Photosynth

Photostory3 in Window 7 - NOT always

This is a calamity. Photostory3 is not supported in Win7 in some cases. In an upgrade from Vista to Window 7 the programme was not flagged as an issue. However, when it went to run it crashed as not suitable for this version of windows.

Microsoft compatibility does not register it as problematic. However, an online search shows that it is an issue with many others in Win7.  Why 'almost', well it seems some people have got it going. It seems that there is a version 3.1(which is not available for download) that works but it came as of a package that was being distributed a couple of years ago. In addition, I have found that it does work on one work laptop that I have. Both my home one and the work one are HPs, and both upgraded from vista Business to the same Win7 Professional! One worked the other didn't. What gives?
This a serious issue, and I would certainly recommend schools holding off on upgrading to win7 while photostory3 is not available.  It is such a simple educational tool that is so widely used that I think it has really serious consequences.
I have tried to uninstall and re-install pstory.msi. Result it won't install again, but gives the same compatibility message. I have tried to run it as administrator etc., have tried all the compatibility modes but to no avail. It is a dead duck in the water.

This is disappointing, along with Blogger's dropping of the video option in these blogs. You used to be able to make a quick photo story or load an audio track into a photo story and upload directly here into your blog. But no longer. Now two simple child friendly features have suddenly evaporated from the educational toolkit.

Footnote. It is possible to run Photostory3 within Virtual PC, but this is a long and circuitous route, and my little netbook certainly doesn't have the capacity to do it properly. Using virtual pc is not viable solution for schools. Unless the programme can be guaranteed to run in the upgrade I would be wary of moving to win7...

Can't resist getting on the bandwagon - and presenting Did You Know 4

embeded from Live Spaces - Skydrive

Windows Live

windows Live has just offered some space for storing photos and files with SkyDrive and I wondered how useful it would be for linking to pdf and powerpoint files when you want those in blogger.
http://cid-7fab23d85024a604.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/zilch.pdf this is the code for this link to Zilch
http://cid-7fab23d85024a604.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/future%20computers.pps is the code for this link to Future of computes.pps.

Emerging Technology

The ability to stitch two photos together to make a panorama has been with us for many years. I can remember using a hand scanner and aligning and stitching photos back in the early 90's with relative success. There are also some wonderful online panoramas that you can find if you go searching and MS Encarta had some pretty neat ones too. So why would I be so excited by the release of Photosynth which is a free online photo stitching site. Sure you can put together a remarkable number of photos (it complains that it might get slow if you try to upload more than 300!), and it does do a remarkable job of putting them together in layers and in sequences. You can dive into the picture to hit a different perspective or more details close up. It has been released to the public for us to play with and has a generous file host capacity of 20gb. You can already see a number of interesting photosynths appearing.

The exciting part is not here yet, but the potential is extraordinary. It was alluded to by Blaise Aguera Y Arcas in his presentation at TED 2007 where he introduced Photosynth. At the moment we are collecting our own pictures either from the internet or from our own personal collections to create our synths. But what the programme is doing is creating visual meta data and interlinking images to one another. This portends a visual search engine of enormous significance. Imagine taking an old picture from your travel photo album, which you have forgotten to write on the back of. Where was it again? You just can't remember. Scan it, and upload into a visual search engine and it stitches it into a Synth. The resultant page that would pop out is a synth of the surrounding photos of the same location in differing perspectives, taken by different people, no doubt linked to a google earth location and map!

Photosyth at the moment shows the remarkable ability for the software to piece together a visual jigsaw, it is only the dimensions that are daunting. And that is truly only momentary given the rapid pace of processing and storage evolution. And where does that lead to, well to a time line version mapping the past seems feasible, and to sketched visual searches based on a hand drawing of what you are looking for… draw a quick sketch of something or maybe put together template objects, for example a pyramid (hand drawn or computer graphic) which becomes the search "keypix" (keyword) to find buildings with triangular fixtures. Pictures would become tagged with visual features and rich in meta data content. Multiple keypix would refine the search and a new breed of engine would be created. Look out text, there is a visual revolution on the doorstep!

What will Anthony be doing?

I am off to teach in a tertiary teachers' training institution as part of an ICT faculty of 5. I will be involved with a B.Ed programme and post graduate courses. The college took in a preliminary intake in 2007~8 to get started but the first real year of courses will be rolled out from the September 08 Semester. I will be based in Abu Dhabi but I believe I may also have to travel up to Al Ain on occasions to work with institutions there. At the moment the college is in temporary accomodation in the centre of the city (for the next 3 years) while a new purpose built campus is constructed on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Moving

This blog may shift its emphasis as I am now in the process of moving to the UAE. Once I am there I will be working in a teacher training institution. I will try to post a record of what I am doing when I get there.

