Derek Disgraces David!

We had the last of the big ICT lectures for the PGDE(S) course at Jordanhill on Friday. We had three sets of guest speakers.

First up was Jan Pollock and Neil Stewart talking about Glow. I found this very interesting because they were showing examples of what Glow will look like and showing us some of the things produced by the pilot projects. For a long time Glow/SSDN sounded like a good idea. It is now beginning to look like something that could be used. My only slight concern is that it is an intranet. A major advantage of the Read/Write web is its global reach. There is a danger that

we could shut ourselves off in a wee Scottish corner. However, I think people in Glow are aware of this and I hope they find a way to balance the security of a controlled, closed, intranet (desirable to reduce child protection concerns) with the value of access to a world of experience through the World Wide Web.

Next up was Nick Morgan talking about LTScotland's range of online services. I use their website a fair bit, but it was great to be reminded about just how much stuff they have up there... and to hear a bit about some future developments.

Derek demonstrates,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir

Finally, Derek Robertson talked about the Consolarium and more generally about games in education. He was great at de-bunking some myths but, more importantly, arguing the positive case for the use of games in education. If you remain unconvinced, head over to his blog post, The Consolarium visits Jordanhill, where you can download his presentation which has a load of links for further investigation. Unfortunately, the machine in the lecture hall wouldn't play any YouTube clips but if you download his presentation, hopefully you will see them in all their glory.

So why is this post called Derek Disgraces David? Well Derek challenged me to a head-to-head on Guitar Hero II. He chose a stunning track - YYZ, from the greatest band in the world but despite my adopting a classic rock stance and raising the goblet of rock before starting, I was exceptionally bad! Thankfully, when it became clear how bad I was, he stopped the tune before it was finished... but I had already been humiliated in front of the students! In my defence, can I point out that my only previous experience was having a couple of goes in Debenhams. Let this be an object lesson on the importance of rehearsal! For a change, I had remembered to bring a camera... but forgot to bring fresh batteries, so unfortunately there is no photographic evidence of my performance. :-(

As before, the lecture was videoed so you can watch all three presentations in all their glory. Jan and Neil are at the start (obviously), Nick starts about 43 minutes into the video and Derek takes over about 58 minutes in.

And if you want to see my public humiliation... the Guitar Hero slot starts around the 1 hour 30 minutes mark.

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Technorati Tags: PGDES, Glow, LTScotland, Consolarium, Jan Pollock, Neil Stewart, Nick Morgan, Derek Robertson, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

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Technology Troubles Part Two

The problems described here proceeds my Digital diary disaster in time but I thought it was worth retelling here so that I could get a cheap laugh at the end. (And it is vaguely Educational Computing related at the end... honest.)

The youth worker at our church was getting married just before Christmas. Ordinarily, I would have liked to attend his wedding but he was getting married in India, so that made it a bit trickier. However, our minister was going and was going to be taking part in the ceremony. Just before the minister left for India he said that it would be good to set up a Skype video link during one of the Christmas services. This would allow us to see our youth worker and his family and would allow them to see us. I agreed to set this up with a confidence that was misplaced!

The church has a broadband connection in its office and for reasons unknown they use AOL (or Internet Lite as someone described elsewhere). Plan one was to use my own wireless router with the church's connection and hope the signal would reach the sanctuary. Problem one was that the church router had an USB connection and no Ethernet. Scunner.!

Plan two was to connect the church's Macintosh laptop to the router and run a long telephone extension into the church. The problem is of course that I need to download all the setting files etc. which I can't do in the church because I don't have an Internet connection. So I download the stuff at home, run round to the church to try it out, run back home to download more stuff and check the online help, run back again... You see the problem? Eventually I got to the stage where the Mac was making contact with the Internet but was dropping the connection after no more than two minutes (and usually significantly less than two minutes). The really annoying thing was that after being thrown off, the only way I could get back on was to restart. This meant I wasted hours connecting, getting thrown off, restarting, tweaking a setting or two and then starting all over again. Scunner!

Eventually, on the Sunday afternoon before the link was due to take place, I got it working with a Windows laptop. Windows 1 - Macintosh 0. Scunner! :-) However, at least it was working and in due course the connection was made, we talked to India, they talked to us and everyone was impressed. So, all's well that ends well I suppose.

Two things about this experience seen relevant to educational computing. Firstly it brings to mind the Arthur C. Clark quote:

"Any technology, sufficiently developed, is indistinguishable from magic."

