition software has been around for a long time. I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking since the late 90s. The software is pretty awesome and during my undergraduate years was able to speak the first draft for most of my papers (I would have to go in to correct the mistakes after the first version). I also found this software extremely helpful when I had to transcribe videos in both corporate and educational settings. To transcribe, I would listen to the speech and talk as they were talking. It was a very quick way to transcribe.

Currently I use speech recognition for two things on a regular basis: talking to my car and my phone. I have the Ford Sync system on my car. So whenever I want to call someone I tell my car to call them. Then I speak to the person through my speakers. It is very useful. Then on my phone I speak to my Galaxy Nexus for many of my texts.

How accurate is speech recognition? Honestly, I notice no improvements since the late 90s when I started using it. It is somewhere around 90% (guess not a true stat). If there is noise it is even worse. I have also noticed that it just does not like the way some people talk. I talk very clear and so it works for me. I have also noticed that accents do not seem to affect it, it’s more about the clarity of the persons voice.

So will speech recognition get more popular? Well it has with SIRI. However, are people still using SIRI? Many of my friends found it annoying after the honeymoon period. That does not mean it is not useful. I do see it becoming more popular as people adapt to the idea of speaking to their computers or phones. However, it is still not perfect and I am not sure it will ever be as we just do not have the technology for perfect AI at this time, so until then the mistakes may turn off users.

Article: http://mashable.com/2012/05/29/where-speech-recognition-is-going/

PhoneGap: Building an app and classroom use

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Well I have built my first mobile app using PhoneGap. Here are my thoughts:

Usability: Setting the software up was pretty easy although I did think the PhoneGap tutorials were not very good and had to look elsewhere to get the software installed on both Eclipse and Xcode. However once I was set up, all I needed to do was to drop HTML files into my WWW folder. Additionally, it was not easy to figure out how to publish my apps to the Android/iOS stores but very easy once I did figure it out. I would recommend one be familiar with Eclipse and Xcode before working with PhoneGap. Now onto building an app – very easy. Building an app using HTML was pretty easy. PhoneGap does have the ability to interact with the phone’s internal hardware just like a native app, which is nice. It does require javascript though, so be prepared to program if using PhoneGap.I did have to also modify things in both Eclipse and Xcode in order to get certain things to work, for instance, just adding external links to my app in Xcode required modification. I honestly think PhoneGap needs to work on their tutorials, for many things their software could do, and it would used by many more people. They are limiting themselves with the poor tutorials they have on their site.

Publishing – Publishing on multiple devices was pretty easy. After I had finished my app for Android, it took me maybe 30-45 mins to get it ready for publishing on iOS, which is pretty impressive. Keep in mind though that in order to publish on Apple (or even get your app on your iPad/iPhone) you need to pay the $99 developer fee. On Android, that fee is only $25 which is much more reasonable. Also, Android lets you publish your app without review, Apple needs to review (takes weeks at a minimum) and might actually reject your app.

Education use: I think this would be a very good tool for the classroom but there are a few things that an instructor needs to be ready for. The first thing is setting up this software. It was not that easy to set up. You have to download and install like 5 things for Android and like 5 things for Apple. Not only do you have to download/install but you need to create directories and move files around. While this was pretty easy for myself (and it did take a while), this is a nightmare waiting to happen in the classroom. You will have to walk your students through this process and I would expect errors. This process alone will turn off non technical students who will never use this tool after class due to this set up process. Once all set up though, its HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I do believe your students should thoroughly understand HTML and CSS with intro level javascript knowledge before attempting to use this tool. You at least need to know how to find/modify javascript to really do  anything ‘fun’ with the tool (unless you are just creating static HTML pages). Now, if you can look past all of that (and I probably can for my non programmer/non technical students even though I did sound rather negative in my review), I would recommend to require all students buy an Android develop account for $25 (vs iOS $99 due to cost) and let them each publish their apps to the Android Martketplace (Google Play). I think students would love to see their apps on the app store.

Has Adobe won the mobile war? I think so…

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There is so much misinformation out there it is ridiculous. I hear so many rumors from non-developers about mobile development and the funny thing is, most of them have never developed an app. So why has Adobe won? Two software packages – Adobe Air and PhoneGap.

Each of these software packages allows you to create mobile apps on multiple devices. So I can develop one app and it will run on the iPhone, iPad, and Android based devices. Thus I no longer need to waste valuable time developing apps for both iOS and Android when I can develop one that deploys on both.

With Adobe Air, you develop your app in Flash and package it for each device. Wait, isnt there a rumor that Flash doesnt work on iPhone? Yes there is that rumor and it is only partially true. Flash does not run in the iOS browser BUT it will run as a stand alone app. So YES you can develop apps in Flash for Apple and they work very well.

With PhoneGap, also owned by Adobe, you can develop apps via HTML5 and then publish to Android and iOS devices. Again these work very well.

