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 ).

screen writing software

Ruth came back talking about a friend who wants to get on writing her novel and that got me to thinking about software for narative writing.

I have a look at a number of screen writing apps and found them quite interesting. I was thinking about how similar novel/script writing is to thesis writing - you have to keep a lot in your head. You have to keep notes and keeping non physical notes help.

1. The key feature is outlining. 
1. This highly top down approach strikes me as a bit odd in an industry which regards its self as creative. I think this top down only approach reminds me more of software engineering than unlimited creative 
2. The most important feature is export format
1. looks to be key, again you would think that getting the format output would be the least of the problems but no it looks to be what people mostly use the software for. 
3. Many have a card sorting section 
1. this is just a 2d version of the outlining
4. Most of the apps have some kind of library/reference section to hold additional material  
5. Most apps help you keep track of words used. 

Some of the apps have interesting additions

• Moive Outline has a number of interesting additions 
• Feeling factors a graph showing some aspect ( action, conflict, tension ) and how it changes over a section 
• A character section which tracks the personal arc on a scene by scene basis 
• using four questions 
• what does x need in this step 
• what does x get from this step 
• what conflict or dilemma  does X face in this step 
• how does this step move X's story forward. 
• a profile section which has a number of questions and an interview zone
• A relationships which plots the relationships ( by time I'm not sure)
• A todo list - This I've see this in netbeans and eclipse 
• Spotlight - which pulls all the dialog of X together so you can check the phrase of voice. 
• Scrivener is a mac program which handles the outliner stuff
• Has a nice way of working with fragments you can then reoganise   
• Nice snap shot mode. 
• Fullscreen mode 
• I wonder how many programs ( pages, and now scrivener ) have this full screen mode for when your concentrating on something. 

My problem is that with this software we still get strangely awkward plot lines - Tomb Raider, Sky Captain being my favourites.

Things I would like to see 

1. Something to help you generate people - suggest names, identities, back ground plots possibly lots of stock pictures to help form a mental image.
2. Something to help generate locations 
1. either cities, landscapes, rooms, feelings  
3. Something to interupt the casual flow of the plot 
1. perhaps the machine automatically adds in cards into the script which challenge the writer to throw away some thing. Perhaps the machine adds in things like 'the protagonist is a woman' or 'Incorporate river into the plot' or 'your hero is guilty'. Perhaps you see an evocative picture of something - a large tree. See the very excellent trvropes 
4. Something to help with language 
1. perhaps substitutes words or has some notion of the kinds of language a person might use. Perhaps has a dictionary for each person which limits the words they might know
2. I like the notion of having access to a good dictionary of similar words - pages and Word do this well enough. 
5. I guess what I might be looking for is the textual equivalent of the photo shop filter. You apply a filter to the narrative and the machine alters it in some random way and you evaluate it looking for inspiration. 

1. Storyworld  works quite nicely ( but its paper )  it has Propp like characters/events 
6. Character renaming - so if you change something like name/sex/nationality the software can go through substituting requires a link to the original charater rather than text.
7. Narrative arc - 
1. This for me would be a visualisation which lets you see each character and how they interact in each scene. 
2. A large character by character time line
3. Like a visual Vladimir Propp
4. The idea is to look for inconstancies in the plot 
8. Reading age check - for children's novels guesses the reading age 
9. A synomyn check - looks for and underlines words which are spelt correctly and sound the same as the real world 
10. A text to speech facility like Narrator which lets you listen to your dialog with two ( or more ) voices which lets you test your dialog out.
11. Lots of ways to look at things in new ways. Similar to the feeling facors in plot above. 
1. For example have lots of diffrent types of paper/fonts and get a notbook printed out look. 
2. 
   

All in all it makes you wonder what they do to come up with a plot for a visual effects intensive film. The highly non visual elements of the software makes you wonder. 

re-reading this I'm starting to wonder if this has anything to do with the inability to see the narrative in details for the the child protection people ( from A previous post ).  Also how we can track narrative while looking through large amounts of forensic document data ( I problem I've heard about and blogged about before too ) How can we best illustrate over all narrative in addition to text ? 

Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on CBC in 1968

One of my interests is how/if we are made by technology how does it change our view of the world and our selves. I've been watching these and enjoying them immensly.
Interesting the notion of the pre/post TV generation which has resonances with the pre/post Internet generation ( I've heard them called digital natives).
Lovely to see prime time television from a point when people can say Faustian or Existential.


Violence is the search for identity.






McLuhan 'to select is to distort' so quote-alisious.
'All science and technologies are extensions of our own bodies' is another apt one.