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Just a quick reminder for my students: if you have a question about the course and you need an answer within 24 hours, send me an email message. My email address is in the Facebook badge on this page.

I check my email several times each weekday. I try to stay offline over the weekend… professors need some down time, too.

General questions abut the course are fine material for comments.

I don’t check the blog comments as often as my email.

The comments feature on this blog really isn’t a good place for students to ask me specific questions about their assignments or grades. Because this blog is publicly available, anyone can read the comments.

I can edit and remove comments when needed – such is the power of the blog administrator.

Users don’t have to register on this blog to post a comment, but they do need to leave a name and email address, to help me out. The email address doesn’t get posted in the blog.

The IS 6100 and IS 7010 links at the top of this page now lead to the Fall 2007 pages for those courses. This should help my students get to the proper pages faster.

Of course, it’s easy for students to make a favorite or bookmark to the proper pages, too.

EarthLink, the primary contractor for Honolulu’s municipal WiFi project in Chinatown, is laying off more than 900 employees and closing 4 offices, according to news reports. This is a massive cut that affects almost half of the company and several business units.

In one of yesterday’s posts, I discussed some of the changes in the wireless Internet industry. EarthLink’s retrenchment in municipal WiFi was announced earlier this year, when the company said it wouldn’t pursue new contracts until it had a better idea of the financial returns on current projects. Sprint’s recent alliance with ClearWire, Google’s continued efforts in mobile applications and wireless access, and the stagnating economy are other factors that have affected EarthLink’s competitive position.

Helio hath no fury… or market share

It isn’t the WiFi market that’s hurting EarthLink, though. The company’s investment in Helio has not worked out well. I mentioned Helio on June 17 and April 17. The iPhone and the industry’s various responses to that service have put Helio in a lousy position for a startup company. According to The Register, Verizon is moving fast with its new offerings, with some help from Samsung.

After all these years, I still write academic research. I also work with MSIS students on their professional papers.

So today’s entry in Piled Higher and Deeper comics made me giggle. By the time I got to the F’d ratio, I was LOL.

Wired ran an article a few days ago about pecha kucha, an art-house event that turns PowerPoint on its ear and makes presentations bearable.

The rules are simple:

1. 20 slides per presenter
2. 20 seconds maximum per slide
3. The presenter talks as the slides whiz across the screen.
4. No questions may be asked during the presentation.
5. When the show’s done, the presenter is done.
6. Next presenter, please.

I checked Pecha-Kucha.org to see if there were any events posted for Honolulu. After all, there have been pecha kucha events in over 80 cities around the world since 2003.

No luck.

Pecha kucha in Honolulu?

But this seems like a natural for First Fridays. Pecha kucha was first developed for architects and designers, to keep their pitches reasonable. A typical pecha kucha event has 14 slide shows in a single evening. That’s 280 slides.

There are reports of businesses who use pecha kucha as a presentation format for internal meetings. Perhaps this works better when no one else in the room is using a laptop. This article in the New York Times and this Microsoft web page discuss how Microsoft managers deal with laptops in meetings.

Personal computer use in a meeting can be helpful, but a computer is often a distraction, especially when they’re connected to the Internet. Mobile devices are almost as bad, too.

Now I’m wondering if pecha kucha is a useful tool for teaching. While the format doesn’t leave much time for questions, it does provide a quick pace.

Could pecha kucha help in the classroom?

Over the years, I’ve given student presenters rules that are similar to pecha kucha. I hadn’t made the connection until today, though. One common issue was that students tend to have problem with time limits and slide counts, possibly because this type of presentation format takes some practice to do well.

This format might be very useful for presentations given in online courses, though.