I often say that part of the job of the ICT/Computing teacher is to open the box and show how the magic works. While the computing industry is saying, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!", I want teachers to lift the curtain and show pupils what the levers do. The problem is, I think, that networking and communications is not yet, "sufficiently developed" and experiences like the one described above are still too common. The technology gets in the way of the learning rather than supporting it. (I may return to this theme in a future post.)

The second thing that started me thinking was one of the help pages I accessed while trying to get it all working. I took a screenshot. This is from an official help website not just an amateur/enthusiast page. Have a look at point 7. It was the "alot" that first caught my eye as I skimmed the page - I then re-read point 7 more carefully. Oh dear!

My spelling is not very good (understatement) and my writing style could be better so perhaps I shouldn't criticise, but it seems incredible that despite (or because of?) all the wee red and green squiggly lines that Word displays, we can still produce gibberish with surprising ease. My favourite example of gibberish comes from a students essay. The student confidently wrote that, "The computer is not a pancreas." We assume they were aiming for panacea but just took the first suggestion the spell checker offered. If you can offer a better example of a spell check error I'd be interested to see it. :-)

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Technorati Tags: networking, communications, spell check, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

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Digital diary disaster

I use an ageing Palm m130 as my diary (and for entertainment and a few other bits and pieces). I like it. However it is getting a bit old. The handwriting recognition section is so worn that it doesn't recognise my writing any more, the clip that is supposed to hold it together has been bashed so many times that it no longer holds it together and the battery barely lasts from one day to the next! ...And therein lies the root of my digital diary disaster! I took my Palm home over the Christmas holidays but forgot to take the charger. :-(

17/365 - New Agenda,

originally uploaded by athena.

By the time I got back to work and plugged it in, the battery was so flat that it had forgotten everything. "No problem!" I thought, since all the stuff was on my office computer and all I had to do was sync the Palm with my desktop and I'd be back in business. I'd have my diary, my contacts list and most importantly, my Sudoku game back. But you know what they say about the best laid plans...

For some reason, when I tried to sync the Palm, it tried to sync with a user called DavidDMuir. Not a problem you would think but unfortunately my diary etc. was saved under a profile called David Muir. Of course, I didn't realise that straight away and followed standard Computing procedure for the next wee while... In other words, I tried doing exactly the same thing two or three times in a row, before restarting the computer, trying the same thing again, resetting the Palm, trying the same thing again and only then did I notice that my computer had a user called DavidDMuir with no calendar entries and a profile called David Muir with everything I wanted still there!

Now that I'd worked out what the problem was, I thought it would be easy to fix... but I couldn't find any way of making the Palm sync with David Muir rather than DavidDMuir. Curses! Therefore I followed standard Computing procedure 2... I used Google to try and find a solution. I couldn't find an exactmatch to my problem, but a couple of sites suggested renaming a user on the desktop and then creating a new user with the same name that the Palm was using to sync. ...So that's what I did. I renamed user DavidDMuir to Temp and renamed profile David Muir to DavidDMuir... and then I hit the HotSync button... and then I lost everything on my desktop computer too!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhh!

I was a bit upset. Backup? What backup?

I failed to find any way to recover what I'd deleted and eventually became resigned to my loss but couldn't quite bring myself to rebuild the missing data. However, two days later I remembered that I had synced with my laptop at one point in the past and sure enough, there on the laptop was most of my missing stuff. Huzzah! I've lost the most recent entries (perhaps a month's worth) but most of it is now back on my Palm. :-)

It is therefore worth saying that if I agreed to meet you, and arranged the meeting some time in December, I probably no longer have a note of the date, time or place we agreed. Feel free to contact me and check I still expect to see you. And if you think that the entry to send you a £5000 cheque may have disappeared from my To do list, feel free to remind me of that as well.

So, Happy New Year! Sorry I was a bit quiet over Christmas, but hopefully I am back into the swing of things now. :-)

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Technorati Tags: Palm, PDA, diary, backup, Happy New Year, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

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Merry Christmas

Thanks to Mrs Blethers, I've just wasted some time throwing snowballs at Buddy the Elf (among others). I am ashamed to say that I was on my third go before I discovered that you weren't supposed to hit Santa!

Also thanks to Mr Tosh (Master Blethers I believe) I spent some time smashing sprouts and listening to versions of 80's pop-songs. Ah... happy days! :-)

Now, all I need is for Mr B. and young master Blethers to chip in with game suggestions and I'll never have time to make an educational blog post again. (Ewan tried to distract me with the Irn Bru advert, but I'd already seen it - thanks Ollie - and it's not a game, so that doesn't count!)

