www.nickhodge.com

1. Web 2.0: needs extra work to map to teach­ing out­comes (del.icio.us, flickr) Many Web 2.0 sites still blocked by policy. It makes it dif­fi­cult to use all the cool web 2.0 stuff in school, espe­cially when these tools will be used by the stu­dents for pro­ject deliv­ery. Think a mashup as a pro­ject handin. (cool!)
2. If multiple-media sub­mis­sion types (Power­point, video, web sites) are required for present­a­tion: how do we present? Mak­ing the tech­no­logy easier is key; and the stu­dents have more advanced Quick­time, Flash­Player, WMV, Power­point than on the stand­ard, locked down desktops. Secondly, as SVGA style con­nec­tions to pro­ject­ors in the room.
3. Web job oppor­tun­it­ies mapped to ICT. What sort of jobs exist for stu­dents in a web-world? Art teach­ers > design, for instance
4. 90+% of Yr10s have IM address; 80+% com­mu­nic­ate with people out­side Aus­tralia! Can only think this is based either on fam­ily or friends over­seas with sim­ilar interests
5. Man­aging the bal­ance between ICT evan­gel­ism vs. Microsoft demo-stuff.  Show­ing cool stuff is cool. Con­sider that video cabling and audio may not suit in all circumstances.
6. Key guid­ance from Sean Tier­ney crit­ical. 20 minute chunking import­ant; just like adult learning.
7. Sur­prised many teach­ers how few people it took at Cas­tle­maine XXXX to make beer, how auto­mated the pro­cess is. Can a bunch of teach­ers organ­ise a p*ss-up in a brew­ery? (yes, if timetable permits)
8. Mount Gravatt High: Im in ur your Wiki­pe­dia pages.

It has been an excel­lent week for the ABC. The Curtin “docu-drama” gave a por­trait of a man of his time: Prime Min­is­ter John Curtin dur­ing the 1941 through 1942.

Last night, Jeff McMul­lan did a stand­ard “journ­al­istic show” wrapped as debate on new tech­no­lo­gies, and the impact on com­munity on “Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion: Grow­ing Up in the Digital Age”. Cap­tured inthe fresh­ness of the moment, this Pod­cast cap­tured by Chris Saad of Particls. Dis­cus­sion boards on the topic are inter­est­ing to read.

Another essence is that people’s online and digital life is real. It is a part of generation-y iden­tity. The base-level mor­als and eth­ics still apply; and prob­ably more so in a world that is flat and always on.

• Life in Chip­pend­ale, Steven Noble.
• Roy Porter: Social His­tory of London
• Eng­lish: defin­i­tion of vir­tual. Is vir­tual a pejor­at­ive? Maybe my lan­guage is a little too 1990’s

Time to get ser­i­ous on my res­ol­u­tions. Well, at least one any­way; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gad­get post­ing, and a gen­eral feel­ing that gad­gets are where it is at for non-professional pro­gram­mers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer cen­ter

Decision time: what to gad­get up? A Cricket gad­get is under­way. I am sure that one of the vari­ous national reli­gions of foot­ball will fol­low come March. For weather I can use my real win­dow to look out­side. (note: grow­ing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by look­ing through the win­dow at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyr­ics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small data­base, and ren­der­ing text smartly onto a ran­dom Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to con­fuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and down­load the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javas­cript. Easy. I have a loc­al­host web server run­ning, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, cod­ing music in the ears.

How to test out the gad­get? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of har­ness­ing your local gad­get to Inter­net Explorer and the live.com serv­ers to test out before embar­rass­ing your­self pub­licly! Hmm, seems like you can dir­ectly access the test har­ness with the cor­rectly formed URL. There are three ver­sions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gad­get test­ing Javas­cript har­nesses, Inter­net Explorer 7 and cross-site script­ing are in the midst of a con­spir­acy to stop test­ing. Time to hit the pro­duc­tion serv­ers with the code.

