Playing with Technology

In case you haven’t noticed the folks at Mozilla released Firefox 3 yesterday. I got the notice and downloaded it straight away. I’ve updated all the add-ons I can and am loving it so far. I’m actually writing this with ScribeFire (a nifty add-on for Firefox). So go forth, download, and enjoy.

I write this post not from my silvery MacBook Pro but from the G4 iMac in my office. Why? The tale begins over two weeks ago with the preorder of Mac OS X Leopard. I put my preorder in the day it was available and waited eagerly for it to arrive. Last Friday it was waiting on my doorstep when I got home. I took it inside and peeled it out of the shipping box and pulled it out of its shrink wrap. I opened up my laptop which was sleeping in its travel case and popped in the Leopard DVD. Restarted as requested and started the update. I then went to get my daughter from daycare. When I got back the screen said “Update failed”. “What,” I said. I restarted and ran Disk Utility to see “Invalid node structure” appear as the program tried to verify the disk. Panic set in. The machine would not boot. It was not visible to other computers in target disk mode, and I did not own Disk Warrior. I called Applecare after I determined I could navigate the drive in Single User mode, but they had no ideas on how to possibly repair the boot table or partition information. So the machine went to the Apple store where they determined that the hard drive needs to be replaced. This would all be mildly irrtating except I forgot to do the one thing I have always done in the past: backup the User directories on the machine. So now I am hoping the Apple service guys can pull data off onto an external drive I left with them. I’m not hopeful and I may lose a years worth of e-mail and documents (I was planning on using the drive with Time Machine for backups). So take my plight as a warning and backup before updating. It will make the process much less stressful.

This is an amazing video of a multi-touch surface that blows away the current SMART boards I have seen. It is available now and boy would I like to get one to experiment with.

Well, clearly, I have not been blogging more. Warcraft is still consuming most of my free time at home. So let’s put that to good use. There are several videos on YouTube and Google video of Warcraft game play and strategy videos. These hold interest for players like me but not the general public and certainly not educators. However, there is also Machinima (In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence.). What would such a thing look like? Here is an example.

One can also look at Machinima.com and the Machinima FAQ.

For me the above video is an excellent example of Machinima. There are a number of filmmaking techniques visible in this music video and for someone familiar with Warcraft it shows a tremendous amount of understanding of the game world.

Warcraft has over 8 million players and a large number of those players are sitting in our college classrooms. Some of those players are even in film studies courses. In the past we might have asked these students to create a short film by developing and filming a script or adapting an existing scene. Why not move the filming into one of these game worlds? Why not combine something we know students love with something we want them to love and understand? I hope to help some of our faculty to develop projects in this direction which will give some validity to the amount of time I’ve spent playing, at that point it will count as research :-)

On Tuesday Apple Computer added an iTunes U area to it’s iTunes store. This should be a very exciting thing for our faculty as it provides them with access to a myriad of educational podcasts and example of what they themselves could be doing with a little help fromInstructional Technology. Wooster has been accepted in iTunes U but hasn’t returned a signed agreement. Why? First there is a requirement in the contract to maintain a certain level of content on your iTunes U account and second to meet this requirement would require that we add significantly to the Instructional Technology staff. It is a chicken and egg type of problem. Anyway, I plan to let faculty know about this new resource and will do everything I can to help them produce similar types of material.

TechCruch had a story today about Y Combinator (an interesting venture capital firm) and some of the software starting to come out of these ventures. Two applications caught my eye in the list: writewith and Snipshot. writewith is a collabrotive writing application similar in nature to Google Documents. I have been looking at these kinds of applications as I am involved in more and more ad-hoc committees where we are drafting some policy. I don’t really feel it is productive to e-mail revisions around endlessly and see an application like writewith as a natural tool for such work. Snipshot was interesting because I just think it is cool to edit my photos without the need for big bulky software. Don’t get me wrong; I love to fire up Photoshop but sometimes you don’t need the bolt cutters. Check them out when you have time.

See it is not about copyright.

I’m sure all of you are aware of Yahoo!’s Pipes product. I am very interested in it and how faculty can take advantage of it. However, I have not had the time to sit down and play with it. D’Arcy Norman has had some time to play with it and has a nice post titled Trying Pipes as a proto-Eduglu platform, which I encourage you to read.