Like many people in IT I have to confess to having a love for new gadgets and the one that has my attention at the moment is Sony’s new Mylo wireless broadband communications device. Targeted at your average (traditional) uni student’s age group, it seems natural that people will start assessing this device’s potential in an educational context. Mylo supports instant messaging, Skype, Web browsing, photos, video, music, text, and streaming content to other Mylo devices. It is a very convenient size, looks cool and for those of us who are challenged when messaging with numeric keypads, has a slide out querty keyboard. I can’t wait to get one!.
However, I see one of its great strengths as a weakness here in Australia at least. It is totally reliant on the presence of a wireless network. While this may seem great - using wireless to make voice calls with Skype, perform all your messaging etc avoids the cost of mobile calls, I wonder how practical this will be for most people. I have a wireless network at home and there is one at work, but most publicly accessable hotspots seem to be quite an expensive alternative. Also, wireless hotspots do not seem to be as ubiquitous as they need to be to make this type of device really useful. I am not sure how many schools, campuses etc have really good wireless coverage but until wireless is much more generally available, I think that we won’t be seeing the full potential of such a handy device.
Here’s an interesting video review of the Mylo
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Hi Jerry,
I thought this was the most likely place to talk about this, as its “Uncategorized”.
Garry mentions talking to George Siemens about ‘peer production’ on his blog. George said, ‘the expert(s) still lives in some ivory tower…address unknown!’
You might also know that I’ve been talking to garry about the idea of using the dewey decimal code as the basis of addressing - givinng a fixed spot for the open online environments of (subject specific) working groups ie. www.xxx.xxx.edu.au. The closed version of which look something like sandpit.groups.edna.
There are bunch of discussions that have been going on since nov which I doubt if you’ll be across. But as you’re the manager of the .edu.au register, and obviously like psyche stuff, would yu take a quick squiz at this thread. http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11232
If that one’s of interest, you might go back to the nov index and take a look at Robyn’s thread. As I said to Garry, I think the inmates are plotting an escape.
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