Fortnightly Mailing

Something "generative" to try at home with a Wii Controller

Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Following up on Donald Clark's "$50 whiteboard - honestly", here is Lee's Wii projects page, from which you can find out how to use a Wii Controller (£30 from Amazon, say - you do not need a Wii games console) in various ways, including as the sensor in an interactive white-board. Excerpt:

"As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expansion port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support."

In the continuation post is a lucid video-explanation by Johnny Lee of the white-board project. As an aside, what Lee is doing is a really good example of the "generativity" of the Internet and some of the devices that connect to it  (that is, devices being tinkered with, openly innovated with, and used generally in ways not envisaged by their suppliers, with the Internet used to spread know-how) which  Jonathan Zittrain describes, and defends, in "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It".

Understanding the Web a.k.a. Web Science - interesting article in a meaty issue of the ALT Newsletter

The Spring 2008 ALT* Newsletter has plenty of meat in it, including:

• a piece by Southampton University's Wendy Hall and Keiran O'Hara (from which a version of the above diagram is taken) discussing Web Science, and reporting in the Web Science Research Initiative;
• Dick Moore of Ufi's In-source, out-source, open-source, right-source - running a service not a system, about the heavyweight infrastructure underpinning learndirect’s learner management system (LMS), learndirect’s service characteristics, and the importance of what Dick calls ‘right sourcing’ in Ufi's technology choices;
• a piece by John Falchi, Chief Program Strategist with IMS, about student textbook use and pricing, and the role of the IMS "Common Cartridge" specification in enabling text book content to be (more cheaply) distributed digitally to students.

* I work for ALT half-time.

Web 2.0 Rights intellectual property toolkit

Here is a new and useful looking "IP Toolkit", part of a newish JISC-funded project that seeks to deal with the following sorts of questions:

• Do IP rights exist in a virtual world and, if so,  who owns them?
• Who owns the rights in works that are a result of collective collaboration?
• What happens if you can’t find the rights holders?
• Can rights be given up, and if so how?
• How can risks associated with content reuse be sensibly managed?

The toolkit provides extensive practical guidance under the following main headings:

1. Basic information about the IP and Web2.0 landscape
2. Practical IP tools for projects engaging with Web2.0
3. Template licences and model releases, covering “Rights in” and “Rights Out”)

Tangible Benefits of E-Learning - newly published report

Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does investment yield interest? is a just-published report jointly produced by JISCinfonet, ALT (for which I work half-time), and the Higher Education Academy. It summarises a 2007 review of e-learning practice in Higher Education, and contains examples of where and how technology-enhanced learning is benefiting learners, teachers and institutions. Download a copy of the report [222 kB PDF]. Access a 2 page briefing published by JISC [170 kB PDF]. Order hard copy of the report from JISCinfonet.

"Motion charts" - Data animation tool for Google Docs

You may have seen (and wondered at) some of Hans Rosling's talks, in which he uses Trendalyzer (the Gapminder Foundation's data visualisation tool) to draw conclusions from complex time-series. Last year Google bought Trendalyzer and some or all of the team that designed it joined Google. In the last few weeks Google seems to have implemented the tool - now renamed Motion Tool - along with a couple of others - as standard components of Google Docs. The addition of these features begins to differentiate Google's spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel in a particularly profound way, as you will see if you look at this sample spreadsheet and motion chart.

Jane Hart's "25 tools – a professional development resource"

25 tools – a professional development resource,  by the indefatigable Jane Hart, is divided into 8 categories, ranging from “bare essentials”, via “share content with others”, to “develop and manage courses”.

Each tool is tagged by whether it requires downloading and installation on your own computer, or runs as a hosted service, or both; and for each Jane provides several simple activities to help you find out about the tool itself, and about the technology behind each tool.

One might take issue with a few of Jane’s choices (for example, from my exposure to both I am fan of EditMe over PBWiki); and possibly the resource could be rationalized a bit.

But Jane deserves thanks and congratulations for bringing this ambitious set of materials into one place.

Might there be a point in putting some or all of the activities into a collaboratively editable form to enable users to contribute to their maintenance and development? If yes, I'd be game to contribute.

Richard Stallman interviewed by Michael Reilly in the New Scientist

Richard Stallman "left MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1984 to develop the GNU operating system", which later merged into Linux. "He has been the GNU project's leader ever since" and has "dedicated his life to advocating the use of free software and campaigning against software patents and restrictive copyright laws". I was luck enough hear Stallman in Sheffield in October 2003 (when he spoke intently and engagingly, without notes, for over an hour, whilst nursing a badly broken arm); and though this interview in the 12/4/2008 New Scientist is no substitute for hearing him in person, it does give you the gist of Stallman's position.

OLPC: Good, Bad or Ugly? Hands-on report by Geoff Stead and the Tribal m-learning team

After all our enthusiasm for the One Laptop Per Child initiative (OLPC) it was amazing to be able to spend the last two weeks testing one out for real (thanks Seb!).

So what is it really like?

The lunch-on-the-move quick read version

We, the Tribal m-learning team think the OLPC X0-1:

• is inspirational, embedding good educational ideas and collaboration;
• solves several big technology challenges;
• is great fun, but pretty slow;
• is full of first-generation quirks;
• has an amazingly rich seam of support info on the OLPC wiki;
• leads the field in several key directions, but might be superceded quite quickly?