This post­ing on the new Gad­gets for­ums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of clean­ing up and renam­ing things as per the recom­mend­a­tions, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Fur­ther com­ment live.com gad­gets are simple to cre­ate. XML file mani­fest, or list of what’s import­ant; a CSS file to style your con­tent and the Javas­cript. This Javas­cript con­tains the logic of your gad­get which is essen­tially insert­ing HTML into the stream. It can gather text extern­ally to gen­er­ate this HTML into some­thing more inter­est­ing than a picture.

What a fun few days! I repor­ted earlier I was in the midst of Ruby on Rails. The small pro­ject is com­ing along fine. Even though I could quickly build in Python or PHP, its time to learn and immerse myself in a new lan­guage — and more import­antly, a new platform.

This plat­form is more than just code: it is also the con­cepts of ver­sion man­age­ment, agile devel­op­ment, fast deploy­ment and easy roll back.

So the configuration:

Debian-sarge: from a new base install. Added to this is sub­ver­sion for ver­sion man­age­ment, post­gr­esql for data­base stor­age. Tweaks are required to get this part work­ing and ready for Ruby on Rails.

As Debian has a strict policy for “stable” pack­ages that can be installed into their stable OS, you have to munge /etc/apt/sources.list to point to serv­ers con­tain­ing “test­ing” or “unstable” pack­ages. This causes heartache as there are all sorts of bits-and-pieces on these serv­ers that may con­flict. So frankin­stall time.

What is “frankin­stall”. I am sure the lin­guistic source is from “franken­stall” or “franken­stein”. Basic­ally, you down­load the sources, ./configure && make && make install your­self. The res­ult is a half-package man­aged deploy­ment, half source com­piled and installed — leav­ing the admin­is­trator to mas­ter the sys­tem. Thank­fully, 18 years of Unix means that this seems the best, anyway.

Then comes the myriad of con­fig­ur­a­tion files:

As I planned to deploy behind Mon­grel and Apache; I had to upgrade to Apache 2.2 (to get proxy_balancer), Ruby 1.8.5 (to get the latest Mon­grel 0.3.13.4 with Mongrel_cluster 0.2.1) and Cap­istrano for remote deploy­ment. Apart from the source, the best resource for all this text file tweak­ing is at Coda Hale’s site, with some extra double-cross check­ing from Rimuhosting’s wiki.

As I have split our Debian server’s IP into dif­fer­ent parts for secur­ity, some extra work was required on the application’s deploy­ment under Apache (essen­tially, get­ting Vir­tu­al­Hosts cor­rect) and ensur­ing that the /log/ dir­ect­ory was cor­rectly linked to the cur­rent release in the applic­a­tion deployment.

In the end, our Debian server now is a source-code repos­it­ory and applic­a­tion deploy­ment plat­form — with a mongrel_cluster for mul­tiple users behind safe and secure Apache.

So why do all this?

Today Liam is using Gary’s Mod to build a cus­tom envir­on­ment in Half Life 2. Dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion, dif­fer­ent tweak­ing I guess.

Hav­ing recently used Google Spread­sheets , and the bet­ter fea­tured Edit­Grid : I thought it best to give Google’s Writely a spin.
As a sid­e­note, I am con­tinu­ally impressed with Edit­Grid. The external Web data tool per­mits auto­mated for­eign exchange rate and stock mar­ket updat­ing. Every minute or so, there is a flash­ing in your spread­sheet as the data; includ­ing Aus­tralian Stocks, are updated. Excel­lent for man­aging a port­fo­lio online.
Back to Writely: this post is writ­ten in Writely: nor­mally I use Mars as my blog editor; and this whole “do it in the cloud” is all pretty new to me.
The data from each of these applic­a­tions: Edit­Grid, Writely, Google Spread­sheets: all live in their own clouds, and inter­chan­ging data is copy and paste from win­dow to win­dow. I also have to restart Fire­fox every couple of days as the memory use grows to 1.5Gb. And no, I have dis­abled all Fire­fox 2.0 exten­sions.
My wish is that data lived in the cloud, too. Applic­a­tions could push/pull data in a stand­ard way from the cloud. We are head­ing in that dir­ec­tion. Flickr is the almost the uni­ver­sal static image storer; You­tube the video stor­age “place”. Will an online virutal-file man­ager that ref­er­ences all these formats, no mat­ter the source, be the next ultra-cool Web 2.0 applic­a­tion?
It looks like Google is start­ing to grok: integ­ra­tion is key.

