Playing with Technology

Firefox 3 = win

Jon Breitenbucher — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:38:10 +0000

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.

Mac OS X Leopard: A cautionary tale

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:41:20 +0000

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.

What SMART boards should be

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:31:07 +0000

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.

Download This Video from You Tube | View This Video on You Tube

Game worlds as sets

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:48:23 +0000

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.

Download This Video from You Tube | View This Video on You Tube

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 :-)

iTunes U goes public

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:55:02 +0000

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.

Interesting Web based software

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:28:43 +0000

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.

Pipes in education

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:17:03 +0000

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.

Back on the copyright kick

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:05:08 +0000

Well, it seems like I am the copyright czar at this place. It is a self-appointed position but the void must be filled. Thus you read another post relating to copyright. I promise that the next post will not be about copyright.

Our topic today is deep-linking. A Texas 5th Circuit Court judge ruled in December that SuperCrossLive.com was violating copyright by linking directly to audiocasts of motorcycle racing rather than linking to the main page of the SFX Motor Sports site. The Judge said this practice did not constitute a “fair use” of the material. Does this mean anything for professors who link to images and stories on the New York Times’ site? Should I be telling them not to do this in their Moodle courses? I’m not sure. What do you think? Is an instructor doing this “fair use”?

The full article is here.

Why the long absence?

Jon Breitenbucher — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:31:59 +0000

So, I haven’t posted for a while. Curious as to why? Well, too bad, I’m going to tell you. I started playing World of Warcraft (WoW). It’s Joe’s fault really although Derek Newland contributed. “So what does that have to do with the absence?”, you ask. I used to do a lot and I mean a lot of stuff for work at home. I would spend 3-4 hours a night blogging and doing other things related to work. Those hours are now split between family and WoW, which is much healthier for me and my family (Kathy also plays WoW and that’s my fault.). However, it means the blog suffers because I am only 2/3 Instructional Technology and there is more than enough work to fill 2/3s of a person when the department only has 2 and 2/3s staff plus an intern and a few students. I’ll try to carve out some time to post each week, I have a backlog of things to post about.

New way to do copyright clearance

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:13:29 +0000

The CCC has a new license model in which the institution pays a yearly fee to CCC and then is surveyed for usage and the CCC distributes fees to publishers. It covers classroom use, course packs, conversion to digital, faculty-to-faculty sharing, faculty-to-student sharing. How do you collect usage information which is not able to be traced to particular faculty or students? Middlebury is a charter member for the new license. Testing this Spring. Middlebury has a popup when a file is uploaded that asks if the work is copyrighted and if so asks for the bibliographic info. This would be a nice feature for Moodle, maybe a module? It needs to pull a report across all courses in Moodle of the copyrighted material.

Some more interesting copyright stuff

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:47:03 +0000

Mary Minow started off the session. She has a couple of good sites LibraryLaw and the LibraryLaw blog.

Minimizing Legal Risks in Digitization Projects

Copyright
Some things to keep in mind: ADA, NAGPRA, HIPAA, Rights of Publicity, Deeds of Gift
Privacy, Censorship, and Pornography

PCLED

Physical
Copyright (applies to all)
License (applies to signing parties)
Encryption (DRM, passwords)
DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act-illegal to tamper with technological protection measures)
Exceptions
- The big one is the exception allowing film and media studies professors to break protection on DVDs

It appears that before we digitize the IS projects we must make sure that the Catalogue has always said that the College can do whatever it wants with the ISs. If it has not, then we must contact the authors or the heirs to get permission. We should have students sign a non-exclusive perpetual license with the College. This might be put in the Catalogue and made very explicit to the students. Or we could have the students sign something just for IS.

We should check to see if we are insured possibly “advertising injury” against copyright infringement. Use of disclaimers and there are examples at http://memory.loc.gov and a take-down policy. Things which are not subject to copyright: Facts, Recipes, Ideas, Dedicated Work, Government Work, Expired. Copyright metro will guide you through the use of media in the classroom. TEACH allows the use of something like Moodle for video and audio delivery.

Oh my god not more copyright stuff

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 05:57:28 +0000

Well, after a long pause, I begin the new year with the excitment that is copyright and fair use. I’m starting to think I went into the wrong profession. There is a fortune to be made in litigating all the issues surrounding copyright.

