This is a terrific short video of Johnny Lee’s Nintendo Wii remote controller hacks. The head tracking VR display screen application is particularly amazing and could have some powerful uses in educational games. I know of groups that are using complex technologies to achieve the same effect as this elegantly simple approach. Be sure to check out Johnny’s projects web site.
Word clouds with Wordle
I’ve just discovered Wordle, a web application that creates word clouds from any body of text. Word clouds, like tag clouds, are a collection of individual words whose text size reflects the frequency of occurrence in a given body of text. Wordle has some nice layout tools to help you create beautiful word clouds. It’s easy to make your own. Here’s a word map from my weblog’s RSS feed. It’s easy to see the emphasis of words in my recent blog posts (click on the picture to see the whole word cloud).
In the past I’ve used a more formal version of this kind of approach in the battle against plagiarism. For my module’s assessment I get students to write a dissertation and occasionally one student tries to pass someone else’s work off as their own. There are a number of applications that compare text from one source against another to look for blatant copying, but another approach is to use textural analysis that compares the linguistic style and word count of one section of a piece of work with that of another section. If you suspect a student of incorporating someone else’s work you can use this approach to spot a change a style from one chapter to another. This is a useful approach when the plagiarised source cannot be identified.
Anyway, for fun I thought I’d use Wordle to compare the word maps from the recent blog posts of three leading learning technologists. It’s interesting to see the different word emphasis. Can you guess which map belongs to Josie Fraser, Scott Wilson and Stephen Downes?
IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next
I attended a couple of days of the IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next in Birmingham, UK last week. Sheila has written up some notes. I have to say I was disappointed by the learning design session. Five years after the learning design spec was finalised it’s still a complex business using the spec and current tools to define and implement a simple interaction. I keep feeling that IMS LD was a solution looking for a problem and I haven’t yet seen anything that solves any problems I have in learning & teaching.
Anyhoo I gave a presentation on using lightweight RSS for syndicating learning resources. Old stuff but still new to some. Sorry there’s no commentary to go with the slides. If asked ’so what’ I’d ask you to look at slides 17-20 as these outline a simple approach that uses RSS as a manifest for delivering learning resources (and activities, in fact anything you can point a URL at). It’s lightweight (the ‘manifest’ lists title, description and URL to resources, not the resources themselves), has an implicit sequencing built in (simple linear), with metadata if required, and is in a format understood by many existing applications and content management systems.
WordPress on my iPhone
First post from the new iPhone WordPress application. Looks like a nice little app.
Phoenix has landed
NASA’s Phoenix lander has arrived on Mars!
Dalai Lama Bringing Meaning to Our Lives
Yesterday I was in Nottingham with my friend Kwansuree to attend a public session of teachings from the Dalai Lama. The theme was ‘Bringing Meaning to Our Lives’. His Holiness is in the UK to hold a series of meetings with political and spiritual leaders, and to bring a simple message of hope and the achievement happiness through compassion and understanding for all human beings. For these public teachings he warned the audience that if our motivation to attend was because of wanting to witness the cult of the Dalai Lama, or to receive his wisdom and solutions to our problems, then we were certain to be disappointed, ‘I am just a simple monk’, he told us at the start. That said, there is no doubt that many of the 10,000 or so in the audience, myself included, came because of the tremendous warmth and charm of the 14th Dalai Lama that adds considerable substance to his simple message.
Fireflies swarming around your web site
This is interesting.
Firefly allows visitors to a web site to point and chat. Basically a Flash overlay movie with transparent background allows contemporaneous web site visitors to point at content on the site and instant chat with each other. Chat messages are currently anonymous but I expect that will change. Messages are also transient so unless you’re there to see them posted you won’t see them although a chat history is recorded.
Dave was one of the first users to demo in public but they’re now taking beta signups so you could add the app to your site too. What will you use it for?
Critics will ask ‘what’s the point?’. Sure, being able to comment on a web site so that subsequent visitors can share comments is not new, but there’s something kinda cool about being able to do this in real time. Of course if you have a high traffic site like Dave’s you’ll get several people online at once, but for my site and I suspect many others you may be chatting alone for a while 
Burn your own RSS feeds
There are two people who probably don’t know it but to them I owe most of what I know about computer programming. One of them is Dave Winer. I learnt to program using BASIC in the early 80’s but I learnt to love programming when I discovered Frontier in the mid 90’s. Ah those were the days.
Anyhoo like me Dave feels there must be an easier way of leveraging RSS instead of using services like Twitter, so he has burnt his own RSS feed as a contingency for when Twitter is down. It makes sense of course because RSS is ubiquitous and shouldn’t need centralised services like Twitter to syndicate. Stephen correctly reminds us that finding RSS feeds still isn’t as easy as it could be (anyone know of a good way to find email addresses? Me neither yet we manage with those) but that could change very quickly if there was the demand, and of course new ways of using web data are demand driven. A special kind of search like Google’s blog search or FriendFeed or countless others could find and syndicate RSS feeds relatively easily.
I’ve recently found Feeder, an elegant way of burning your own RSS feeds for almost any occasion. It even supports iTunes podcasting extensions. It’s easy to make a feed and publish it to a variety of hosts including via FTP. The beauty of making feeds in this way is that they have a permanence that conventional feeds e.g from a blog don’t. This can be a good thing.
For example, here’s an RSS feed containing the sources I used for my recent randomly generated CD covers. A trivial example but you can do a lot with RSS as a lightweight content syndication format.
Fancy a cuppa?
If your hot beverage of choice is tea rather than coffee then head on over to the Rare Tea Company. Henrietta Lovell, the proprietor sells the most amazing teas and she’s a jolly nice person to boot, happy to chat about her selection of teas to help you make a choice. I can recommend them all but particularly special are the Jasmine Silver Tip and Oolong tea. For the single tea drinker I can also recommend buying the White porcelain tea pot and tea cup.
While you’re at it head on over to the testimonials on the web site. Yours truly somehow managed to enthuse about Henrietta’s tea right next to Angelica Huston. So you’ll be in good company for your next cuppa!