Think

Several weeks ago I suddenly started to use FreeMind :S  I forget why to be honest; I had seen it before and watched a short how to video, and then started to have a go.  It’s a free mind mapping application, simple to use, free and so far has been extremely useful.  I’m no expert at mind mapping, I’ve never read anything about it but it’s proving to be a useful tool to me to make sense, graphically, of various things and their relationships to things.  I’ve developed a number of mind maps on various topics and so far have been pleased with the results.

In response to this I began to think how I could use it in teaching, as a delivery mechanism to replace PowerPoint, the purpose being to remove the linear emphasis of PowerPoint, reduce time spent on lecturing and to provide something more visual for learners to engage with in order to make sense of the subject and see how topics are connected.

So far I have discovered that:

• you need to make sure auto format is turned off to change the size of fonts
• to remove a hyperlink you need to select the node, then right-click and select Hyperlink (Text Field) and delete the link in the pop-up window
• exporting as a Java applet seems to be a bit better than exporting as Flash (the Flash export muddled some text)
• fonts should be around size 26 as a minimum in order for them to be displayed clearly on a projector screen in a class
• you need to copy any image you use in production to the exported folders in order for them to appear during delivery

So far I have developed sessions using FreeMind with the learning objectives as the main nodes.  This allows a learner to see exactly what content is attached to that learning objective.  This is sometimes not clear in PowerPoint.  Also using the note feature to a node is a good way of implementing the activities you want learners to engage in at each point in the session.

Recently (about a week ago) I had a wretched day.  Although I had things to do I just could not motivate myself to do anything.  I must have spent most of the day thinking about doing things and not doing anything.  I think the most I did was some washing and took some plastics for recycling.  The sheer lack of drive, momentum and enthusiasm was pretty overwhelming.

As a result of this I felt wretched for wasting the day.  I came to the conclusion that boredom is now a demon, closely related to laziness perhaps, and as such needs to be overcome and put in its place. In response to that I felt that after certain events that occurred recently I have little to do, so I started to think about what I used to do in the past that I enjoyed.  Here are some of those things:

Play computer games (Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, PC)

I remember after my brother left home I retreated upstairs and started playing computer games, first on the ZX Spectrum and then C64, and Amiga as I grew older.  I call these the golden days of gaming, when it was all about the game, not graphics (although as machines grew more powerful better graphics, music, sound and colour were beneficial ).  I remember going up ‘anley duck to the small arcade where Fantasy World (now Forbidden Planet) used to be, and next door was a games shop.  On Saturday it was a regular haunt for gamers to go and play on the arcade games.  R-Type, Robocop, Final Fight, Shadow Warriors…awesome.  I also remember nearly being knifed down Hope Street inside Castle Computers by a group of youth’s after my wallet  Not nice.  There are plenty more memories, far too many to list here but for sure playing computer games made me happy.

Paint models of spaceships (Star Wars, Star Trek etc)

Our family has always painted models of some sort, particularly my brother and myself.  The first decent model I had and painted was the APC from the film Aliens.  It was a Christmas present from my Dad, and my brother showed me some of the basics of painting (he had more experience than me).  And so began an epic journey collecting models of ships from science fiction as they were released.  I think by the time I stopped painting I had collected nearly every single spaceship on TV or film that you could buy, with the exception of one or two.  It was very much like meditation to me, painting and detailing.

Draw (Sci-Fi related)

My friends were better at this than me, although I did enjoy art at school when we did it I suspect that if I had carried on with it I would have been very good.  I remember when we used to use early PC software to draw on computers.  I took technical drawing as my options and did well at advanced levels, but then for some odd reason went into computing :S  Although I did enjoy drawing at the time, it’s not something I have done  for a long time.

Read science fiction (mostly Star Wars novels)

I read all the time, but a lot of it is computer/job related so not actually recreational.  But there was a time, one summer, where I did nothing but read science fiction novels, mostly Star Wars related.  I enjoyed that.  I have since moved onto the Warhammer 40000 Horus Heresy novels lately, Star Wars was getting dull.  But yes, reading I enjoy a lot.

