Digital Media

(Credit: Screenshot by Leslie Katz/CNET)

If orangutans can post photos to Facebook, then toddlers can certainly Twitter.

And now they have a prototype gadget for doing that--the Twoddler, a tricked-out Fisher Price Activity Center with pictures of family members and friends attached and an Arduino board inside.

When a child presses a certain picture for a select amount of time, software captures sensor data from the activity center and selects and sends a predefined text related to that data.

For example, when Bobby plays with Mom's picture for more than three minutes, a Twitter message will post to Bobby's personal Twitter account saying, "@mommy_bobby Bobby misses mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening" (or as the messages get more refined and personalized: "@mommy_bobby Bobby is having a temper tantrum and wants mommy home now."

Twittering toddlers can also communicate with their social-networking peers by pushing buttons that generate effects, such as colored, blinking lights, on their friends' Twoddlers (a scenario that could easily turn day-care into a disco). Twoddler is connected to the Internet and to other activity centers using the home area networking standard ZigBee.

Twoddler emerged from a course on mobile and pervasive computing at Belgium's Hasselt University. Earlier this year, Twoddler beat out around 40 submissions for the top prize at the 09 Innovative and Creative Applications competition, where judges called it a "good, well-implemented idea, with a lot of potential that allows people/children that are not capable of verbal communication to communicate through an inventive combination of hardware and software."

As we mentioned, Twoddler is just a prototype for now, so don't expect to get an endless stream of tweets from your overexcited 3-year-old just yet.

INCA Award 2009 WINNER: Twoddler from IBBT on Vimeo.

(Via Engadget)

BetterLesson lets teachers create, organize, and share curriculum.

(Credit: BetterLesson)

What do you get when you cross teachers, tech, and social networking? A BetterLesson.

Although not the first or the only Web site that hooks teachers up with friends and new curriculum, BetterLesson takes a different approach.

"Teachers mine content on other sites," says Erin Osborn, the field director for BetterLesson, based in Somerville, Mass.

But here, teachers are compelled to create and add content, she says. The Web site, still in beta, has been built with a curriculum organizing and filing system specifically for teachers, that's done using cloud computing, so teachers don't need to worry about carrying around a flash drive.

Most new teachers, for example, start at square one, testing what works and what doesn't, and often feel like it's difficult to sustain re-developing content year after year. This is something the founder of BetterLesson is familiar with, since he, too, was a teacher.

After two years of working in a high needs school for Teach for America, BetterLesson founder and CEO Alex Grodd felt a certain frustration at having to reinvent the wheel with each lesson plan. He thought getting a job at a high-achieving charter school, Roxbury Preparatory, would be better. But it wasn't, he still had the same frustrations.

Grodd joined forces with Osborn, and two other team members, another teacher, and a techie; they brainstormed and came up with BetterLesson. They've spent the last year doing research, outreach, and coding to get the site ready for private beta. The goal?

"We want people to stay teaching longer than two years," says Osborn.

Part of what can help teachers stay teaching is to give them a strong network and support system that assists them to creating robust lesson plans tailored specifically to the needs of their kids, she says. This is where social networking comes into play.

Right now, there are dozens of social-networking Web sites for teachers, but most fall into one of two existing models, intranet or open source, they say. With the intranet model, the community tends to be limited to one school, network, or district, which makes for limited material and oftentimes locked platforms that can't be build out.

Conversely, the open-source model, whose goal is to make all knowledge shareable, has massive open sharing platforms. While there is a lot of material, it can often be overwhelming and difficult for teachers to navigate, they say. Also, the actual networking aspect and community feel is lost.

Teacher's stats show how many of their lesson plans have been downloaded.

(Credit: BetterLesson)

"We're taking an intermediate approach," says Osborn. "It's the nexus of technology and personal teacher experience."

Similar to Facebook, each user has their own profile and can join groups and networks. Members can "colleague" each other and then keep up through a news feed. On each person's profile page, there is general information, courses taught, and curriculum overviews.

The part that really differentiates the site, its creators say, is the teacher-specific design, where teachers can upload their multifile 180-day curriculum. They can show supplies, texts, related lessons, and create discussions. Digital files can also be exchanged, including video, audio, and images.

Members have rating charts that show how many people have downloaded each lesson plan, which encourages content contribution. And teachers can do key word searches to find information on specific topics and click "add to my curriculum." There's also a state standard tagging tool, so teachers can tag and search for files that use state standards.

