Category Archives: wwwd

Mostly stuff to do with the classroom & Teaching and learning. Posts that fit with the site’s description: “Teaching, ict, and suchlike”

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I’ve blogged before about the wonderful Hmsg Spiral Map a project that combines video, audio and google maps into a mesmerising meditative experience.

Recently I noticed that iPhoto shows the location of videos as well as audio which got me thinking a wee bit. I checked out a few exif tools and found that the location was stored in exif data in the same way as photos.

I already had made some crude tools to map walks on google maps and made an odd foray into adding sounds to the photos: burn, so though I might be able to knit together some video and maps.

After a few false starts I manage to do this:

Loch Hump Screen
A Loch Humphrey Walk

This is a webpage that shows a series of videos with a couple of maps pointing to the location the video was shot at. When one video ends the next is automatically loaded. You can jump around by clicking the numbers.It information: videos urls, locations and time shot is stored in an xml file, this is loaded by some javascript (jquery)

Bideomapfolder

The list of movies and locations are loaded from an xml file that is a very simple list:
<item><file>loch_humprey_02.m4v</file><loc>55.9323,-004.4594</loc><dc> 2011:08:02 21:27:10</dc></item>
I though xml was a good idea as it would allow reuse to display the movie in different ways. As the movies are shown the location is used to show a couple of images using the google maps static api. This first Video Map Experiment was cobbled together using a couple of command line tools (pcastaction, built into Mac OS X and ExifTool by Phil Harvey). I am not knowledgeable about shell stuff but it can often help do interesting things and once you figure it out is easy to reuse.

After a couple of tries I’ve made a Supercard project that sorts this all out, here is what I did to make the A Loch Humphrey Walk

  1. Take videos on iPhone
  2. Trim on iPhone
  3. import into iphoto
  4. Drag videos from iphoto on to a field in a SuperCard project I’ve made.
  5. Click a button on said project which:
    1. Asks me to choose a folder
    2. Gathers locations & date/time from the video files
    3. Makes a copy of videos in the folder, shrinking file size & dimensions (this take a few minutes)
    4. Creates an xml file & and index.html file in the folder to show videos

Video Maps.sc45

I then upload folder to server via ftp.

Getting the JavaScript stuff sorted out took me a wee while and quite a few wrong turnings, but it all seems to work on both Mac & Windows with FireFox, Safari or IE now. I started to write about the gory details in this post, but decided to split them off and I’ll put them up somewhere else sometime soon. I also hope to make the Supercard Project available for anyone who is interested. (If you want to see an early version let me know)

I hope this could be an interesting way to tell a story, record a trip or describe a place. I’d be interested to know what other folk think.

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What has Twitter and Facebook done for me? Nothing, really. Other than perhaps attending to my emotive needs of being connected to people when I’m traveling and whining.

Social media=emotions.

Blogging/writing/transparent scholarship=intellect.

Put another way, Twitter/Facebook/G+ are secondary media. They are a means to connect in crisis situations and to quickly disseminate rapidly evolving information. They are also great for staying connected with others on similar interests (Stanley Cup, Olympics). Social media is good for event-based activities. But terrible when people try to make it do more – such as, for example, nonsensically proclaiming that a hashtag is a movement. The substance needs to exist somewhere else (an academic profile, journal articles, blogs, online courses).

via elearnspace › Losing interest in social media: there is no there there

I seem to be collecting stuff like this of late. It parallels my feeling about open VS closed technology. Unfortunately my blogging has never been deeply thought out or philosophically substantial.

Twitter and G+ have been valuable to me in getting specific answers to problems and leading me to interesting posts and I do think the emotional connections (even if the emotion is laughter) are important.

I started writing the above a few hours ago, stopped for dinner and some TV. Since then John Connell picked it up: Putting Social Media in their Place and Jen Deyenberg posted Writing 140 Characters at a Time pointing out some valuable uses of twitter.

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Last week at work (North Lanarkshire Educational ICT & Technical Services) we were being supported by Oggy East of Semantise, who is helping update the setup of our school websites. Oggy is an expert in FirstClass which NLC uses for emails, collaboration & school websites.

My colleague Ian suggested that Oggy entertain me with his interesting career path. This passed through doctoral study, pub management and educational technology.

At one point Oggy started telling me about an educational project he had worked on. This involved collaboration between pupils in the UK and France. They used text based chat to talk (alternating languages), translated each others horoscopes, passed audio and video files back and forth helped each other produce CVs and more. As I was becoming more and more excited about the project Ian suggested that Oggy tell me when this happened: 1998.