Paint Warhammer 40000 figures

My friend and I were the first customers in the Games Workshop store up ‘anley duck when it opened.  I remember buying a Terminator Squad from Fantasy World as my first set, not really knowing what they were or what they did or what game they played in, but somehow I was intrigued by them.  For something that cost so much (they were made of solid lead back then), were very small, had no moving parts etc I wasn’t disappointed.  Odd really.  I think with that it was/is definitely more to do with your imagination than the physical items, and this could be very powerful.  I was only ever into Warhammer 40K, fantasy is OK, but I much prefer sci-fi.  I collected Space Marines at first then moved to Chaos, but as my friend and I grew older we drifted apart and there ultimately was no one left to play the game with.  Ho hum.

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After getting Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit no less) up and running I started to play with DVD ripping and transcoding, for media serving purposes. I came across dvd::rip which offered both the ability to rip a DVD to hard disk and to then transcode it to an AVI/Xvid format with 2 channel sound.  I tested this on both my PC and laptop to help determine if the process is more CPU intensive or memory intensive.  The process was tested using Evan Almighty, with a running time of 91 minutes (we own Even Almighty incidentally )

On my laptop, which ran Ubuntu 64-bit, with a Intel Core 2 duo processor running at 2GHz and 4GB of memory, it took 16 minutes to rip the DVD to hard disk, then 20 minutes for the first transcode pass and then 39 minutes for the second transcode pass.  All other settings in dvd::rip were kept at their defaults.  The total process took approximately 75 minutes.

On my PC, which runs Ubuntu 64-bit, with an Intel Core 2 Quad at around 2.somethingGHz, with 4GB memory, it took 10 minutes to rip the DVD to hard disk, 12 minutes for the first transcode pass and 27 minutes for the second transcode pass, all in at approximately 49 minutes.  All other settings in dvd::rip were kept at their defaults.

The resultant AVI/Xvid file size in both tests came out at just under 700MB’s.

Therefore it seems that the whole process is more CPU oriented than memory oriented.

However, it is quicker simply to rip the DVD, shrink it and then burn it to another blank DVD, however this obviously doesn’t fit into the media serving ethos!

On the whole however I must say that I was mightily impressed with the results of the transcoded files.  The picture on my 32″ LCD seemed more ‘natural’ than pure DVD pictures (red’s tend to bleed on DVD whereas in the transcoded version they didn’t suffer as bad) and the down-mixed sound from 5.1 to two channel stereo sounded fine through my stereo.

All in all I am satisfied with dvd::rip (although there are one or two little niggles with the software) and transcoding in terms of picture, sound quality and file size.  Of course, a nice i7 would make this all a lot quicker

After reading DonkyBoy’s post here I decided once again to try Ubuntu (for the nth time).  I’d read a little about the latest version, 10.04 so downed a copy, burnt it and slammed it on my laptop as a dual boot.

After screwing that up (somehow I managed to install it on my external hard drive!) I was soon up and running with the OS, happily booting my laptop about 10 times faster than Windows Vista and giving me a lot to play with.

There’s no doubt that this release has eased the whole process of migrating from Windows to Ubuntu and the whole affair has been fairly interesting, for example, learning how to use the CLI, downloading software and updates from the repositories, trying to apply familiar Windows metaphors and tasks etc.  It’s even given me the stimulus to set up media streaming between Windows 7 and my PS3!

Something that’s been of interest is the DVD::Rip program that will rip a DVD film to disk and then transcode it.  That’s been my main area of interest so far and coupled with the media serving its been pretty fruitful.

I’ve always given up with Ubuntu after a while as ultimately in my job I am forced to use Windows products and Adobe, which don’t play too well with Ubuntu.  But for other activities, mostly web related, it’s superb to use and I think it’s going to stick with me now

I found a DVD in my office draw whilst I was cleaning it up a bit the other day.  It was the college’s smart board training DVD, which I haven’t watched up until now, (however I did attend the physical training for, but only because it was mandatory!).