There is an alternative to the “traditional eWhiteboard” which addresses some issues some teachers have with the height and use of eWhiteboards. Consider this, the whiteboard is interactive because you touch the screen and the mouse pointer follows that touch at the point of contact. You have an association between the touch and the display screen. However, with a projector you also get a masking shadow, and as teachers have noted, there is an unfortunate height issue in the primary school classrooms necessitating either bent teachers or moveable scaffold whiteboards, or boxes on which children stand.
The Alternative – link a Tablet PC with a projector, or a large screen TV (I use a 50” plasma). What are the essentials we a trying to get with an eWhiteboard? A large display screen with point association. The Tablet PC gives this, and displays it for the class on the projector without someone standing in the beam. The teacher/student doesn’t mask the screen during use, they work to one side, on the tablet, and others watch the main screen. The Tablet can be passed around (even better if it is wireless to the projector!) In addition the Tablet PC exceeds a traditional eWhiteboard by giving pressure sensitivity to the pen. This is a nice feature in Art programmes like Paint.Net and Artrage. Point association with the screen, in this case the Tablet PC, permits good handwriting recognition, drawing, highlighting, dragging and revealing – all part of the standard repertoire of an eWhiteboard.

Costs of a traditional eWhiteboard {approximate}
Board {2,000}
Computer {2,000}
Software {incl with board}
Projector {2,000}
Board scaffold (if to raised and lowered) or boxing {?}

Costs of a Tablet alternative [approximate}
Tablet PC {4,000}
Projector (plasma/LCD) {$2,000}
Software {some features incl in Vista – others may need purchase}

The obvious feature that is missing is the propriety software that comes with a board. This is nothing to be sneezed at, as some have fantastic shared resources available, many of which may have been the deciding factor in which brand of board schools choose.
But what features are they? Can you collect them piecemeal from other sources? For example, countdown (up) timers, graphic organisers, clipart,

Some observations.
I am trialling a 50” Plasma as an alternative to a projector because there is really no way to mount a projector in my classroom (the ceiling is far too high, believe me, I know, I’ve put them in 8 other classrooms). A short throw reflective projector would work but they are expensive and I’d still need a reflective surface and mounting space. The Plasma is better, brighter, has a wider viewing angle and comes with a decent built in amplifier and speakers! Not to mention the life expectancy is much longer (cf the 2000 hours till replacement of a projector bulb which is getting dimmer by the hour.) We have another class trialling a ceiling mounted projector with a Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth graphics tablet. The disadvantage here is you loose the association between the touch point and the screen, that is, the user has to look at a different place from where they are touching. That gets easier the more you do it, it is after all what you do with a mouse, but is somewhat harder with a pen!

I have tried linking the plasma with a 19” touchscreen LCD but the sensitivity is not good for classroom use, it is better suited to POS! Your fingers cover where you are pointing. We use it for large object work, powerpoints, etc. The Tablet PC is by far the best.

Technology in the classroom

If you wish to see some uses of technology in my classroom check out qps-rm9.blogspot.com

Portable Applications at Learning@School

With a usb pen drive you can leave your laptop or desktop behind. All you need is someone else's to piggy back on. The pen drive runs its own application menu from which you choose the programmes you want to run. These programmes don't exist on the host computer, or if they do are unaffected by the "parasite"! Great things to have on your pen drive include the full suite of Open Office, a web page editor and ftp (Kompozer), a pop email client to download all your messages (Thunderbird), and a web browser with all your bookmarks/favourites (Firefox). The list is actually endless. You have the choice of either aggregating them with a menu based programme or just having them as standalone programmes.

PortableApps is a good freeware place to start http://portableapps.com/suite

But there are alternatives like www.pegtop.net/start

There is also a very good commercial variation which ties in more directly with Windows and lets you run windows programmes from you portable drive. http://www.ceedo.com/ Not all windows applications will run this way but a good number do. It also lets you piggy back on to other programmes such as outlook express and Office. There is a Mac way of doing it too if you are that way inclined.

Plasma in the classroom

No, this isn't a science lesson. Instead I am about to embark on a experiment using a 50" plasma screen in a junior classroom as an alternative to a projector or my favourite multiple VGA monitors. I have looked into the comparison between LCD vs Plasma and confess to be still unsure which is best. LCD seems to have the advantage of no "burn in" issues which plasma claim to have fixed but still warn about. Plasma still has much better contrast ratios and a wider viewing angle but those differences are rapidly disappearing. As is the price difference. They are almost identical. I have ended up with plasma because I can get a bigger 50" for the same price as a 42". Size does matter! ;-)

The screen is being driven by another experiment, a touch sensitive LCD screen. In addition I have wired up an activboard slate to give a pen based solution. To even further complicate and test the limits I can control the whole system from my tablet PC using VNC or get it to follow (mimic) my tablet with the same VNC connection. Altogether this should let me try a variety of ways of interacting with the computer and also a variety of software programmes for presenting to the class.

