A cool phone.  So far, it does everything I want it to, including handwriting recognition.  The keyboard is less useful than I had hoped, but it is functional.  I can’t imagine writing anything of length on it, though.  Mostly, I use the handwriting recognition tool for scribbling notes to myself along the lines of “milk, bread, cheese,” etc.  Two things that I wish were different:

Use of SD card instead of miniSD.  MiniSDs, while smaller, are presently limited to 2 GB and less common and (therefore) are more expensive than SDs.  It’s a poor trade-off and I would have accepted the tiny increase in size for the better format.

Use of the 2.5 phone jack.  Yes I know, the 2.5 is the standard, but the 3.5 mm headphone jack is far more convenient for a multimedia phone.  Again, the smaller size is inconvenient and more expensive.

I didn’t expect the camera to be anything more than a toy and the external speaker isn’t generally useful for much.

Other than that, I’m happy.   I love having everything on one small device.

And since you mentioned it, we’ve got some cool podcasts coming up, with interviews and presentations about writing with academics and professional writers in production.  Check it out, please.

In terms of personal digital media, I’m taking the big step of ditching my Dell Axim pda and my cheapo cell phone in favor of a Sprint PPC6700. I’m hoping that I get much of the same functionality, but that I don’t walk off and leave either my pda or my cell phone sitting around in a restaurant or airport lobby again (recovered, both times!). I’ll post a review of it here. The only glitch I see already is that the PPC6700 doesn’t do handwriting recognition out of the box, but I hope the keyboard (more than) makes up for that. Once again, the shaky idea that technology will help me be more organized will be put to the test!

WAC E-Thoughts » Blog Archive » Beyond the ‘Pedia: Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools

Podcasts from this workshop will also be available soon on iTunes. The introduction to the workshop is available below.

My wife says this is evasive.

Since she’s so often right, I guess I need to work on this answer. Perhaps a better one is that I work to facilitate better digital media use at CSTW. That means that I contact a host of people and learn various programs to figure out how to make CSTW better able to use digital media. Whether it’s blogs, wikis, Drupal, or open-source software like GIMP (terrible name), NVU, or Picassa, I try them all out and find ways to use them to make the teaching of writing better.

On my way to doing this, I run into any number of fascinating technological sideroads and diversions. This blog is dedicated to discussing some of the larger ones. I hope you’ll enjoy these detours and distractions, and like Fat Albert and the Gang used to say “If [we're] not careful, [we] might even learn something.”