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This week I have been mostly…

…writing workshops and training materials. It’s proving slower than I’d anticipated but I’m actually having to do quite a lot of thinking through the early stages and my reflective tendency means I have to mull things over for a while before taking action. The benefit of that is that the results are quite well formed. The downside is that it’s not a very dynamic process where it’s easy for others to get involved. I’m trying to achieve a better balance.

Online Activity

Being away for 2 weeks has meant I’ve been able to detach myself from the online world for a bit. I uninstalled all my twitter clients and turned off my work email just to stop me getting tempted. I realised just before I went on holiday that I’d got the balance wrong somewhere and focussing so much on Twitter was causing as much stress and unproductivity as it was helping me.

I’m going to be scaling back my use of Twitter and focussing more on blogging and reading other blogs.

This, of course, is all under review. Everything is always under review!

Year 2 as a student

I’ve enrolled for the PG Diploma year of Sheffield Hallam’s MSc in Technology Enhanced Learning, Innovation and Change (TELIC2). Really looking forward to it.

…and on a personal note

My brother’s in Japan and he and his wife had a wee boy on the 23rd August with all the punctuality of the Shinkansen (1am of the morning of the due date). I learnt that the Japanese health system doesn’t “do” pain relief. Ouch! All went well apart from that and we’ll be meeting him at Christmas.

Have you been to Dumfries and Galloway recently? Why not? We had a lovely week there. It’s beautiful and there’s plenty of stuff for kids. I highly recommend Cream of Galloway visitor centre for the ice cream and the Smuggler’s Warren play area which has to be the most inspired piece of fun-engineering I’ve ever come across. Oh, and the ospreys at Threave Castle – thrilling!

If you’re the camping kind try the Gillespie Leisure site at Sandyhills near Dalbeattie.

(BTW, the cows are Belted Galloways)

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My weekly round up of things at work and beyond

At work

Collaborative Writing

We have a major project on at work at the moment and I found myself using Google Docs properly for the first time. I’m a little late to the party.

Initially, this was working collaboratively with @sboneham (who must be sick of me mentioning him on this blog). We have a series of documents to write on a number of topics and it seemed to make sense to do this together to get an idea of a format that would work.

It was a strange experience working in realtime on the same document whilst sitting in the same room but curiously energising. My usual pace of work is quite slow and reflective so this was a bit out of my comfort zone but well worth it. It forced me to think a bit harder but also not be so precious about ideas that I was putting down; not being afraid to put down half thought-out ideas and thinking “out loud”.

I also like the stripped down interface and the simplicity of the sharing options.

AR

I did a few posts on AR in the last week. I’ve found myself  thinking like a proper geographer, about how space is used and perceived, and it made me wonder what life would have been like had I actually decided to carry on and teach it.

Affective Context Learning

I’m still thinking a lot about digital storytelling and trying to find a way of explaining the importance of emotional responses in learning. Nick @shakletonjones expanded on his idea of an Affective Context Learning model with this video which offers an intriguing answer

Proper blog post on this coming shortly…

On a personal note

Walking

I spent a rare weekend with my Dad, tackling Ben Lawers (3982 ft)and BeinnGhlas (3618 ft) on the shores of Loch Tay (see pic); the first proper walking I’ve done for about 8 years, I reckon. It was wet and windy, slow going,  visibility was down to about 20m and it was completely fantastic! I tried out the MotionX app for the iPhone while we were up there. I can’t seem to work out how to attach the pictures I took using it but at least it’s some sort of evidence that  we actually made it (the battery only lasted long enough to get to the summit and have a bit of charge in case we got into trouble).

Click here to see our route in Google Maps

Contrary to disparaging comments from my sister-in-law I did NOT update my Facebook from the top of the mountain!

It was great to spend time with Dad and I’m looking forward to doing  more Munros in the future.

Spotify ads

I love Spotify and can handle the occassional ads…but I can’t help feeling that advertising music (heavy metal) that is completely different from what I’m listening to (Elbow) is pretty counter-productive.

I’m on holiday for the next 2 weeks. Whoop!

My overall impression was that I’m not going to get too excited about this first generation but I am looking forward to what’s coming.

Watching this future-gazing video made me realise a couple of reasons why AR still has a long way to go. (WARNING: gratuitous use of Coldplay!)

I said last week that one of the main shortcomings of the current crop was that they understood the spatial environment in terms of direction and distance. In real life if we’re navigating from place to place we do it along lines (roads, paths etc) and via nodes (junctions, bus stations) and avoiding barriers (rivers, walls, dodgy areas of town). So, two things; AR needs to be able to understand maps and REALLY good AR needs to understand MY perception of space by looking at my behaviour over time and recognising my choices.

