Mike W’s Blog

It’s been a long time since my last post. February was pretty busy. Last month during a presentation of some Google Earth features, I was wishing I had a tablet so I could scribble some notes and highlight some areas on the map. I found a cheap program for Mac users called desktastic that’s pretty simple and cheap ($12.95) that does a nice job. Here’s a shot of Mt. St. Helens where I jotted a few notes.

As you can see there’s a pencil, stamp, and text tool. Pretty simple stuff but useful. You can assign a key to toggle the program, so that it sits on top of programs or underneath.

Of course you can have fun doodling as well. I think Newton looks pretty cool with the mustache.

Check out this video. See if you can count the number of passes between members of the team in the white t-shirts, and then read the post below.

Did you watch the video from the post above? How many passes did you count between members of the team wearing white shirts? I counted 14. Did you see anything strange? If not, watch the video again and keep an eye out for the gorilla. You aren’t alone if you missed it. Over 50% of folks fail to see the person in the gorilla costume walking through the center of the action.

This is the example of inattentional blindness that I mentioned in a previous post. My colleague Dr. Larry Pace pointed me to the video. Here’s another page with some more examples. This is so fascinating. My favorite is the study where they ask a subject for directions and creatively swap the recipient of those directions. The study revealed that the more the recipient approximates the subject in age, etc., the more likely the subject is to notice the switch. The bigger the differences, the more likely it is that the subject will keep giving directions to a completely different person and never notice the switch.

This inattentional blindness can play a big role in poor decision-making in survival situations, according to the book I’m reading. Basically, if you’re lost in the wilderness with me, it’s best to ditch me as soon as possible. Your chances will improve! I wouldn’t have seen the gorilla if I hadn’t known it was coming.

This has so many implications for the relationship between learning and learning environments. I can’t wait to read more.

Yesterday I taught a FULIR (Furman University Learning In Retirement) class on blogging as part of Dr. Lipscomb’s What’s New in Technology Series. I’m really enjoying the opportunity to get back in the classroom, and this was a great group of folks – friendly and very curious, especially with regards to how this technology fit into the big picture. The initial discussion was fostered with some iClicker questions about experience with blogs and familiarity with the term ‘Web2.0’. After a quick overview, we jumped into creating our own blogs.

The time I spent on Friday creating WordPress accounts (wordpress.com) for each participant was worth it. We quickly started creating posts, and I think everyone enjoyed swapping out themes.

Sample WordPress Theme

I’d like to see WordPress simplify adding pictures to a post. What if by inserting a photo into a post, it was uploaded behind the scenes, instead of having to upload, send to editor, etc..? We got through it, but the challenges highlighted the counter-intuitive user interface.

I think a decent portion of the class may keep blogging, based on the questions I was getting after class. Several wanted to know more about feedreaders, so they could consolidate the blogs they have been following.

A couple of things to do differently next time:

1. Track down some mice for the laptops. The trackpad was a significant barrier at times.

2. Provide more detailed, step-by-step instructions for adding / editing a post, and especially adding an image.

A couple of things to keep:

1. The clickers. This helped get a quick, anonymous gauge of experience level.

2. Directions on how to get to the admin panel. Many of the themes either make this link hard to find or remove it altogether, so having this in the handout really helped.

I really enjoyed this and might propose some classes for the spring!

One person commented as they left that they would explore this more the next time they couldn’t sleep. My blog started one morning when I was tossing and turning. I wonder how many blogs have started during a bout of insomnia??

On Friday I presented at a meeting of the Upstate Schools Consortium which met at Furman University. I got to meet with a great group of talented and enthusiastic K-12 educators from across the upstate. It was a lot of fun!

I talked about our recent and early investigation into clicker technology. We’re piloting these in a handful of classrooms to determine if they’re a good fit and developing best practices. I’ve reviewed a good bit of the research, and it seems like clickers are most effective when they are used to support a constructivist learning environment which makes good sense. A great bibliography of the research is available from Vanderbilt University. If the technology is only going to be used to deliver fairly low-level content questions and not going to be used to modify instruction or engage the student, then I’m guessing we’ll find it’s not worth the investment. I’ve used them in several sessions and feel my initial skepticism waning.

Here’s a link to the question report that was generated from our discussion. Just click on the session summary to see the responses. Each session is actually split in two, so session 1 and 2 are the interaction with the first group and so on. For some reason, the second half of the session with the last group wasn’t recorded.

I split the sessions because there seems to be a bug in iClicker (at least on my machine) where if you add to an existing session, rather than starting a new one, the screen capture breaks.

* The question about Saddam Hussein was to start a very mini discussion about potential advantages of the anonymity that the clickers provide. I wish we had more time to discuss.

* The question about the gorilla required some intro explanation not on the slide. I described the Harvard study in which folks were asked to count the number of basketball passes between two individuals. During the video a woman with an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the scene. 54% of participants reported never seeing the gorilla, so I asked if this intense focus would be a plus or minus in a life or death survival situation. In sessions where there was time, they discussed and recast their votes (Mazur-type of model with clickers).

* The Google Earth Question revolved around the spread of avian flu and asked participants to predict where the early outbreaks occurred (answer C: Southern Asia). The circled regions aren’t visible in the iClicker report, but were visible to participants.

* Oh yeah, the answer to the state insect question is A (Carolina Mantid). This was pretty obscure, but most folks knew it! I sure didn’t. I was hoping to demonstrate that simple content questions weren’t as fun or interactive as the gorilla / discussion type, but this generated a good bit of buzz as well (pun intended ).

