Category: ICT

BdRuAmIpN 4 days of craziness

Posted on by primaryt

I have been none stop since Thursday and I figure, what with it now being technically Tuesday I should give myself an opportunity to brain dump.  So in the last 4 days..

I earned a BrainPOP badge, yay thanks for that 🙂

I’m Impressed by Egil, Joes and Michael’s ability to sit in complete science with the odd groan for prolonged periods of time.

It sucked that Aaron Iba the original developer of Etherpad couldn’t make it talk to us, he was ill, I hope he gets better and gets a chance to have a chat with us soon!

I’m not a proper programmer, you might think I am because I can fix problems by programming.  But programmers are awesome.  Scala has changed and Etherpad can’t compile on the latest version so I went into #scala on freenode, explained my problem and some guy fixed it and committed to Github.

One of the work vehicles got broken into.  We will not be claiming on the car insurance and probably wont report it to the police.  Tools were left in the van.  It’s just one of those things that comes with the territory of living in Bradford.

Firebug is awesome.

I now have a load of kudos on Reddit, how the hell did that happen whilst I was away from my computer?

As a general rule of thumb, caretakers should avoid touching ICT in schools, in hindsight I’m sure they create more problems than they solve.

Primary Blogger has had some updates (I can only assume by Adam) and it looks much nicer.

We had a bunch of hackers from Olin university join us for the hackathon and while I appreciate their efforts I was slightly disappointed with their output.

Everyone from the Etherpad foundation shares the same views about how the foundation and software should be maintained and supported.

The Amazon Kindle doesn’t really fit into my busy life schedule.  Most tech rarely does.  I didn’t get time for books before the kindle so who was I kidding thinking I would when I bought it?  It is a great device though, I wish I had more time to play with it.

Here is a picture of Etherpad running on it.

Word Processor on kindle 3G

Posted on by John McLear

PrimaryPad appears to be the first collaborative word processor to be available for Kindle and it sure packs one hell of a Punch.  PrimaryPad is based on Etherpad so you can do really-real time collaboration over the net.  Currently the user interface is a bit tricky to operate but this will be improved over the next few months.

What does this mean?  If someone calls you and asks you to proof read a letter you can easily do it on your kindle and make any changes in really-real time.

What does it mean for schools?  Could this be the beginning of the demise of school infrastructures including servers/wireless networks.  Could 3G/HSDPA be your device connectivity of the future.

This is the first announcement by the Etherpad foundation due over the next 5 days, with another 4 expected it is great news and hopefully a sign of things to come!

iMute – Muting internet activity on your TV

Posted on by primaryt

So you want to have a load of cool social features on your TV, great, but when the kids are watching CBBC or you and the Mrs are enjoying a film you might want do temporarily disable all those tweets and Facebook updates.  Fear not, a solution is at hand.

You simply hit the iMute button.  iMute/Intermute/InternetMute.  It mutes all your internet jabber and leaves you to enjoy some great TV content.

Get ready to see it on your remote controls some time this year!  You heard it here first 😛

Could an Android update be the reason you replace your next TV?

Posted on by primaryt

Ever owned an android phone that has been late to receive an Android update crippling some functionality? It is pretty frustrating. Your TV may have same issue. In the future when a new great game is released and the only way you will be able to play it is by getting an entire new TV. Google apologize because an update for your TV is not available due to Android hardware restrictions. Sony point at Google. Sony win because you buy another TV.

Sony’s new TV potential poses this exact problem, it runs Google Android and it is speculated that it has the same processor as the Motorola Droid. I’m a big fan of Smart TV as a whole, I just hope that Google / Sony were smart enough to allow modular upgrades of the Android device.

It would be awesome if the big TV players could develop an open standard so other operating systems, not just Android could leverage the warm glowing screen in our living rooms. It will also be interesting to see if any camera functionality is build in for video conferencing and for Kinect like control.

Sony you are in charge here, make it open and the community will do the rest. Note: Please no comments about Android being O/S. I know it is, but that doesn’t mean there is choice if the TV platform is closed.

Scrobbling Learning

Posted on by John McLear

Scrobbling is a process last.fm uses to figure out the type of music you like.  It is about 90% accurate and over time builds a more and more accurate profile about what you “might like”.  A while back we have entered into an Internet age of recommendations.  Amazon adopted it a long time ago, it is about 20% accurate for me.

Recommendation engines do work but they must rely on users not only “doing” tasks but feeding back if they felt it was a positive/negative experience and if the recommendation engine should of recommended the item or not.  For example even though last.fm is 90% accurate for me sometimes I block a song but get the rest of the songs from that artist.

A project called ROLE intends to profile a learner based and recommend content based on their learning profile.

Currently the project is in an abstraction and development phase.  I appreciate the concept.  I think it is possible, doable and feasible and should have a number of practical purposes.

ROLE has many more challenges to face, such as what type of content is being delivered and is the learner more focused on a type of content IE biology or a type of learning style or will it approach it with a 3d angle of trying to profile the style of learner and the content desired?

The largest challenge ROLE faces it the natural opposition from educators feeling like their workload is being converted into a factory style process. I hope ROLE get a decent video up on YouTube explaining the challenges they face and how they intend to address them. It appears for an open project they are having lots of problems communicating to the wider public exactly what they are trying to achieve and why developers should get involved.  I hear some recent employees have been brought in to address this and I think that is a huge + and I’m looking forward to seeing what they achieve!