The other issue struck me when I saw how “fixed” the points of interest were in the simulation. Not only did they not have the movement latency you get with the apps I’ve had a go with but they were pointing to doorways, adhering to the surface of walls, clinging to the edges of books etc.

From a technical point of view I guess a few things need to develop for that to happen:

• Processing speeds and connection rates in devices need to be substantially quicker
• GPS positioning and directional sensing need tightening

But more importantly, the app needs to be able to see the world as I read it, a little bit like facial recognition – spatial recognition, maybe. When I look at a shop I can recognise where the door is, I can read entrance and exit signs, I can distinguish between a war memorial and a dustbin. To get AR as good as it shows in the video the app needs to be able to do that too and that is a loooong way off!

AR apps need to understand better how us squishies use and understand our environment so I withold my satisfaction and unbridled excitement until that starts to happen. (Although I still think it’s all quite cool…)

NOTE: the video was flagged up on this post from the Writers’ Gateway blog and references a really good post by David Hopkins on Don’t Waste Your Time about whether AR has a place in education.

Digital Storytelling

Most of my attention this week has been geared towards writing materials for the forthcoming Digital Storytelling workshops I’m going to be running in November. That seems quite a way off but I’m determined to put this through a few iterations before presenting it.

The main thrust of the workshop will be looking at how to capture the whole process of digital storytelling, from research through to reflection and looking at different ways of making it assessable.

I’m getting a little stuck on issues of intellectual property. I’ll be bigging up use of Creative Commons but I’m looking for some examples of best practice for crediting images used – Creative Commons have a standard format but not many people seem to be following it. The other issue is regarding students’ copyright over their own original work.

I’ve been looking through JISC Digital Media’s guidance on it but may also put a call into JISC Legal.

On a related note, I posted a comment on Mike Herrity’s blog post about using Animoto and he turned it into a guest post! <blush> The teacher it refers to is Justin Banks, head of drama at the City School, Sheffield – someone I really enjoyed working with due to his innovative ideas and willingness to experiment.

The bitter sting of rejection

OK, that’s a little dramatic but a proposal I wrote in response to an invitation to tender from JISC was unsuccessful, I learnt at the end of last week. It would have been a good project to get my teeth into.  These things happen, though. I’ll take the feedback on board and have another go when the opportunity arises.

The sweet smell of success

My Sheffield Hallam Blackboard records page shows I have officially passed the PG Cert year of my Masters and am cleared for year 2. I’m really hoping that budget problems don’t cut a swathe through our small cohort, though. We’ve had a really good group.

I’ll do a review of the 1st year soon – many interesting and unexpected things learnt.

On a personal note…

This weekend we met up with some good friends from Matlock at the National Railway Museum. It was great just being able to pick up instantly where we left off with them. I miss Matlock but it’s definitely the people I miss the most.

…and we got the keys to our new house! Whoop! It was a slightly odd day, waiting till 3pm to pick up the keys only to turn up at the property to find that the previous owners were still there…which was awkward! So, we are now the proud owners of a lovely 3 bed semi in Newcastle, about a dozen large frogs (in the garden – see pic), some of the most outrageous ad hoc shelving I’ve ever seen and a to do list as long as the street (task 1: remove the shelving!).

There’s a shiny new app for the iPhone, iPod and iPad that looks really promising: Dragon Dictation from Nuance Communications. In a nutshell, it’s a tool for dictating text which can be added to a document or linked to social networking accounts like Twitter or Facebook. It’s spookily reliable (unless you happen to be a five year old girl – it had difficulty picking up my daughter’s voice generating gobble-de-gook sentences which she found heeeeeelarious!).

Dragon Dictation in action

James Clay has done a really good post on it which you should read.

2 things really appeal to me about this app;

1. It’s reliable enough for people with motor function problems to be able to quickly create large amounts of text giving all sorts of benefits for accessibility, inclusion and social participation in education (and beyond).
2. It’s another tool that moves the smartphone away from being primarily a content delivery system. On devices like the iPhone, text entry on anything other than short snippets of information is tricky thanks to small buttons small buttons so Tweeting is fine but blogging or document writing can be quite tricky. With Dragon Dictation you can get round more of those shortcomings and contribute more.

I’m looking forward to using this in the future and it’s sister application Dragon Search.

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.

NOTE: I followed up on some of these ideas in another post shortly after.

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