I’ll be updating the blog with our iClicker pilot experience. Here’s a link to the session handout. Please comment with your clicker experiences and thoughts in the comments here. We didn’t have enough time to talk, so it would be fun to continue the discussion here.

The purpose of this post is two-fold.

1. To demo the timeline animation and wikipedia features new to Google Earth (see my earlier post)

Check out the very amateur demo below. My apologies for the hushed tones. You may need to turn up the volume. Everyone in my house was still sleeping . Viewing the video requires at least Flash Player 8. The latest and greatest Flash Player can be found here. I need to explore more elegant ways for detecting the user’s player version, so I’m going to go back to this article soon.

In the meantime a link to the .mov file is included too in case you have trouble with the swf version. Please let me know via comment if you can’t see or hear the embedded video below.

It would be really interesting if you could combine the wikipedia and timeline features of Google Earth. For example, a user could tag a wikipedia article with geographic coordinates and date information, so that a user could get time-specific information while traversing the timeline. Perhaps placemarkers are more appropriate. I need to learn more - just thinking out loud.

The 3D view of Mt. St. Helens is just plain cool!

2. To prompt me to experiment with iShowU for screen recording and conversion of the movie files it creates to swf for a, perhaps, more web-friendly approach

Tim Lauer blogged about using iShowU as a Mac alternative for Snapz, so as a newly converted Mac user, I decided to give it a try. I wanted to see if I could generate an swf from the created movie like Camtasia does automatically (only for the PC - sigh) . After taking care of some minor edits in iMovie, I was ready to experiment.

This article on converting video to swf from Adobe was very helpful. We have Flash in-house, so it made sense to try it with that. I still have some learning to do, but the process wasn’t too bad. I want to get rid of the dead space above and below the capture, and I sound like I’m talking into a tin can after the conversion to an swf.

I learned that the swf autoplays automatically, even if you set params in the html object tag. I had to take care of that setting in the flash file itself, setting the movie component autoplay parameter to false. Hopefully, this saves someone else some time in the future!

You essentially have 3 files you need to move over to the server to include the swf in your webpage.

1. The generated swf file
2. The generated flv file
3. The swf that presents the player controls to the user

Then it’s just a matter of including the appropriate tags in your html to bring it into the page. Dreamweaver makes that pretty easy, and the publish feature mentioned in the Adobe article also creates a sample html file that has what you need.

On the Google Earth Blog, Frank Taylor lists the top ten Google Earth time animations for 2006. Time animations were added in Google Earth 4 and are a great way to view data that changes over time, for example animal and human cases of avian flu (Declan Butler’s blog). Authors simply add a time span element to data in kml files, like so, and Google Earth renders a time slider bar in the user interface.

<TimeSpan id=”ID”>
<begin>begin date here </begin>
<end>end date here</end>
</TimeSpan>

The time slider is highlighted in a screen shot of the avian flu map below.

There are some Google Earth software limitations that were apparent when viewing Hurricane Katrina data. I wished I could have incremented the “animation” in hours rather than days. There are some great suggestions for improvement on Stefan Geens’ Ogle Earth Blog, so I won’t rehash them here. This functionality is a great addition to GE!

Tim Lauer of Lewis Elementary School points to an interesting use of Darwiin Remote Software and the Nintendo Wii remote to run a Roomba (a robot which will vacuum your house). I don’t have a Nintendo Wii game, but if Darwiin will capture 3D acceleration from the Wii game remote, it shouldn’t be too difficult to determine force information from the remote. So if someone is playing Wii baseball for example, it should be easy to capture the force of their swing. Perhaps students could experiment with different variables to increase the force of the swing and determine the impact on the distance the batted ball travels. Does the game show the force of the swing already?

In my physics classes we used the Vernier accelerometers to capture 3-dimensional acceleration on different amusement park rides. Although the experience turned me green, we got exceptional data (see image and graph below). I wonder if using a combination of a Wii remote, Bluetooth, and some sort of handheld device if the same sort of data could be gathered on the ride? It still doesn’t solve my motion sickness, but maybe it would save a few bucks and be fun to try.

As I mentioned in a previous post we’ve just begun to explore the use student-generated wikis to help students construct chemistry knowledge, making use of ChemDraw to generate chemical structures. After an initial introduction today, ChemDraw seems to be a great way to create very nice chemical structures for a final page. However, it’s definitely not as quick as drawing the structure on the back of a napkin, so the extra time involved in creating the structure could limit a good wiki collaboration. I read that the open source course management system, Moodle, is looking to integrate a collaborative whiteboard currently available through Jabber / Coccinella. I tried it out and it’s pretty simple. Since Moodle has a Wiki module and will soon have an interactive whiteboard via Coccinella, we could do what we need with Moodle and ChemDraw. While the wiki page is undergoing development, the students could “hand draw” the chemical structures and then use ChemDraw for the more formal, final presentation.

One of the output formats of Coccinella is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) but not jpeg. Although the new Mozilla browser supports SVG display, I didn’t want to bank on the fact that everyone’s browser would support SVG. I found a nice SVG converter online, so I was able to convert the molecule above to a jpeg from home, without photoshop.

GE has a collaborative online whiteboard as well that looks potentially useful. The sketching session can be saved, so that you can see the progression of the diagram as well as the final product.

I’m experimenting with Google Docs and noticed there’s a feature to publish the collaborative Google document directly to a blog. I’m going to give it shot, so if you see this, it worked! This may help me get around the fact that I haven’t had much success getting a spell checker installed in WordPress. This seems to be a really nice way to collaborate, as opposed to emailing a document back and forth with tracking turned on. Nice! You can save as a pdf, open office document, and more. The only problem is that the title didn’t transfer. I added that manually. Other than that… very smooth.