We’ve used No Limits Rollercoasters for a couple of years. It’s a great sim where you build a rollercoaster in a quasi-technical drawing environment, then you get to ride the fearsum beast that you created - and analyse where your passengers would have died due to excessive G force. We introduce a number of topics around it in Year 9; design and analysis; the use of ICT in society and how accurate simulators can save money; the shortcomings of simulators; writing letters/memos to theme park owners; designing leaflets/other advertising blurb including podcasts and vodcasts; costings spreadsheets using goal seek (et al) to find break-even points. And we have some great fun seeing what the students come up with in their rollercoaster designs.

But the great just got better. Since I introduced Wings 3D, Mark has been using his outstanding design skills to get students using it to make ’stuff’. His students won first, second and third with their artistic interpretation at the Shropshire Create IT! awards. I’m looking forward to the day when Second Life gets going around here, because our students will have a huge head start in designing prims in Wings. But I digress.

Today Mark showed me how he can create models in Wings and then import to No Limits. He’s got the techs to do the necessary adjustments to the permissions and locations of various files so students can insert their own models into their rollercoaster designs.

I watched in awe as he created a ghost in Fireworks, imported it to Wings then rendered it with UV mapping and created a 3D model to import to No Limits. Then he did the same with a dragon and a galleon he’d created previously.

So what’s the learning potential? No longer will students create beautiful models that they can admire only in Wings 3D. They will now be able to put them anywhere that there’s a need for 3D objects - I’m thinking games, scenery, creating their own landscapes (Mark’s a wizard in Bryce and Daz Studio). They’ll be visualising and creating their own artefacts in different packages, using the appropriate tools for the job without necessarily seeing any difference between one software package and another. That’s what I call ICT capability. It’s the future.

Interactive whiteboards are like marmite. People either love ‘em or hate ‘em. I know people who believe strongly that the IWB is an expensive luxury in a classroom and that the same learning gains can generally be met using just a projector; conversely I’ve spoken with teachers who believe strongly that the interactive aspect of the board is what makes it useful, and they now wouldn’t be without the IWB. Interestingly, these two poles of opinion were found to be split generally between phases, where primary teachers wouldn’t part with their boards but secondaries were indifferent to them. My own observation was that whereas a huge investment was made in putting IWBs in classrooms, less importance was placed on training teachers how to use them. And so they sat on the wall as an expensive ornament for months until somebody went on a course and found what “other people” were doing with them.

To me, the biggest impact of a school’s investment in IWBs lies not in the whizzy resources that they produce for their own particular brand of IWB with its proprietary software. The biggest impact is to get teachers to use ICT to prepare and deliver rich content that is pertinent and relevant to learning objectives, and the rest will follow. As suggested here, the initial use of an IWB is simply to use it as a data projector and not to exploit the features of the interactive board itself. Surely that represents a wasted investment? Couldn’t we have bought two projectors rather than a projector and board? Yes we could. We should. And now there’s a way to dispense with the expensive board altogether, or at least see if your teaching style needs the features that a board has to offer.

Here’s how I did it…

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Sorry.  Couldn’t resist.  I’ll get me coat.

So today they’re doing some coursework, on databases.  It’s a really dry boring task but to spice it up I suggest they can  collect their screenshotted evidence and display it how they like.  Some played safe with Word but others started to tell a story in Comic Life - some really excellent renditions of coursework are coming out.  With 10 minutes to go they were asked about other ways of showing the info - they suggested Animoto and my eyes sparkled with the vision of an OCR moderator watching Animoto’ed files of coursework evidence.

I’m not sure if they managed to get any done with only 10 mins to go…still watching the inbox.  I bet I get some next week though.

For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result, Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a “dual-boot” option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar.

from http://www.thestate.com/technology-wire/story/383365.html

Why the heck does it need Windows?  The big success story lately is the Asus Eee, running Xandros Linux.  OK, you can make it run XP if you want but it begs questions about whether you want a learning machine  or something that conforms to Windo$e just because everyone else has it (not that they do).

Could it be that the hard work done by the OS guys at OLPC was just to raise product awareness and get some units sold before opening a backdoor for the heavy mob to move in and take over?  Even if Windoze was given away free on the XO, the hardware costs increase to accommodate it, moving further away from the $100 goal price tag.  I hate to say it but it looks like a puppy-dog sale to me - when it needs an upgrade in a couple of years and support for XP has been withdrawn, and those folks with an XO find they just can’t manage without it so they just gotta have the upgrade, what’s to stop a commercial entity like M$ charging for it?  They’ve generated a sleeping market by giving it away free, investing in their own future sales.  Well, slap my cynical wrist.

Seems to me that part of the philosophy behind the XO is compromised by Windoughs.  The bit where it was to be, as far as practical, fixable locally.  With Linux the user can learn to fix the software when it throws a hooley, but a bug in Window$ stays unfixed until the next upgrade.  And if the nearest access point is a 10 mile walk away across a minefield, the revolutionary new learning machine becomes a placemat.

I loved the scandalised  call that”it doesn’t support Flash”.  Um, as I remember neither did my Asus when it came out of the box.  Oo, neither did Firefox on the Mac Pro.  Adobe drives traffic to their website to install the plugin.

