Get Dropbox

Go to getdropbox.com now and get it if you regularly work on more than one computer. Dropbox does one thing really well, which is share and update versions of files among different computers. You get a folder at your user account level on your Mac or Windows computer and you drag an file you want to have access to at your other computer/s. Sure, you could easily do this by emailing it to yourself or uploading it to a web site of some kind, but this just takes all file types, up to 2 GB free, and makes the task so darn easy. Just log in to your other computer and after a little spinning of arrows the contents of your dropbox on that computer are updated. And if you are at a public computer, just go to getdropbox.com, log in, and download what you need. Seriously, get it.

Fair Use Explained Clearly

This document, "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education," is an excellent resource for understanding Fair Use. It puts the power and responsibility of choosing appropriate media for instructional use in the hands of the educator as the law intends instead of making us feel like we are getting away with something by using any media. It also makes clear to me that in cases where I have felt like students' use of media wasn't covered by fair use I was right. "...students may use copyrighted music for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs simply to exploit their appeal and popularity." The original work needs to be repurposed or transformed in such a way that its use contributes to an educational goal.

Prensky, Digital Natives/Immigrants

I noticed a point in Prensky's "Digital Natives Digital Immigrants" that was similar to the way I'm thinking of the Learning Wiki. To create software to teach engineers how to use a new type of CAD software Prensky had the developers and professors (content specialists) "create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded." The skills were not to be organized by concept or vocabulary or in a certain sequence, but by practical application. This is how I envision information being organized in the Learning Wiki.

Point about Identity in Cyberspace

Reading Lawrence Lessig's "Code Version 2.0." There's a good point about identity on the Internet. "While in real space...anonymity has to be created, in cyberspace anonymity is the given." On the Internet your identity is built from the IP address up. What you add to your IP adds to the picture of your identity. Of course, the main point of the book is that commerce, the law, and government have created an architecture of the Internet that prevents you from accessing many, if not most, spaces without significant creditials that certify who you are.

Learning Wiki

In a constructivist learning environment providing sufficient support for students to be successful is tricky. Since students are working on solving unique problems at varying levels of difficulty the teacher can't predict very easily exactly what information they will need to find their solutions. In addition, the teacher can't, and shouldn't, be there to help every student with every problem. I propose developing a learning wiki as a means of providing some of this scaffolding. This wiki doesn't have a predetermined structure, nor specific predetermined content. The students will decide and maintain both. My hope is that when they encounter a problem they will be able to find possible solutions in the learning wiki. The key to making this successful is for students to update the wiki with their solutions as much as possible and create the structure of the wiki around the problems they faced. More on this later.

Robots in Different Cultures

I've been listening to the robotics podcasts on Talking Robots. Dario Floreano spent about 2 years until August 2008 interviewing top researchers in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. The podcast archive is a gold mine of information for someone wanting to get a leg up on what the current trends are in the field. One theme mentioned in several interviews is the different levels of acceptance of robots by the general public in different countries. One interviewee, I wish I could remember who, summed it up by saying "The Japanese embrace robots in their daily life, Americans are afraid robots will take control of their lives, and Europeans think robots will take their jobs." I guess for my part I hope to dispell my students' fear of robots taking over by teaching them that robots are only ever doing what they've been told to do. The key is understanding what that is. Then you know what you're dealing with.

Storytelling Alice: Looking Back

My 7th grade students have just finished their animation projects. In the end I decided to collaborate with the science teacher and have the students apply what they were learning about genetics in that class in making these stories. The assignment was to portray two groups (families) of characters in two scenes and have a character's genetically inherited trait explained in some way. One family had to be human and the other non-human (animals, aliens, robots, fairies, etc) and while with the human family the traits had to be real, they could make up the non-human characters' traits. They came up with some interesting solutions to integrating scientific information into a narrative. A few students set the story in a classroom in which a teacher was beginning a lesson on genetics, then it would cut to a video the class was watching in which genetics were explained using animals or fairies.

