The mobile app marketplace is turning five years old! Read a short history and try to figure out where it’s going.     (New Yorker)

A new app from the folks behind the Botswana-UPenn Partnership (BUP) will help avoid miscommunication between healthcare workers with language barriers.     (Penn Current)

Check out some cool ways that PennDesign courses have been utilizing the iPads available in the Weigle Information Commons.     (WIC)

If you’ve been absorbed in the idea of Google Glass, watch Sergey Brin give a philosophical discourse on why his team chose to pursue the project.     (TED)

Screenshot much? Check out this research guide to all of the resources available for this kind of task.     (WIC)

Much like our My Five column, the folks at lh interview some of the most interesting people in the world about their work habits, favorite apps (or total rejection thereof) and more. Here are a few we think you might enjoy.

Wharton MBA grads and Warby Parker founders Dave Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal lay out their blueprint for daily success. Neil’s hidden talents? “Ordering in Chinese food and giving motivational speeches. These skills do not necessarily correlate, but I can do both at the same time if necessary.”

Pamela Fox, Product Engineer at Coursera codes on a MacBook Pro, works “stealthily” and loves her Mighty Wallet. Hidden talent? “I’m really good at Googling. Even at Google, amongst Googlers, I could Google better than the Googliest of them.”

Chris Kimball, Founder of America’s Test Kitchen is a Mac/iPhone guy, knows from fluffy pancakes, and owns a pork chop costume. Really. Most unusual productivity tip? “Have over 4,000 unopened emails. Ignoring email saves a lot of time.”

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, actually uses his own app, has a messy desk, and plays Minecraft to relax. Just one of many great revelations: “When I’m working at home, I play The Hobbit dwarves humming Misty Mountain Cold over and over and over again on my Sonos speakers until my wife tells me that I have a serious problem.”

ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi has an “immaculate” desk, a Livescribe pen and skips shaving every few days to save time. On travel: “…I sort of make a personal game out of it—like I’m playing Frogger, airport edition.”

Choosing only five profiles was incredibly tough. More profiles include Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, Cory Doctorow and Marc Frauenfelder of BoingBoing (and other happy mutant things), the founder of Lifehacker, the manager of Reddit, the founder of TaskRabbit… so many. So so many. Go. Read.

The Situation

Last year, on the day of the final of the last section of my course, I received my University-issued iPad.  I teach chemical information to graduate students and give a “practical” exam; the students are asked to search the literature and retrieve relevant information to answer a series of questions that I ask.  I had just printed out exams of about ten students who chose to represent their search strategies using screen shots from the databases, and my backpack was weighing me down.  The first thing that I thought of doing with my new toy… I mean tool… was using it to eliminate the metric tons of papers that I was currently carrying.  The students prefer to type their assignments, using pictures and diagrams that they collect through screen captures; why couldn’t I grade them in digital form?  The tablet offered me the option of grading the way I like to grade, circling things and hand-writing comments, without carrying around stacks of paper.  I immediately procured a stylus and some annotation apps, and, after a year of experimenting, I am ready to report my preliminary findings.

The Apps and Programs Involved

Courseware: Canvas. In addition to piloting electronic grading, I was also trying the Canvas courseware system in my class.  I used Canvas to bulk-download the students’ assignments each week, and I uploaded the graded files for student view using the comments feature of the SpeedGrader.  There is no Canvas app, so, I used it with my Web browser on both the computer and iPad.

Storing the Assignment Files: DropBox (free from App Store). I extracted the zip files Canvas had created into DropBox, and after I had annotated them, I replaced the files with the graded assignments. Because I also use DropBox with the two PCs and one Mac that I use for work-related activities, I could then access them easily from most locations.

Annotating the Assignments: iAnnotate (Branchfire, $9.99 from App Store). I decided to try the iAnnotate app because it came highly recommended from several colleagues.  iAnnotate was easily synched with DropBox and has several features that I like for hand-writing comments on the assignments.

The Workflow

I quickly discovered that the workflow was much more complex than I thought it would be.  After much trial and error, this is the most effective way that I found to work.  (Note that I use the word “effective,” not the word “efficient.”)

1. Configure iAnnotate to access my DropBox folders (only needs to be done once for the lifetime of the app.
2. Download student submissions from Canvas into DropBox, using the bulk download feature in Canvas from either the PC or the Mac.
3. Process the downloaded documents in iAnnotate so that they can be opened and graded on the iPad.
4. Grade the student submissions using handwritten comments in iAnnotate.
5. Upload the annotated documents into DropBox.
6. Input grades and uploade graded assignments using the Canvas SpeedGrader on the PC or Mac.
7. Transfer the documents from DropBox to a permanent folder on the PC for safe keeping.
8. Delete files from DropBox and iAnnotate.

