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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Best wishes for health and happiness for all during 2009.
NASA’s 