Here is the hardware

An ACER Aspire RC500 multimedia PC with 512mb, TV/FM, multicard reader, firewire, running XP Pro. (this is a 3 year old machine!)

A Viewsonic 19" touchscreen controlled by serial port and run from a vga splitter

An AWA 52" plasma screen run from a vga splitter

An ActivBoard slate/pen wired to the serial port of the computer to get hardware activation of the ActivBoard. This is tethered because there is no eWhiteboard to receive it wirelessly.

Wireless mouse and wireless keyboard (comes with the Aspire)

Portable Applications

There are free and licensed versions of these and they are a developing field. I will post more about this shortly. At the moment I am just experimenting with Microsoft's Live Writer to post here. Seems to be a reasonable option.

So what is the point about portable projectors?

Well the crucial element is the synthesis that mini projectors provide with miniature computers to make at tiny computer. Imagine a cellphone size computer standing on the table in front of you, projecting an image onto the table, as your workspace, and you writing on that workspace with your stylus/pen with either hand writing recognition or on screen keyboard. Using an onscreen keyboard I can even foresee touch typing with the typist finger movement being recognised for those with 'legacy' QWERTY training. This is all possible now (2007) in prototype form and looks set for limited release in 2008. What is it going to be, it will be a miniature computer with a virtual screen and a virtual input device all in your cellphone (or other convergence device). Another interesting video along these lines is the Movable Displays.

What can a portable projector offer us. Think of augmented reality. This is a little harder to grasp but will have a much greater impact. Think of the "heads up" in fighter plane's cockpits and the recent arrival of similar technology into cars (eg BMW). The developmental work which is partially shown in the video on Handheld Interactive Desktops, is that you can get a mobile projector to recognise its surroundings, then display on the surfaces, messages relating the environment. For example, a wall power socket, recognised by the device would project onto the wall beside the device text and images explaining about it, describing how to fix it, or any other context sensitive information as may be appropriate.
Where can this go? We apart from simplifying manual and tech support, it is really also the fore bringer of 'heads-up' displays built into sunglasses!!! The camera in the glasses will sense its surroundings and add in augmented visual information projected onto the inside lense of the glasses. One immediate use I can see for that would be for colourblind people to be given the ability to detect Red. The question is, what other information would we choose to receive (in the privacy of our own glasses) on top of the real world.

Mini Data Projectors - keystone

One element that data projectors have been working on is the automatic adjustment of keystone effects. Now there is an interesting little video about the development of a realtime automatic keystone adjustment that will integrate nicely into these new portable "cellphone" size data projectors. Have a look at the Automatic Keystone correction video.

The Future of Computing - Pen Based Pt 2

Handwriting recognition provides a power tool for accessing computers, but a more interesting an important development is the translation of the pen into a truly portable device. Used in conjunction with a data projector the pen can be physically located to write on any surface, not just a tablet or a whiteboard. With the image projected on a convenient surface the movement of the pen can be calibrated and mapped to the image to permit full computer use anywhere.
Check out the Portable Pen Computing video on the right. This shows a large projector sitting on its back projecting onto the table with the aid of a mirror. Cumbersome but they also show a small projector prototype as well.
However, the true synthesis comes when this pen technology gets married with the cellphone laser projector due to be release in 2008. For information on this tiny laser projector that is predicted to cost only tens of dollars! Have a look at the Miniature Data Projector video.

The Future of Computing - Pen Based pt 1

Why is it that we are still using the QWERTY keyboard? It is such and anachronism. This legacy device needs to removed immediately. And teaching children typing is such a waste of time. The keyboard doesn't fit under their fingers and by the time it does they have learned bad habits from hen-pecking around the keyboard for years. Instead we need to be teaching them good handwriting skills, especially since pen based computing is so good. Tablet PC and electronic Whiteboards clearly show the degree of ease with which handwriting recognition can function. On the right you can see a video comparing the recognition on a Windows Tablet PC with Inkwell on a Mac.
Below you can see a short demo of the data entry I can do with my Tablet.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typists down on the old original mechanical armature typewriters. While there is still a usefulness in having some specialist touch typists, that is a skill that is taught and learned much later in schooling than in the primary/elementary levels... We have to teach children to write, let them write on their computers.