more cool tangible

Tangible activities.

Some times I remember I have a great job.  This is a draft video I've made to explain a tangible computing activity exercise I'm working on for TU100. Yes making this counts as work and I don't know how many jobs you can say that of. 

All the vids will be professionally remade, listen closely on this one you can hearJeff in the background.

Ginger - nice when can I have the mac version

I guess you realise I'm dyslexic but I think this software is good enough to put paul out of a job. I'm a big mac user - lots of dyslexic friendly applications  on the mac.

So I'm waiting for the mac version.

Makes me all warm and fuzzy about the natural language people.

a bit cheeky

I thought I would just check out this new Amazon feature in blogger. I know Yvonne is close to getting the next edition of her book finished so I thought I might just make a link to the current version. If you follow the link I get tiny amounts of money in return - worth prostrating my self over huh!

I'm listening to Duniya to what a life saver.

Osculator

So Intereasting find over the weekend was a program that can read wimote ( wii remotes) and claims to read a wii fit plus board ( not sure ) and converts into OSC signals. 

Gives rise to insperation to a surfboard game running round the city (possibly looking for signs).

Emma Mercier, Durham University

This week we had a visit from a table top and teaching researcher from Durham university. 

Nice clear straight forward work.  here are my live notes.  

class with shared tables 

multiple 

using two tilted tables 

design and implement a new interface for education multitouch systems. 

A New pedagogy 

How do you support whole-class collaborative learning ? 

Collaboration research 

includes 

Barron 2003 Quart of interaction 

Webb 1983 Quality of explanations 

Task and group 

Status of group members cohen 1994 

Priori relationship Mell & McDonals 2000 Azmitia 

What are the outcomes, Successful Learning, Successful Products ( things made ), Successful interactions, suggessful grades, successful attitudes

Multi-touch compare with paper. 

Doing maths and history. 

Teacher, content,mode (multi-touch/paper), gender 

Maths 

Logic problems - sorting out school

Questions are like bits of paper, but can change size. 

OK- how to evaluate 

TIme on task - about same but less time wasted between tasks setting up/tearing down. 

Multi touch and paper same for history test. 

Looking at how children process 

amount of time reading aloud, or reading to self or 

Quieter kids start on outside might move to centre. 

With stuff on screen students share cards rather than owning them.  

But in this case does the multi-touch doing anything? 

Giant orrery

Watching another wizzy computer graphic that explains little, science program on the solar system and I had the idea of building a giant robotic orrery. The robots would then be free to go round in circles around the sun ( big ball/light in the middle ). Each robot is a planet. With light from sun showing day/nights inclination giving seasons, moons giving solar ellipses.


Except everything is huge ( each planet is the size of someones body).


Build it in the middle of Middelton hall in the MK centre. Or run it outside.


I'm full of talk.

More thoughts on Narrative.

As you may know I've been thinking about narrative in the context of UI for a few weeks now. What drove me to this was the ex Head of Department's notion that what made the social work case go wrong was the absance of being able to track the narrative of the developments. I think there may also be a case in complex financial accounting forensics to track the actors in a case to help elucidate the over narrative of events. I wonder if the police use anything. It would have to be big to help. 

Something like this might make a good tabletop app. 

Narrative chart

Some lovely visualisations

The big paper got in to conference so fingers crossed. Truth be told at this level its a bit of a lottery, but I don't think we could write a better paper. 

Check out http://theroxor.com/2009/12/14/30-great-examples-of-data-visualisation for more fabo examples

Jaron Lanier - You Are Not A Gadget

Basically argues that we should treat our selves as super natural ( not emulatable by a machine ).
Also wants to go against the everything for free culture of the internet. Which is funny this is precisly what Ted Nelson approached in computer lib.

Data outage

I came in this morning to find that the server had crashed ( out of memory ) over the weekend. I've restarted the server.

We now have the feed back on the paper ( I must finish reading ).