So what did they get out of the project? I think they did benefit from applying the genetic vocabulary to a story of their own. I overheard many conversations trying to clarify trait types, recessiveness and dominance, and how to spell words like allele and phenotype. I also wanted to them to get some programming concepts as well, and this happened to varying degrees. I demonstrated what seemed like the most useful concepts as they began their stories and told them to use them when they felt they needed them in making their stories, like tools they may or may not need in a toolbox. I showed them the looping command, do together command, and how to create a new method. Do together was by far the most widely used, which is interesting because it gives the programmer a high degree of control over the action to a degree that would be very hard to do in most programming languages. Do together essentially allows instant multi-tasking, making that concept deceptively easy to apply in Alice. Some students found it necessary and worth the effort to make new methods. We discovered how challenging it can be to program a character that doesn't know how to kick to do so. Some students were, of course, quite lost. One big misconception a few students had was thinking they had to create a new method to make anything happen. They would create a 'stand up' method and drop a whole dialog sequence in it. They were missing the basic idea of methods as meaningful containers of instructions. Some of the students realized the possibilities for programming the camera actions and made some very exciting things happen with that. Many had to be walked through the steps to create the second scene and link the two together as described in this post. A few completely missed that idea and just started a new project when they went to create their second scene. If they hadn't gone too far I would stop them and show them how to add the second scene to the first.

Next go around I'll spend more time teaching them how to create multiple scenes. I want to create a screencast of the process so they can do it independently. I also want to spend more time practicing the commands at the bottom of the scripting panel, like looping, do together, and do in order so they have a better idea of when they will be appropriate.

I encountered few bugs after using it for 6 weeks. One was due to the wireless connection not being quite robust enough when students were saving to their network drives. A lot of students were getting corrupted projects that couldn't be opened until I updated the Dell wireless drivers on the laptops and that problem stopped. Often an animation would throw an error with the message "An error has occurred during simulation." I would go back to the script and disable the command directly after the point in the animation that the error happened to try and pinpoint the faulty code. More often than not once I found the command I had to delete it and reinsert it and it worked. It often occurred with the command "Camera fade to black" for some reason. Other than that the program was impressively reliable.

Will The White House Go Cutting Edge?

Eye-opening post about the Obama tech team trying to make sense of the antiquated technology in The White House.

Britannica Wikifies

Why?

Creating Multiple Scenes with Storytelling Alice

I just had a great week teaching 6th graders how to program 3D animations with Storytelling Alice. (See here for more about the program.) But they also taught me a lot, because there were things I couldn't figure out how to do and their discoveries put it together for me. The biggest was how to create multiple scenes. Kelleher provides a sample animation you can access in the help section that sort of explains how, but wasn't explicit enough for me to get it. So here's how:

1. First, understand that the default method, 'World.scene 1 method,' must be used as the method in which the first scene is scripted and an organizing method that will play all of the other scenes in your story.
2. Add a few objects and characters to your first scene and click 'done.' You can go back and add more later.
3. Program an action for one character in the first scene so you have something to see when you play it.
   
4. Now create the second scene by clicking 'create new scene' and call it 'scene 2.'
5. Add a character to it.
6. Now change your current scene tripod to opening scene tripod and try playing the animation. You will see that the first scene plays but the second doesn't. We'll fix that.
   
7. Up in your object tree click on the world object. You'll see the scene 1 method and scene 2 method below the tree. Drag the scene 2 method into the script area of the scene 1 method, at the bottom of what you already scripted. In this way, the actions of the first scene will play and then the second scene will follow.
   
8. Now edit the scene 2 method and before any action in the scene occurs direct the camera to orient to that scene by clicking the camera in the object tree and dragging the 'camera orient to...' tile to the top of scene 2 method's script. Choose 'scene 2's tripod' in the context menu that pops up.
9. Try playing the animation again and you'll see that the second scene now plays.
   
10. Between scenes the camera swings wildly from one scene to the next. You can direct the camera to fade out before it changes orientation and fade back in when it's pointing at the second scene so you don't see the transition.
11. If you want a title first, click the tab for the first scene in the scripting area, click the camera in the object tree and drag the 'camera show title' tile before the first action in scene 1's script.

You can program as many scenes as you want this way. The amazing revelation to me about this is that now I can see how the program allows you to direct not only the characters in the scenes but the camera, lights, and titles, giving you a lot more control than I realized. My students really took off with this once we all put it together.