The HTML from Writely is bad. Lots of br’s; cer­tainly not XHTML compliant.

Inter­est­ing read about the future of Web Applic­a­tions; and spe­cific­ally their arche­types, by Matt Webb.

From applic­a­tion design, to applic­a­tion size, loc­a­tion and other bits.

In 1988 Mitchell Waite sent me a small paper­back to read: Ver­nor Vinge’s True Names. I was a mere, lowly Hyper­talk pro­gram­mer from Adelaide, South Aus­tralia. He was an import­ant person.

This book has stuck in the neur­ons, and now the vir­tual is becom­ing real. It really goes to show how hard sci­ence fic­tion depicts a future that cur­rent liv­ing humans will not see. Based on some work I was doing to Tricks of the Hyper­talk Mas­ters, cre­at­ing what would be now known as a “skin” over Com­puServe; the book was just sci­ence fiction.

True Names pub­lished in 1981, describes a world called “Other Plane” were people inter­act online. The premise of sep­ar­at­ing your online from your phys­ical inden­tity; and the concept of a future Sin­gu­lar­ity per­vade my per­sonal world-view today.

Thanks Mitch.

Now, what does this have to do with today?

Second Life. It’s more than the tech­no­logy; it is also about the plat­forms involved. It is also how it impacts real people: such as Dave Wal­lace. Second Life is what I visu­al­ised as “Other Plane”

Watch the first half of this video: Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv, Lang.NET Sym­posium.

The first half of the video is light on tech­no­logy; but heavy on the eco­nom­ics, and wider-world impacts of the vir­tual world. The user cre­ation rate (Write­ness in the Read/Write equa­tion) is over 60%; com­pared to the web which is less than 10%.

A key reason seems to be the eco­nomic value attached to vir­tual objects scrip­ted in Second Life. As items in the Second­Life vir­tual world are intel­lec­tual prop­erty; an item can be cre­ated, sold and purchased.

Ensur­ing that intel­lec­tual prop­erty is val­ued is going to be one of the toughest chal­lenges for upcom­ing generations.

Is the script­ing in Second Life the new HyperCard?

Boe­ing has announced they are shut­ting down their Con­nex­ion ser­vice. I won­der if the recent restric­tions on carry on lug­gage, let alone the com­plex­ity of mod­ern travel, has impacted their busi­ness plan.
Put­ting paid to my vis­ion of future Busi­ness Travel.

The world is a dan­ger­ous place, with a whole bunch of eejits. Sadly, the impact of no laptops on planes will have a ser­i­ous impact on busi­ness travel. It shouldn’t, but it will.

Many senior exec­ut­ives use this “down time” to catch up on emails and sort out their presentations/spreadsheets/reports. For many, this time is the only time execs have to be off­line. In the office, or at their des­tin­a­tion the time is spent with staff, meet­ings and cus­tom­ers. Not hunched over a QWERTY keyboard.

I think the impact on tech­no­logy may be different.

Ima­gine Busi­ness Class with a per­sonal in-seat laptop, with web browser and live inter­net con­nec­tion. As their the busi­ness trav­el­ler has their nor­mal laptop securely locked up in bag­gage, hope­fully on the same plane going to the same des­tin­a­tion, this in-seat laptop is their only means of working.

Web access to email has been around for some time. Desktop applic­a­tions on the web is emer­ging. Using such tools as forth­com­ing in Win­dows Live and Zoho may just find another niche. The chal­lenge for these vendors and IT is to securely con­nect applic­a­tions to sens­it­ive data.

Now we just need some for­ward think­ing car­ri­ers to imple­ment both high-speed inter­net and the browser hardware.

Stuff to read:

CNet Ajax Spurs Web rebirth for desktop apps

Tech­nor­ati Tags:
tech­no­logy, laptop, plane

Spent yes­ter­day at the Education.au con­fer­ence “So What’s New”, I asked myself — so exactly what is new? I must admit to slight symp­toms of intel­lec­tual stock­holm syn­drome. Agree­ing with all points of view and res­ult­ing in a mush of thoughts, and no opinion.