"Hopefully they take this and cobble what's out there to create something meaningful in what they teach," says Osborn.

As for a business model, Osborn says they don't have plans to advertise because they'd like to keep the user's experience as clean and unencumbered as possible. So, the start-up is looking at several other ways to monetize the site, including a freemium model, in which it will offer free services while charging for advanced or special features.

BetterLesson has been in private beta for the past five months. Starting this month, it will bring in 10 select schools to start building up content and giving feedback. Over the course of this upcoming school year, it plans to do serious ramping up and bring in hundreds of schools. By next summer, it hopes to be fully open with a content-rich site that can fold in teachers who need extra support.

This post was updated at 3:05 p.m. PDT to better describe the founding team members.

With online education growing more popular, a recent survey has ranked the most affordable online business colleges.

Coming in No. 1 as most affordable was East Carolina University in North Carolina, according to the survey released Wednesday by GetEducated.com. Residents of the state can pay $11,880 for an online bachelor's degree in business, though out-of-state students pay a less modest $54,480 for the same degree.

The University of Wyoming came in second with its bachelor's in business administration program costing $16,080 for all online students, in or out of state.

Top five online colleges ranked by affordability

(Credit: GetEducated.com)

GetEducated.com graded online schools with an A-F scale for affordability. Coming in at the bottom was Drexel University in New York, which earned an F as the costliest business school, charging $103,500 for its bachelor of science in general studies/business degree.

In scouting out online colleges, GetEducated founder Vicky Phillips advises students to "look for public universities where tuition is naturally low. Public colleges are already subsidized by your tax dollars. Almost 70 percent of residential colleges now offer their most popular degrees online."

GetEducated.com is a consumer group that rates online colleges for cost and quality of education. The latest rankings were based on the group's spring survey of online business and management bachelor's degrees. GetEducated.com compared tuition costs at 83 online-learning bachelor's programs offered by accredited universities in the U.S.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shows off the Kindle DX

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET News)

NEW YORK--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the much-anticipated large-screen Kindle e-reader in a lecture hall Wednesday at the downtown Pace University. Called the Kindle DX, the new device is geared toward readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers, and magazines--and textbooks, a potentially huge target market.

The debut of the bigger Kindle wasn't exactly a secret: rumors of a larger-screen Kindle had been around for quite some time, and concrete reports began to surface earlier this week.

Amazon's Kindle DX

(Credit: Amazon)

According to Amazon's Kindle DX page, the device has the following:

• A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of gray. (The standard Kindle has a 6-inch display.)

• Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents.

• An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views.

• A built-in PDF reader.

• 3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts.

• Battery capacity to "read for days without charging."

• Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud.

Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that doesn't require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen.

Leaked photos of the alleged 'Kindle DX' device from Amazon.

(Credit: Engadget)

Newspapers hoping the next version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader will be a savior for their beleaguered businesses are likely to be disappointed when it's unveiled Wednesday. But this Kindle could win plenty of converts in academia.

Amazon is slated to unveil a new, larger-screen version of the Kindle, which it originally launched late in 2007. Possibly called the Kindle DX, the new device is designed for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, and it's expected to be part of new electronic course material test-runs at six universities this fall. The list, according to The Wall Street Journal, consists of Pace University (where Amazon is holding Wednesday's press conference), Case Western Reserve, Reed College, Arizona State University, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Princeton University--Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' alma mater, which already publishes Kindle textbooks.

This move makes loads of sense. Anyone who's been to a U.S. college in the past few decades could tell you that textbooks are very highly--some would say obscenely--priced. They're also bulky, and often difficult to get rid of once purchased: Selling the third edition of an introductory biology textbook on the used-book market is pretty difficult when the fourth edition comes out a year later. Theoretically, this should be the perfect market for an electronic reader like the Kindle.

But just because Amazon has inked a few deals with textbook companies, and a handful of prominent academic institutions, doesn't mean that hordes of incoming freshmen across the U.S. will be moving into dorms this fall with Kindles in hand.

"I do think the textbook market will be the killer app for e-readers," said Sarah Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research. "(But) we think it's going to start to develop in 2011 and really pick up in 2013...We've been talking to publishers, talking to universities, and what we're seeing is that from the publisher perspective there's some hesitation."

