First, what are some problems facing students, teachers, and administrators could be solved through technology?

1. Students need help in document management and collaborative editing. Where’s the latest copy? What are the new changes? How do I combine everyone’s changes?
2. Faculty and administrators need to be able to change course schedules, syllabi, and assignments and be confident that students will see and understand those changes.
3. The career services office needs to inform students of new opportunities and upcoming  deadlines
4. Everyone needs to be able to hold conference calls and group chats.
5. No one wants to have to worry about the technology: “Do we all have the same IM client? Was that sent by email or posted on the bulletin board?”
6. Professors might want to have their lectures recorded, but limit viewing to students enrolled in the class, or to students with a documented disability or need.

Second, what sorts of functionality might be needed to solve those problems?

1. Asynchronous information distribution
• Text, like in a blog
• Audio or video of lectures, like with a podcast
2. Calendar information and schedule distribution
• Office hours for professors
• Campus and club events
• Job and internship application deadlines
• Free/busy information for rooms and resources
• Free/busy information for people
3. Document distribution and versioning
• Lecture notes and syllabi–how do you know if you have the latest version?
4. Address book and directory services
• Contact information: phone, email, postal, IM, websites, etc.
5. Real time communication
• Instant messaging and text messaging
• Voice chat
• Video chat
• Whiteboarding
• Document distribution
• Both one-on-one and group versions
• Transcripts and recordings available
6. Non-real time communication
• Emails
• Bulletin boards
• Voice mail
• Comments
7. Group editing
• Real time document editing
• Collecting and merging document changes
• Whiteboarding
• Wikis
8. Testing
9. Drop box for handing in assignments
10. Surveys, polling, and voting
11. Data analysis
• Summary statistics
• Pivot tables
• Data collection

Third, what are the restrictions and limitations placed on a technology solution:

1. Can a solution be branded or the appearance changed to match the institutions standards?
2. Will a solution be accessible?
3. Will users always know where to go for information or for a tool?
4. Will users be able to choose their client? Will Outlook be required? A specific browser? Some third-party tool?
5. Doe user access and role information need to be maintained?
6. What security needs exist?
7. How hard will end users need to work? How much education will they require to get started? How many steps or clicks will be needed to use the tools?
8. Where does the server need to be located?
9. Do the tools need to be accessible to people outside the domain or outside the firewall?

Finally, the development and deployment approach needs to be considered:

1. A monolithic or waterfall approach, where projects are properly scoped, spec’d, implemented, and tested before deployment
2. An iterative or agile approach where incomplete or inadequate tools are deployed to users as quickly as possible, and the users participate in frequent revisions and refinements.

While there are many reasons for the traditional waterfall approach, schools struggle because of their very high turnover (students change classes every semester and graduate after a few years). Furthermore, as schools can be extremely bureaucratic, an iterative approach also allows end users to feel more ownership over the product and might increase adoption.

So, what software? I’ve already begun a page on some free tools. But perhaps the best tools to use are the ones that you already own. Most people do not know how to use the collaborative editing features in MS Word: send for review and merge revisions. And most people don’t know how to use group calendars in Outlook.

In terms of easy ways to get your feet wet, it’s worth trying a blog system as a means of distributing information. Better than a news page, most blog software allows makes it easy to create items, to categorize items, and to have viewers subscribe. Not only is software like WordPress free, but there’s even software to easily manage multiple blogs. If you’re hosting the blog yourself, it should be no problem to include documents and multimedia files as enclosures, or you could use one of the many hosting services–some of which let you keep files private, are free, and have no size or bandwidth limits.

And there are lots more geeky tools. Google Calendar allows you to subscribe to calendars (such as class calendars, or club calendars) so there must be some way to do the same thing in Outlook. Developers have many options in version control software: there must be something that allows students to check in and check out documents and compare versions.