Naughty Microsoft to hijack this project like they are doing with the Asus Eee (sigh, but who wants to pay fullsize laptop price for a tiny laptop?  we’ll see).  Naughty Nick Negroponte for selling out.

More on this story here, here, here, here.

Thing is, apart from the nagging doubt that I didn’t ought to be building things in a Second Life until I’ve finished building the place where I and family live, I wonder at the structures some of my fellow denizens are setting up. Sure, it’s good practice to pass this creativity and the skills required on to others and I salute that - but the elaborate buildings I’m seeing onscreen are - um - buildings. Beautiful, often unique, buildings. With walls.

I tentatively showed spouse SL last night and it was she who pointed this out; that was when the penny dropped for me. Apart from the aforementioned reasons, this might have been why I have been so slow to develop a vision for my patch on the island. I didn’t know what I wanted to make my learning space resemble. I was thinking of reproducing various buildings, from 1970s concrete and glass schools to a sci-fi building from a Brian Aldiss novel (I think it was). But no - Karen’s right, it’s a learning space and the form of it should follow the function.

Do I need chairs to sit on in an online environment? No. Do I need a whiteboard where I can assist learners with resources that can be changed and delivered at the press of a button? Probably, although it might take some other form.

Do I need a means of assessment to make sure they “get it”? Yes. Am I going to feed back to them and help them along their learning journey? You bet.

Do I need a wall to hang my resources on? Nah. I need to have lots of stimulating resources though, that can be changed quickly.

Why should a virtual learning space resemble the real-world enclosures by which we are confined? Surely we have a chance to redefine learning spaces…

So my part of the island is unlikely to have a building on it (there’s a token gesture underwater) but it will be a learning space. At the moment it has a virtual Sloodle classroom on it (standing in the bounds of the blue box puts you in the classroom) which, in time, will link to my school moodle so that I can test how the two online environments work together.

Shame I have to do real work too. These reports are late…

After a night of no-sleep on Weds (working on a project for somebody) I was in no shape to try to get the Asus to talk to the WPA-TKIP network. Apparently it won’t do it with the native ndiswrapper package and it needs madwifi. I think I fell asleep trying to install it all, but anyway my patience wore thin (helped with the nagging conscience that I should be doing reports) and I left it for another day. But I’d scrambled the wireless settings for home… Not to worry, there’s an easy rollback to default settings on the Asus and I was home and dry again.

Getting software - once the Synaptic repository manager is set up, installing packages is a doddle as with any Linux distro these days. I installed Audacity for good measure (just to prove it could be done - Harvey had asked me recently if I could do it, and it was easy once I’d found how to install synaptic). My favourite so far is the advanced desktop tweak, which changes the look and feel to be a standard KDE desktop. I was intending to install Ubuntu on the machine instead of the factory default Xandros Linux, but I don’t think I’ll do it yet awhile considering that Ubuntu isn’t so hot on wifi at the best of times (so I understand - please tell me if I’m wrong, but it took a bit of fiddling to get ndiswrapper installed on the kids’ EdUbuntu machine at home so that I could move it out of the study.) The Xubuntu people are getting things solved daily though, so it’s only a matter of waiting.

As I said in a previous post - this little machine is really going to change things around here.

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I once vowed that I would never need an iPod, because the most useful thing about my iRiver is that it allows me to recrod straight into it.  You can’t do that with an iPod, so nar nar de nar nar.   The thing I rarely mention is that if I want to add an external mic to the iRiver I have to amplify the signal from the mic, which means another piece of kit (Behringer amplifier) that has to plug into the mains, so there goes my roving reporter capability.  I tried a mic with it’s own (alleged) power supply but it didn’t work.  So I’m left to using the barely-adequate internal mic on the iRiver, or sticking to recording things in reach of a power socket.

So, now I’m becoming a Macboy I tend to read some of their fansites.  Sometimes it’s gut-wrenchingly cringeworthy, the level of simpering loyalty that people have for their computer (it’s a MACHINE, FGS) and it’s creators, but I’ve found some useful stuff (no cure for mouse stutter yet though except the Mac equivalent of a ctrl-alt-del).  This is my favourite so far - a Podcasting Studio for the iPod.  Oops, checking again reveals that this isn’t a Mac Fanzine site, but Podcasting News.  This might just see me buying an iPod, but really I wanted one of those nifty iTouch jobbies.  Bet it doesn’t work with one of those.

<whisper> OK Steve, you were right.  I do like it. </whisper> (Steve knows how hard it was for me to say that.  In public, as well).

Yes, I know, one of those “plastic toys” (I got round that, mine’s aluminium). After a lot of thought and anguish about how I’d need to transfer all my Windoze expertise and Stuff (lots of Stuff) across to a Mac, and how there would be a huge learning curve, etc., etc., my thirst for adventure exceeded my reluctance and I made the jump. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the PC running right by me - Just In Case, you understand - and I have taken out insurance against hitting technological brick walls such as You Can’t Do That on a Mac. Umm..the insurance is that this Mac runs Parallels so I can run Windows on it (and Linux, w00t) all at the same time. Scary stuff. I’m still gathering confidence to run Bootcamp so that I can run Windows DirectX 3D games on this baby (Parallels won’t do it - yet) but when that’s done I shall retire the old PC to the children’s room.

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