(Items 7 and 8 were not strictly necessary, but I wanted to keep the graded assignments on hand until I had submitted my grades for the semester, and I have limited storage space in both my iPad and on Dropbox.)

I took this somewhat round-about route of obtaining and posting the assignments because, although I was able to download files directly from Canvas into iAnnotate on the iPad, I could not find a way to upload the graded files to Canvas.  What’s more, iAnnotate limits one’s ability to move documents between local and server locations, so, I couldn’t download the files directly into iAnnotate, grade them, and then move them into DropBox for later upload (which, I suppose, serves me right for trying to beat the system).

The Process of Annotation

I actually tried two different annotation apps during the course of the semester, iAnnotate and GoodReader.  I eventually decided to go with iAnnotate because I found that it fit my workflow a little better, and it could open more documents at a time than GoodReader.  These are the features of iAnnotate that I regularly used and liked when annotating my students papers.

• Convert to PDF: If my students submitted their assignments as Word documents instead of pdf files, iAnnotate could read, process, and convert them before I started annotating.
• Pencil icon: You can choose your favorite pen color and scribble on the copy, using the pinch gesture to zoom in if you don’t have a very precise stylus, and scrolling around amidst annotating.

Highlighting and commenting (click to enlarge)

• Feather pen icon: This lets you tap the screen to magnify a small segment of the screen and write short comments, but I don’t recommend it for much more than scribbling point values due to the fact that you cannot undo or erase errors.  The best thing about grading by electronically annotating the papers is that I can erase mistakes and change things when I change my mind, and my students do not have to see my thought processes!

Using the pen icon to zoom and comment in my preferred ink color (click to enlarge)

• Sticky note: For those people who prefer typing or for longer annotations, you can use the iPad’s built-in keypad or a keyboard to type an expandable note.
• Highlighter: Whenever a student missed a section of the question, I would highlight that using the text highlighter.  If the thing I wanted to highlight wasn’t text, there was another highlighter that I could use.

A graded question (click to enlarge)

iAnnotate also has some serious drawbacks.

• System Limitations: You can only have eight documents open at a time, and I like to grade laterally (all the question 1 answers at a time, then the question 2 answers, etc.).  This wasn’t a problem in my five-person class, but for my ten- and fourteen-person classes, I found myself constantly opening and closing documents to ensure consistency across a question.
• No Wrist Protection: When using the pencil icon, there is no wrist protection, so, you either need to ensure that the section you’re annotating is near the bottom of the screen, or you must hover your hand above.  Goodreader does have wrist protection, but this feature wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that it could only open five documents.
• Crashing: There was a great deal too much crashing.  The only good thing about this is that my work always seemed to be saved, so, I didn’t have to repeat myself.
• “Vanishing” Annotations: After I synched my documents with DropBox, I could not read my annotations again until I had made another annotation on the paper.  This caused me to unnecessarily repeat work until I realized what was going on.

I polled each class mid-semester, and I had very few students who had difficulty reading the annotated assignments.  Of those who did, the vast majority either had trouble with my handwriting (I have good handwriting, but it is much more difficult to write neatly using iAnnotate) or were trying to view the annotations on a tablet.

Better Than Paper?

I really can’t decide.  Here are the benefits to electronic grading.

• You can’t lose your students’ homework.  It’s always there in the courseware system.  The only thing that you can lose are your annotations (which means you have to grade it again, but they don’t have to DO it again).
• You don’t have to spend hours printing the assignments if the students submit electronically.
• It is easy to return a copy of a group assignment to each member of the group.
• If there isn’t room for everything you want to write in the margin of the assignment, you can use a sticky note to write a lot more in a much smaller space.
• You can change your mind as many times as you want, and the student will never know since you can delete the annotations and start over again without scribbling them out on the paper.  This is particularly good if you can’t add points accurately or read your own questions.
• You don’t need to use class time to return assignments; you can post them as soon as you have finished grading them.  This means that, if you are organized, you can return the assignments and have the students review them before class so that, if you wish to use class time to highlight something from the homework, everyone is prepared.
• It is much tidier; instead of carrying around a scrappy stack of papers, you just need your tablet.
• It is much easier to surreptitiously grade assignments wherever you happen to be (on the train, in a meeting, in bed) because you aren’t constantly shuffling papers.  The fact that the iPad is backlit also helps you to grade in low-light situations.  This becomes increasingly important towards the end of the semester.