Edutalking

I got Oggy to record a quick podcast about this project for EDUtalk which you can listen to: Dialogue 2000 Electronic Village

Oggy is also involved in the wonderful Not School 1. I got a podcast out of Oggy about this too: Not School – EDUtalk.

Repeating

The fact that Oggy was successfully involved in the kind of project that is still seen as innovative 14 years later is telling. I remember in 2005 feeling very proud of jumping of the blog wagon with my class the previous year and meeting Peter Ford who had pupils blogging several years before that. We had a flowering of blogging in Scotland in 2006 and this year pupil blogging has been hitting the headlines again.

What is interesting is that quite often these bit of innovation don’t seem to be connected, wheels are reinvented.

I wonder when ideas of audience, purpose, collaboration and connection using technology will really become part of the mainstream. Perhaps Glow, with all is faults, is driving this in Scotland. I certainly hope so.

1.I became aware of not school when I went to Be Very Afraid and was very impressed by the Flash skills of the a Not School ‘student’. ↩

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I’ve updated a work mackbook to the new Lion OS and thought I’d post about a couple of interesting things. I posted them to google+1 as a wee experiment and am repeating them here.

Fiona A Scottish Voice in Lion

You can download extra voices from the speech system preference pane. Fiona is a Scots one and quite nice. The speech seems pretty nice to me. Even without upgrading to lion you can select text and send it to itunes as synthetic speech using the service menu. You can also, as I did for the e use applescript to save an aiff file of synthetic speech. I’d I’ve not used this in teaching, but could think of a few way that it might be useful…

Dictionary Access

I frequently access the dictionary on mac os by holding command-control-d over a work, it pops up a wee box showing the dictionary definition. In Lion you double click with 3 fingers and the box is a bit nicer:

QuickTime Pro in Lion

After installing Lion I was disappointed to find the QT pro had vanished from my Utilities folder (Where it was moved by Snow Leopard). Tried to download and install from Apple but got the wrong installer. This is the right one. After the install QT picked up my pro registration key.

The New version of QuickTime X has improved over its Snow Leopard version but still lacks some of Quicktime 7’s features. I was very relieved to find out you could install the old one again. QT 7 can be used for quick & dirty editing and does some things 2 that I can’t do any other way (without buying & learning some other piece of software).

1. I’ve been playing with google+ for a bout a week. Simple and straightforward to use, the main dislike is the difficulty of getting information out of it at the moment. No RSS. I was hoping just to be able to pull the 3 lion post in here, or at least embed the video, but I needed to re-upload them to vimeo. ↩

2.For example you can have a movie with more than one picture in picture movie added to it. You can’t do this from iMovie which is limited to 1 but you can do it quite quickly with QT 7 pro. for example the end of this movie. QT7 also is very applescriptable, many of the features are missing fro QT X’s AppleScript dictionary. I’ve made a few quick scripts that have really sped this up. ↩

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What are all of the terms and genre defying categories which are emerging – a few I’ve collected and researched:

Digital Story – a generic term for stories produced and shared by digital means.  It tends to include image and audio, not just a word processed version of the story.

Transmedia – Stories which cross genre, medium, and type.  For example a television show which has some of the plot developments play out on a website, or in a game.   The term was described by Jenkins (2003) in his work Transmedia Storytelling who looked from the perspective of Hollywood and the media and how they can build a depth of character development and use it as a marketing opportunity to build a franchise.

via writing.trailsoptional.com

Early post from Jen Deyenberg’s new blog Writing and the Web which will collect her research, ideas, and inspirations for the last stage of her Masters in Education (announced here: Writing and the Web « Trails Optional)
I am looking forward to seeing posts pop up in my reader.

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These scenarios have been developed with leading social scientists to provide insights into the different possibilities that might face education in the future. They are not predictions. Instead, they are stories of three different possible futures, imagining how the world could look after 2025, in order to challenge assumptions and stimulate thinking about the present.

They are structured around three potential worlds, each built around a different set of social values – increasingly individualised, increasingly collective or increasingly contested approaches towards life and education. These are the final versions of the scenarios. Use them to formulate robust future plans, to promote reflection and to give yourself greater confidence in your strategic thinking.

via beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk

Lots of food for thought.

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With more open tools it is easy to gather, mix and redistribute information, blogs, wiki updates, podcasts, flickr, del.icio.us etc. can all be mashed with existing tools or a bit of scripting. Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

Or am I missing something?

via johnjohnston.info

I posted this originally in 2007: Facebook – John’s World Wide Wall Display getting something of the same feeling about Google Plus but perhaps it is early days.

