Since we started playing around with Create-a-Scape at Sheffield East CLC, I’ve got a geeky thrill at the possibilities afforded by augmented reality. It combines 2 areas of interest for me; spatial awareness (or spatial literacy) and mobile technology. There’s something quite exciting about adding layers of meaning and interaction onto the real world to get people interacting with it and each other. Create-a-Scape was great but an idea ahead of its time. We never really found a mobile device that would host it reliably and the amount of time and effort we had to expend on getting it to work was immense. I remember one geography teacher in Sheffield who was desperate to try it but threw in the towel after the frustrations reached critical mass – a real disappointment for him and us.

Finally, though the technology is emerging into the light. It’s still early days though. I’ve been having a bit of a play with a number of apps for the iPhone;

• Junaio,
• Wikitude and
• Layar (in conjunction with the Hoppala developers’ tool).

They all provide a similar function – point the camera in different directions and you see icons attached to real world locations: points of interest or POIs. These can be clicked to link to web pages or media. This information can be viewed by channel so you can separate information according to theme (e.g. culture, architecture, shopping etc). Junaio has more of a social approach where you can add your own locations fairly easily and share them with a network of friends, announcing them via Twitter.

Junaio in Action

The other apps are more delivery platforms with less scope for creating your own content but using Hoppala was a reasonably easy first step in creating my own Layar layers (although, not for the feint-hearted).

They are worth a play with but I think the next generation of AR is going to be a lot more interesting.

I found the current crop of apps quite clunky to use. The main issue was overload of information. In a location that has many POIs it can be difficult to read all the text on them and selecting the desired one for viewing.  I had to spend a bit of time trimming out channels on Wikitude as it assumed I wanted to find a hotel room (of which there seem to be lots in Newcastle!)- personalising the POI’s shown was a repetitive task.

The other factor is that it’s difficult to relate what you are seeing in AR to the real world in dimensions other than distance. Also,  distance is represented still isn’t intuitive. I can grasp that a particular landmark is south from my position and it might tell me it’s 500m away but actually navigating towards that point is tricky and requires checking a traditional  map display.

As such, tools like Google and Bing Maps still have the edge for me.

Also, the actual response time of the phone when pointing in different directions leads to a slight lag in the POIs catching up which got a bit frustrating.

Plus, you do look a bit of an idiot waving the phone around at eye level!

Of more interest is the development of visual search with apps like Google Goggles (not available on the iPhone yet.) With this you can point your phone at certain objects and it will identify it and search for information. Link that with location-aware capabilities and that provides a much more useful form of AR.

I’m also intrigued by apps like the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum. This overlays historical images of London over your live view, giving you a window on how locations looked through in the past. I’ve not had a chance to try it out in London yet but I’m looking forward to it. It would be great if this sort of thing incorporated audio as well as visuals (something which Create-a-Scape was designed to do). Have a look at History Pin for a non-mobile, beyond London version of this.

There’s the whole other area of AR tagging of objects using QR codes to add extra layers to things like text books and museum exhibits but that’s something I hope to have a look at later.

The growth in location aware stuff is really exciting (and not without risks). I think the opportunities for informal learning, participation and breaking out of institutional walls could offer real educational benefits. It will be interesting to look back on this in a year’s time to see how much has changed.

Have a read of Nick Shackleton-Jones’ vision of the near future.

madamepsychosis - by-nc-nd

Over the last 2 days I’ve been following the tweets from the #bectax (link) and #gbl10 (link) events. It’s a great if slightly frustrating way to keep up with goings-on (frustrating ‘cos it makes you wish you were there).

I’ve yet to deliver a presentation or workshop where there is an active  backchannel and don’t have any planned yet but the thought of it does make by blood run cold rather.

These are my current thoughts about it which I wanted to capture and then possibly revisit having experienced it properly.

Why I don’t like the idea…

• Paranoia – I remember making soto voce snarky comments about a lecturer (his name was Peter Cundill) during a session he was running while I was a snotty under-grad. I was showing off and he was particularly unhappy about it. I’m ashamed of it now because I know how that sort of behaviour would affect me. To feel like a whole audience is having a discussion about you and your message whilst your doing it I think would throw me right off my concentration.

• Control – this is especially true about presentations where the twitterfall is visible behind the presenter. If I’m putting together a presentation I spend a lot of time getting the visual side as stripped down as I can. If the audience want to follow what is happening in the backchannel then by all means they can follow it on their own devices. But unless I say otherwise the podium is my space and I want to control the message that is delivered from there.