Here are the benefits to traditional grading.

• This really only works if your students are submitting their assignments electronically, so, it might not be good for math or science classes in which the students are hand-writing long equations.  You can scan such assignments to pdf, but this is probably more trouble than it is worth.
• It is easier to learn your students’ names when you are regularly returning papers to them in class.  I pride myself on always knowing my students by name, so, I had to spend some quality time with the class list with pictures from Courses in Touch.
• It may actually take less time to annotate each submission using a pen and paper than to annotate it digitally.  Since I needed to choose a tool, zoom, and scroll for each annotation I made, I may have lost some time here.
• You don’t have to worry about system limits for the number of open documents if you have a big class and are a one-question-at-a-time grader.
• Paper submissions never have low batteries, and you can grade them during the first minutes of airplane flights (provided you don’t need your tray table).
• It is much easier on the eyes to grade papers than to use an iPad when reading term projects or other lengthy assignments.

I will probably give it another year before making a final decision, particularly if I can find an easier way of integrating my courseware and my grading app.  Incidentally, if anyone knows of a pdf annotation app that can open more than eight documents at a time AND includes wrist protection, I would love to know about it!

Anu Vedantham’s got five

Qualtrics – I began using Qualtrics in 2010 when collecting survey data for my dissertation. Survey Monkey and Google Forms didn’t have the features I needed. John MacDermott helped me get started with a Penn Qualtrics account. I appreciated the ability to send reminder emails only to those who had not yet clicked on my survey without having to annoy people who had already finished it. I could export to Excel or Access. I could import lots of email addresses into panels and then generate random samples. I could share survey designs with colleagues or just share results without risking my painstaking setup of skip logic. Most recently, I used Qualtrics for the Mashup 2013 online voting.

Excel – I think Excel is amazing at so many levels. We have improving our Excel Guide for months now, adding sample spreadsheets and handouts. I use Excel daily. I copy/paste data from a webpage, and clean it up so I can pull out numbers for an email message. I use filters to find data entry errors. I create text formulas to rearrange words or extract first names for name-tags. Much of my work involves tracking and synthesizing information from many sources, and I find Excel pivot tables a big timesaver. I also love teaching others how to use Excel – it keeps me on my toes, and often teaches me a new trick or two.

NVivo – I just started using NVivo this April, teaching myself using our NVivo Guide. It is getting me excited to go deeper into qualitative research! You can bring in such a variety of data – video interviews, text transcripts, PDFs, spreadsheets and database files. You can click and drag your data to tag it with “node” names. You can collect text phrases and notice similarities across interviews. You can “auto-code” interviews. I wish I had learned about NVivo earlier – it would have saved me a lot of time.

Access – I see Microsoft Access as Excel’s big brother – more intimidating and more powerful. A few years ago, I made Access macros that generated a few hundred webpages each morning – so I invested many hours in the Access learning curve. Today, I find myself using Google Drive as a substitute. I depend on Access though for a few key tasks. It has some rare features, like the wizard that finds unmatched records – helps me quickly locate missing information. And I appreciate the wizard that finds duplicates for helping combine lists efficiently. Lately, I’m hearing rave reviews for FileMaker Pro so I plan to explore that over the summer.

WordPress – WordPress doesn’t quite fit the rest of this list, except that I find it so incredibly functional. This April marked the second birthday for the PennWIC blog which has far exceeded my expectations. I’ve been thrilled to watch individual posts go viral, and certainly, I did not expect several hundred people to want to get our posts by email! The platform has been simple, easy and a pleasure to use. We host posts by many people, and we can manage tags and categories intuitively. I find that we are better now at sharing ideas and information in a timely way. Now, if I could only understand how the plug-ins work…

VideoNotes is a web app that works with Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Khan Academy, YouTube and Ted videos.  It saves notes to your Google Drive, so you need to be logged in to your Google account in the Chrome browser.

Just a few years ago, I would not have conceived of myself as a person who who want or need such a tool.  Nor would I have thought of myself as someone who would have discovered this on my own, or gotten access to it without help, or begun using it without difficulty.

I’m interested in how people who are not tech savvy begin to develop the skills and intuitions that allow them to flourish in this crazy world of rapidly evolving tools and technologies.

The story I’m about to tell about myself speaks to that question.

Step One – I become a Twitterer

A couple years ago, I didn’t quite “get” twitter – who needs yet another stream of incoming information when we’re already overloaded?  Observing a very smart colleague who avidly used twitter, I began to realize what he was doing, how it was making him smarter.*  So I started using it and discovered how easy it can be to learn things by networking in the right way with twitter, a very different picture than frantically reading every tweet and following every link.

