Our Sunday trip to Lake Heron

We tramped around the shores of Lake Heron, a jewel of the Ashburton Lakes. The way from Christchurch is to go through Darfield, take scenic route 72, all the way to Mount Somers, and take right from Hakatere on a gravel road to the lakeshore. Magnificent lake, unbelievable landscape.

Click on the photo below to view the slides:

Some Resources for Education using Ipad ((ipad))

Attempt at finding a list of ipad apps for education

The following is a list of my Google Search (26th November, 2010), using the terms “apps education ipad”. You can update the results youself if you stick the following search terms to Google:

Google Search apps education ipad http://www.google.co.nz/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=apps+educat...

http://www.google.co.nz/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=apps+education+ipadI-ear was the top result, here http://www.iear.org/I did not go with any specific plan to identify the best apps for education (other than the ones for tertiary education). I liked the following list of resources for the administrators and thought they provided quite an exhaustive list, here:

List for administrators http://www.mhric.org/ipad.htmlThe issue is, running a search for ipad apps for education invariably brings up apps suitable for primary education and for children, but there are few sites that list apps appropriate for university education courses. http://www.appannie.com/top/ipad/united-states/education/?has_in_app_purchases=0

An encouraging development is interactive textbooks, the stellar example is Inkling There are several really nice free ebook readers which can be used for the same purpose.

A separate section for ipad apps should be devoted to web apps.

Ipad being such a connected device, a good thing might be to roll out your own web app, and there are several excellent tutorials and free books. A place to start might be the Six Revisions Site http://sixrevisions.com/web-applications/designing-web-apps-for-the-ipad/

Another Good resource to learn ipad web apps development is the ipad-web-apps site. Interestingly both Google and Yahoo! have excellent web apps for the ipad.

Here’s Mike Press' review of ipad as a research tool. The world of ipad apps is an enormous and depending on what you are planning to use it for, it’s more than likely that you will find an app exactly. If not, you can make one if you want. In a next post, I am going to write about journals, books, and newspaper apps.

Photos from Ron Mueck Exhibition

Ron Mueck's Hyper-realism

This afternoon we were at the exhibition of the Ron Mueck's installations at the Christchurch Art Exhibition Centre. Ron Mueck is a hyper realist artist from Australia based in the UK. The installations were quite remarkable. In particular, the details and the art were quite magical. I really liked his "dead dad" installation, the finer points about the facial expression of a man in sleep was remarkable.

Robert Rosenblum, a curator himself and authored on Ron Mueck, wrote about this genre of installations as "post human" art.

The installations were very impressive. Included here a few photographs.