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Tag Archives: mobile phones
360 Degree Photos in an Android Phone Camera
I’ve been playing around with the Google Camera app that lets you take immersive, Google Street View-like pictures (Google calls them photo spheres). You make a photo sphere by taking pictures all around you and then letting the app stitch the images together. Sometimes the stitching is pretty good, sometimes there are a lot of weird artifacts. Here are some photo sphere pictures of our library and my office that I took yesterday and today. If you download the pictures, they don’t have that interactive immersive effect that you see when you view them on your phone in the app or when you view them in Google+.
Here’s an video showing you how to take pictures in the photo sphere mode of the Google Camera app:
As you can see from the video, you can upload these to Google Maps so that when someone is viewing a place on the map, they’ll be able to check out any photo spheres that are affiliated with that place (more details here).
I haven’t found a way yet to embed a photo sphere in your own site; it seems like you have to click over to a Google website that hosts the image to get the interactive and immersive experience. If there is a way to embed the images, they’d be fun to add to the library website.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Android, Cameras, Cell phones, Google Maps, Mobil, mobile phones, Photo spheres, Photographs
1 Comment
Tech Sharecase, 14 September 2012
NFC (Near Field Communication)
We watched this video to learn more about this new technology that is increasingly being found in new smart phones.
The video shows how small tags that look like little stickers can be programmed to communicate with NFC-enabled phones and transmit messages or commands to the phone.
Mobile Device Usage at Each CUNY Campus
We took a look at the latest annual “Student Experience Survey” (pdf) from CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research to see data on what technologies students use regularly (see table 6a, which begins on page 22). We were surprised that 74% of Baruch students report regular use of a smart phone, a number higher than what we had expected.
LibGuides
We shared a number of hacks and workarounds for LibGuides.
Make the tabs for a page taller by inserting the HTML tag <br> in between two of the words in the page name:
For an example of a guide with tall page tabs, see Sandy Roff’s recent guide to European history.
We also talked about the custom fields that we can add to the template for all librarian profile boxes. Those fields could include things like space for a biography, recent publications, courses taught, etc. The admins for our account can set this up. For details on what’s involved in setting it up (just a few minute’s work), see this help guide from Springshare: Additional Fields – Profiles in LibGuides.
If you want to link to a specific box on a specific page, you can get the URL for that box by following these steps:
- Click “Edit” in the top right corner of the box you are interested in and then select “Edit Box Info” from the sub-menu that appears.
- In the “Edit Box Info” window that opens, click the tab labeled “Box Link and Embed Code”
- The URL for that box should be the first thing shown on the tab you’ve opened. Copy that URL and use wherever you want to send your user straight to that specific box.
If we want to republish a box on some other web page (such as a page on the library website), you can just grab the embed code that appears in the same place you get the box link.
Finally, we looked at the way that you can use an image instead of text for a link. When you are adding links in a “Link Box” you can use the HTML for an image in the “link title” field:
So on the “Managing the Sources You Find” box on the guide for undergraduate honors theses, the link for Zotero doesn’t just have the plain text “Zotero” but instead an image found on the Zotero website. You can find the URL for an image you want to use this way by going to another site with the image you want and then right clicking on the image; after you right click, look for a menu option labeled “copy image location.” That will grab the URL for the image that you’ll need when you are adding the link in your LibGuide.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged LibGuides, mobile phones, Near field communication, NFC, Surveys, Tech Sharecase, Technology adoption, Technology use
2 Comments
Baruch Student Cell Phone Carriers
We recently polled our students about their cell phone service carriers. Here are the results based on 3,437 respondents:
T-Mobile = 36%
AT&T = 30%
Verizon = 21%
Sprint = 9%
Metro/PCS = 2%
Nextel = < 1%
Other = 2%
We will be using this data to improve some services on campus. I will update this post with the details.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged mobile phones, Mobile technology, Surveys
Comments Off on Baruch Student Cell Phone Carriers
Tech Sharecase, 18 June 2010
Attendees
Saad Abulhab, Joanna Cruz, Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, Ellen Kaufman, Wilcina Longdon, Jin Ma, Louisa Moy, Christina Muniz, Peter Philips, Ryan Phillips, Ester Ramos, Michael Waldman
Baruch iPhone App
We watched a screencast from the developer of the forthcoming iPhone app that is being designed for the Office of Student Development. There are placeholders in certain sections where library services and resources can be added. This app is being designed primarily as a student recruitment tool.
Microsoft Office 2010
If you are a faculty member, you can go to the CUNY Mall within the CUNY Portal and download for free the latest version of Microsoft Office, which was just released this week. The license is for home use only and not for work PCs. It is very possible that this fall, though, our work computers will get upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010. The 2010 version of Outlook (and the earlier 2007 version) has a built-in RSS reader, which will work once we get our Exchange server here on campus upgraded this summer.
Pew Report on Use of Social Media and Mobile Devices Among Teens
We took a quick look at the recently released report from the Pew Internet and America Life Project that about how teens use mobile devices and social media.
Online Education
This fall, the statistics department will use online course content developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative for its intro statistics course. We also discussed briefly the large library of video tutorials created by Salman Khan and published on YouTube. Over 1400 videos are available; most of the videos are about science, math, finance, economics. Here is a sample video on balance sheets:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged CUNY Portal, iPhone, Microsoft Office, mobile phones, Mobile technology, Online social networking, Reports, RSS, Software, Tech Sharecase, Tutorials, Videos
Comments Off on Tech Sharecase, 18 June 2010
Tech Sharecase, 5 March 2010
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Ryan Phillips
Mobile Phones
We looked at a report from Gartner that predicted sales of mobile phones with touchscreens are expected to rise 97 percent in 2010. We also wondered if we were able to track how many visitors to the library’s website came there on mobile devices. There is some data to that effect in our library’s website statistics if you look at what browsers and operating systems were used by site visitors, but the data isn’t as complete as we’d hoped it might be. We also talked about how much we know about the extent to which Baruch students have adopted the latest cell phone technology.
Ebooks and Ebook Readers
After looking at a graphic from the New York Times comparing the “economics of producing a book” in print vs. electronic, we had a discussion of our school’s Kindle experiment and what we might do with the Kindles after the semester is over. One idea that was floated was what it might mean were we to load public domain editions of books that are required reading in undergraduate courses (especially ones that are part of the general education curriculum).
We watched a video from Flat World Knowledge about their “open textbooks” that can be freely read online as well as purchased as a file download or a print-on-demand book.
Video Collections
We looked at the way that the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University has created a “Toolkit” site where screencasts are collected. Each video offers an embed code, making it easy for instructors and librarians to deploy the videos on course websites, course blogs, etc. The embed codes are for the hosted webservice where the video file actually resides (YouTube, etc.). It doesn’t appear that the videos are locally hosted on the Toolkit site.
We also browsed the collection of screencasts that have been uploaded to our library’s YouTube account.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Amazon Kindle, E-books, E-readers, mobile phones, Mobile web, mobile web development, Screencasts, Tech Sharecase, Textbooks, Videos, YouTube Inc
1 Comment