So I watched it and was fairly impressed I have to say with the capabilities of the device.  It occurred to me that it might be quite useful especially with my intentions to reduce PowerPoint slides as the main learning aid in a session and introduce mind maps created with Freemind.  After registering for the software I managed to get a key from the manufacturer’s and install it on my laptop.  I learned that you need both the serial plug attached to the laptop and the USB plug in order to make it work.

On the whole though I have set the software up quite well, and tested Freemind with success.  The only issue to be wary of is that you would need to use the smart board’s zoom facilities to zoom in on any note text created in Freemind as Freemind does not have the ability to zoom in on it itself.

Today I read in the Great Book of the Way that when one achieves balance one cannot move, and if things stay balanced then they cannot grow.  The universe is in a constant state of imbalance so that it can move and grow according to its nature.

Likewise, a storm of some kind will seek out its opposite in order to dissipate.  A flood will find it’s own level, a fire will burn itself  out and the strongest winds will run out of energy. I was reading something the other day, I forget what it was unfortunately, but the author was describing things by saying “X is a good way” and “Y is a good way”, he never described them as the “best way”.

I then got thinking today how becoming the best at something is also finding a kind of balance.  Being the best implies that something is at the top, it cannot be  beaten.  If a process is defined to be ‘the best process’ then there is no better way, and if there is no better way then what becomes of innovation?

There is no place for the best to go, and if there is nowhere for it to go then stagnation will surely set in.  If the best cannot move and work its wonders because it is balanced, then what good is it?

Because good is out of balance in that it has not become the best, then it is still free to move in different ways.  Because good has not stopped moving, it remains flexible and open to suggestion.

So being the best is not a good thing.  Being good is actually best.

I had lengthy conversations over Christmas with family and in one of them spoke about several issues that to me seem rife in society now and are nothing more than folly.  I can’t remember for sure what those issues were, but am pretty sure three of them were the use of statistics, style over substance and the perception of something being done about something else!

Statistics

I’m no statistician, but during a course I took last year had my insight of the subject improved by the tutor and became aware of circumstances that make this science on its own a poor measurement of, well, anything at all really.  It seems to me that statistics demands a lot of discipline on the part of the statistician in order to make this science useful on its own.  But we rarely find out how impartial those who have developed the statistics really are.  There is always an agenda and statistics seem little more than a figure to prove someone’s point of view. What bothers me most though is that in a given field, statistics are the easiest asset to develop and it is rare to use statistics as the starting point and to then develop further measurements after.  I have read that triangulation is the key, but as statistics are thrown down the public’s throat on all manner of topics I see no triangulation at all.

We are obsessed with numbers.

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Sometime in mid November I was invited to give a days training for a group of people from the local library.  The topic was pod-casting, and it appeared that these people wanted to know more about it.  Although I wasn’t given a great deal of information about the group I reasoned that they would be of a lower level of computing ability or background compared to my regular students in HE.  The only real reason I accepted the invite was to see if I could go from 8 years or so of HE back to the sort of level of work I used to teach at when I first started in 1999.  Well, I got my answer. continue reading…

Since about October I have been recording a workflow and documenting a process of developing video lectures and tutorials for my students.  I’ve been wanting to make some for some time now, and finally got round to it due to a slightly decreased work load this semester.

Anyway, here is the write-up.

The Production and Distribution of Video Lectures and Tutorials for Blended Learning

A couple of developments occurred this week that got me thinking, unfortunately.  I have used a very cheap and cheerful way of converting PowerPoint files to Flash so that they can be displayed through Endeleo without the leaner having to download the PowerPoint file, load up PowerPoint and follow the lecture through on there.  When I implemented that, I think around Christmas 2008, it was a quick fix, so didn’t get any further development.  Basically the process involves saving the PowerPoint as a Windows Meta file (images) and then importing them into a Flash template I made, and with a few buttons and a bit of ActionScript you can get a very basic Flash based PowerPoint presentation.

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