Will has a post mentioning the Wii-mote hack by Johnny Chung Lee. Lee has developed some software allowing for the use of a Wii-mote to interact with your computer in a similar fashion to an electronic whiteboard. Will's post is clear that it's not the hack that's super-impressive — although it is awesome — it's the fact that Lee has made the work available to others.
I don't think this came through clearly enough, and it's worth stating again: the project is cool not because it creates $60 white boards. It's cool because of the openness and the sharing. A state-wide rollout of Wii-mote powered whiteboards is a pipe-dream that's never going to work. We have a hard enough time deploying technology that has been tested and has training, support, and content. Giving people the ability to interact with their computer using a home-built pen doesn't add much to a lesson. With most whiteboards (Promethean, Smart, etc.), it's the additional software and functionality that's the real draw.
Another issue is that tech administrators aren't going to jump at soldering infrared emitter pens together, mounting Wii-motes to the wall, or compiling C# drivers and programs together for deployment. If you click through some of the documentation Lee posted, you'll see a note from the developer of one of the APIs saying that your bluetooth adapter may or may not work with the wii-mote. Some work, some don't. If your adapter doesn't work, get a new one. That's not the type of technology most teachers want in their classroom. It's certainly not the type of technology administrators want to deploy.
The whole project is fantastically cool. You won't hear me deny that. What's cool about it isn't that it's cheap, hard to deploy technology though. It's creative thinking, freedom of ideas, and sharing of work. It's the "maker meme" that Tom mentions. We need to be clear that this is the type of thinking we want from our students.
I recently came across a post at Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog about students exchanging XBox Live gamer tags. Vicki was concerned about allowing students to do this based on safety issues. I posted a comment pointing out that both Microsoft provides a variety of ways to make gaming safe for children. Vicki expressed interest in learning more, and that turned into an email detailing how to enable parental controls. Vicki posted that email with my permission, and I'm cross posting a slightly modified version here as well.
Stanford recently created a directory of campus blogs. Currently the contents of the directory range from academic to personal and the authors include alumni, students, faculty, and staff.
This is interesting because I recently attended a seminar on social software in business sponsored by Six Apart and Forrester. During the session someone asked dealing with people who say inappropriate things in their blogs. The response was that corporate blogs allow you to more closely monitor things that are said in a place where you can respond quickly and manage the situation better. One of the presenters quipped that we don't always know what people are doing with the technology they have access to already. Many employees use instant messenger, email, and more; all of these technologies are difficult to monitor. Schools go through the same thing.
However, when you provide a central space, you can allow for monitoring, governance, etc. Instead of searching for things across multiple other public services, you create an environment where things are more manageable.
Also of interest in the Stanford directory are the many academically oriented blogs. They're certainly something to keep an eye on as we all try to learn from each other how this technology will best work in education.
A new report published by the Urban Institute claims that "U.S. student performance rankings [in science and engineering] are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year."
This is interesting, as many educational thought leaders, business people, and public officials claim the opposite. I remain fascinated by the complex web that binds our country's economic and educational systems.
VectorMagic is a project out of Stanford that allows you to upload a bitmap image. The application then converts the image into a vector based image. The site contains a series of samples showing the results of the VectorMagic algorithm compared to those of commercial products. The results look very good. This might be a good way to rescue that horrible .gif logo you use, turning it into a better quality .eps version that is reproducible in larger sizes.
linux.com ran an article this week about a GPL licensed application called GeoGebra. Written in Java, GeoGebra is multi-platform. From their website:
What is GeoGebra?
GeoGebra is a dynamic mathematics software for education in secondary schools that joins geometry, algebra and calculus.
On the one hand, GeoGebra is a dynamic geometry system. You can do constructions with points, vectors, segments, lines, conic sections as well as functions and change them dynamically afterwards.
On the other hand, equations and coordinates can be entered directly. Thus, GeoGebra has the ability to deal with variables for numbers, vectors and points, finds derivatives and integrals of functions and offers commands like Root or Extremum.
These two views are characteristic of GeoGebra: an expression in the algebra window corresponds to an object in the geometry window and vice versa.