One quirk worth mentioning is that almost everyone who tried to open it first time ... couldn't! To avoid this, and other basic blunders we have made a bluffers guide to the OLPC  to be released shortly ...

The sit-down-and-eat longer read version

There are so many competing views and agendas around this little green machine that we felt the best way to review it would be collaboratively. We got the entire Tribal learning technologies team in on the act, including animators, UI designers, teachers, academics and programmers. We also enlisted the real experts: our kids! (aged 6, 9 and 11).

The good:

• The XO is all about sharing. It has a great visual representation of available local networks, and of the people in your group. This is all about kids doing stuff - and building stuff - together, the collaboration is hard-wired into the system.
• Seymour Papert lives on. The XO includes great tools (like pippy and turtleart) to help everyone develop basic programming - and from that problem solving skills.
• The interface is interestingly different, without being counterintuitive ... even for those of us wedded to the Windows / Mac metaphors.
• The XO includes inspirational technology solutions to many 3rd world equipment problems that until now were ignored by the mainstream, but that we can all benefit from. Things like:
  • good protection from the elements (especially dust and spillage), as well be being very robust;
  • fantastic screens that can even be used in direct sunlight;
  • flexible power use and generation (very low power use, and you can plug it in just about anywhere or even generate your own power by sun or friction);
  • mesh networking: a combination of powerful wireless connections (can travel over 1km!) and ad-hoc networking help get many users sharing a single Internet connection;
  • no license fees, and endless scope to customise the software (thanks to a cut down Linux OS and open source apps);
  • good extensibility, with plug-and-play for standard USB peripherals (useful for an extra mouse and keyboard if you have got grown-up fingers - the keys are tiny!).
• Useful fold-back screen and mouse / tab controls on the screen casing. What it really cries out for in this mode is a touch screen, though.
• This device, more than any other we have seen, is all about kids. All about sharing. All about communicating and problem solving - in fact all about learning. OLPC should be a wake-up call for the first world as well ... why aren't we giving our kids the same tools?

The bad:

Slow and Unresponsive. This may sound ungrateful for such a cheap device, but bad responsiveness very quickly becomes a barrier. You can load multiple apps, but with two or three running at the same time the delays between mouse-movements and on-screen responses get so slow that many apps become unusable. Even drawing a single line in Paint results in a series of disconnected bits.

The ugly:

The interface (both software and hardware) suffers from many small irritants that you would hope get resolved in later releases. Individually they are just "quirks", but together they do start to make the "collaborative" nature of the OLPC development more visible. Some of our pet peeves are:

• The mouse pad: it looks like there are 3 mouse-pads, but only the central one works. You finger has no cue that you have moved onto one of the not-working pads so you keep "loosing your mouse". The pads need raised lines to separate them.
• The mouse buttons: need to stand out a little more. They are sunk-in, so tricky to use.
• Integrating with Sugar: the Linux interface being used (called Sugar) lets you access the main menu by moving your mouse to the 4 corners of the screen. A great idea, but several of the bundled apps also use the corners of the screen for menus and icons, which means the menu pops up by mistake when you want to use them!
• Webcam is off to the side of the screen, so the only way to get your face in shot is to lean over sideways! (Why not put it on top?)
• Even our veteran Linux developers struggled to find out how to upgrade what. It needs a single application to display all the technical information. For example: hardware version, software version, flash player version, security settings etc. Without this it is very fiddly to upgrade.

Overall we loved the X0 - but want more:

We love the fact it has had so much philanthropic energy put into it, and the bold, exploratory and collaborative ideals it encompasses. But we were frustrated enough with the speed and some of the interface quirks to give it the thumbs down until the next version gets released. If those get sorted, and it gets a touch-screen added, it will be one amazing device!

 

Review by Geoff Stead and the team at www.m-learning.org. Their blog is at moblearn.blogspot.com.

The Kiss Communicator: human-computer interaction in the year 2020

Kiss Communicator - by IDEO

"Being human" - with the strapline "Human-computer interaction in the year 2020", and edited by by Richard Harper, Tom Rodden, Yvonne Rogers and Abigail Sellen, is an elegantly designed 51 page report [2.3 MB PDF], published by Microsoft Research in 2008. Whilst I'm sure I'll not be using the Kiss Communicator - a concept prototype that allows you, by squeezing and blowing on the device, to "blow a 'kiss' to your beloved even when in another part of the world", the report does set the scene for how the computing may change in the next 10 or 20 years, in the developed world at least.

BBC - Learning Zone Clips Library

I do not know how long the BBC's Learning Zone Clips Library has been available:

"The Learning Zone provides rich audio-visual material for use in primary and secondary schools and colleges. These short videos have been selected to match the curriculum; they can be used in many ways, from the stimulation and engagement of students to the delivery of very specific learning points."

You can browse by "primary", "secondary", or "colleges", although the latter category seem rather empty. There is help, which focuses on how to embed a video into PowerPoint, but which needs expanding to explain how to embed a resource in a web page, or a web-based presentation application like Slideshare, as well as into OpenOffice.