iPod Gen at the HSACCC conference.

Today I gave my iPod Generation presentation at the Health Services Association California Community Colleges (HSACCC). The venue was the Mission Inn in Riverside, CA and it had to be one of the coolest hotels I have ever seen. The building was over 100 years old and the room we were in looked like an old chapel - complete with stained glass windows. I wasn't sure if I should do the presentation, or preach a sermon.

The group was composed primarily of Health Center Directors, RNs and psychologists. I really enjoyed the time with them - during the presentation and just chatting before and after. One of the things I really love about doing this presentation before such varied groups is to see higher education through so many different perspectives. One example: I suggested to them that they might want to create a Facebook account for their health centers and use it to promote their services to students. I was asked about liability issues if a suicidal student used Facebook to ask for help during off-hours and they didn't respond in time. That's the kind of scenario that I never have to think of as an IT geek (thankfully), but that's the world they live in every day.

Hopefully I left them with some things to think about - they certainly did so for me.

Microsoft Tag

Both of my faithful DigitalEdu readers know that I'm always interested to see innovative new ideas when it comes to the computer/human interface. Microsoft has a new idea with something they are calling Microsoft Tag. They are trying to solve the big drawback in the new generation of mobile devices. Anyone who has used one knows how frustrating it can be to type on it because the keyboards are so small. I've got an iPhone and it can be a maddening experience to type on it. I'm getting better at it over time and I've learned to just keep on typing because their algorithm that filters out the typos is pretty darn good. Typing a URL won't work with that though, and one typo makes it a meaningless string of text.

Enter Microsoft Tag. It's a way to encode information in a graphic and it uses the camera on your cell phone to grab the image, send it to their server to decode, and then it triggers an action associated with your device. You can encode text, a URL, trigger a text message or a phone call. It requires that you preload their software on your phone, but that's a simple one-time process. I created the tag for this web site in about 5 minutes (pictured to the right). Go ahead and try it out and you'll be able to get all of the miniatured wonders of DigitalEdu on your phone without once touching the keyboard.

Obviously posting this on a web site doesn't make sense because you can just click on a link much easier. But picture a restaurant or store encoding the directions to their location in a print ad. Or having this on a business card so it automatically loads all of the information into your address book. Or having the graphic on a bus stop sign and it gives you real-time status of when the next bus will arrive.

I don't know if this will catch on but it's a real interesting idea.