Is Web2.0 new? Rel­at­ively. Is the Web new? Is TCP/IP new? Are com­puters new? Is technology-augmented learn­ing new? On the short bus ride home, all I could answer is “no”. The demands on the next gen­er­a­tion is new. The gen­er­a­tion that is going to replace the Baby-boomers and Generation-X are enter­ing into an envir­on­ment and com­munity where pure “know­ledge” or rote learn­ing can eas­ily be out­classed by any­one with a mobile phone to “google” an answer. Child­hood Obesity is a furphy. It’s about Child­hood Apathy.

It isn’t about teach­ers, cur­riculum, ped­agogy, cent­ral­ised test­ing, digital divides, politi­cians or depart­ments. Formal learn­ing about indi­vidual teach­ers and how they engage with their stu­dents. Enga­ging teach­ers leave a long emo­tional memory that has long term impact. Learn­ing Mentor Apathy Breeds Child­hood Apathy.

As the token lay­man at the con­fer­ence, I kept quiet and listened and learnt. The chal­lenges for par­ents and teach­ers is very sim­ilar for man­agers of small teams: enga­ging the minds of people is no easy task.

Phil­lip Adams was the key­note, fam­ous speaker. His feel­ings in rela­tion to the dot­age of mass-media and the rising of unme­di­ated media is inter­est­ing; and the impact the web and imme­di­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion have on the oncom­ing gen­er­a­tion seems in tune with the cur­rent mood of the internet.

James Farmer: post-punk decon­struc­tion­ist (icon­o­clastic edu­ca­tion, incor­por­ated sub­ver­sion) using web2; or more import­antly, using more advanced web tech­no­lo­gies in and out of the classroom. In a multi-dimensional, non-mediated media this seems the cur­rent norm.

Annika Small: the future learner, future learn­ing of the envir­on­ment. Future­Lab in UK. Not quite sure where this present­a­tion was on about; show­ing off Xerox Parc or MIT Labs-like videos of learn­ing scen­arios in the UK. Any of these could have been cre­ated with pure paper tech­no­logy and an enthu­si­astic teacher.

Whilst in these highly abstrac­ted circles, one should be extremely care­ful not to pro­ject your per­sonal life into a debate as import­ant as edu­ca­tion. As a par­ent of a teen age stu­dent, and not here to sell “stuff” to any­one. Just to listen, absorb — and sur­pris­ingly learn. Immersed into a world of instant-ness. Liam has cre­ated a digital learn­ing envir­on­ment based on strung-together tools. Cre­at­ing con­tent, and col­lab­or­at­ing with his class­mates to get work done.

The wis­dom of enthu­si­astic teach­ers is long remembered, les­sons from rote teach­ers is soon for­got­ten. Digital tech­no­logy will rarely aug­ment a bor­ing, non-engaging teacher. This concept is touched on by Judy O’Connell, a blog­ger at today’s con­fer­ence and rep­res­en­ted by Al Upton and Immanuel College’s Kevin Richardson.

A brave and far-sighted Edu­ca­tion Min­is­ter is going to have a dif­fi­cult time mov­ing the col­lect­ive wis­dom of rote learn­ing, exams, com­pet­it­ive effort and incre­mental res­ults into per­son­al­ised learn­ing and flex­ible meas­ure­ment. I wish them well. All chil­dren have a lat­ent thirst for learn­ing; and unlock­ing this should not be con­strained by short sighted populism

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The idea was to spend the day with the illus­tri­ous Uncle Mike. In a strange coin­cid­ence on the day, we both wore blue shirts. I was merely a calm­ing and super­flu­ous “num­ber 2″ gopher. Even more stra­tegic behind the scenes, earn­ing his stripes, was Munge Brother and Life Kludger No. 3, David Wal­lace. Wel­come to the Blue Shirt Bri­gade, and the Munge Broth­ers.

A good day out, and an excel­lent way to end the first week of doing something.