Additionally, with both of these software packages I can actually use hardware features of the phone and use them when not connected to the internet. Something you can do with all mobile apps but not the mobile web. The disadvantage to developing an app over a website is that Apple has to approve it (not a problem with Android). Otherwise Apps are much better than a mobile website.

Why would I use one over the other? Flash apps are designed for more sophisticated apps that require large amounts of data (database), high intensity graphics, lots of screens, animations, etc. PhoneGap apps are better for small simple apps. Both are great for development though. Additionally, Adobe is really starting to integrate phonegap into dreamweaver so I would not be surprised if we see these two software packages merged at some point (maybe CS7?).

I will be using both of these software packages in my courses next year, so if you are interested in learning more about them, please contact me.

Adobe Air – http://www.adobe.com/products/air.html

PhoneGap – http://phonegap.com/

Facebook IPO

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Will you be buying? I will not be – not because I do not have the money (Although I do not because I am a college professor which means I cannot even afford to live). The reason I would not buy at least in the long term, for those looking for investments, is that this company can go down and fail overnight. If you do not believe me, look at myspace or any of the IPOs in the early 2000s during the tech boom. On the other hand as a short term investment for the person who watches the market and pay attention to what is happening in the tech world, this is probably a decent investment as it will go up right away just as google did. The key here is watching and knowing when to get rid of it. The best part of everything was watching and learning how big financial firms operate in the market and do things. SoFi is such a big player and any advice they have for you is something id recommend.

An article about the ipo: http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/17/technology/facebook-ipo-final-price/index.htm

Watch the IPO (FB) on NASDAQ: https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:FB

Do you trust ‘information’ and ‘history’?

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This is a very interesting tale of a professor whose class was designed to try and create a fake part of history via the web. They made up a person and a story about them. This is very fascinating and makes me wonder how much of history was made up? Are there things we believe that were simply the act of someone trying to trick us?

From the article:

“A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown’s Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery–the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.

These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly’s course Lying About the Past.

Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.”

Read the rest here: http://mashable.com/2012/05/16/fake-wikipedia-caught-by-reddit/

Replacing ADDIE?

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Well since this is the second time this week I have seen this post, which I addressed on both forums where I saw it posted, I thought I would post it here too:

Here is the article

My take is that the article is wrong – it tells me nothing. No info why ADDIE is ‘bad’ and no info on how they would change it. In fact, the only thing I get from the article is that the people who wrote it are using ADDIE incorrectly and do not understand the process.  Here is my response to this article in a linkedin forum:

“So why use another process? What does it do differently than ADDIE? I have seen many people try to replace it and yet they cannot – for good reason. ADDIE works. While a systematic process, ADDIE is not linear. If you are using it in a linear or limiting way, you are using it wrong. Additionally, these two bullet points in the article contradict one another and show you would be using ADDIE wrong if you developed training that has little impact:

* departments spend too much money and time on training that has little, if any, impact on the performance of the learners.

* is in the constant cycle of allocating ever diminishing budgets which are not adequate to build training that has any return-on-investment.

And this bullet point shows me you are not doing a proper learner analysis or using the right instructional strategies (again not using ADDIE correctly):

* are becoming disillusioned and unmotivated by the boring, lifeless click-through training to which they are subjected.

And to address your points, if your ISDers are not using ADDIE correctly or doing proper instructional design and you are running into these types of issues, why blame ADDIE? It seems that the problem is that you are using it incorrectly. In fact, you are probably cutting corners somewhere. I usually see this when reviewing training which looks like flash cards – boring and not effective. Why? The ISDers did not actually design the instructional strategies to match the learning objectives and then did not asses properly (i.e., they did not use ADDIE correctly).

I guess my question for anyone getting rid of ADDIE for another model is, how are you ensuring quality? Because if you are cutting something out of ADDIE then you are cutting quality somewhere. If you are adding to ADDIE then I could understand because ADDIE by itself is missing a PM and Communication piece but its understood that its not meant to have them either.”

Kinect cameras being used to help detect autism in children

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Very cool what gaming software and hardware can do. Kinect and Wii motion technologies are powerful and will be doing much more in the near future.

From the article:

“Detecting autism in children can be a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming process that requires the trained eye of a medical professional. But researchers Guillermo Sapiro and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos believe that the Microsoft Kinect gaming sensor could assist in that task.

As part of an experiment at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, Sapiro and Papanikolopoulos set up a series of five Microsoft Kinect sensors in the playroom of a school. There, the motion-detecting cameras recorded the movements of the children, aged 3 to 5, and sent the collected data to a series of PCs. The computers then calculated what children were most at risk for autism based on their hand movements and activity levels. Children whose activity levels differed greatly from their peers were flagged for further study by medical professionals.

Researchers admit the cameras are no substitute for the opinion of a real doctor, but say they could still help determine which children require closer examination for signs of autism. “The same way a good teacher flags a problem child, the system will do automatic flagging and say, ‘Hey, this kid needs to see an expert,'” says Shapiro.”

More of the article here