Why's this? There are a lot of questions for the publishing industry, the biggest of which is whether electronic textbooks will take a bite out of the profits that manufacturers are making from paper textbooks. There's also the potential issue of licensed content in textbooks that might not have digital rights stipulated in its original agreement with the publishers. Then, as Epps pointed out, there's the Google problem.

For the past few years, Google has been pushing forward a book scanning and digitization project called Google Book Search, and though it has some prominent allies in the industry, to say that Google Book Search has been controversial would be putting it lightly. The Association of American Publishers sued the search giant in 2005 over potential copyright violations. Authors and publishers of out-of-print books have petitioned for royalties from digitized books. More recently, library industry trade groups have expressed concern in the form of a legal filing over what Google's efforts could mean for their business. An agreement in court has been delayed.

For Amazon, this could mean that it'll have to deal with some publishers who have become quite suspicious of large-scale digital book projects. But on the flip side, this could work to the Seattle-based retailer's advantage: if the digital shift is as inevitable as it appears, and Google is to be the Silicon Valley villain in this story, then Amazon, which has been in the book business for nearly two decades, could be the friendlier alternative.

There's also the potential for the new Kindle, whatever it's called, to have a significant impact outside the U.S. Forrester analyst Epps speculates that it will make waves in developing markets like China and India, where there are millions of university students with tight textbook budgets. "Using e-readers for textbooks would be incredibly empowering for students in their universities," Epps said, "but that's going to take some time."

It's clear that Amazon could shake up the twin pillars of educational publishing and academia with its new Kindle, potentially a much bigger splash than the launch of the original Kindle or its improved Kindle 2 successor earlier this year. What's less clear is how immediate the change will be. And what's even less clear is what impact the new, bigger Kindle will have on the market that everyone was expecting Amazon would target: print periodicals.

Rumor has it that The New York Times will be part of Wednesday's Kindle announcement, possibly lowering its price for a Kindle subscription. But this doesn't mean that Amazon's skinny gadget will suddenly save print media: Newspaper and magazine publishers may think they still get the short end of the stick.

"The way things work now, newspapers and magazines can distribute their content over the Kindle if they want, but it's not a very good model for them. Amazon is keeping the majority of the revenue," Epps said. "In addition, there are some business problems, like that publishers can't count subscribers toward their rate base, so it's diluting rather than adding to their subscription base from the perspective of the business."

But while Amazon has the textbook market in focus, it shouldn't let newspapers and magazines get away from it: this is somewhere that the manufacturer of a rival e-reader could sneak in.

"Some of the other device competitors that will be coming to the market over the next year may be more appealing partners for newspaper publishers," Epps said. "It's another distribution channel for their content, but not all distribution channels are created equal. So there could be a great opportunity for publishers to distribute their content on other types of e-readers, where they have a more favorable business model."

These days, what can't be accomplished in real life is likely doable in Second Life. The virtual world even allows for study abroad.

Avatars gather at the New Media Consortium Campus, just one of many campuses in 'Second Life.'

(Credit: Second Life)

According to an article in The Christian Science Monitor, several universities and even the U.S. Department of State are using Second Life to spread culture and experience to people who can't afford pricey semesters overseas. This year, Ohio University noticed that its virtual campus was party to many visitors from around the world. The foreign students interacted with the campus' avatars in an attempt to learn more about American culture.

Most notably, the idea was employed by the Dubai Women's College in the United Arab Emirates. The small school used Second Life to virtually meet and practice English with Korean students, visit Darfur, and make a pilgrimage to Mecca--opportunities that would normally require lots of cash and traveling to accomplish.

Teachers at the school said Second Life is an aid for students to learn about foreign cultures and obtain experience for international business.

The article also notes that the U.S. Department of State is jumping on the Second Life bandwagon by inviting avatars from other countries to American virtual concerts and art exhibits, in order to engage in public diplomacy.

The number of virtual worlds continues to grow as companies introduce Second Life alternatives. On Tuesday, Google announced the launch of "Lively," a new online social destination.

Wednesday, Virtual Worlds Management, a virtual world trade media company, announced investors are pouring millions into new such virtual destinations. As a result of recent research, the company found that venture capital and media firms invested more than $161 million dollars in 16 virtual world-related companies during the second quarter of 2008, added to the $184 million dollars invested in 23 companies during the first quarter of the year.