Step Two – Might as well try

I saw a tweet about a tool for taking notes on video lectures, called VideoNotes.  Given my enrollment in a couple MOOCs, I thought “Might as well try it!”

But wait, it required using a Chrome browser!  I didn’t have Chrome on my laptop, in fact I had only used it maybe once or twice.  But I was pretty motivated to try VideoNotes, so I overcame my trepidation and downloaded and installed Chrome.  Then it asks me, do I want my bookmarks?  Oh, well, I did but….this is how you go down a rabbit hole, right, and end up taking 3 hours on something you thought would take 30 minutes!  But, I might as well try it!  So I clicked the Yes button and swooooosh.  All my bookmarks were there!  For a person who carries the emotional scars from the bad old days of computers, when so many things could–and did–constantly go wrong, this was pretty smooth!

Next,  I’m grabbing Video Notes, pointing it to a MOOC lecture, and within minutes, I am taking notes and indexing a lecture.  This product had virtually no learning curve.

Step Three – The new interface in 5 easy steps

There’s one other thing about VideoNotes that should be a lesson to tool designers everywhere.  I wasn’t confronted with a tutorial — either text or video — and I didn’t need the help section.  Instead, they had some pop-up balloons, not more than 6, which sequentially showed me in about 1 minute all the key features of the screen I was looking at.  I could click “End Tour” if I didn’t even want to walk through this tiny orientation.

What does this all mean?

Clearly, things have gotten so much easier, that’s a given.  But something else happened too — it’s partly a sense of confidence for me.  Affect matters when you’re trying to learn new things, so feeling confident may very well help with persistence in getting the hang of a new tool.  But intuition is a big part too — it’s the same kind of tacit knowledge that you have when you suddenly know you’re lost and have to find your way back.  It comes from some general understanding of the landscape, some kind of familiarity.

I suppose I believe that my ability to take on new productivity tools and incorporate them into my workflow has to do with both affect and intuition.  The question for me as an educator is – what helps foster intuition and confidence?

*The celebrated white paper (Jenkins et al, 2009) Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture would perhaps describe this competency as  either distributed cognition or collective intelligence.

Fall semester is looking to be even bigger & brighter than usual: Lippincott Library is constructing a new electronic classroom for Bloomberg, Capital IQ, and other financial database instruction.     (Datapoints)

Create “day-in-the-life-of” stories using Storyify in the WIC, and make a scholarly argument come to life.     (PennWIC)

Use the new Document Delivery function within LexisNexis Academic, to seamlessly upload documents to a Dropbox account.     (Lexis)

Don’t let your tech skills lapse over summer break! Head to the WIC for one of their summer workshop offerings.     (PennWIC)

It’s great to hear what apps healthcare professionals use on a daily basis to enhance their work performance.  It gives me ideas on how I might use these same tools.

Dr. Murayama explained that he’s not a technology expert, but a doctor who uses an iPad on a daily basis.  In fact, his iPad is beginning to replace his laptop.

During the session I jotted down a list of some of the apps Dr. Murayama uses, in no particular order:

SlideShark – An iOS presentation program. Dr. Murayama used SlideShark as his presentation software during the session.  He showed us how he could use his iPhone to move through his slideshow that ran on his iPad.  He warned that videos can’t be imbedded into a SlideShark slide.

GoodPlayer – An inexpensive media player app. It can convert a number of different media files including AVI, Xvid, Divx, WMV, MKV, RM, and RMVB into files that are compatible with the iOS platform.  Dr. Murayama uses Handbrake on his MacBook to rip and convert video files.

FlipBoard – Access popular news and social media sites with this visually stunning app.

DocPhin – This iOS & android app allows easy access to favorite medical journals.  When accessing a specific article you are prompted for your PennKey.

iAnnotate – Markup your PDF’s, Word, PowerPoint files, and images.  Dr. Murayama syncs marked-up PDF’s with his Dropbox account.

DropBox – Store and access all your files using a Dropbox account.

DocsToGo – Use this app to access and edit your Microsoft files.

Scanner Pro – Scan anything, receipts, notes, multipage documents.  For the money, Dr. Murayama suggests that it’s one of the best scanning apps.  Scanned documents are saved as PDF’s.  They can be emailed, or uploaded into  Dropbox, EverNote, and many other cloud services.

Junos Pulse & PocketCloud – Secure connection to your networked data (including VPN) and desktop computer.  Dr. Murayama demoed his ability to access his Mac workstation in order to pull up important work data.

