Tangled up in Purple » media

Linkeracy 12 October 2008

nix — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:20:50 +0000

Test the strength of your email security – CNET check out how easy it is for someone else to recover YOUR password.

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Lifehacker’s hivemind give you the best five media converters but …

UPDATE: MPEG StreamClip from Squared Five is an amazingly excellent tool to

to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices.

This is the best tool we have ever found for converting DVD files into a format that can be used in WIndows Movie Maker.

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Have a look at Adeona to install opensource laptop tracking software. This free tool, developed by the University of Washington, will periodically send off an IP address update. If you are on a Mac laptop with an iSight camera there is an option for you as well.

According to the site

Adeona has three main properties:

Private: Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that the owner is the only party that can use the system to reveal the locations visited by a device.
Reliable: Adeona uses a community-based remote storage facility, ensuring retrievability of recent location updates.
Open source and free: Adeona’s software is licensed under GPLv2. While your locations are secret, the tracking system’s design is not.

There are some really interesting philosophical discussions about what is tracked with this software.

Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Worth a look I think.

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My own instructions for uploading and embedding video files using WordPress 2.5, 2.6

The Media of Their Times

nix — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 20:14:39 +0000

Every week a new webtool pops up. This week I watched a short video about Dabble DB which promises to combine “the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applications into a new way to manage and share your information on the web.”

Cool.

Then I read about getting back to basics and teaching kids wordprocessing skills so that they can function in a wired world. One writer went so far as to rubbish the idea of kids making movies and slideshows because that’s not what’s done in the real world.

For certain, it would be great so see more people become more comfortable with a keyboard and to be able to use more than one finger when they type. But, hey, the Intermediate school kid in this house has never been taught how to type. He can type a report or story very quickly (just like he can IM or text message very quickly).

Back to slideshows and movies. And spreadsheets and databases. And web applications.

A few months ago we hosted a couple of Canadian women from the Galileo Foundation. I can’t remember which of the women said it, Dr Pat Clifford or Dr Sharon Freisen, but the point that they made was about children being able to present in the “media of their times“.

That idea really struck a chord with me. Kids today are surrounded by all sorts of media that is very different to the media that surrounds us as adults. Have you ever watched kids’ TV and seen the way that things are presented? It’s very different to the dinner-time news that we watch. Kids magazines are really different to the periodicals that I read. Their music is different. Not better or worse just different.
This week I worked with a teacher and some great kids to make a couple of very short movies. The kids had all sorts of ideas and ways to do things. The teacher knew how to do things and how to organise and structure information. He also knew how to get the best from his kids without slowing or stopping their creativity.

Tablets in Education

nix — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:39:45 +0000

Last week New Zealand hit the edu-geek press with the news that a school in Wellington is trialling using Tablet PCs amongst their year five and sixes.

NZ Herald story

DigiOps Website

There has been lots to say about this project and about some of the dollars that are being spent on increasing connectivity and capability for New Zealand teachers and schools. Computerworld journalist Stephen Bell provided an interesting analysis of the press release information. He notes that the initiative could be a useful little earner for HP as it is one of the few vendors still selling tablet PCs.” Not quite true. There are several big name vendors selling Tablets , it’s just that many of the vendors are not well known here in New Zealand. Motion Computing? NEC? Fujitsu? And Lenovo or IBM? Toshiba? Off the top of my head …

Overall the article is a positive report about the value of putting tablets into the hands of kids and the importance of the government putting some dollars into ICT in schools in general.

Stephen Bell’s last paragraph is worthy of comment:

The children say the tablets provide for a quicker method of recording data in real-time, but say they would prefer a simple spreadsheet rather than the specially set up, but perhaps inadequately explained, database entry form provided. (italics mine)

In this case it’s not the tablet that is the issue, it’s the activity that is the problem. The kids can use the Tablet PC but are not quite sure about the activity they are doing. Surely the same issue would occur if they had been using a regular laptop or desktop computer – or even a pen and paper. So in this case it’s the design of the activity that is the problem.

Apparently there was a bit of controversy about this story:

There is little need for computers in day-to-day education. It may be nice to use Google Earth to see where you live, but Google this (or that) is not going to teach you the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.

and this:

Kids doing this kind of survey should stand outside with clipboards and pencils, and make marks on sheets of paper. They should then transfer the results to the white/blackboard. After that, they should draw, on paper, their own little bar chart showing the results and then colour it in.

