BlogDale

I’ve been mooching around Second Life lately, now my machine can cope. Although I’ve been on the WMNET island for ages I’ve done the least building and my patch looks rather unimpressive. Bare, too.

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…

Everyone I show my Asus to is really impressed. Teachers can see that it will fit into their daily flow, students all want one (not just to play Tux games). In a Year 9 sessions today we talked about how useful it would be to have one in lessons and how they could grab information from the web to support their learning. Again, this use raises the issue of “information literacy” in that they would need to be able to differentiate between good and bad information, and where they should be looking for information and how to acknowledge it. All of the class members thought that the outlay was justified.

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.

So I got fed up of the stuttering on the Mac and sent it back to the supplier for a replacement.  Seems they’ve sent me the new 8-core model (mine was 4-core).  Just my luck - being Without a Mac at the very time when I need to do some vital video editing and I Most Need a Mac.  Ah well, the old Ergo Tablet PC will have to struggle yet awhile with Pinnacle and I look forward to the new Mac.  But like my old mate Patrick says - what will I do with 8 cores?  Memo to self - find out how to tell if it actually does have 8 cores.  Multiple Apple Cores.  Ha.

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These Mac toys aren’t all that bad, really.  I’m finding a few niggles with the Mac Pro such as the cursor stuttering all over the place when an application is loading up - I’m finding it very very annoying, and am in the process of doing something about it.  Surely this Mac which cost over 10 times as much as my trusty old Windows PC should be able to cope with the same kinds of load that my butterfly mind can put on it (10 applications open, doing stuff in each simultaneously -  you know the kind of thing)? Anyway, moves are afoot to cure this.

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.

Please don’t tell on me. I bought a mac.

<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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