In an elevator! I love the creativity and the public nature of the display. I only wish the elevator ride lasted longer!
Read the student’s reflection about the role of cellphone photos in his life.
Tag Archive for mobile
Mobile Theme: WordPress vs. Drupal
How to enable a mobile them in WordPress
Install WPTouch. Congratulations, you are done! You automatically get a cleanly designed theme with dynamic drop-downs, a comment counter per post, and “mobile theme” toggle at the bottom.
How to enable a mobile theme in Drupal
Research various approaches. I decided go with the mobile theme option.
Select the most stable, current modules to support your approach, in my case Mobile Tools and Browscap.
Select a mobile theme. I have tested a number: A Cloudy Day, Adaptive Theme Mobile, Fusion Mobile, iUi, iWebKit, Mobile jQuery (not to be confused with jQuery Mobile), and Nokia Mobile.
Realize that these themes are pretty bare out of the box, and you have a lot of custom theming in your future!
Fusion Mobile
Mobile jQuery
What is the problem?
I understand that it is easier to develop a mobile theme plug-in for WordPress, because content is managed in just one way. You have pages and posts, and a mobile theme just needs to organize them. Our Drupal site has many custom content types, views, blocks, and regions, and no mobile theme is going to automatically display them correctly out of the box. However, I had expected the theme designs themselves to be more mature than this.
I also find it totally unclear how to modify regions and block visibility in our Drupal site for the mobile theme. In our single-theme Drupal site, the theme template controls when and where certain regions exist, and the block system determines when to display block content within page regions. I want to organize the home page completely differently for the mobile theme, but now I have to learn how to define page regions and block visibility separately for the mobile theme. I will try to create a home page template in my new theme with unique regions and block content, but something tells me that this will not be easy. Or I could install modules to make display configuration more dynamic, but I do not want to add performance overhead for our non-mobile users.
Dear Drupal Themers
If you would like to submit a modest proposal for mobile theme development, please write me at kassissiehr (at) catlin.edu.
iPhone HDR
I am very impressed with the new iPhone HDR feature. My phone now does automatically what Photoshop only recently gained the ability to do with manually captured photos.
Single image
HDR image
The best camera is the one you have!
iPhone 4 First Impressions
I finally gave up my BlackBerry for an iPhone 4. I was perfectly happy with the BlackBerry for email, calendar, and taking photos but increasingly found myself in situations away from the office, during which a more capable device would have helped.
I had hoped that Android was equal to the iPhone, but reports of buggy early versions of ActiveSync and Facebook, compared to their mature iPhone counterparts, scared me off. Usability trumped joining an open app ecosystem.
BlackBerry just kept falling behind. For example, the community-contributed WordPress app required some arcane manual configuration on the phone, whereas the iPhone version Just Worked with only the blog URL!
The new device is fast, easy to use, and extremely capable. It’s a lot of fun, but I’m not getting carried away. Ultimately, it’s still a smartphone, and a computer is still far and away the most useful device.
Just two screens of apps so far! One pleasant surprise: the Comcast app provides fast access to voicemail messages and even DVR scheduling. Otherwise, my list of apps will look pretty familiar to iPhone veterans.
Phone reception has been flawless so far. I think we have it better here in Portland. Also, no “death grip” issues so far. That seems more like a juicy story for the press and a poorly handles PR moment for Apple than an actual issue for most users.
I ordered the phone through an AT&T store on Friday and received it on Wednesday.
Oh, and the iPhone costs me $40/month less than the BlackBerry, because it works without an enterprise server plan.
Post written entirely using WordPress for iPhone.
Sexting and Texting
Our middle school head recently asked for resources to help understand sexting within the context of other technological risks and students’ general texting habits. I came up with the following. Do you have other good resources?
ConnectSafely: Tips to prevent sexting
Pew Internet Teens and Mobile Phones Over the Past Five Years
Teens and Sexting – PEW report 2009
Which Is Epidemic — Sexting or Worrying About It?
danah boyd: how youth find privacy in interstitial spaces
danah boyd: teen socialization practices in networked publics
Teen Sex Culture and Technology
Our middle school counselor researched this topic and wrote the following article for parents. I’m interested in learning what other schools are doing in this area.
http://www.catlin.edu/news/middle-school/teen-sex-culture-and-technology
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at