FolderShare, now owned by Microsoft, provides a P2P tool that shares and synchronizes files across multiple computers. For example, I have set up a set of “Babson” folders on my laptop and desktop and, after installing the free FolderShare software on each machine have nearly instantaneous replication and synchronization of the files and folder structure. Furthermore, folders can be shared with other registered FolderShare users. The rights of these users can be controlled: read only, read and update, add documents, add and delete documents, and manage user rights are all options. I’m working on a project with a friend, and rather than email files back and forth, we’ve used FolderShare to mirror the documents. FolderShare has a number of advantages over online file sharing tools: you don’t need to be online to access files, local files are fast and responsive, all Windows Explorer and OS/X Finder (yeah, there’s a Mac version of the client) functionality is maintained, and post-installation everything works quickly and automatically. There are, however, some disadvantages: FolderShare doesn’t handle collisions (copies are created with new names) or versioning, and deletions are more or less propagated to all machines. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to use FolderShare in conjunction with some backup or archiving software (we’re using CVS for that).

37Signals has a great product called Campfire. It’s a web-based chat application, allowing groups of users to easily talk and share files. Apparently, it’s fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s not free. I wanted to allow my entire section (all 65 or so of us) to potentially talk at the same time. Roomsays.com provides all that functionality, for free. Right now we’re using it to prep for a test tomorrow. People can ask and answer questions without sending out a group email, and we can post our cheat sheets in there, too. A few minor quibbles with the software: even if you’re already logged in to the site, you still need to reenter your password if you join a room as a registered user. Also, when you enter a room, you don’t see any of the earlier messages. But, honestly, how can you argue with free?

It’s not really software, but sometimes you need to be able to talk, not just IM. My groups have tried Skype, but having a real number to dial is sometimes easier. There are a number of similar services, but LifeOffice’s free teleconferencing worked well, didn’t require any personal information or credit card, and the sound quality is great. Combining conferencing with group text chat should work pretty well.

If you’re using Microsoft Word, the 2002 (XP) and later versions allow you send a document for review by email, and automatically merge the changes back in once you’ve received the updates. If you’re tired of trying to figure out who has the latest copy, it’s worth trying this tool.

Finally, for straight up general communication and document sharing there’s the myriad of blog tools. My wife has set up a private group blog for her PhD classmates on WordPress.com. Since they only meet once a week it’s been a great bonding tool and a handy way to share information.

You’ll note there are no Wikis and none of the purpose-built student applications. To be honest, they’re too geeky and too complicated. I have been using a combination of ScheduleWorld and the Funambol Outlook SyncML client to synchronize my Outlook/Exchange and Google calendars. Here’s where I learned to make it work. Totally geeky, but the upshot is you can all look here and see how busy I am.

Wikipedia’s Sound/list

Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum’s chamber music concert archives

Archive.org’s collection of public domain classical music

ClassicalArchives lets free users download 5 tracks per day

And there’s even more streaming music, but that wouldn’t do him any good.

But it’s not just Parrots who are surfing the Internet. Earlier this year, USA Today reported that Dutch zookeepers have set up webcams between their zoo and an orangutang center in Borneo.

Surprisingly, there don’t seem to be too many other instances of animals surfing the Internet (New Yorker Cartoon notwithstanding). I’d think that, for example, dogs or dolphins or other “smart” animals might enjoy something like Subservient Chicken. Maybe the next killer Internet application won’t even be for people.

The software which comes with the MediaMVP is fine, but doesn’t let you take advantage of any BeyondTV functionality (if you have it, obviously). You can’t browse upcoming listings, search for shows, schedule recordings, or, crucially, delete recordings. The Open Source MVPBTV project remedies that by using BeyondTV’s client-server architecture. It’s pretty slick. (And yes, I did purchase and extra Beyond TV Link license to use.) It would be great if the SnapStream folks would sponsor the project (it’s been languishing) to better compete with SageTV.

I should do a writeup on my home TV recording system because it works so well and was so cheap: $70 for a Hauppauge PVR-250, $80 for the MediaMVP, $70 for BeyondTV, and $30 for BeyondTV Link. That $250 for better functionality than Tivo!

Please send me a review system to evaluate. I don’t have a big following like Josh Rubin, Fred Wilson, or Avi Greengart but I will do something none of your other reviewers have: install it at my parents’ house. My dad is a late adopter but technically sophisticated classical music geek. My mom is…less of a technophobe than she was ten years ago. The have a good sized house, different tastes in music, good ears, and influence with their friends. Let me help you target this ripe demographic.