My own contribution to festive time wasting is this Grab a Gift game from Santa Clause 3. Enjoy!

Happy Christmas everybody

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Technorati Tags: fun, games, Christmas, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

This will require deep thought...

Try entering the query:

• What is the answer to life the universe and everything?

into Google. (Note - no quotation marks!)

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Technorati Tags: fun, humour, information literacy, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

EduFlickr: Telling Tales

I think I have mentioned a few times in previous EduFlickr posts that Flickr (and other online photo sharing tools) can be a great source of images and that these images can be used to stimulate creative writing. I've been meaning for some time to write a post about telling stories with Flickr but Alan has already given an excellent introduction to fliction. I will therefore content myself some observations and a couple of examples.

Colin's first haircut,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir

Although I have titled this Telling tales and I've talked about "creative writing", it should not be assumed that the English department is going to have all the fun. Apart from anything else, one of the examples Alan gives is of the Tell a story in 5 frames group where the pictures tell the story. Of course once a visual story has been published, often people give their interpretation in the comments and in the discussion area, so there is still scope for creative writing. However, I think some of the best submissions to this group demonstrate the power pictures to carry a story. For example one of my favourites is Women!, which tells a story in only three pictures. (See them here: one, two and three.) The text with this story gives you more information, but it stands alone as a good story without any words at all.

Young girl's haircut. Now a woman.,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir

Flickr groups like this often throw out challenges, for example, the Six Word Story group (only six words because of Ernest Hemmingway's famous six word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never used.") recently had a discussion thread where people submitted six word stories and invited others to submit suitable pictures. And as reciprocity would have it, a number of pictures are submitted be people looking for six word stories. Plenty of opportunity here for cross-curricular work?

My final observation is that "story" can be interpreted fairly loosely and stories can be told within a variety of curricular contexts. For example, could you use pictures to tell the story of a glaciated landscape - from a corrie, through a u-shaped valley and down to a terminal moraine? (Scraping the bottom of my geological knowledge here - maybe Ollie can confirm if this makes sense as an example!) Or, Mr W's story about how to make toad in the hole. Or a photo story on the development of a model. Or... oh, you get the picture!

...And the examples? I thought it only fair to have a go at telling a digital story myself before making this post. So here is my go at a six word story and my first attempt at telling a story in five frames. Leave a comment if you have a go and let us know where to find your stories.

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Technorati Tags: EduFlickr, literacy, storytelling, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

New cars, synchronicity and iPods

I've been a bit quiet recently. I'd like to say it's because I've been too busy, but while I have been busy, it's mostly my lack of organisation that has led to the lack of posts! (See the photograph of my desk for evidence of my lack of organisation.)

I've got loads of things to blog about and I'll try to get some of them out over the next few days. I thought I'd start with our new car (well, new to us... it's about 9 months old). We picked up our new car on Saturday 25th of November. As we were signing all the forms to transfer ownership of our old car (see picture!) and take possession of the new one, we had to say when we got the old car. To our surprise, we discovered that we got our old car on the 25th of November 1999 - exactly seven years earlier! {Do-do, do do! Do-do, do do! - insert Twilight Zone theme tune here!}

Apart from having a working clutch (which wasn't the case with our old car) the new one is notable for having an auxiliary audio input socket - in other words, I can play my iPod through the car stereo. Huzzah! As a result I caught up on a huge backlog of David Warlick's podcasts in the space of one day's school visits. Huzzah! As always, David's podcasts gave me loads to think about. Huzzah!

In particular, I liked the way one of the people he was chatting to described information. (Can't remember who said it, but I think it is in Episode #70 if you want to check it out for yourself.) The chap said something along the lines of... "Information today is like white noise. It's always there but usually we tune it out. However, when we need to find something, we can tune in and find out what we need." I liked that. I've talked before about how many of our pupils carry about with them mobile devices capable of tuning in to this white noise and extracting the important stuff... but I'm not convinced that as educators we've really worked out how to cope with this or what changes it will bring to our education system.

One other thing that stood out from a recent podcast was the report of a conversation. A teacher who was perhaps concerned about losing their status as sage on the stage, asked something like, "But what do you do if a pupil asks you something and you don't know the answer?" The reply made was something like: "The same as when I do know the answer - I say, 'That's a good question. How do you think we can find an answer?' "

All good stuff. The only problem I have with the listening in the car method is that there is no easy way to take notes. (Hence all the "something like" bits above!) I think I need another iPod so I can record my thoughts in a podcast as I listen to other people's podcasts. :-)

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Technorati Tags: iPod, podcasts, DavidWarlick, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog

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