Computer control is the silent part of ICT, just making things happen in the background. Wouldn’t it be fun to create one of these things to display messages? I found this vid on YouTube (sorry if it doesn’t show up inside your firewall).
This week I have been playing with my Wii. Following Johnny Chung Lee’s posts about his research into using Wiimotes and an IR pen to create an interactive whiteboard (for less than £50), and Doug Belshaw actually doing it, I’ve mashed up a complete solution that is cheap and convenient.
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.
The One Laptop Per Child project always seemed to be too atruistic to be true yet I had high hopes for it. With a forceful and charismatic leader to front the hard work done behind the scenes by the open source developers it looked as if this projet would work in ways that have never been seen before. Now it seems that Negroponte is courting the favours of M$ to widen the appeal of the XO. (erm..by doubling the size of the storage to accommodate XP? Does not compute, captain)
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.
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.
