BOB: Barron's Own Blog

In this post you'll see pictures of the Texas Tech University Advising Center front office, where I work. In my class, #mobilerice, I was asked to take some photos of the digital signage used to provide coverage of our continually updated RSS feeds (sources include @g00dAdvice, www.actt.ttu.edu/blog, CNN, ESPN, the Daily Toreador, TTU Emergency Updates, www.prelaw.ttu.edu/go, www.fgc.ttu.edu/go, www.discovery.ttu.edu/go, www.calendar.ttu.edu and the TTU Communications and Marketing Division.

Especially you'll notice the date on some of the crowd pics was January 20, 2009, when Barak Obama was inaugurated as president. We used the live Facebook/CNN feed from their web site, and had a lot of passersby stop between classes (and skip class, admittedly) to experience an historic moment with us. It was really quite exciting to see their interest and to provide them (and all of our staff, too) with a window out of work/school into the rest of our world, all from the TTU Advising Center's front office. Yep, very cool.

What do you want to build?
I want to build the world's simplest iPhone application ... wait ... that has already been done ... click the image here for more on that from my favorite twitter-er, Pete Cashmore (or more accurately, by Mashable.com).

Okay, so then, what should I build? Hmm... this article makes a good case for data visualization applications, and this article gives an introduction to some of the new features that will be available to us to exploit on the iPhone 3Gs (and the upgraded iPhone 3G) as of 17 July.

Certainly stuff to think about. If you can stand the 13:45 video, there's a lot more hype and yes, admittedly, geekedly neat things that we could use in some cool new app ... if we (me) were super developers.By the way, I'm thinking that those readers of this blog who can handle a quarter hour of Apple might also get something out of an hour and a half of Google. You've really got to watch the 1:20:00 video of the new Google Wave. It's going to change it all. Seriously.

Well heck, while I'm promo-ing Mashable, I should just link you directly to the iPhone category where I'm getting most of the good stuff I'm taking time to write about here. [http://mashable.com/tag/iphone-apps/]

Okay, okay, so I'm thinking that an iPhone application that helps a student calculate their GPA, including some calculations for Grade Replacements, etc., would be useful. Especially if v1.0 was built in such a way as to provide an extensible skeleton that could actually allow students to enter their classes, assignments (with due dates) and their relative weights, and using realistic expectations, to calculate real-time the changes made as they increase or decrease their confidence in their preparedness for an exam, etc.

Maybe even the application could connect with study groups and resources using Facebook or other social media applications.What do you think?

What's a "blobject" as it relates to your project? (iPod Philosophy, Chapter 2)
Okay - I'm officially and literally laughing out loud. Note the tweets I've left on the status of my books. So, obviously I've not yet read the iPod book yet, but I do have the pentultimate in online resources ... wikipedia.

Why am I laughing ... to answer Dr. Rice's question literally, a blobject is ... no ... you're going to have to read it for yourself, if you can stand the possible neologism ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blobject.

So I've made an assumption that the intention was "blogject" and I may be (and probably am) entirely wrong, but the rest of this post is on blogjects ... Without the text to inform me, I went to the web ... http://rooreynolds.com/2008/04/24/blogjects-and-tweetjects/.

The article says that we currently have "gizmos," that the future is "spime," and that "blogjects" possess the real estate in between. Reading here, especially some of the comments below the article, makes me think a lot about big brother watching as we work to make so much more information and interaction publicly available.

As it relates to my project, a blogject would be some data summary that receives posts of students' confidence levels and projected GPAs and tweeted some information when crossing threshold levels to alert university resources into a proactive mode, monitor student perceptions on their own performance as it relates to the season of the semester, assignments graded, exams given, etc. If appropriately allowed, an aggregator could identify the geographical proximity of students who are interested in studying for the same classes and show mashups of campus maps of where on campus you are most likely to find students enrolled in the same coursework as you are taking.

What model mobile manifestifact excites you? Why?
Again, without the text, I'm totally guessing here, but I love those Sprint commercials that say, right now, this is happening, and this many people are doing this. The coolest is their little application that shows a "big bowl of now" [http://now.sprint.com/widget/]

One more that I love, among all the products from Digg Labs, is Swarm [http://labs.digg.com/swarm/]. I just think it is really amazing to watch and see the realtime data be reported about what folks are digging. There's so much cool stuff out there.

You know, this makes me think, hey - we collect real-time data all the time at work, and report it with real-time reports at www.advising.ttu.edu/stratplan. I could write a script (and run via a cronjob) to tweet the "busy-ness" level of the Advising Center based on the number of students entering and exiting the facility, appointments being seen, etc. Hmmm.. something to think about.

Okay, now back to reading that PDF file for tomorrow night's discussion.

Regards,
JRB.

I've decided that, to more fully document the ENGL 5376 course expectations and my own progress, I should start by copying down Dr. Rice's syllabus. The following content is all his, posted here for my record-keeping and memory-jogging. So here goes ...