And now for the other side…

Why I love the idea…

• Feedback –  What a fantastic motivator to make your presentation the best it could possibly be! My aim would be to get tweets that were agreeing, disagreeing, offering alternatives, building ideas etc. What I wouldn’t want to see is comments highlighting a weak presentation style. I know I’ve delivered poor presentations in my time and yet the feedback from delegates is very complimentary and polite. People who haven’t appreciated I suspect have chosen to remain silent and anonymous (at least to my face!). The backchannel appears to be fearless even though it’s not necessarily anonymous.

• Interaction – OK, I mentioned my need for control before but I love engaging audiences and getting their thoughts. With Twitter you have an amazing tool for doing that in a much broader way than by raised hands and voices alone. I hope I would be brave enough to open up questions to the backchannel. If I was watching a presentation like that I think I would be really engaged.

• Networks – A perusal of the backchannel comments after an event is a great way of finding out the individuals who have a real interest in the topic you were discussing and that’s a great way for establishing those links.

• Engagement – I’ve heard some people argue that if people are tweeting during a presentation they can’t be concentrating on it. You could say the same thing about taking notes in that case! With Twitter people can take notes in a much more socially constructive way and that is likely to make your presentation MUCH more effective anyway.

So, on balance I think I like the idea providing I can keep on my toes as a presenter!

The most exciting thing about it is that it turns a presentation into much more of a social event. To some extent that means that the training I had on how to be a good presenter is gradually becoming obsolete – that was based much more on the one to many delivery model.

I also think it makes a conference hall a much more honest environment where people are able to express themselves in a way that they perhaps didn’t on their paper feedback forms.

Whether I’ll still believe that after having gone through the experience remains to be seen!

Image - gordon2208 cc on Flickr

It struck me earlier this week how much of a role technology has played in helping us with our move to new jobs in Newcastle. Some aspects were fairly bland but others have been a little more interesting. I thought I’d itemise the different ways and then draw some tenuous conclusion as I usually do. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Getting a job

Using Google Reader to keep tack of job adverts from various sources – There was a lot of irrelevant stuff to wade through but that may be down to how well I configured my searches. I didn’t want to narrow this down too much in case something came out of leftfield that looked interesting. It was the rss feed from Newcastle Uni that threw up the Netskills job.

Twitter - part of researching the role and the organisation was to start with the website and read around it but more useful was actually following the Netskills employees on Twitter. This did feel a bit like stalking initially and I was a bit cautious about what impression I was giving through my own Tweets when they started following back. One of the most important things about jobs for me is the people I’d be working with so this was an opportunity to see whether I thought I would fit with the general feel of the place. It have me a window on Netskills that more traditional research methods couldn’t have done. Twitter was also useful for getting my networks opinions on the topic I was given for the presentation.

Blogging - Candidates were asked to provide a sample of their work as part of the interview process and to bring it along to the interview. My work at the CLC involved only a little bit of materials writing and I didn’t think this gave a good account of what I was capable of. I had a few videos I’d produced, a podcast or two and actually the blog itself is a good representation of me as a learner. So I created a showcase page on this blog and embedded the various bits of meida hoping that it demonstrated I was at least competent with the technology. It was like making a mini e-portfolio.

Prezi - oh Prezi, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways… Both my wife and I had to do interviews with presentations, both of us used Prezi and both got the jobs. See my effort here – obviously you miss out on the sparkling repartee that went with it (and the grilling I got from the Netskills audience afterwards) but it’s a flavour.

Finding a house

So you can search for properties on the internet. Yada yada, so far so normal.

Google Streetview – as we’ve been moving to an area we’re not familiar with and that involves a 2.5 hour car drive to get there having Streetview as a way of getting a closer look at the outside of a property has been invaluable. I’ve always been frustrated that brochures for houses never give you an clear picture of the surroundings but with Google’s various mapping tools you can see how a house fits into the neighbourhood, proximity to services, noise sources etc.

iPhone/iPod Touch – I’ve jumped on the iPhone bandwagon the the last week but had access to an iPod Touch from work for the majority of time we were looking at properties. Aside from the fact that checking emails has been a cinch Rightmove have a nice app for doing quick property searches where you can see the pics of the property, find it on the map and request further details. Viewing a house yesterday having the iPhone to take pics and video of the rooms has been a useful aide memoire.

Choosing a school

Oh the shame of it. Most of our research on schools was done via the OFSTED site. I felt like a complete Judas! The schools’ websites varied so much in quality and content that it made it difficult to draw comparisons. A decent school website can give some indication of their approach to ICT and other things and for people coming into the area from outside with few contacts and local knowledge it’s a nice starting point.

