Fortnightly Mailing

"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.

Micah Altman's statistical software resouces - via Richard Elliot

Micah Altman's The Impoverished Social Scientist's Guide to Free Statistical Software and Resources, last updated in February 2008, looks like a good source. With thanks to Richard Elliot, whose occasional elearningWatch mailing usually has several items of interest. (Altman works at the Harvard-MIT Data Center, and his The Impoverished Social Scientist's Guide to Data Resources looks impressive too.)

Google forms - for easy data capture - screencast by Dan Schellenberg

Dan Schellenberg has made a nice clear screencast about how to use the new "forms" feature of Google Docs to create a form for people to fill in, with their information then fed back into a Google Spreadsheet.

Accessories for the OLPC laptop - Jonathan Hsu is looking for a UK distributor

Several weeks ago, through a roundabout route, I got into correspondence with Jonathan Hsu of Zoltantech in Taiwan, with the aim of getting hold of a USB-to-LAN adaptor for my OLPC laptop. Jonathan kindly remembered to tell me about Studio Fibonacci (the Zoltantech distributor of the adaptors in the US), and in passing Jonathan mentioned that he is in talks with OLPC about producing a USB-to-VGA adaptor, and also that he is looking for a UK distributor.  Jonathan's email address is jhsu "AT" zoltantech "DOT" com.

Semantic web: Tim Berners-Lee interviewed by Paul Miller

 

Source: http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

I'm pointing to this piece in ZDNet more out of instinct than deep understanding. (Paul Miller is someone who has made the transition from the JISC-world to the private sector - he now works for the software company Talis.) The interview with Berners-Lee is also available as a 1 hour podcast, and if you've time is more informative than the ZDNet piece itself.