Anyway, I am in Pamona (a very nice area with mountains all around) at a NITLE sponsored workshop on copyright. I ran into Peter and Eric from the ITLAC conference in 2005 and have had dinner. The discussions start tomorrow but I’ve already got a lot out of it in the form of handouts which lead to the Copyright Information Center. This is a treasure trove of all things copyright. The two most useful documents so far appear to be the

but there are a lot of other interesting looking things. There is also the flow chart for determining if permission is required (adapted with permission of Mary Minow).

I look forward to the discussions tomorrow.

Hmm, could we use this?

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:59:59 +0000

MobiTV is a way to get TV on your cell. What if this could be the delivery mechanism for lecture captures and Profcasts? Students love their cells and they love their iPods. Maybe the much rumored Apple phone (no longer the iPhone as Linksys took that one) would create a perfect delivery channel for all the educational content on iTunes U and even allow new and innovative pedagogical developments.

I must be sick

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:38:47 +0000

Why, because I have a copy of Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. I have had a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac for quite a while. However, I never took the time to install a copy of XP. Well, the new Coherence feature finally made me take the plunge. That and the fact that I got tired of using the Diablo II character editor on Kathy’s Gateway and having to transfer the hacked characters back to my Mac. Now I can edit the characters in my copy of XP and the folder the data is in is shared so there isn’t even a need to drag and drop.

I really don’t like the entire Windows experience (when I installed my XP pre SP 1 OS I had to endure four hours of upgrades to get it to SP2 with all the latest patches), but I need to run GroupWise (I’m pushing to have us look at something else) and my character editor and this makes it convenient. Performance is great and coherence makes you almost forget you are using Windows. I’d say that if you can’t wait to see what Leopard holds then snag a copy of Parallels.

Yet another obstacle

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:25:24 +0000

Office 2007 introduces a new document type, docx. Of course old versions of the office applications can’t read the new format and the converters for Mac won’t ship until significantly after the release of Office 2007 on Windows. Luckily some clever people have found a way around this. You lose formatting but then I ask everyone to send me things in plain text, so it’s not a big deal to me.

What if this were part of a Smart Board?

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:57:40 +0000

Bryan strikes again with his post about Magic Paper. What is Magic Paper?, you ask. Imagine drawing 2d objects and then animating them. That is the goal of the Magic Paper project. Imagine what it would be like in a Physics, Chemistry, or Math class if this technology was married to a Smart Board. I can see very interesting times ahead.

Maybe the kids aren’t as hip as we think

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:50:20 +0000

Kevin Lim had an interesting post a while back. He was describing his recent experience in discussing the use of social media in corporations. In his post Kevin states, “I was quite disappointed with the lack of awareness to a lot of things I mentioned.” I wish I could say that I was surprised to see this statement but my experience over the past two years has been similar. I don’t know if they are too busy, frightened, … Whatever the issue it is something that needs to be dealt with soon.

Something to keep an eye on

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:22:39 +0000

Automattic and KnowNow seem to be entering some sort of formal arrangement according to TechCrunch and a press release. I wonder what if any implications this could have for Wooster and our RSS/Blogging future.

It seems that even Professors don’t know the laws about copyright

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:16:28 +0000

This is an old story but I haven’t been able to blog because of work. I’m on break now so I’m trying to catch up on posts.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer ran a story in its business section on Nov. 20th with the title “Professors get ‘F’ in copyright protection knowledge.” The main beef comes from book publishers who are upset that a growing number of professors are using excerpts and in many cases large excerpts of texts to create course packs and not requiring students to purchase books. It is another “fair use” interpretation issue. I am sure this will be on the agenda for the copyright workshop at Claremont.

Distoring a classic

Jon Breitenbucher — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 01:36:34 +0000

Well, it is the time of year when The Year Without a Santa Claus (thank goodness they show this one again), Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph’s Shiny New Year are on TV. I love these cartoons but I love parodies of them even more. My favorites are from MadTV. If you haven’t seen them here they are

Download This Video from You Tube | View This Video on You Tube

I love the Mob movies these are based on and think it is a wonderful twist on such a classic feel good childhood memory. It would be interesting to find a way to do something like this in a film studies class.