Social Networking – On the subject of local knowledge using Twitter and Mumsnet to help us navigate the confusing set up for mid-year admissions in Newcastle City Council was a boon.

And so the the contrived moral of this tale…

Organising this move up to the North East would have been perfectly possible without all this technological input but having these tools at ones disposal can really improve the way you build connections,  the range of choices you have, remove some (not all, definitely not all) of the anxiety and also introduce a bit of fun into the proceedings.

…and that is one of the reasons why I think it’s worthwhile me helping people become more confident with technology.

York Minster

I was invited last week to support a creative session at the Sheffield Primary Headteachers’ Conference in York on digital imaging. It was run by Rob Walker from Playing for Success with me tagging along and throwing in my tuppence-worth.

I thought I’d share the results with you.

The aim was to demonstrate what could be achieved with a few simple guidelines on taking decent pics and different technologies. It would have been nice to give the Heads that took part a chance to try out the technology but in the end we only had 1.5 hours, enough for a pleasant, sunny walk round York.

We did a rudimentary Photostory of the best images the delegates took for the evening meal but I spent the following morning negotiating with BT Openzone to create the following (they’re just speedy sketches to get the delegates thinking so don’t expect high production values…

Animoto – an quick and easy way of stitching photos and video together with a bit of text to create something really engaging. See my previous post on Animoto for more.

Click here to see the video…

@Trip – we took along a wee GPS tracker mentioned previously so we could log the photos in Google Maps and upload to the @Trip server.
Click here to view (embedding isn’t really effective).

Photosynth – This was the first time I’d tried it and for a Microsoft product I was pleasantly suprised. But as Andy Bush, a colleague pointed out, what’s the educational benefit? Maybe not much by itself but as part of a larger project it makes for a high impact element. All you have to do is take as many pictures as you can of one location from plenty of different angles, upload them and some fancy algorithm stiches them all together. Frightfully clever! You can view it as a slide show or “walk around the semi-3D environment.

Needs Silverlight to run.

Soundscapes – we didn’t get a chance to do this due to time constraints but consider sending students out with sound recorders instead of cameras. When they get back to base, use Audacity, Garageband or Myna to create an abstract soundscape using loops and effects. The results may be a little “out there” but it’s a great way to shift your perspective on a location by thinking aurally, not visually.

Here’s a soundscape created by some Y9 students a while back in a location in Sheffield. I’ll send a Wispa bar to anyone who can correctly identify the location!

Adobe Premiere CS3

Clip Notes has been available with Abobe Premiere since CS3. I saw it demo’d when CS3 was launched 2 years ago but haven’t got around to trying it out till now. There are plenty of possibilities for using it in education.

In short, Premiere allows you to render a movie to Quicktime or Windows Media and embed it in a pdf. When you share the pdf it allows you to play the video and add annotations at specific points in the movie. Many users can add comments so you can build up a converstation about a particular video clip.

Have a look at this example I’ve put together using a video I produced for one of our schools last year.

Click to open Clip Notes

 You can download Adobe Reader here.

The comments sometimes zip past quickly but use the goto buttons and pause to catch them.

The main purpose of the tool is so that video producers can get a client’s approval on a cut of a video prior to final production but it would work equally well in an education setting. What about:

• Media – students can get detailed feedback from a teacher on their assembly, rough and final cuts before they hand the work in. Also good for digital video projects in ICT.
• PE – students can film a phase of play (in rugby for example) and then analyse patterns, outcomes and choices players could have made.
• History – download a clip from an archive site and then ask students to comment on aspects of the film.
• Science – film a reaction or process maybe using time-lapse or super slo-mo and get students to comment on what is happening.
• And so on…

It does require someone in school to have access to Premiere CS3 or 4; not cheap so it isn’t a universally accessible option (look for en educational supplieras there is a discount). Also, it’s not easy to use this online so it requires cumbersome saving and exporting on the school network.

Nevertheless, as Adobe Reader is free and already has a wide user-base it makes it a useful tool for education.

NOTE TO SELF: Include instructions on how to make it, fool!

• In Premiere, make sure the correct sequence is highlighted in the timeline
• Click on File – Export – Clip Notes
• Use the following screen to change the compression settings (QT or WMV, screen size, frame rate etc) click OK.
• Choose a location for the file
• Click Save

A further point is to make sure that you’re not running another pdf reader. Only Adobe Reader has the video codecs embedded in it (as far as I know). See my reply to Catherine’s comment below.

I thought it needed sharing. Please have a look and let Catherine know what you think.

Now, go and look at the Sheffield South CLC blog for more ideas and a showcase of the work they’re doing.