Sincerely yours,

Josh

A few years ago, I bought my wife a Dell Inspiron 700m on one of Dell’s once-frequent $750-off sales. Total price for a loaded ultraportable? $800. It’s a great little machine with long battery, great screen, and usable keyboard.

Unfortunately, on my recent trip to South Africa, I discovered a major bug: it wouldn’t read SD cards greater than 1 GB.

According to the Dell-hosted message boards, this problem has been reported at least since April of 2005 and no fix has been posted. Not acceptable.

Apple has gone a long way towards fixing these problems with their iPod and iTunes combination and if I were to suggest a player for my mom it would be the 2 GB iPod Nano. But she doesn’t listen on headphones, doesn’t mind the radio in the car, and would be annoyed at carrying a little device around and plugging it in to speakers in each room.

My parent’s music listening lifestyle must be a fairly common one–they aren’t urban nomads and lead most of their life at work and at home with only limited time spent in transit. At home they move around the house a lot, enjoy having music on, and have different but overlapping tastes in music. Sometimes they’d want to listen to same music throughout the house and sometimes they’d want their own music to follow them around. My mom’s pretty web savvy, listens to Internet radio and has the vague (and probably correct) idea that there are podcasts she’d want to listen to.

They’re the perfect market for the Sonos music system. It’s an ingenious blend of networked music players (some models with high quality digital amplifiers and others with clean stereo and digital line outs) that connect to your network to play electronic audio files and connect to the Internet to play streaming audio. Their proprietary wireless mesh network allows the synchronized playing of the same audio file or stream across one or more “Zone Players”. But they aren’t limited to playing the same music. Each player can play its own audio, or any combination can be synced any number of ways.

Here’s an example. In my parent’s house, they’d probably want one for the kitchen, one for their bedroom, one for my mom’s office and one for my dad’s office. Let’s say they both brought some work home over the weekend. My dad is upstairs in his office, listening to FLAC rips of Joshua Bell playing a Mendelsohn violin concerto. When it’s time to start making dinner, he finishes the movement, turns off the stereo upstairs, and picks up the next track in the kitchen. Meanwhile, my mom has been listening to Science Friday, which she had missed last week. Since she’s moving back and forth between her bedroom and her office, she has the streaming feed playing in both rooms. By the time she’s ready to help with dinner, she still hasn’t finished. She pauses Ira Flatow in mid-sentence, heads downstairs, restarts the stream in the kitchen, turns off both players upstairs, and enjoys a nice dinner.

One other handy feature is to replicate a synchronized input at one player to multiple other players. So, for example, if a player were located by their digital cable tuner, they’d be able to play those cable radio stations throughout the house. Alternately, CDs could be played throughout the house with no ripping and encoding necessary.

Users like my parents need an essentially transparent day to day experience. That isn’t to say that they wouldn’t be willing to invest in up front setup (for example, mounting speakers, configuring audio streams and podcasts, ripping music CDs) but once setup is complete, actual usage should be trivial. Achieving this will depend on two technologies: the controller and configuration capability.

The controllers appears similar to the iPod. A large wheel, used for scrolling, is supplemented by a set of hard and soft keys. The screen is color and medium resolution. The built in battery lasts a few days between charges (the device sleeps to save power) and you can purchase additional charging cradles to leave around your house. Much like cordless phones, there’s a trade off between the convenience of carrying the device around with you can the convenience of always knowing where your controller will be. At a minimum, households will want a controller for each active listener. I don’t know how easy it is to join and separate different players.

Configuration of audio sources, such as files and streams, should also be easy. New files should be added to the Sonos system when saved into known folders. Both file structure and tags should be supported, and there should be some method to optionally not fill your track listing with uncharacterizable junk. iTunes is apparently very good at this, and Sonos reportedly integrates with iTunes.

I’ve convinced my father in law to get one – we’ll see how well it works.

Disclaimer – a former coworker used to be director of QA for Sonos at their Cambridge, MA office. He couldn’t get me an evaluation unit. I tried not to hold a grudge.