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I’ve been aware of the Primary Games Arena 1 for a while. I only noticed yesterday that it had an API The api lets you search for games and returns some xml. XML makes me think of Glow 2. Glow handle xml quite nicely, unfortunately for most teachers this needs a knowledge of XSL, which I do not think is common. I’ve managed in the past to figure out way of displaying RSS using XLS so though I’d try to do the same with the Primary Games search results. It turned out to be pretty straightforward as the xml returned by Primary Games is nice and simple.

Displaying a set of Primary Games in Glow

Glow xml Webpart Empty

You use the xml webpart. This part has 4 main fields: xml link, xml editor, xsl link and xsl editor, of these you only use 2, using either the link the direct editor field for both xml or xsl.

The way it work is that the xml is loaded and modified by the XSL. The XML webpart can be usefully used to display any html fragment without any XSL at all, but in the case of RSS or xml from the primary games arena it need to be formatted.

For example the url:
http://primarygamesarena.com/
searchapi.php?q=money
in the XML Link field produces an XML list of games tagged money. Clicking that link will show you what you would get in glow if you do not use XSL, not pupil friendly at the moment. We can use XSL to transform this. As a first test I used this xsl in the XSL Editor field.

This produces this: (click for flickr page):

primary games in glow

On the glow page the images launch the Primary games page with the game in an iFrame.

It then becomes simple to repeat this for other searches and give pupils sets of games, just replace money in the xml link with another word.

We can also pass around webparts already loaded with the xml address and the xsl and these can be imported onto a glow page. Here is a the money one. You could import that onto a glow page and just change the search string at the end of the url to get a different set of games to display.

Taking it a bit further

After doing the above brief test with glow I asked @johnmclear, one of the folk behind Primary Games, if there were any other parameters that could be used on the search, this is what I got back:

johnmclear
John McLear

@johnjohnston can add it. Email me an ideal request/response
Sat Jul 09 12:19:28 +0000 2011 from HootSuite captured: Mon, 11 Jul 11 16:11:04 +0100

A few hours, a couple of email and some tweets later John had updated the Primary Games API to include subject, year, keystage, topic, unit and gametype!

This man we can now use, for example: ?q=money&y=3&g=Strategy as a query and get all the money games suitable for year 3 (=primary 4 in Scotland) that are categorised as Strategy games.

Of course the API can also be used outside Glow on the web via php. Here is a page that lets you search and display games: Primary Games Arena API and here is the Source.

I’ve extended this a little to create a page that can search and display games in the same way but also supplies an embed code to embed the code on webpages, blogs or glow.

Primary Games API with Embed codes

To embed in a blog you just need to switch to the html view in the editor and paste in the code. In Glow you can use an XML webpart and past into the xml editor field.

Simulation

Can you organise the planets in our solar system?

The embed code here was edited to make the background yellow.

Of course you could simply create a screenshot of a game page, upload it and make it a link, but this is quicker and loads the games inside the Primary Games ecosystem this has a nice wee toolbar allowing pupils to gain achievements by playing games, rate games anonymously and get links to other games. You also get the advantage of the folk at Primary games having already categorised a huge range of games suitable for primary aged pupils. Many thanks to @johnmclear for the extremely quick additions ot the API.

Footnotes:

1. Primary Games Arena run by Primary Technology an company who run a fleet of commercial and free ICT services for primary schools. ↩

2.When Glow was introduced I was one of the many folk who were very disappointed that Glow did not have tools for handling RSS: At the Scottish Learning Festival, on RM developer was asked about RSS and answered, ‘What is RSS?’! It turns out glow did and does support RSS and XML in general. ↩

The footnotes are a wee experiment to make my posts a little less verbose, I used a technique describe on Daring Fireball: About the Footnotes.

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I’ve been dipping into the stream of fun and information on the University of Mary Washington New Media Center Digital Storytelling Summer of Oblivion online course. Organised by Jim Groom it would be pretty hard to describe but it is producing lots of interesting stuff. A great way to spend a lot of time following links to posts that range wide.

Among the various weird and wonderful posts I found a series of website/blogs from the University of Mary Washington New Media Center which give a good introduction to basic Digital Media Tools:

I’ve also created a la list of these links on linkli.st: Digital Media · linkli.st. linkli.st is a service that make it easy (bookmarklet) to create & curate lists of links.

Update (a couple of hours later): I just found a wiki I put together last year covering some of the same ground: Digital Media.