And on the discussion goes.

What is being ignored here is the reason why we put kids in front of computers (on in this case, computers in front of kids). It’s to allow access to other ideas. It’s to allow data and ideas to be manipulated and shared and focussed upon. Yes, children need to do the old tally charts and construct graphs by hand. But, they don’t need to stop there. They need to be able to look at those tally charts and elegantly constructed bar graphs (and pie charts and line graphs) and identify what the data is telling them. Once a child has made a few graphs in their maths book do they need to go on forever making pretty colourful graphs? Or does it then become more important to analyse the data and develop some ideas or conclusions? And then maybe find ways to appropriately share their conclusions.
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As a new tableteer, I am interested in how they are being used in education. One of the huge advantages of a Tablet PC over a traditional desktop or even a ‘normal’ laptop is the smaller form factor and the way that it combines the best of paper with the best of digital. Sometimes a screen becomes a barrier in a discussion; the tablet, because it resembles a diary or notepad, is far less intrusive. I quite enjoy entering information using the stylus pen and it’s an amazing way to work on digital art. A lot of the time (like right now), it’s easier to type but if I am in a meeting, then I prefer to go into slate (tablet) mode and draw on my screen.

The DigiOps website says:

Brooklyn School is part of the Digital Opportunities Project, a joint initiative between the Ministry of Education and technology partners and is looking at how emerging technologies can help improve student learning. The school’s three-year project named CHaOS (Children Having Ownership of Schooling), is investigating whether pen-based technologies such as the Tablets, help increase student engagement levels and contribute towards enhancing student learning.

I am interested in the Tablet Classroom project. I hope that we continue to discuss what is happening in all of these inovative projects and actually get some hard data about whether “whether pen-based technologies such as the Tablets, help increase student engagement levels and contribute towards enhancing student learning.“

Content Sharing

nix — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 22:37:57 +0000

Andy Carvin has blogged about Jimmy Wales’ (the founder of the Wikipdeia) latest project:

He also announced a new project called Wikiversity. It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It’ll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.

This will be an interesting idea to watch develop.

In his notes from a Jimmy Wales presentation, Andy reports that the Wikipedia organisation are really concerned about quality.

“We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn’t even heard of – but I’m just teasing there.”

“We’re not there yet. We’re not as good as Britannica – yet…. So in the coming years we’re going to see a turn towards quality.”

In other surfing, I found a link to another blog called The Best Media in Life. This blog aims to show some of the gazillions of material available under Creative Commons license or in the public domain. It’s a great little site wityh heaps of links to CC texts, music and other audio.

Speaking of the Creative Commons, I have just discovered a new resource on the site They have developed new tabbed Creative Commons Search engine. Find Flickr images, use Google or Yahoo! Good stuff. This willmake it even easier to find “stuff” to use in presentations, movies and podcasts.

Conversation

nix — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:03:32 +0000

David Warlick has condensed the construct of Web 2.0 into three simple points:

1. Content is Conversation

This, I like. The conversation is strong and it is often (:) ) lucid. The media of the conversations invites even more conversation. This reminds me of something said by our Canadian visitors last week. They talked about kids publishing in the media of their times. Blogs, podcasts, v-logs, wikis … are the first web-media of our times. Who know what is going to be next.

2. Content is organizing itself

David says,

Well this is a rather melodramatic statement, meant to start a conversation about how the way that information flows is largely resulting from the behavior of its readers. Aggregators, mashups, blog linkings, and other more esoteric techniques are causing us to reshape the information environment on a global and on a personal level.

I’m not so sure about that. To organise, structure, categorise content or “stuff” requires an understanding of tagging and the basics of social networking. I think that it’s still very haphazard. Tagging is a very personal thing and many of us just aren’t that good at it. So our content becomes pretty dis-organised and often the good “stuff” is only picked up when one of the better organised conversationalists picks up on it.

3. People are connect to each other through their content

This is a great statement. I’m not sure if he wants “connected” or “connecting” but I love it. Our content defines our connectors and our connections.

And so communities are built.