Dr. Murayama wrapped up his session by encouraging us to talk to colleagues about what apps they use, and to test apps as we hear about them and decide for ourselves whether their use would enhance our work (and social) lives.

Along the way, Granny skates, flips, flies, whoops, whinnies and recovers from crazy crashes without so much as a bruise. The game is so whimsical and fun, it brings a smile to my face every time I get her rolling. Download the free version for a perfect set of study breaks. It comes with eight very fun levels that are just enough to show you what this old lady can do, but not so much that you won’t get that paper written.

If you like it as much as I did, you can buy yourself the full version ($1.99, iOS and Android) when you finish exams as a reward.

And if you aren’t sold yet, here’s the trailer:

Check out some of our other study break suggestions while you’re at it.

The opening screen. Each item in the star is made up of tiny little objects.

This time of the year, everyone is working extra hard, often for long stretches at a time. But it’s not productive to sit and study for long periods of time without taking breaks.

My latest way to take a short break is the game “Little Things Forever,” by developer Klicktock. I play it on the iPhone and iPad, but it’s available on Android devices as well.

A triceratops made of little things

Little Things Forever is not a fast-paced action game.  It’s a slow, satisying, almost Zen puzzle game that is guaranteed to take your mind off your studies while you’re playing it.

Each level in the game presents you with a picture of an animal or object, which in turn is made up of hundreds of tiny little things.  You’re given a list of objects to find among the mosaic of objects.

Zoom in to find the items on your list

The mechanics of the game are simple: You can pinch to zoom in or out, use your finger to pan around the screen, and then just touch the picture of each object as you locate it. The object will start to sparkle and it will be removed from your list. If you tap on a wrong object, an “X” appears to let you know you made a mistake.

There’s no time limit, but if you find all of the objects on a list fast enough, you get a “Puzzle Piece”.  The puzzle pieces themselves are also made up of “little things”. When you get enough of them, you fit them together to unlock additional shapes in the game.

Rearrange these jigsaw pieces to unlock…

Every time you find on object on your list feels like an accomplishment.  Finishing a list feels like an accomplishment.  Getting a puzzle piece feels like an accomplishment.  And fitting a set of puzzle pieces together to unlock a new shape is the most satisfying of all.  And then the cycle begins again.

The game is beautiful, colorful, and bright, and it has a soothing soundtrack.  It’s good for all ages, but don’t go thinking that means it’s too easy.  It’s challenging and even more fun than it sounds, but it’s very addictive.  Give it a try and be sure to let us know what you think.  I have it installed on our Nexus 7 down in the Vitale Digital Media Lab if you’d like to come and try it out.

…the goat!

Just remember to put it down at some point and get back to work.

$2.99 for iOS, Free for Android.

Be sure to check out some of our other study break suggestions while you’re at it.

Timeline

Now that spring has sprung, it’s time to get active outdoors! You might be too busy with end-of-semester work to get in a long workout, but maybe Moves can help assuage your guilt.

Moves is a free iPhone app that functions as a smart pedometer - it knows your every move, no fancy bracelet required. I tested it out for a few days last month and was impressed with the level of accuracy and the surprisingly efficient battery usage.

All you have to do is download it and launch the app. Once you turn it on you can forget about it…but don’t forget to grab your phone before you head out! Moves will track your total walking time and distance, as well as the number of steps you take. It can also distinguish between running, cycling, and “transport” (travel as a motor vehicle passenger).

The interface is minimal but elegant. Your numbers show up in attractive colored circles. Touching a circle changes the display of the measurement unit, e.g. from steps walked to total distance walked. Scroll down to see a timeline of your movements throughout the day, with Foursquare locations automatically inserted. Clicking on any of the map excerpts will bring up a full map of your day’s activities. Clicking on the date displays a daily or weekly summary.

I was afraid that my battery would be gone by midday, but Moves is fairly well optimized. It doesn’t use GPS if the phone is still, so it conserves battery power fairly well for an average work, classroom or exam-crunch day. However, if you’re a very heavy iPhone user, or if you’re out on an all-day hiking expedition, you may end up with a dead phone.

I didn’t find any major flaws in my Moves data (but as you can tell from my screenshots, I’m not a hardcore exerciser), but it would be awesome if it could sync with calorie-tracking apps such as MyFitnessPal, or to exercise-specific apps such as RunKeeper. Also, remember that this app only works if you’re carrying the phone on your body, so it’s easiest to implement for people who already keep their phone in their pocket as opposed to those who leave their phone on their desk all day.